Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the United States, Canada, and Australia

These lines from Janice Mirikitani's 1995 poem “We, the Dangerous” form the ground of Timothy Yu's major reassessment of Asian American literature. Yu returns to Mirikitani, an icon of the Asian American literary scene from the 1970s movement period onward, to recover an originary diasporic framework. “The link,” Yu writes, “between these three locations—the site of a US atomic bombing, the location of the then-current US war, and a camp where the US government imprisoned Japanese Americans—cannot be made through ancestry or through any common point of origin.” Instead, these sites propose a political solidarity, and it is Yu's contention that “we must employ the broader, racialized appellation of ‘Asian’ in order to make Mirikitani's grouping coherent” (18). In calling forth a reactivation of this term, Diasporic Poetics explores the resonance of this broadened “Asian” as a transnational political coalition in three national locations—Canada, Australia, and the United States.Yu's argument for political solidarity freed from origins addresses a long-standing conceptual dilemma in the field. Opening with the critical consternation of the field in the heyday of the “transnational turn” in American studies in the 1990s, Yu launches his study with a revealing critical genealogy of a “seeming crisis of Asian American studies,” which pits diaspora against nationalism (6). Yu recalls Sau-ling Wong's salutary fear of the dissolution of the field's political foundations in the absence of the nation—and then points to the realization of these fears in highly influential theories that ultimately resulted in Kandice Chuh's “‘subjectless discourse’ in which the term ‘Asian American’ has become a ‘meaningless’ signifier” (2). Against these poles of identity politics and theoretical nonentity, Yu turns away from the critical dead end of undoing “American” in favor of a revived understanding of “Asian” that addresses the spectrum between these ends.This refocusing is piercing and capacious: Yu neatly dispenses with the destabilizing theorizations of Asian America that sought to address the limitations of domestic frameworks, and he opens an even vaster term, freighted with its own dangers. To marshal “Asian” into conceptual use, Yu relies on Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, in whose theorization of Black culture as a dialectic between national and transnational frameworks Yu identifies a conception for Asian diaspora. The problem of diaspora in Asian American studies, Yu notes, is that it “continues to rely, covertly or overtly, on the notion of origins” (12). Yu's “Asian” does not denote an origin but “the common experience of being racialized as ‘Asian’ in white majority culture,” and the literature produced out of this experience “is shaped by a complex series of political identifications and aesthetic influences” (17).Yu's first book significantly resituated Janice Mirikitani within the American avant-garde, and Diasporic Subjects builds upon that elaboration to examine the politics of her formal juxtapositions. Mirikitani's “We, the Dangerous” is the linchpin for Yu's revisionist understanding of the field's origins. From the introduction's pitch against an “emptied-out” diasporic Asian America, the first chapter returns to Mirikitani to effect “a restoration of the deeply political engagements with global solidarity that characterized Asian America at its inception” (27). Returning to the Third World Liberation Front, Diasporic Poetics reminds us of the global orientation of the movement toward ethnic studies, citing a telling exhortation by Alex Hing, the minister of information of the Red Guard Party, a radical youth group formed under the influence of the Black Panthers: “we must become Asians” (29); becoming Asian means forming a political solidarity that combats American foreign policy in Asia and racism at home.In thus restoring Mirikitani's poetic and coalitional commitments to the origins of the movement, Yu presents a revisionist genealogy that demonstrates “that Asian American politics cannot always be correlated with cultural nationalism” (44). Generations of scholars in the wake of the masculinist identity politics of Frank Chin and his comrades have sought to undo this correlation; Yu's elaboration of Mirikitani's transnational commitments debilitates it at its source. Not “so-called identity politics” but “a recognition of political solidarity across racial and national borders” (44): this is the significant revisionist work afforded by Yu's reexamination of Mirikitani's “juxtaposition of different political and literary frameworks—what we might call, in contemporary terminology, a diasporic poetics” (45).From this critical reassessment, subsequent chapters feature two Asian diasporic poets whose emblematic work is “transnational from the start” (50), Fred Wah in Canada and Ouyang Yu in Australia. The second chapter traces Wah's career, from the influence of Black Mountain poets in the United States to a political awakening occasioned by the 1970s redress movement