This project will look at the matter of identity in Asian American poetry. Identity is a difficult thing to pin down, especially in a country made up of immigrants. Generalizing identities based on ethnic or racial groups is difficult because of how varied, and often nebulous and always personal the matter of identity is. The project will offer an historical context for the development of an Asian American identity to the extent that it has been the result of many anthologies of literature, essays and critique, with the aim to discover how a group of people that weren’t recognized, then only through the lens of racism, have now entered the poststructuralist realm of post-identity. I would like to analyze Asian American post-identity in Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution and support my findings with texts pulled mainly from two books, The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry, edited by Xiaojing Zhou, and Reading the Literatures of Asian America edited by Shirley Geok Lim and Amy Ling.
In my initial reading, I discovered the reclaiming or creation of Asian American identity through poetry during the Second World War when Asian Americans, especially Japanese, were being discriminated against. The poets post-Japanese internment camps discovered that the Asian American poets that came before them weren’t concerned with their identity as others in the United States cultural landscape, but rather with the poetic movements of the time. In a response to the seeming lack of identity in Modern American poetry to that point came whole anthologies devoted to poets claiming their Asian roots in a free form school of poet-activists, a movement that took off in the 1960s and 70s. This movement, though, morphed into what is still the dominant one today, which is that of post-identity Asian American poetry. Many poets now, while still concerned with identity, think of it more as a conceptual topic that drives their writing, not something they need to carve out and claim. This seeming shift in mentality and motivation has led to a reversion in a sense, to the first and disowned Asian American poets, who were more concerned with their art than with the political statements it was making.
This is the tension I would like to explore. Post-identity Asian American poetry still makes statements about Asian American identity. Through analyzing Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution, I would like to unpack how her Avant Garde art uses language, inference, and empathy to make statements about otherness and identity in the United States, to discover that this text fits into the category of post-identity Asian American poetry.
Exploring the idea of post-identity identities is prescient to the world we live in, and the mixing of cultures will only increase. This topic is important for understanding myself and my own experience of an identity that is the product of converging cultures. Not surprisingly, I tend to write characters with a similar experience. The post-identity mindset requires a particularly humble and empathetic posture, which is why I believe literature is central to unpacking its weight and how it applies to us as contemporary Americans. Through analysis and of Hong’s collection and the secondary sources I land on, I would like to grow in my understanding of post-identities. I’m not solely interested in how this one group, Asian Americans, went from enduring a general ignorance of their cultures and outright decimation, to pushing for greater understanding of identities in general, but also how this relates to our current context. What can we learn from these poets, and how can we write poetry and prose that adds to our understanding of each other as human beings?
This is a great start to your project! I especially like the moves you make towards the end regarding the continued relevance of identity even in a context when previous markers or categorizations of identity based on race and ethnicity no longer seem as sturdy or as useful as they had been in the past. Hong’s poetics are concerned with identity in fascinating ways, but that concern is abstracted on so many levels in the book’s framing and fictional setting. To bring this book back into the folk of politicized Asian American poetry through means of experimental poetics addresses the core question or concern that Jeon raises at the end of the critical reading you selected: is a post-identity poetics too removed from the specific locus of identity as to use its real purchase and claim to the problem in the first place?
In future proposals, I would recommend trying to phase out, as much as possible, the meta-references to the project and to your process of research. Rather than saying “in my initial reading,” for example, you can simply, and more confidently, state that broader contours of the debate. And instead of framing the entire thing as your project, begin by helping and encouraging the reader to care about it. You might begin, in that sense, with what is now your second paragraph: filling in those details on the complete literary-historical background.
I look forward to working with you on this as your thesis comes into clearer focus in the weeks ahead!