Poetry by Asian American writers has had a significant impact on the landscape of contemporary American poetry, and a book-length critical treatment of Asian American poetry is long overdue. In this groundbreaking book, Xiaojing Zhou demonstrates how many Asian American poets transform the conventional “I” of lyric poetry—based on the traditional Western concept of the self and the Cartesian “I”—to enact a more ethical relationship between the “I” and its others. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of the ethics of alterity—which argues that an ethical relation to the other is one that acknowledges the irreducibility of otherness—Zhou offers a reconceptualization of both self and other. Taking difference as a source of creativity and turning it into a form of resistance and a critical intervention, Asian American poets engage with broader issues than the merely poetic. They confront social injustice against the other and call critical attention to a concept of otherness which differs fundamentally from that underlying racism, sexism, and colonialism. By locating the ethical and political questions of otherness in language, discourse, aesthetics, and everyday encounters, Asian American poets help advance critical studies in race, gender, and popular culture as well as in poetry. The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity is not limited, however, to literary studies: it is an invaluable response to the questions raised by increasingly globalized encounters across many kinds of boundaries. The Poets Marilyn Chin, Kimiko Hahn, Myung Mi Kim, Li Young Lee, Timothy Liu, David Mura, and John Yau

Asian American Literature in Transition Volume Three: 1965–1996 offers a multidisciplinary perspective on the political and aesthetic stakes of what is now recognizable as an Asian American literary canon. It takes as its central focus the connections among literature, history, and migration, exploring how the formation of Asian American literary studies is necessarily inflected by demographic changes, student activism, the institutionalization of Asian American studies within the U.S. academy, U.S foreign policy (specifically the Cold War and conflicts in Southeast Asia), and the emergence of 'diaspora' and 'transnationalism' as important critical frames. Moving through sections that consider migration and identity, aesthetics and politics, canon formation, and transnationalism and diaspora, this volume tracks predominant themes within Asian American literature to interrogate an ever-evolving field. It features nineteen original essays by leading scholars, and is accessible to beginners in the field and more advanced researchers alike.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry gives readers a cutting-edge introduction to the kaleidoscopic world of American poetry over the last century. Offering a comprehensive approach to the debates that have defined the study of American verse, the twenty-five original essays contained herein take up a wide array of topics: the influence of jazz on the Beats and beyond; European and surrealist influences on style; poetics of the disenfranchised; religion and the national epic; antiwar and dissent poetry; the AIDS epidemic; digital innovations; transnationalism; hip hop; and more. Alongside these topics, major interpretive perspectives such as Marxist, psychoanalytic, disability, queer, and ecocritcal are incorporated. Throughout, the names that have shaped American poetry in the period--Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Sterling Brown, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Posey, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Larry Eigner, and others--serve as touchstones along the tour of the poetic landscape.

An exploration of the burgeoning field of Anglophone Asian diaspora poetry, this book draws on the thematic concerns of Hong Kong, Asian-American and British Asian poets from the wider Chinese or East Asian diasporic culture to offer a transnational understanding of the complex notions of home, displacement and race in a globalised world. Located within current discourse surrounding Asian poetry, postcolonial and migrant writing, and bridging the fields of literary and cultural criticism with author interviews, this book provides close readings on established and emerging Chinese diasporic poets' work by incorporating the writers' own reflections on their craft through interviews with some of those featured. In doing so, Jennifer Wong explores the usefulness and limitations of existing labels and categories in reading the works of selected poets from specific racial, socio-cultural, linguistic environments and gender backgrounds, including Bei Dao, Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, Hannah Lowe and Sarah Howe, Nina Mingya Powles and Mary Jean Chan. Incorporating scholarship from both the East and the West, Wong demonstrates how these poets' experimentation with poetic language and forms serve to challenge the changing notions of homeland, family, history and identity, offering new evaluations of contemporary diasporic voices.

American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounteroffers a framework for understanding the variety of imagined encounters by eight different American poets with their imagined 'Chinese' subject. The method is historical and materialist, insofar as the contributors to the volume read the claims of specific poems alongside the actual and tumultuous changes China faced between 1911 and 1979. Even where specific poems are found to be erroneous, the contributors to the volume suggest that each of the poets attempted to engage their 'Chinese' subject with a degree of commitment that presaged imaginatively China's subsequent dominance. The poems stand as unique artifacts, via proxy and in the English language, for the rise of China in the American imagination. The audience of the volume is international, including the growing number of scholars and graduate students in Chinese universities working on American literature and comparative cultural studies, as well as already established commentators and students in the west.

Foreign Accents examines the various transpacific signifying strategies by which poets of Chinese descent in the U.S. have sought to represent cultural tradition in their articulations of an ethnic subjectivity, in Chinese as well as in English. In assessing both the dynamics and the politics of poetic expression by writers engaging with a specific cultural heritage, the study develops a general theory of ethnic literary production that clarifies the significance of "Asian American" literature in relation to both other forms of U.S. "minority discourse," as well as canonical "American" literature more generally. At the same time, it maps an expanded textual arena and a new methodology for Asian American literary studies that can be further explored by scholars of other traditions. Yao discusses a range of works, including Ezra Pound's Cathay and the Angel Island poems. He examines the careers of four contemporary Chinese/American poets: Ha Jin, Li-young Lee, Marilyn Chin, and John Yau, each of whom bears a distinctive relationship to the linguistic and cultural tradition he or she seeks to represent. Specifically, Yao investigates the range of rhetorical and formal strategies by which these writers have sought to incorporate Chinese culture and, especially, language in their works. Combining such analysis with extensive social contextualization, Foreign Accents delineates an historical poetics of Chinese American verse from the early twentieth century to the present.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Cultural Hybridity -- Linguistic Hybridity -- Narrative Hybridity -- Formal Hybridity -- Conclusion -- Works Cited -- Interviews -- Index.