-
Acknowledgments
- University of Texas Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Acknowledgments This project would not have been possible at all without the generous help of a great number of people inside and outside of academia . I would like to thank Ira Allen, Thomas Austenfeld, Frank Biess, Boris Bugla, Ursula Heise, Marcel Hénaff, Nicole King, Lisa Lowe, Anne Reynes-Delobel, Bruce Robbins, and Don Wayne for their valuable feedback at various stages of the project’s evolution. Michael Davidson was the one who first gave me the idea to concern myself with cosmopolitanism , and I will be forever grateful for his extraordinary support and excellent guidance. It was through Bruce Dick that I was able to make contact with a number of important scholars of African American literature who, himself included, gave me valuable input on the chapters on both Richard Wright and William Gardner Smith. Of those, I am particularly grateful to Michel Fabre, who welcomed me into his house in Paris and generously opened up his extensive private archive for me. Like all scholars in the field, I deeply appreciate Michel’s seminal work on black American expatriates in general and Richard Wright in particular. We all will continue to profit from it. I also want to thank Amritjit Singh, David Bakish, Edward Margolies, and Richard Gibson, who all have helped me greatly in tracking down information on William Gardner Smith. Richard Gibson was especially helpful because he put me in contact with Smith’s family. My great thanks here go to Smith’s sister Phyllis M. Ford, who gave me a warm welcome in her house in Philadelphia, and who provided me with a wealth of valuable information about her late brother. She was also the one who helped me to establish contact with Ira Gardner-Smith, who has become a wonderfully supportive friend over the past few years. Without these people, much of the information included in my chapter on Smith would not have been unearthed, and I am especially indebted to Ira for permitting me to quote from her late husband’s letters and unpublished manuscripts. Part of my research was conducted at the New York Public Library, which generously gave me access to the Farrar, Straus and Company Files, and at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, where the Richard Wright Papers and some of William Gardner Smith’s papers are archived. I very much want to thank both institutions for their generous open-door policy and helpful staff. My special thanks go out to Jim Burr at the University of Texas Press x cosmopolitan minds and to Patrick Colm Hogan, who has supported my project enthusiastically from the moment I first contacted him. I am also deeply indebted to Patrick’s pioneering work on literature and emotion. Without it, this book would not have been possible. Mark Bracher was kind enough to share with me the page proofs of his own chapter on Richard Wright before it was published in his book Literature and Social Justice (University of Texas Press, 2013). My thanks also go to Leslie Tingle and Paul Spragens for their work in preparing the book for publication, and to Ryan Schneider , whose astute comments helped me to rethink some passages of the manuscript. In a different way, my understanding of the emotional dimensions of cosmopolitanism has greatly benefited from the extremely rich and lively discussions with that particularly bright group of graduate students at the University of Fribourg who enthusiastically took up the challenge of spending a whole semester on the exploration of the cosmopolitan imagination. And I certainly owe a deep debt of gratitude to my wonderful friends and family in the United States and Europe, who all supported my project wholeheartedly over the past years. Finally, I want to thank my husband, Michael von Mossner, for his unwavering emotional and intellectual support. In its early stages, my project was supported by several generous grants and fellowships from the University of California, San Diego, including a UCSD Center for the University Pre-Doctoral Humanities Fellowship, a Humanities Dissertation Research Fellowship, and a Dissertation Fellowship from the UCSD Literature Department. On the other side of the Atlantic , a research grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation made it possible for me to return to the United States at a later time to conduct additional research for the book. An earlier and substantially different draft of a portion of chapter 3 appeared as “Confronting The Stone Face: The Critical Cosmopolitanism of William Gardner Smith” in the African...