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3 - “I Seek Out Poems Now Incomplete”: Writing from the Angel Island Immigration Station

from Part I - Early Forms of Expression to the Start of the Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2015

By
Sunn Shelley Wong
Edited by
Rajini Srikanth  and
Min Hyoung Song
Rajini Srikanth
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Boston
Min Hyoung Song
Affiliation:
Boston College, Massachusetts
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Summary

The critical nexus of materiality and writing affords a standpoint from which to examine the Angel Island poems: that of language politics. The Chinese written language has long been a source of fascination for Europeans, with much of that fascination deriving from what was (mis)understood as the pictorial or graphic basis of the construction of the written character. Taking up the foreign language aspect of the Angel Island poems, entails grappling with not only the semantic content of the language of the poems but also a history of Western responses to both the Chinese language and Chineseness. The Angel Island poems are currently on display at a restored Angel Island Immigration Station now designated a National Historic Landmark. Revisiting the Angel Island poems occasions questions about what the poems mean or signify and what different constituencies of readers need them to mean and signify at different historical moments.
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The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature , pp. 71 - 87
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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