Edmund A. Lefevre Professor of Literature Steven Yao has contributed an essay to the recently published volume, A New Literary History of Modern China.
Yao's contribution, "The Angel Island Poems: Chinese Verse in the Modern Diaspora" discusses poetry written on the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station detention building by Chinese immigrants seeking entry into the United States during the period of formal Chinese exclusion (1882-1943). Yao argues that these poems offer a diasporic, non-elite model for thinking about the shifting features, meanings, and functions of "Chinese literature" under the conditions of global modernity.
