Asian Diaspora Poetry in North America

Benzi Zhang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415512862
• eBook ISBN: 9781135908829
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Presenting a new way of reading that helps us discern some previously unnoticed or unnoticeable features of Asian diaspora poetry, this volume highlights how poetry plays a significant role in mediating and defining cross-cultural and transnational positions.

Asian diaspora poetry in North America is a rich body of poetic works that not only provide valuable material for us to understand the lives and experiences of Asian diasporas, but also present us with an opportunity to examine some of the most important issues in current literary and cultural studies.

As a mode of writing across cultural and national borders, these poetic works challenge us to reconsider the assumptions and meanings of identity, nation, home, and place in a broad cross-cultural context. In recent postcolonial studies, diaspora has been conceived not only as a process of migration in which people crossed and traversed the borders of different countries, but also as a double relationship between different cultural origins.

With all its complexity and ambiguity associated with the experience of multi-cultural mediation, diaspora, as both a process and a relationship, suggests an act of constant repositioning in confluent streams that accommodate to multiple cultural traditions. By examining how Asian diaspora poets maintain and represent their cultural differences in North America, Zhang is able to seek new perspectives for understanding and analyzing the intrinsic values of Asian cultures that survive and develop persistently in North American societies.

Chapter One
Introduction

Departure for a Detour

How does distancing produce an effect? Westerners find it natural and normal to meet the world head-on. But what can we gain from approaching it obliquely? In other words, how does detour grant access?

François Jullien
Detour and Access (2000, 7)

The notion of diaspora has been deployed both literally and figuratively to designate a particular opportunity for reinvention and liberation from various naturalized categories, set within historical contingencies that weigh into the production of such subjectivities.

David Palumbo-Liu
Asian/American (1999, 343)

Asian diaspora poetry in North America is a rich body of poetic works which, on the one hand, provides valuable materials for us to understand the lives and experiences of Asian diasporas and, on the other, offers us an opportunity to examine some of the most important issues in current literary and cultural studies. As a mode of writing across cultural and national borders, these poetic works challenge us to reconsider the assumptions and meanings of identity, nation, home, place and memory in a broad cross-cultural context. In recent critical inquiries, diaspora has been conceived not only as a process of migration in which people crossed and traversed the borders of different countries, but also as a double relationship between different cultural homes/origins. The reconceptualization of diaspora as a relationship, according to Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg, enables us to “understand the dynamics of transnational cultural and economic processes, as well as to challenge the conceptual limits imposed by national and ethnic/racial boundaries” (1996, 14). With all its complexity and ambiguity associated with the experience of multicultural mediation, diaspora, as both a process and a relationship, suggests an act of constant repositioning in confluent streams that accommodate multiple cultural traditions. By examining how Asian diaspora poets maintain and represent their cultural differences in North America, we will seek new perspectives for understanding and analyzing the development of Asian cultural heritages that survive persistently and change constantly in American and Canadian societies. This book, therefore, will offer a fresh point of departure for our exploration of how Asian diaspora poetry plays a significant role in mediating and defining cross-cultural and transnational positions.

For many years, criticism of Asian diaspora poetry has mainly worked within the boundaries of Asian American literary and ethnic studies. In the age of globalization and postcolonialism, however, the significance of Asian diaspora writings has actually gone far beyond the traditional boundaries; and the reading of Asian diaspora poetry, as a result, demands new approaches that would expand the field of ethnic literatures by embracing cross-cultural, transnational and postcolonial inquiries. Probably as a response to the increasing involvement of transnational and cross-cultural interactions in the age of globalization, a “significant switch in emphasis has also occurred in Asian American literary studies,” as King-kok Cheung observes; “the stress is now on heterogeneity and diaspora” and “the shift has been from seeking to ‘claim America’ to forging a connection between Asia and Asian America” (1997, 1). By exploring the cross-cultural connections between Asia and America, this study will examine how Asian diaspora poetry has developed itself in a process of negotiating across different cultural traditions in a global context. “The massive social, cultural, and political dislocations and realignments characterizing the end of the twentieth century,” according to Sunn Shelley Wong, “call for new strategic namings, new ‘words’ to enable us to see into the conditions of our own time and place and to clear the ground for future possibilities” (2001, 302). Since Asian diaspora poetry inscribes an international mode of thinking and a way of living between cultures, a diasporic perspective is needed in the reading of those exceptional poetic works whose relations to Asia and to other parts of the world are much more complex and extensive than we have imagined. It is important to go beyond the limits of ethnic and national approaches in the study of Asian diaspora poetry, for cross-cultural and inter-national investigations will produce a better understanding of diasporic identity and writing whose structures and perimeters do not coincide with the borders of singular nation-states. As Robin Cohen asserts, it is no longer necessary “to imprison the butterfly of ethnic identity in too small a net with too dense a mesh. Perhaps the butterfly should be permitted to fly in its own direction at its own whim” (1997, 126).

