Men in Eugenic Times: Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring and the (Im)possibility of Cosmopolitan Friendship

Abstract

In 1959, after being awarded the Lessing Prize of the Free City of Hamburg, in her acceptance speech Hannah Arendt dwelt with compelling force on the subject of friendship. She drew attention to the cosmopolitan dimension of the occasion and took the opportunity to elaborate on the strange trajectory of cosmopolitanism and transatlantic friendship; after all, the German city granted the award to a Jewish-German intellectual, who was then living permanently in the United States due to her escape from Nazi Germany twenty-six years earlier. For Arendt, friendship “seems pertinent to the question of humanness” (31) and is inextricably intertwined with the problem of worldliness, i.e. of people’s relation to the material world. Friendship is a fundamental notion that builds human identity, as well as shapes the community and the world we live in. Arendt’s musings provide the background to the problem that is addressed in this chapter: that of cosmopolitan friendship at times which are intrinsically inimical to it. I am interested in investigating how political and racial divisions, as well as the discourse of racial absolutism, which are prominent in certain epochs, affect the shape of interracial and cosmopolitan friendships. What is the relationship between oppressive and divisive politics and human interracial and cross-geographical intimate bonding? While talking about friendship, Arendt makes a distinction between friendship that is realized through a commonality of suffering and that which is fulfilled through its participation in the world. The former is “a privilege of pariah peoples” (21) and constitutes “humanity in the form of fraternity” (20) among “the repressed and persecuted, the exploited and humiliated” (21). Fundamental as it is during times of persecution, and as rich and warm as it is, it comes at a dear price—erasure from the world. Thus those that bond in pariahdom pay with their “invisibility,” which always means “a loss to the world” (21). An alternative friendship is one “in the world” and “of the world,” even though it may be more difficult, or even impossible, to realize during times of persecution. To Arendt, this “worldly” cosmopolitan friendship across borders and ethnic and racial divisions, by engaging with difference allows people to truly participate in the world as “world citizens.” It is also this type of friendship that can leave an indelible mark on the shape of the political world at large, change the world, and bring “a bit of humanness” to it (31). Arendt’s speculations are compatible with contemporary cosmopolitan theory. In its post-World War II and post-1960s reformulation, cosmopolitanism is perceived as a moral and political project “of productive global interdependence” aimed at furthering the ideal of “belonging to a harmonious global community of cosmopolitan