i ASIAN AMERICAN POETRY, AMERICAN POETRY, AND THE CRITIQUE OF IDENTITY: ASIAN AMERICAN POETRY IN COMPARATIVE CONTEXT, 1887-2005 BY MERTON LEE DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: ! Professor Cary Nelson, Chair ! Professor Leon Chai ! Associate Professor Lisa Cacho ! Assistant Professor Matthew Hart, Columbia University ii Abstract ! In this dissertation I attempt a critical evaluation of identity. While I see identity, in the sense of the social categorization of individuals, as a discourse that perpetuates the kind of reduction that impoverishes conceptions of those labeled as “others,” ultimately, identity can"t simply be dismissed. My analysis begins with Asian American poets who I see as challenging the different forms that racism takes across more than a century of Asian American writing. But I go on to suggest that the form these critiques take connect them to the work of American poets who outside of race, seek to contest the reduction of a sense of the full multiplicity of personhood, that is, they defend a certain democratic understand of self. ! The first half of my dissertation consists of two chapters that critique identity by appealing to selfhood. My first chapter reads the work of Walt Whitman and Sadakichi Hartmann in the context of Chinese Exclusion. I argue that Chinese Exclusion results in a social death, in that “Oriental” immigrants were defined as not possessing the full social existence conferred by legal rights. Thus I read Hartmann"s early work as a kind of late work; he draws on late Whitman, who he knew. Both poets focus on the fragmentary and personal to object to a presumption that individuals can be known or totalized, which therefore also rejects race and identity. Similarly, my second chapter shows that Marianne Moore and José Garcia Villa"s poetry, directed toward creating what I call the “didactic subject,” is meant to challenge the kind of assumptions that subsume individuals under categories of identity. The didactic subject is a form of self understood to be self-critical and in process, and thus ethical. But in the context of US iii colonization of the Philippines, which took a tutelary form, conceiving the self as unfinished risks repeating notions of racial atavism and makes the didactic subject an ambivalent, possibly compromised form of critique. ! The two chapters comprising the second half of my dissertation reflect a shift away from challenging identity to appropriating it. My third chapter argues that the poetry of David Rafael Wang and Amiri Baraka attempts to naturalize identity to personality by invoking intensely subjective experiences, pain and sex, as proof for the reality of racial identity. But since race must be constructed to define selfhood, alternative notions of the self have to be disavowed. My final chapter proposes an understanding of identity as multiple, through a critique not just of identity but also the self. In it, I suggest that what Whitman undertakes in 1955, a grounding of identity in the multiplicity of simultaneous experience is affirmed in the postmodern poetry of Linh Dinh. Dinh"s work suggests that the multiplicity of identity can"t be affirmed, except asymptotically, as a horizon. That model of identity, multiple and never attainable describes identity"s continued significance in understanding not only the social, but the personal. iv Acknowledgments ! This dissertation owes its existence to some unwelcome advice from Stephanie Foote, then the Director of Graduate Studies. She recommended that my special fields reading list contain not just Asian American literature, but broader contexts of American literature, generally conceived. Although I had come to University of Illinois with no intent to study ethnic poetry, in fact, to study a particular strand of mainstream poetry-- the Confessionals--and Foote"s advice helped to incorporate that initial intention of my study into my Ph.D. work, I had initially and unwisely, wanted to resist her suggestion, hotly remembering just-learned information on how Asian American students protested the assumption that Asian American literature was not sufficient to justify classes in the 1970s. ! That I overcame my short-sightedness owes much to the initial labors of Matthew Hart and Cary Nelson, who seemed to presciently understand that the limits I wanted to impose on my field would be self-defeating, and who also seemed to draw that understanding based on realizations about my writing and research I had at that point not yet become aware of: that I am a digressive thinker who strains to put disparate ideas into meaningful relation. The actual work of creating the dissertation has shown me that those tendencies are at times productive and at times my worst obstacle to being understood. ! Having not been a student of ethnic literature in my coursework, I struggled to