Literary Studies
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Literary Studies
Chair: Betsy Huang
Committee members: Tamiko Nimura, Jolie A. Sheffer
Winner:
Race and the Avant Garde, by Timothy Yu
The panel is pleased to recommend, by unanimous vote, that Timothy Yu receive the award for the literary studies category of the AAAS Book Award. Yu's Race and the Avant-Garde exemplifies the best combination of well-researched and well-told literary history, startlingly fresh close readings of new and familiar texts, and, most important, a persuasive argument for the entwined relationship between two seemingly disparate groups of poets: the Language poets and Asian American poets. Yu traces each group's founding members, guiding politics and aesthetic ideals, key publications, and evolving definitions of "experimental" writing. The result is an elegantly woven account of their parallel courses that reveals the convergences and divergences in their respective developments. Deft expositions of the racial politics and "postmodern orientalism" of (white) avant-garde aesthetics, along [End Page 438] with those of the aesthetic innovations of Asian American experimental poets and their vexed responses to the white aesthetic, are carried out through meticulous readings of a wide range of writings by key figures in each group—Allen Ginsberg, Ron Silliman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Janice Mirikitani, and John Yau, among others. These illuminating analyses persuasively substantiate the book's overall argument about the ineluctable relationship between ethnoracial consciousness and avant-garde aesthetics in the post-Vietnam War American poetics scene.
The studies of poetry and poetics have been unwitting casualties to the long reign of the study of prose literature, to which much of the scholarship in Asian American studies, and ethnic studies more broadly, is routinely dedicated. Yet Yu convinces us that the contributions of Asian American avant-garde poets in the field's formative years were every bit as significant as those who wrote in more conventional genres. We see Yu's project as a continuation of the fine work done by Josephine Hock-Nee Park in last year's winner of the award, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics, along with those of important poetics scholars on which Yu's and Park's work rest. Replete with new insights on the considerable connections between two movements of consequence rarely discussed together by scholars, Race and the Avant-Garde will surely expand these two fields' critical horizons.
