Theorizing Difference in Asian American Poetry Anthologies

Abstract

Anthologies of literature and processes of canon formation are closely linked to contemporary cultural debates about Americanness, identity politics, and questions of and racial difference. In The Equation: Literature in a Multi-Ethnic Culture (1971), Katharine D. Newman, whom this volume celebrates, writes that multi-ethnic literature commands respect, not sentimentalization, exploitation, or neglect (xiii). Yet she goes on to ask how a scholar can unite literatures as different as a Japanese haiku, a Black play, a poem by Archibald MacLeish, a translation of a Yiddish story, and a monologue in dialectical English? (xiii). Our questions today have multiplied: what happens when we take difference as our starting place and not our end? How do we attend to differences within variously defined groups as much as between them? How do we account for differences within poetic subjects themselves? How do we attend to what Newman describes in Ethnic Short Stories (1975) as performance and potential, problems and paradox of identities in a constant state of process (16)? The Open Boat: Poems from (1993), edited by Garrett Hongo, and Premonitions. The Kaya Anthology of New North Poetry (1995), edited by Walter K. Lew, both take differences within category poetry as their starting place. Each explores ethnicity and identity, never fixing that which is or Asian American or ethnic writing, for example, but constantly questioning boundaries of such identifiers. These anthologies represent two of many locations where op/positional poetic practices are being formulated in contemporary poetry. The anthologies, and poems they anthologize, oppose mainstream anthologies that continue to marginalize and tokenize poets of color. They oppose easy categorizations of what counts as writing. They identify and disidentify with Americanness. In other words, they are oppositional in traditional sense of word. But they are not merely reactive. These poets and anthologies actively examine their positionality in complex and dynamic body of writing referred to as contemporary poetry. Hence, they are op/positional; they examine politics of oppositionality, but they also construct new approaches to their multiple positionalities in literature. In past few decades, numerous literary critics have worked to broaden canon of literature to reflect inclusive literary values. The success of Paul Lauter's work on restructuring canon of literature and widespread use of The Heath Anthology of Literature (1989), now in its fourth edition, suggest that literature departments and teachers are receptive to such initiatives. In Canons and Contexts (1991), Lauter describes his project and its culmination in Heath Anthology as designed to present and validate full range of literatures of America (37). Cary Nelson's Anthology of Modern Poetry (2000) engages in this same project, taking as its focus genre of poetry. Nelson argues that urges a major reassessment. For example, it is the first comprehensive anthology to give sufficiently full and diverse coverage to Langston Hughes (xxix). Furthermore, Nelson provides more detailed annotation than any comprehensive poetry anthology has offered before, contextualizing how processes of racialization and ethnicity situate poetic production (xxx). Yet dissenting voices continue to question validity of such efforts, and argue that revisionary projects dilute truly literary tradition. (1) Jane Tompkins documents a long struggle with such points of view in her scholarship on consolidation of literature. Indeed, Tompkins argues, history of anthologies is full of editorial voices claiming that they did not select great works of literature, but merely served as vassals codifying choices about which there could be 'no question' (189). …