Book chapter
Warm with Tipsy Embraces: Allen Ginsberg, the US–China Writers’ Conferences, and Queer Internationalism
The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century American Literature
Oxford Handbooks of Literature, Oxford University Press
09/08/2022
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198824039.013.21
Abstract
This chapter examines Allen Ginsberg’s “Series of Poems on China,” works written during the 1984 US–China Writers’ Conference, as an important example of how cultural diplomacy sometimes enabled the expression of queer intimacies. An iconoclastic literary ambassador, Ginsberg had little interest in contributing to the emerging ties between the People’s Republic of China and the United States, but he did hope to connect on an ad hoc basis with ordinary Chinese citizens. He pursued this goal by sharing poems by Whitman and Williams and by generating his own lyric tributes to China and Chinese writers in an affective, and often homoerotic, manner. Rather than serve as a medium for state expression, poetry for Ginsberg had the capacity to detourn the cultural Cold War, transforming the grand narrative of geopolitics into the fleeting closeness of a same-sex literary encounter.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Warm with Tipsy Embraces: Allen Ginsberg, the US–China Writers’ Conferences, and Queer Internationalism
- Creators
- Harilaos Stecopoulos - University of Iowa
- Contributors
- Leslie Bow (Editor) - English, University of WisconsinRuss Castronovo (Editor) - University of Wisconsin–Madison
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Publication Details
- The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century American Literature
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Series
- Oxford Handbooks of Literature
- DOI
- 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198824039.013.21
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 09/08/2022
- Academic Unit
- English
- Record Identifier
- 9984398816302771
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