ABSTRACT
The International Writing Program (IWP) was created in 1967 by Paul Engle to host writers from around the globe at a literary residency in Iowa City. According to the rhetoric of its founder, the Program was meant to give a home to an international community, yet institutionally and financially, it was embedded within the framework of Cold War U.S. cultural diplomacy. The examination of the IWP, through a focus on participants from Eastern Europe and the Global South, provides a micro-history of how the implementation of “world community” was experienced and interpreted by those invited to be its members. By emphasizing the agency of the writers and analyzing their travelogues or diaries, the chapter explores the negotiated reception of the residency program. It shows that the meeting of individuals and the encounter of “worlds” in such rhetorically charged cultural sites was pronouncedly different from what the designers of “utopias” envisioned. Transforming the Program into a site of contest through their interactions, the writers subverted the superficial globalizing narrative of their American hosts and reflected on the inherent hierarchies within U.S. cultural diplomacy projects. Moreover, through discovery and communication, they produced a lived and personal solidarity: a deep and thorough knowledge between East and South.
