Description:
In Racial Things, Racial Forms, Joseph Jonghyun Jeon focuses on a coterie of underexamined contemporary Asian American poets--Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and John Yau who reject many of the characteristics of traditional minority writing, in particular the language of identity politics, which tends to challenge political marginalization without contesting more fundamental assumptions about the construction of racial form. In the poets' various treatments of things (that is, objects of art), one witnesses a confluence of heretofore discrete factors: the avant-garde interest in objecthood and the racial question of objectification. Jeon argues that by invoking the foreignness of an avant-garde art object as a way to understand racial otherness, these writers model the possibility of a post-identity, racial politics that challenges how race is fundamentally visualized.
Review Quotes: "Joseph Jeon's Racial Things, Racial Forms is exactly the kind of book I have been waiting for. It is sophisticated and sensitive, providing inspired interpretations of some of the most innovative work in avant-garde Asian American poetry. Jeon's voice, which is lively and gracefully suggestive, truly does justice to the creativity of the poetry and art that he discusses."--Juliana Chang, editor, Quiet Fire: A Historical Anthology of Asian American Poetry, 1892-1970