attract someone to my committee willing to work with a person who seemed like a dilettante. I"m thus grateful that Lisa Cacho agreed to mentor me, especially since the v first writing I showed her was an attack on the pieties of ethnic studies, that I had intended to be exciting, but that really showed a shallowness to my knowledge. Similarly, the guidance of Leon Chai, who also agreed to drift out of his area of primary expertise to join my committee, has shown me that intellectual work is a labor of carefulness and inspiration. Indeed, his vast learnedness and thoughtful approach to a bewilderingly diverse field of knowledge encouraged me to see the value of what might otherwise be the wasted labor of learning things that didn"t in the end pertain to the dissertation--that value is that I became less ignorant. ! My committee has also proven to be unusually supportive as I"ve written this dissertation away from campus, in Baltimore Maryland. That distance has meant that Cary opened his living room to me for meetings when I came to town, that Leon and I developed a phone relationship, that when Matt moved to Columbia University, we could meet in day trips, and that Lisa met me on short notice at coffee shops. The advice given in all of these meetings, written down in the three notebooks I filled in the course of writing this dissertation (in fact, it"s only through something as ambitious as a dissertation that I came to learn the importance of keeping a notebook), provide a wealth of perspective on my work that I have barely been able to make proper use of, and which exists to me as what Wordsworth called, in a totally different context, “life and food for future years.” ! I owe to Austin Riede, Donghee Om and Sarah Gray gratitude for advice, mundane favors, and commiseration, not to mention friendship. My mother and father, Young and Jung Lee, along with my sister Ki have all provided both material and emotional support. Mom and Dad especially supported my effort to finally finish the vi dissertation, and Ki has patiently tried to translate the more arcane elements of my work into something she could understand and care about as a nonspecialist, and to give me a way to conceptualize that dimension of my research. Kate Heley procured books for me. Tonya Luster and Sean Pink were also willing providers of favors that enabled this work. ! Finally, I reserve my most intense thanks for Jess Heley, who provides the ineffable backing to my attempted ambition. I have noticed that it is common to save the most intense praise for one"s partner in Acknowledgments sections, and Jess has shown me why this is. The intellectual work that is the purpose and rationale of this dissertation occurs immersed in the personal life one builds through love and care, and at the cost of it. My hope is that in some way this work compensates for the sacrifices necessary in its making, that in some measure it makes her, and our son Abbot, proud. vii Table of Contents Introduction: Identity, Literature, Myth……………………………………………………1 Chapter 1: Late Style and a Critique of Identity: Late Whitman and Early Sadakichi Hartmann………………………………………………………………………………………31 Chapter 2: Textual Ethics and the Didactic Subject: Marianne Moore and José Garcia Villa…………………………………………………………………………………….89 Chapter 3: Pain, Sex and the Reality of Ethnic Nationalism: Amiri Baraka and David Rafael Wang………………………………………………………………………….146 Chapter 4: Postmodern American Ethnicity: Linh Dinh with Walt Whitman……..198 Conclusion: Race, Aesthetics, and the Body without Organs………………...… ..252 Bibliography…….……………………………………………………………….……….….264 1 Introduction Identity, Literature, Myth ! This dissertation proposes a relation between Asian American poetry and American poetry that is not one of opposition and correction--Asian American poetry is not just a condemnation of the American project, at least as I read it through the more than one hundred years this project covers. I do not mean to say that Asian American poetry, or more broadly Asian American cultural discourse, doesn"t address race or inequality, it certainly does. What I do want to argue is that Asian American poetry is sympathetic to a strain in American poetry, and American cultural discourse, directed toward self-critique. In fact, it is through what I am here calling “self-critique,” but what I mean to develop into a critique of identity itself, that the anti-racist potential of Asian American culture emerges. ! My claim that it"s by refusing identity that Asian American poetry combats racism, and that American poetry stemming from Walt Whitman is similarly a refusal of identity, might sound wrong in at least two initial ways. First, even the adjective “Asian American” suggests the preeminence of racial identity so that some degree of insisting on identity is necessary to justify the category of Asian American poetry.