for Japanese Canadians incarcerated during World War II, and finally to “Wah's growing interest in the political value of personal history” (59). Yu builds toward this autobiographical turn, through which Wah's verse expresses a relation between speaker and landscape that requires a “waiting” that “constitutes the poem's politics” (61). Reading against the temptation to “return to Wah's Asian ‘roots’” (63), Yu's reading develops a transnational poetics already steeped in Asian aesthetic influence.Yu's engagement with Asian Australian literature presents a set of revealing distinctions from the preceding North American sites—and this work interestingly reveals Yu himself: “My own role became akin to that of a participant-observer, as I entered into and even contributed to the discourse around Asian Australian writing” (76). His conversations with Australian poets feature conceptions of Asian Australian studies as “an intellectual project” (77), with a tendency toward a “metacritique of cultural politics” (81) distanced from the identity politics and social movements that characterize Asian North American contexts. These differences bring into relief the core claim of Diasporic Poetics: “It is an identification with the racialized, political category of the ‘Asian,’ rather than a sense of shared cultural origin, that links subjects of the Asian diaspora in all three countries” (80). Yu's account of Asian Australian poetics builds toward the key exhibit of Ouyang Yu, a “stubbornly ‘foreign’” and “ungrateful immigrant” (105)—the title of one of his poems, as Yu notes—whose critique performs a “disclaiming of Australia” that resonates with Mirikitani's indictment of global anti-Asian oppression. Ouyang Yu “founds no school and imagines no community,” Yu writes, but his work “reminds us that what links Asian Australian writers, and connects them with their American and Canadian counterparts, is a shared and often painful history of diaspora” (113).From this transnational bond of disclaiming white settler nations, Diasporic Poetics returns to a US genealogy of “Asian American writing that decenters the ‘American’ but maintains political coherence” (115) in the work of Myung Mi Kim and Cathy Park Hong. Yu emphasizes a shared view of transnational political solidarity that not only precedes what we have come to name Asian American identity but in fact conditions the very emergence of that identity, and he sees in their work the full realization of Mirikitani's transnational modes of political opposition. Yu's readings trace Mirikitani's juxtapositions of place into a leveling solidarity in the linguistic terrain of Kim's work and Hong's formal juxtapositions, which pitch her readers into forbidding linguistic landscapes. Delving into the deserts of Hong's poetry, Yu elaborates “a cognitive estrangement from ‘America’ that retains a critical relationship to the reality of the US” (149): Mirikitani's “Hiroshima / Vietnam / Tule Lake” rendered anew, into a disorienting landscape.In its readings of a diasporic poetics that moves from the United States, Canada, and Australia to return to Asian America, Diasporic Poetics presents a transnational circuit. It is worth recalling Yu's introductory overview of his three locations, which marks a defining limit: “None of these three countries uses the term ‘Asian’ in the same way as it is used in the United Kingdom—that is, to refer primarily to people of South Asian descent” (21). Hiving off the United Kingdom has the effect of exposing the East Asian—indeed, largely Northeast Asian—ethnicity of Yu's chosen poets, thus gesturing toward the Asian origins this study has been at pains to disable. It seems to me that a study shaped by Gilroy's transatlantic inquiry may be especially amenable to an extension into the United Kingdom and the Caribbean, and it is my hope that scholars inspired by Diasporic Poetics will take on this work.Finally, it is worth underscoring that the generative critical work of Diasporic Poetics reconsiders the priority and influence of Asian American formations. Just as Yu cuts against a linear trajectory from essentialism to pluralism in the US context, his appreciation of the complex appearance of “Asian” in Canadian and Australian poetry attends to formative distinctions across these sites. In his conversations with Asian Australian poets, Yu discovers a telling ambivalence in characterizations of Asian Australian literature vis-à-vis the United States: these poets alternately imagine their community as an early instance of American-style cultural formation or within a “post-identity” position. I am especially struck by Yu's concluding acknowledgment that “an Australian poet I met joked that I was creating the thing that I was looking for” (160)—this is obviously a byproduct of Yu's more ethnographic approach to this material, but I am heartened by this revealing joke: we need Timothy Yu's illuminating guidance, through which we rediscover a transnational political solidarity that extends from the start of Asian American studies and across imperial sites around the globe.

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