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

The most delightful part of Joseph Jonghyun Jeon’s Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry is its coda, “Hating Yoko Ono and the New Yellow Peril.” In Ono’s public persona, Jeon argues, race and avant-garde aesthetics are so tightly bound as to become indistinguishable. Ono’s avant-gardism “became a way of circumscribing Asianness” in the context of Japan’s rising economic power and increasingly unpopular military engagements in Southeast Asia (147). The entwined hatred of these distinct characteristics reveals the potential of avant-garde aesthetics to frame politicized conversations about race: instead of providing accounts of racialized subjects, avant-garde art calls attention to racial objectification through its foregrounding of the art object. Ono’s iconic connection between racialization and avant-gardism anticipates the ways in which Jeon’s poets recalibrate race by politicizing avant-garde aesthetics: the “negative appraisal” of such aesthetics “ironically indicates their positive political possibilities” (146).

Jeon’s introduction traces the tight nexus among race, thing, and form. “Defined in opposition to the subject,” he explains, “the thing in American literature and culture has stood for nothing short of dehumanization” (xviii). Following Bill Brown’s articulation of thing theory, Jeon pursues the interpretive possibilities of the thing’s defamiliarizing function, but he avoids Brown’s emphasis on texts’ “material unconscious” (xxiii). Instead, the poetry considered in Racial Things, Racial Forms is extremely self-conscious about the connection between racialization and thingness. Jeon’s quartet of understudied poets, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and John Yau, utilize objectifying tendencies in order to call attention to “the operations through which race is visualized and coded” (xxv). They eschew the representation of minority subjectivity and privilege the consideration of “things” in order to frame race “as a set of formal questions” (xxx). Through their distinct foci—the normative, language, bodies, and visual iconology—these poets offer powerful and distinctive reconceptions of Asian American racialization.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is the most canonical of Jeon’s subjects, and while she is typically positioned as the endpoint or limit case in studies of Asian American poetry, Jeon takes her work as foundational to Asian American literary investigations of what it means to be a thing. Arguing that “racial objectification is a kind of containment” that Cha’s work “renders literally as a physical container” (xxxvii), Jeon analyzes Cha’s mixed-media language art demonstrating that her characteristically white pages and screens at once call attention to the materiality of the artistic medium and work against the blankness associated with racial whiteness. Rather than denoting absence, Cha uses the white page and screen to display the operations of the cultural machinery that produces whiteness as normative.

The metaphor of the container unites Jeon’s four chapters, and in the second he argues that Myung Mi Kim’s multilingual poetry depicts the mouth as the container of language. Kim attends to the physicality of the “tongue-tied mouths of nonnative speakers” who struggle to communicate and “to make the necessary sounds” for English (xxxviii). The physicality—the thingness—of these mouths marks racial difference. Jeon demonstrates that speaking mouths are central to Kim’s poetics: their struggles with language problematize “models of assimilation and naturalization” (68). In Kim’s poetry, English itself “becomes a temporal entity that is constantly renegotiated in the now” (69). In place of assimilation narratives, Kim transforms English, offering a Benjaminian “invigorat[ion] of language” (61).

In the third chapter, Jeon returns to a mixed-media poetics and focuses on two recurring containers in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s work: books and bodies, which are analogized. Considering Berssenbrugge’s artists’ books, collaborations with Richard Tuttle and Kiki Smith, he argues that analogies between books and bodies constitute an articulation of “positioned phenomenology” and stage “a central problematic in visualizing race in...