In this chapter, I argue that Asian American modernists Yone Noguchi, Sadakichi Hartmann, and José Garcia Villa experimented with the orientalist styles that were made popular by poets Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound. Writing during the period of Asian exclusion in the USA (1882-1946), these three poets responded to the ideological contradictions between elitism and universalism that were present in Whitman’s and Pound’s poetry by calling for a more democratic and egalitarian America. Noguchi’s and Hartmann’s Japanese American haiku and tanka and Villa’s style of “reversed consonance” — “a new method of rhyming…which has never been used in the history of English poetry” — also articulate a queer diaspora that exposes heteronormative structures of power and calls on the USA to be more inclusive of racial and gay others. They do so by using nonbinary motifs in their poetry which critique the binary structure of racial exclusion: native/foreign. These nonbinary motifs are what theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call “rhizomatic,” which is a theoretic concept that organizes ideas through nonhierarchical multiplicities. The rhizomes of their poetry are composed of “deterritorializing” the normativity of Asian exclusion and heterosexuality and “reterritorializing” the American landscape through inclusion. Despite their politics of inclusion, their works problematically objectify women.

This chapter reflects on theorizations of “queer diasporas” through an analysis of Monique Truong’s novel The Book of Salt (2003). A crucial, though not uncontested, concept, “queer diaspora” investigates the global circulations and alterations of “queer” practices, identities, and economies as well as the incommensurate meanings and valuations of nonnormative gender-sexual formations across disparate geopolitical locations. The Book of Salt illustrates and complicates these precepts by rewriting the story of expatriate modernism in Paris from the perspective of a queer, exiled, Vietnamese cook employed in Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s salon. The novel’s portrayals of queer diasporic crossings in Saigon and Paris refuse presumptions of queer commonality across social hierarchies as well as teleological narratives of gender-sexual liberation in the move from colony to metropole, while insisting on the narrator’s persistent pursuit of his queer desires in the face of repeated betrayal and nonreciprocity. It thus becomes the reader’s ethical obligation to respond sympathetically to the narrator’s temporally impossible call and recognize his subjective account.