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Notes
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Notes introduction 1. For historical documents on the debates which led to the laws that barred Chinese and other Asian immigrants from U.S. citizenship, see HyungChan Kim, ed., AsianAmericansandCongress:ADocumentaryHistory (Westport : Greenwood Press, 1996), 22–25. 2. I use the term minority in this study to refer to the difference of social status and political position of people of color from that of whites in the United States. 3. The use of Other (with an uppercase O) and other (with a lowercase o) is inconsistent among writers of various disciplines. Some use both alternately , employing Other to refer to otherness in general such as the socially , politically, and culturally constructed collective identity of women, the outsider, or people of color; and other to refer to the other person, the particularized others. Others use either Other or other for both the generalized and the particular other. Similarly, translators of Emmanuel Levinas do not follow a single uniform rule for capitalizing other. Alphonso Lingis, a major translator of Levinas’s works, always translates the French word autrui as the ‘Other,’ and autre as ‘other,’ regardless of the occasional capitalization of autre in Levinas’s texts. Richard A. Cohen, another major translator of Levinas, follows the convention Lingis has established. In this book, I use the lowercase other consistently while keeping the uppercase and lowercase variations intact in all my citations. 4. Some critics challenge a homogenous definition of Romantic lyric poetry. See for example, Sarah Zimmerman, Romanticism, