Negotiating white male Americanness in travel fiction

<p dir="ltr">The study of literary versions of masculinity has become increasingly relevant to the field of masculinity studies as well as literary studies informed by persistent gender inequality. American literature and masculinity studies scholar Peter Ferry stresses the importance of global contexts when examining local representations of masculine identity and performativity, while transnationalism and travel writing scholars such as Carla Almeida Santos and Terry Caesar have shown how fictionalized travel writing especially reveals white male authors’ attempts to impose their own dominant national ideologies and culturally-conditioned ways of seeing the world (and themselves) over foreign environments and people. For Ferry, Santos and Caesar, this power imbalance occurs despite authorial claims of openness beyond a one-sided intercultural contact over which they extend their white male privilege, American imperialism and authorial power. To date, however, there is no comprehensive study of these presumptions in American travel fiction which definitely tracks how they have manifested across the twentieth century to the present.</p><p dir="ltr">This thesis employs a diachronic methodology to scrutinize key travel fiction works for each of four canonical American authors based upon their experiences in Europe, Latin America and Africa: Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), Paul Theroux (1941 - ) and Ben Lerner (1979 - ). Aided by twenty-first century scholarship on each author, this thesis argues that these four authors adopt a persistent, problematic set of criteria to perform their American masculinity abroad based on presumptions of white male hegemony, appropriations of local knowledge and customs, fetishisation and exoticisation of local women, demonstrations of physical prowess and their perceived right to participate in (and benefit from) foreign cultures. This, in turn, reveals how the American freedom and adventurism espoused by these authors is really an extension of the imperialist and ethnocentric fantasies they export with them and ultimately fail to escape or deeply challenge. This thesis shows that this is a pattern which stretches from canonical American travel fiction from the 1920s to the 2010s, despite far-reaching historical changes in both gender politics and America’s global standing, a pattern which is set to continue unless it is compellingly exposed and deconstructed.</p>