The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry

Conclusion

Conclusion The relationship between self and other entails both ethics and politics, as shown in the work of seven contemporary Asian American poets. In their investigations of the ethical and political questions of otherness, these poets demonstrate an intricate relationship among aesthetics, poetics, and politics, which is embedded in a Levinasian ethics. “Levinasian politics is the enactment of plurality , of multiplicity,” states Simon Critchley in arguing for “a Levinasian politics of ethical difference” (225). By enacting a political plurality and multiplicity through an ethics and poetics of alterity, contemporary Asian American poets confront the relationship between American poetry and American democracy. Whitman passionately asserted this relationship in Leaves of Grass in the midnineteenth century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Robert Pinsky reemphasizes the same in his book Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry (2002). Refusing to regard the lyrical and the social as mutually exclusive, Pinsky contends: “Lyric poetry has been defined by the unity and concentration of a solitary voice. . . . But the vocality of poetry, involving the mind’s energy as it moves toward speech, and toward incantation, also involves the creation of something like — indeed , precisely like— a social presence. The solitude of lyric, almost by the nature of human solitude and the human voice, invokes a social presence” (18). While emphasizing the presence of the other(s) in terms of the lyric speaker’s audience, Pinsky adds something new to the conventional definition of lyric poetry: “Poetry, then, has roots in the moment when a voice makes us alert to the presence of another or others. It has affinities with all the ways a solitary voice, actual or virtual, imitates the presence of others. Yet as a form of art it is deeply embedded in the single human voice, in the solitary state that hears the other and sometimes recreates that other” (39). In developing a poetics of alterity that insists on confronting social injustice against the other and exploring the ethics and aesthetics of otherness, Asian American poets demonstrate that their transformation and displacement of the lyric I engage with broader issues than merely the poetic. Their poetry and poetics call critical attention to the philosophical foundation of binarized concepts of self and other, which underlie racism, sexism, colonialism, and Orientalism . At the same time, by locating questions of otherness in language , discourse, popular culture, and our everyday experience of encounters with the other(s), Asian American poets help advance critical studies in race, gender, and culture, as well as in poetry. In discourses of feminism, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies , the term otherness has been used, more often than not, in a negative sense, while difference has taken on a positive connotation, even though otherness and difference are also used alternately. Barbara Christian critiques forcefully the positioning of people of color as the “‘historical’ other” of the West (337). Luce Irigaray in An Ethics of Sexual Difference points out that, “the Other often stands in our tradition for product of a hatred for the other. Not intended to be open to interpretation” (112). Keenly aware of the fact that women have been defined as the lesser other of men, the East has been represented as the inferior other of the West, and people of color have been positioned as the subordinate other of whites, feminists of color and scholars of cultural studies and postcolonial studies propose alternative ways for rearticulating otherness in terms of difference outside binary schemes. Audre Lorde cautions against the erasure of differences among women’s experience of oppression, and argues for a new concept of differences as “forces for change” and as sources of women’s strength and creativity, rather than as “causes for separation and suspicion” (99). On a similar note, Gloria Anzaldúa offers an alternative concept of difference which rejects binarism and embraces hybridity, ambivalence, and contradictions of “a new mestiza consciousness , una conciencia de mujer,” which is “a consciousness of Borderlands” (Borderlands 77). This new “borderlands” consciousness , Anzaldúa contends, seeks to “break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner” (80). Like Lorde and Anzaldúa, Trinh T. Minh-ha points out the dangers of erasing differences: “Hegemony works at leveling out differences. . . . Uncovering this leveling of differences is, therefore, resisting that very notion of difference which defined in the master’s terms often resorts to the simplicity of essence.” Hence Trinh asserts the necessity for a reconceptualization of difference. “Many of us still hold...