The geopolitics of cultural difference: Locating the spatial poetics of Ezra Pound, H.D., and Langston Hughes (Hilda Doolittle)

This dissertation investigates representations of space and place in modernist long poems by Ezra Pound, H.D., and Langston Hughes in order to analyze depictions of the transnational Other. Drawing upon recent work in cultural geography as well as anthropological ideas of intercultural contact, I argue that these long poems reveal what I call an "uneven geopolitics" that are imperialistic or primitivizing at the same time that they are resistant to these discourses of Otherness. Though traditionally modernism has been seen as responding to new ideas about time and temporality, my project illuminates modernism's awareness of space as an epistemological and conceptual category and the explorations of cultural and national difference that modernist long poems stage.; Ezra Pound's The Cantos, H.D.'s Trilogy, and Langston Hughes's Montage of a Dream Deferred rewrite conventional geography through their experiments with collage and montage. From Pound's superposition of Japan onto Italy to Hughes's layering of Africa onto Harlem, formal juxtapositions on the space of the page allow different places and cultures to clash and blend, enabling modernist poets to expand their sense of home through imagined intercultural contact. While montage and collage strategies disrupt narrative form, this poetics of juxtaposition, I suggest, is also a politics of juxtaposition. Reading geographical and architectural locale in modernist long poems as a metonym for culture and nation, I examine the geographical, cultural, and historical contexts each text navigates and trace in personal correspondence and autobiographical writing each poet's engagement with global culture. The transnational connections produced by each poet's juxtapositional poetics are simultaneously progressive and regressive.; In Pound's Cantos and H.D.'s Trilogy, these connections across geographical space and across national boundaries both support imperialist discourses and resist them. For Langston Hughes's Montage, the connections between Harlem and Africa constitute a strategic form of ethnic nationalism in the quest for oppositional African-American politics. But they also participate in primitivist discourses that construct Africa as a monolith. Attention to the significance of space and place reveals these contradictory representational strategies and serves to strengthen the formal and political connections between the Harlem Renaissance and Anglo-American modernism.