Diaspora, as Shirley Lim put it, “denotes a condition of being deprived of the affiliation of nation, not temporally situated on its way toward another totality, but fragmented, demonstrating provisionality and exigency as immediate, unmediated presence. The discourse of diaspora is that of disarticulation of identity from natal and national resources, and includes the exilic imagination but is not restricted to it” (1997, 297). In our discussion, the idea of diaspora suggests a shift from national to inter-national and cross-cultural contextualizations. Traditionally, the study of literature is charted in national categories. In the age of globalization and postcolonialism, however, the situation has changed, as diasporic paradigm becomes increasingly important for comparative analyses of the ideological and cultural imaginaries among what has been considered as discrete national groups. The shift to “the discourse of diaspora,” in Lim’s words, “is one example of the dynamics of an evolving global technology capable of transmitting information simultaneously through mass media to geographically separate yet culturally related peoples” (1997, 297). Asian diasporas, as a result, should not be “seen as bound to a context exclusively that of their host country,” as Franklin Ng contends; “Instead, the immigrants and their descendents are seen as part of a global phenomenon of international migration and cultural diasporas” (1998, ix).

The strategic naming of Asian diaspora is not simply designated as an ethnic descriptor; but rather it suggests a theoretical detour towards new vantage points with emphasis on the practice of diaspora theory whereby various models of inquiries are set into play outside the confines of singular nation-states. In both figural and practical senses, detours provide a way of transcending the limitations of our perception and breaking the obstructions of our thought. According to François Jullien, only through detours can we create a new space for thinking from a distant standpoint and move out of the self-enclosure of subjectivity. For that reason, we will follow a detour between Asia and North America to explore how the symbolic power of cultural forces has been poetized across geographic and historical divides. The paradox of detour is that by traveling to “Asia,” we may get access to a better understanding of “America” or vice versa. “I expect that this detour through China,” in Jullien’s words, “will open up a perspective: the ability to question ourselves from the outside” (2000, 371). If going outside is a necessary procedure for gaining insight, the study of Asian diaspora poetry would be a multifold journey of interrogative detours at different levels, which will lead us to grasp and to have a dialogue with a number of intricate issues that cannot be perceived or accounted for otherwise. This book, therefore, is not a direct survey of Asian diaspora poetry, but rather an oblique exploration of some major aspects of the poetic works in a vast labyrinth of diaspora.

“Diaspora always takes place after a border crossing,” as David Palumbo-Liu observes (1999, 346). In my discussion, however, border-crossing is figured as a complex multifold process. Asian diaspora poetry concerns not only the movement across the borders of a country, but also the experiences of traversing the boundaries and barriers of space, time, race, culture, language and history. Since diaspora develops multiple relationships that cross and span cultural and national borders, it shifts our attention away from a narrow focus on ethnic relations at the local level to a broad concern with transnational relationships in a large system of global signification. In the following chapter, “the Poetics of Cultural Transrelation,” we will examine how Asian diaspora poetry disrupts the apparent closure of nationality and generates transnational communications. With its ethnic vacillation and cultural ambivalence, Asian diaspora poetry demonstrates that the forces of different national elements may merge in a poetics of cultural transrelation, which challenges the locality of a singular cultural dominance by relocating the site of identity formation in a collective of plural interrelationships. Cultural transrelation, therefore, seeks to compare and to connect different cultural and national elements in the articulation of new identities. In this sense, cultural transrelation does not mean to find equivalence in different cultures for substitution, but to expand the space of continuity in which various cultural traditions are negotiated and reconfigured into new viable forms. Moreover, cultural transrelation indicates a phenomenon of cultural defamiliarization in which one may see one’s own past and culture as foreign otherness. This paradoxical transposition between two cultural frames causes Asian diaspora poets to re-view their historical experiences and cultural inheritances in a new context and to interpret them from a fresh perspective.

