Assistant Professor of English Steven Yao has been selected as a Stanford Humanities Center External Junior Faculty Fellow for 2005-06. The award involves a 10-month residency, from September to June, at the Stanford Humanities Center at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.
From 252 external applicants, the Center awards up to eight fellowships, making this one of the most selective competitions in the nation.
During his fellowship, Yao will be completing his book, which is tentatively titled Foreign Accents: From the Language of Race to the Poetics of Ethnicity in Chinese American Verse, 1910-Present. This study analyzes the range of rhetorical and formal strategies by which various Chinese American writers have sought to incorporate Chinese culture and especially language in constructing a cultural or ethnic subjectivity. Combining such analysis with extensive social contextualization, Foreign Accents thus delineates an historical poetics of Chinese American verse from its beginnings in the early twentieth century to our contemporary moment.
Alongside this literary historical dimension, he wants to track developments in poetry against changes in the dominant U.S. legal and cultural approaches to characterizing the notion of "Chineseness," first by means of the discursive category of race, and subsequently through that of ethnicity. In doing so, he hopes to show how Chinese American verse variously articulates a "counter-poetics" of difference in response and challenge to hegemonic discourses about the terms of minority identity in the U.S.
