William S. Burroughs and U.S. Empire

Abstract

“[Allen] Ginsberg felt strongly that the Beat Generation was an international phenomenon,” Barry Miles writes in his introduction to The Beat Hotel. “[I]t embodied an approach to life, a set of beliefs that transcended national barriers, and in virtually every country he was able to find a local ‘Beat’ scene” (6). In addition to the transnational, global reach of Beat influence, there is the transnational, global dimension of various Beat writers’ lives, travels, and literary production. Among the borders Beat writers crossed—seeking to extend the realm of experience and escape from prevailing domestic norms—were the actual boundaries between nation-states. Movement and pursuit of freedom, central to the Beat experience, are inextricably linked conceptually, often in an antithetical relationship to stasis, boredom, oppression, and authoritarianism. The same kind of dynamism and freewheeling drama celebrated in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is extended from a domestic space into an extra-national space, as our travelers cross the border into Mexico. That quest—that audacity, if you will—is entangled with the operating conditions of empire, as both an enabling condition for travel and the potential for radical critique of the construction and effects of American Empire.