Cultural transrelation is informed as well as complicated by the issue of multi-home conditions. In the chapter entitled “the Politics of Re-homing,” we will argue that the earlier conceptualizations of home based on a singular location are no longer adequate to describe the new dimensions and transformations of home. In a sense, Asian diaspora poetry represents a paradoxical feeling of both homesickness and home-crisis, for the movement between multiple locations of cultures suggests a cobelonging dialogue which, by situating diasporas simultaneously inside and outside of a culture, intensifies both the desirability and the impossibility of a given home-place. Adrift between two or more different sociocultural systems that cannot be fully integrated, Asian diasporas are subject to a constant rehoming process in which various elements of foreignness and otherness are reconfigured and repositioned in relation to new cultural dwellings and indwellings. In modern diaspora, therefore, to rehome is not to go home but to undergo a constructive process in which different cultural passages are convoluted to produce new senses of dwelling around the “axis of a mobility.” Rehoming, furthermore, carries special meanings for women diaspora poets, whose writings often present a strong voice in their strife to challenge the hegemonic, totalizing discourse of male-dominated ideology of home. Re-versing home in their own ways, they develop a critical consciousness in diasporic discourse and adopt new approaches that embrace female consciousness, questioning rather than celebrating the patriarchal values of traditional home.

The rehoming process, furthermore, has touched a sensitive nerve of the global system in which the concept of place has to be reconsidered. In the chapter on “the Problematics of Translocal Place,” we will make a few inquiries into Asian diaspora poetry with emphasis on the relationship between the changing meaning of place and the articulation of diasporic identity. As mutual penetration among different cultural locations has dramatically increased, we need to explore the influence as well as the consequence of place-in-displacement on the formation of identity across cultural and national boundaries. In the age of modern diaspora, it is almost impossible to segregate any local place that does not involve nonlocal or extralocal linkages in a wide network. What Asian diaspora poetry represents is a dramatic change in the politics of place, which starts to redefine place beyond the historical opposition of here versus there, since to a certain extent, there has been both merged and emerged in the very characterization of here. “It is a sense of place, an understanding to ‘its character’ which can only be constructed by linking that place to places beyond,” as Doreen Massey notes (1993, 69). Massey’s observation, which describes place as a node in a global network of relations, points toward a new “sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local” (1994, 155). Asian diaspora poetry, in this sense, inscribes an interaction among different cultural passages, challenges the concept of homogeneous place, and suggests deterritorialized construction of new identity that is both local and translocal.

In the age of modern diaspora, place and memory are closely related together, since memory provides an important vehicle for Asian diasporas to link different places and to connect the past to the present. As discussed in the chapter on “Alter/native Stories of Memory and Amnesia,” Asian diaspora poets express a kind of eagerness to get access to the deepest layers of their memories for stored cultural values and traditions. The yearning to remember their past has entailed an ongoing struggle against historical amnesia. What they regard as their Asian cultural heritages, in fact, is virtually absent from North American societies. As a result, they have to rely on memory as a means to re-store or re-story their fading past and to rebuild connections with their cultural traditions. Memory, in this sense, becomes an effective strategy for Asian diaspora communities to reinforce their original traditions and to strengthen their cultural cohesion. It is significant to note that Asian diaspora poetry gives voice to the unspoken, yet ever-present memory of cultural differences. As a counter-discourse to that of amnesia, Asian diaspora poetry sets in motion a mnemonic discourse that remembers and recollects the silent past from hegemonic oblivion. Memory, in other words, provides a wide, enriching landscape for the poets to relocate the deep dimensions of their identities, and to confirm their renewed attachments to their heritages which, in turn, give them the feeling of belonging, collective awareness and self-consciousness. These awareness and consciousness, moreover, do not merely yield an insight into the past, but more importantly, suggest a vision of the future.

