Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry by Joseph Jonghyun Jeon

Joseph Jonghyun Jeon’s Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry examines formal and affective structures congruently. In Jeon’s development of objecthood as a conceptual tool for analysis, he turns the problem of ethnic visibility into a site for productive inquiry. Developing Frantz Fanon’s account of racial interpellation and art critic Michael Fried’s work on materiality, Jeon offers racial objectification as a “metaphoric kind of containment” that captures and flattens the raced subject as an object (xxxvii). He draws parallels between this mode of visibility and avant-garde art forms, which frequently foreground their materiality. Fanon articulates racial abjection as becoming “an object in the midst of other objects” (qtd. in Jeon 1), while for Fried, objecthood or materiality threatens art’s ability to function meaningfully as art. By identifying strong resonances between avant-garde reification and interpellative racial objectification, Jeon argues that avant-garde Asian American poetry offers unique possibilities for better understanding and arriving at new modes of insight, political engagement, and critique. The central authors of his study—Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, John Yau, and Yoko Ono—“mobiliz[e] the unwieldiness of things as an occasion to explore the contemporaneity of racial visuality and as a means of participating in its ongoing construction project” (xxxii).

Jeon’s methodology relies on recognizing avant-garde formal experiments as interventionist forays into subjectivity: the “strangeness” of the avant-garde object emerges from a series of complex epistemological operations (xvii). He demonstrates how articulating these processes can lead to new critical tools, which his conception of objecthood aptly demonstrates. By applying art critical examinations of materiality and form in his nuanced close readings, Jeon highlights experimental Asian American poetry’s strong ties with the practices and communities of other arts. He also teases out the broader cultural implications of works that engage differently with racial logics.

Jeon’s conception of objecthood is best performed through his analysis of Cha’s work. He observes how “objecthood is a debased condition” upon which Cha’s work actively plays (2). Cha’s visual, performance, literary, and film work incorporate cross-media images of whiteness in ways that can illuminate and critique racialization processes. For example, Jeon discusses how Cha responds to Fanon’s and Fried’s imaginations of whiteness as an abstracted ideality: whether as racial cipher or blank page, whiteness emerges as an abstraction that ultimately upholds power’s possibilities through the illusion of having no limitations, boundaries, or identifying marks. He demonstrates how whiteness in Cha’s artist book Earth (1976) and film installation Exilée (1980) invites us to confront these projects’ materiality, making us self-conscious of our flickering estrangement and enchantment as viewers: “Cha relocates the Duchampian tradition of destabilizing attitudes toward ordinary objects in a more positioned social context by continuously dilating not upon racialized bodies themselves but, rather, the terms in which these bodies have traditionally been racialized.” Jeon’s turn toward the material in Cha’s oeuvre opens up alternative considerations of how racialization processes operate through the gaze while bringing into focus the aspects of Cha’s works that proceed without relying on “literal corporeal figurations of race” (4).

Jeon continues his analysis of materiality and form in his examination of Berssenbrugge’s collaborations Hiddenness (1987) and Endocrinology (1997), finding resonances between human bodies and books. Where Cha’s work invokes self-conscious engagement as a means for echoing racial objectification, Jeon suggests that Berssenbrugge’s interests in layers and synchronic visibilities demonstrate negotiated ambivalences between the somatic and social. Of central concern is how we come to perceive the world through our bodies and the way those perceptions are—and fail to be—ideologically penetrated. He suggests that Berssenbrugge “ultimately works out the impossibility of committing entirely to either a positioned subject, whose body’s physicality assures its ineluctable visibility, or a universal...