An article by Associate Professor of English and Assistant Dean of Faculty for Diversity Initiatives Steven Yao appears in the latest issue of the journal Representations (Summer, 2007). Yao's article, "Toward a Prehistory of Asian American Verse: Pound, Cathay, and the Poetics of Chineseness," examines the various terms -- tonal, rhetorical, thematic and formal -- by which Ezra Pound sought to present Chinese poetic culture and identity in his renowned collection of translations.
In doing so, the essay delineates a "prehistory" of Asian American verse. For, departing from the reigning discourse of the "Yellow Peril," Cathay has come to embody the authority of the cultural dominant in the U.S., thereby defining the framework of reception for other poetic voicings in English of "Chinese" and "Asian" cultural heritage.
This article is part of Yao's current book project, "Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse and the Counter-Poetics of Difference in the U.S., 1910-Present." Representations is a publication of the University of California Press.
In doing so, the essay delineates a "prehistory" of Asian American verse. For, departing from the reigning discourse of the "Yellow Peril," Cathay has come to embody the authority of the cultural dominant in the U.S., thereby defining the framework of reception for other poetic voicings in English of "Chinese" and "Asian" cultural heritage.
This article is part of Yao's current book project, "Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse and the Counter-Poetics of Difference in the U.S., 1910-Present." Representations is a publication of the University of California Press.
