The Avant-Garde as Ecopoetics: Experimental Landscapes of Filipinx Diasporic Poetry

Abstract

ABSTRACT The avant-garde is a socially grounded world-making practice, an aesthetic tradition envisioning collectively produced futures. By examining the modernist verses of José García Villa, this article locates Filipinx avant-garde poetry as an ecopoetic site, where nature, the environment, and human actors produce collective-making and consciousness-building exercises. Villa’s poetry does not only connote the bizarreness of being Filipinx American in the early twentieth century, but also illustrates how invoking queerness conjures new worlds outside our precarious moment. Filipinx avant-garde poetry demonstrates why the ecopoetic should not only seek to protect what is scarce but envision what lies beyond our present.