Networked Narratives: Queer Exile Literature 1900-1969

This project examines the English-language literature that emerged from a range of queer communities across Europe and North Africa from 1900 to 1969. i Within this time period, in the decades before the gay liberation movement, the United States and Britain made homosexuality a crime. In response, many queer people moved to places such as Capri, Paris, Berlin, and Tangier, where homosexuality was either legal or tolerated. Within this group, US and British queer writers wrote novels and short stories about their experiences of being forced to leave their countries of birth. This project compares these texts and suggests that they helped to establish an overlooked literary tradition: the queer exile narrative. This project links the places and writers that shaped queer exile literature over 70 years. It shows how the queer communities of Capri, Paris, Berlin, and Tangier were linked, since queer exile writers often traveled between them. These journeys led to collaborations and exchanges between these writers, as they shared new features and conventions across their work. In one striking commonality, these texts alter traditional definitions of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is usually thought to mean moving between cultures actively and independently, but these texts show how people can become cosmopolitan because of pressures beyond their control, in this case oppressive laws. The project reveals these connections using methods from the fields of computing, sociology, and literary studies. First, it will create interactive diagrams and infographics of the exchanges between writers using new digital technologies. Second, it follows these writers collaborations across borders using sociological theories of networks. Finally, it uses new approaches from narrative theory to show how these authors identities impacted their writing. The project will apply these methods in a series of case studies that each show the ways in which queer exile writers connected across countries and communities. Many well-known writers contributed to the queer exile literary tradition, but this project highlights the equally important contribution of writers that have been relatively neglected by critics. The project therefore provides the first cultural history of queer exile that links these diverse regions and writers. i The term queer broadly includes homosexual, bisexual, and transgender people, as well as those who actively resisted categorizing or labelling their sexual or gender identity.

The project has explored the English-language literature produced in the international queer exile communities of Capri, Paris, Berlin, and Tangier due to the oppression of homosexuality in the United States and United Kingdom. It has shown that textual production about experiences of forced migration in these communities led to the formation of a distinctive queer exile literary tradition. Writers from Henry James and Djuna Barnes to Claude McKay and Patricia Highsmith all wrote works of queer exile literature that are thematically and aesthetically related to one another. First, the project has revealed a global range of connections between international exile communities created by the forced migration of writers. Using new digital tools, it has produced an interactive visualizations platform that communicates these writers' extensive ties through graphs, diagrams, maps, and timelines. During the project, 4969 entries were made into the project database on connections between queer exile writers. The visualizations have demonstrated that these writers moved between and creatively interacted across many different international locations of exile. The platform has therefore mapped the diverse spaces and networks that have fostered queer life during the twentieth century. Second, it has revealed how distinctive narrative techniques and descriptions of cosmopolitanism were circulated across these writers' texts. The project has traced the circulation of a common set of features and conventions across fiction, drama, and poetry that represents queer exile. A series of case studies have illustrated these creative exchanges across time periods and international borders. The project has shown, for example, that Henry James's early twentieth-century transatlantic narratives strongly influenced the Cold War queer exile texts of James Baldwin and Patricia Highsmith, particularly in their shared depiction of characters' involuntary routes through space. Another case study has shown how a series of writers who relocated to Tangier produced texts that linked the Moroccan city to other international ports of refuge in Central America, Europe, and North Africa, therefore blurring the boundaries between these literary settings. Additionally, many writers within the queer exile literary tradition explored an alternative form of cosmopolitanism in their writing, which they associated with involuntary movement rather than freedom and independence. These writers used a range of labels associated with cosmopolitanism, such as "wanderer" or "internationalist," as a form of code to describe the forced mobility of many queer people during the twentieth century. International legislation against homosexuality continues to push queer people into exile through social oppression. "Networked Narratives" has revealed the deep cultural history behind these experiences. By discovering patterns in narratives of queer exile, one finds a template for creative responses to and political activism against such oppressive legislative changes.