In our examination of memory and cultural deterritorialization, we have noted that as a result of the global flows of diaspora, the location of “the exotic” is no longer confined to the remote areas far away from the metropolitan center in the West. But rather, the exotic has moved from the East into the neighborhoods of North American societies and become part of local operations. The chapter on “Writing against the Grain of Cultural Exoticism” examines the question of representing cultural otherness in relation to Asian diaspora poetry. Cultural exoticism, in a sense, is a “pre-condition” for Asian diaspora poetry, in that it had existed in the West before Asian diaspora poets ever started to write their own poems. Since Western cultural exoticism has developed a global epistemological frame in which Asian cultural identities are often the preconditioned versions that express Western perspectives, Asian diaspora poets have to rewrite and represent themselves in new ways; and their self-representations disrupt the existing paradigm of understanding and power relations. Asian diaspora poetry, therefore, characterizes an interrogative mode of writing in which various ideological appropriations and cross-cultural exoticizations are challenged and dislocated from their original meanings. Against the topos of various Western representations of the exotic, Asian diaspora poets have demonstrated their abilities to cope with the task of re-presenting the “other” dimension of their identities in a way that inscribes their own reflections on themselves.

Asian diaspora poetry has its unique features and characteristics which cannot fully be explained within the confines of Western poetics. In the chapter on “Styling Diasporic Carnival,” we will address a few stylistic issues in relation to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of literary carnival. In their writings, Asian diaspora poets often express a willful independence from and acute critique of the Western poetic conventions that fail to provide adequate forms for them to express their experiences and feelings. The search for appropriate styles to express diasporic experiences reflects a critical self-consciousness of cultural differences that may be directed to oppose the force of totalizing cultural hegemony. In order to express their cultural differences, Asian diaspora poets break away from the overdetermined discourse of canonical expectation through an act similar to the play of self-staging in a vernacular carnival. Parody, mockery, pidginization, slanguage and other formal experimentations frequently appear in their works, adding an extra dimension to Asian diaspora poetry that styles itself as multivalent and polyphonic. The idiosyncratic performances and experiments have special significance for Asian diaspora poets, since they provide a discursive space where their disembodied cultural inheritances are reconstructed into viable forms. The obsession with stylistic experimentation indicates a transgressive yearning for freedom of traversing various limiting borders. Artistic innovations and transgressions, however, are not purely formal, aesthetic concerns, but rather implicate Asian diaspora poets’ self-conscious strife to articulate their cultural identities and values.

Asian diaspora poets are people with a double vision or a “second sight” which, in Robin Cohen’s words, allows them to see “‘how things are done’ in other societies as well as in the one in which they find themselves.” “Diasporas are thus both inside and outside a particular national society” (1977, 172). The double vision, which is reflected in their writing across cultural and national boundaries, challenges the totalizing national discourse by evoking extranational consciousnesses. It is impossible to obtain the double vision without detouring through other national domains or cultural worlds. “We cannot escape this situation,” as Jullien notes: “there must be an elsewhere if we are to be able to step back. With it, our view of the question can be more global” (2000, 372). For Asian diaspora poets, the double vision has been incorporated into their dialogical strategies to deal with the relationship between the dominant national discourse and various counter-discourses that preserve rather than efface cultural differences. The search for appropriate voices to express diasporic experiences reflects a critical tension in Asian diaspora poetry, which signifies as well as problematizes the sociocultural conditions that facilitate an ongoing detour through different localities. Many issues discussed in this book have pointed to cultural productions and social structures that are larger than the political units of nation-states. Diaspora or “the movement of peoples,” as Franklin Ng argues, “is one of the important themes in world history, but it is often neglected because of a...

Table of contents

• LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• Chapter One Introduction
• Chapter Two The Poetics of Cultural Transrelation
• Chapter Three The Politics of Re-homing
• Chapter Four The Problematics of Translocal Place
• Chapter Five Alter/native Stories of Memory and Amnesia
• Chapter Six Against the Grain of Cultural Exoticism
• Chapter Seven Styling Diasporic Carnival
• Chapter Eight Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index