Apparitions of Asia
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$55.00 (06)Description
Walt Whitman called the Orient "The Past! the Past! the Past!" but East Asia was remarkably present for the United States in the twentieth century. Apparitions of Asia reads American literary expressions during a century of U.S.-East Asian alliances in which the Far East is imagined as both near and contemporary. Commercial and political bridges across the Pacific generated American literary fantasies of ethical and spiritual accord; Park examines American bards who capitalized on these ties and considers the price of such intimacies for Asian American poets. ^l ^l The book begins its literary history with the poetry of Ernest Fenollosa, who called for "The Future Union of East and West." From this prime instigator of the Gilded Age, Park newly considers the Orient of Ezra Pound, who turned to China to lay the groundwork for his poetics and ethics. Park argues that Pound's Orient was bound to his America, and she traces this American-East Asian nexus into the work of Gary Snyder, who found a native American spirituality in Zen. The second half of Apparitions of Asia considers the creation of Asian America against this backdrop of trans-pacific alliances. Park analyzes the burden of American Orientalism for Asian American poetry, and she argues that the innovations of Lawson Fusao Inada offer a critique of this literary past. Finally, she analyzes two Asian American poets, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim, who return to modernist forms in order to reveal a history of American interventions in East Asia.Features
- Reconsiders a long-standing division between Orientalism and Asian American literature
- Theorizes American Orientalism as a structure of alliance
- Creates a modernist past for Asian American poetry
- Offers a literary genealogy from modernism to avant-garde minority poetics
Reviews
"Apparition of Asia traces with exquisite care the tensile connections tying Asian American poetry to modern American poetry and to the American Orientalism that feeds and burdens both. Instead of taking American Orientalism as a given or an anathema on the one hand and instead of seeing Asian American poetry as fundamentally identity-based on the other, Park's study demonstrates that the relationship between American Orientalism and American poetics may reveal different modes of mutualities that far exceed the twin poles of appropriation or resistance as ways of understanding transpacific literary alliances." - Anne Anlin Cheng, Professor of English, Princeton University
"I had nearly forgotten that writing on literature and poetry could be this good, and am glad to see poetry and modernist poetics brought into transpacific domains of Asian American studies as well as the Beat canon in exacting, theoretically sophisticated, and innovative ways."-- Rob Wilson, author of Reimagining the American Pacific and Waking In Seoul
About the Author(s)
Josephine Nock-Hee Park is assistant professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
