Representations of the Near East in Travel Writing and Conjectural History during the Late Eighteenth Century

Allen Ginsberg's public relationship with a Cold War State responsible for unprecedented incursions into the private lives of its citizens has achieved iconic status in US counterculture discourse. The travels of Ginsberg and his fellow Beats allowed them to explore alternative lifestyles shaded from the disciplinary gaze of the repressive US government. Ginsberg and his Beat counterparts recognized that containment discourse manifested itself as a sophisticated and repressive ideological regime. He uses the figure of the vulnerable, psychologically tormented individual to metonymize the larger biopolitical situation of the early Cold War era, one that used the threats of atomic death and communist incursion to increase the anxiety of the populace in order to coerce conformity to domestic ideals. Ginsberg recognized the repressive tactics on both sides of the Cold War divide, whether biopolitical or totalitarian, not simply as mutually constitutive but as consensual, if ideologically distinct, means of social control.