Diasporic Poetics

This book advances a new concept of the “Asian diaspora” that creates links between Asian American, Asian Canadian, and Asian Australian identities. Drawing from comparable studies of the black diaspora, it traces the histories of colonialism, immigration, and exclusion shared by these three populations. The work of Asian poets in each of these three countries offers a rich terrain for understanding how Asian identities emerge at the intersection of national and transnational flows, with the poets’ thematic and formal choices reflecting the varied pressures of social and cultural histories, as well as the influence of Asian writers in other national locations. Diasporic Poetics argues that racialized and nationally bounded “Asian” identities often emerge from transnational political solidarities, from Third World struggles against colonialism to the global influence of the American civil rights movement. Indeed, I show that Asian writers disclaim national belonging as often as they claim it, placing Asian diasporic writers at a critical distance from the national spaces within which they write. As the first full-length study to compare Asian American, Asian Canadian, and Asian Australian writers, the book offers the historical and cultural contexts necessary to understand the distinctive development of Asian writing in each country, while also offering close analysis of the work of writers such as Janice Mirikitani, Fred Wah, Ouyang Yu, Myung Mi Kim, and Cathy Park Hong.

Disclaiming America

Understanding the way the category of “Asian” writing circulates transnationally offers us a new framework for the study of Asian American writing that decenters the nation. In contrast to the cultural nationalist project of “claiming America,” the work of poets Myung Mi Kim and Cathy Park Hong “disclaims America,” establishing “Asian” spaces that refuse identification with the US while remaining implicated in, and critical of, American history and global power. Although Kim’s work at times thematizes Korean immigration to the US, it is equally engaged with the colonial history of Korea and with a broader critique of capitalism and militarism. Hong’s poetry inhabits a dystopian realm that resembles, but diverges from, the American landscape. Both evoke of diasporic identity that emerges from an understanding of global structures of power.

“Number, form, proportion, situation”: The Measure of Racial Comparison in Myung Mi Kim’s Dura

This essay offers a reading of what could be called a metrological imaginary at work in the writing of Korean American experimental poet Myung Mi Kim and in particular in Kim’s third book, Dura. In Dura, Kim traces a jagged itinerary through the archives of the Atlantic slave trade, imperial networks of exchange, and the settler colonial seizure and parcelization of indigenous lands in order to form the United States. The book continually deploys a quantitative language of number and measure, I argue, in order to highlight how emergent capitalist social relations bind together otherwise discrepant histories of enslavement, dispossession, and exclusion. A kind of historical primer preoccupied with the ways in which space, time, bodies, and laboring activity are rendered measurable and exchangeable, Dura traces the transformation of an older colonial racial order into a contemporary world-system that Cedric Robinson and others have called “racial capitalism.”

The Crowd to Come

This chapter charts the course of exhortation through the contemporary work of multiple poets whose lives are bound up in global processes: Sean Bonney, Myung Mi Kim, and Agha Shahid Ali. Exhortation is one of the modes, stances, or registers of poetry that attempts to call forth a collective “we,” the “we” of lives that, in some case, lack a state at all, or, in other cases, refuse to link their identities to an oppressive regime. Yet instead of making an explicit gesture toward including an existing group, these poets use a hortatory aesthetics to shape the formal totality of the poem. However different in the stances they assume, Bonney, Kim, and Ali share a common endeavor to make the precarious “we” visible..