Chapter 4 - Decadent Bachelordom and Transnational Adoption

Summary

Chapter Four focuses on the Decadent modernist Harold Acton’s time in China and argues that Acton relies on the concept of kinship as he theorizes cosmopolitanism and transnational contact. Inspired in part by Decadent precursors, such as Vernon Lee, he insists that coming into true communion with other nations requires the eschewal of forms of heteronormative domesticity that might delimit mobility or inhibit openness to foreign experience. However, his work is haunted by anxieties about the slippage between cosmopolitanism and Orientalism, and he turns to kinship metaphors, to the figure of transnational adoption, to think through that slippage. He simultaneously suggests that extrication from conventional familial arrangement facilitates transcultural communion and worries, in his figuring of cultural appropriation as unsuccessful transnational adoption, that true transcultural communion is impossible. In examining the manner in which Acton thinks through and against the concept of kinship while theorizing cosmopolitanism, I highlight the influence on his thinking of women writers and artists, such as Vernon Lee, Nancy Cunard, and Anna May Wong, who shared with Acton a vexed relationship to family and marriage as well as the aspiration to move across national and racial boundaries.