Chapter 11 - Asian American Poetics

Summary

The central argument of this chapter is that the poetry produced from 1965 to 1995 becomes legible as forming an Asian American poetics only about a decade after the period’s closing date. The chapter focuses on identifying and unpacking two foundational interpretive frameworks characterizing recent discussions of Asian American poetry. The first theorizes a crucial temporal discontinuity within the timeline of that poetry, beginning in the early 1980s with the publication of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982). The second theorizes how contemporary Asian American poetics deploys this central discontinuity as a strategic necessity that allows a more flexible consideration of how Asian American poetry develops in parallel with the broader goals of the Asian American political movement, grounded in the late 1960s. Utilizing these two foundational frameworks, critical formulations of an Asian American poetics enact a subtle but significant transition away from discussions of the politics of race and representation, and toward a broader theoretical mapping of the politics of race as form, while nonetheless remaining committed to the sociopolitical project of Asian American studies.