Literary Studies

Committee Members: Bakirathi Mani, Cynthia Tolentino

Winner:

Interventions into Modernist Cultures: Poetry from Beyond the Empty Screen, by Amie Elizabeth Parry

Honorable Mention:

Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Autobiographies of Childhood, by Rocio G. Davis

Amie Elizabeth Parry’s Interventions into Modernist Cultures: Poetry from Beyond the Empty Screen is an ambitious, far-reaching project that represents innovative and exciting new directions in Asian American literary studies. Parry reconceptualizes the chronology and geography of modernism to place U.S. imperialist and neocolonial formations in conversation with avant-garde Taiwanese poetry and Cold War minority U.S. writing. Her study thus questions dichotomies that would separate canonical white American modernisms from Asian and Asian American literatures. In rethinking the definition, aesthetics, and politics of modernism, she creatively brings together uncanny partners: Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein with Yü Kwang-chung, Hsia Yü, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Yet as underscored by her book’s title, Parry’s interventions are numerous, as her study also argues for multiple ways of rethinking the boundaries of American, Asian, and Asian/American literary studies—including a comparative and transnational framework that examines texts produced beyond the geographical borders of the United States and literature in languages other than English, an emphasis on the forms and politics of U.S. and Taiwanese modernist and avant-garde poetry, and a consideration of literary connections between U.S. imperialism and Cold War geopolitics.

While, as Parry observes, recent work in modernist literary studies has emphasized transnational or global production, influence, and circulation, Interventions into Modernist Cultures zeroes in on a more specific site of comparison—Taiwan—as a method of attending to the particularities of U.S.–East Asian relations. For Parry, the “empty screen”—a phrase she takes from Gertrude Stein’s Lectures in America—is a metaphor for modernist narratives and epistemologies (both U.S.-based and other national modernisms that are related to the United States through imperial or neocolonial ties) that suppress and erase other forms of knowledge. Moving beyond the empty screen that would render the work of Taiwanese poets and writers like Cha invisible, Parry’s analysis connects canonical modernists and their formation during the development of U.S. empire to Cold War military neocolonialism in Taiwan and its resonances. But while such transnational interactions form the backdrop of her work, Interventions into Modernist Cultures also seriously considers the particulars of poetry, a genre that Parry contends has been ignored in postcolonial, diasporic, and Asian/American literary studies. For these reasons, the committee was pleased to honor Parry’s far-reaching and ambitious project with the inaugural award for achievement in literary studies.

Rocio Davis’s Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Autobiographies of Childhood, awarded an honorable mention, also underscores a genre of Asian American literature that deserves more critical attention. Given the importance of autobiographies and memoirs as foundational texts in Asian American studies, this book is a long overdue and insightful contribution. Davis analyzes both tropes of childhood and the formal aspects of autobiography. The book’s attention to form is a concerted effort to depart from the use of autobiographies as sociological evidence or as ethnographic accounts of some notion of the real, lived experience of Asian Americans. For Davis, formal innovation in autobiographies does not necessarily equal political resistance, but it does indicate an authorial desire to destabilize essentialized versions of Asian North American identity. The project pulls together convincing evidence to diagnose and characterize specific thematic concerns of autobiography. Davis plays with the concept of childhood to theorize different aspects of Asian American autobiography as a genre: childhoods set outside of North America, generational autobiography, biracial autobiography, tropes of Americanization, and children’s literature (itself an undertheorized or unrecognized genre of Asian American literary studies).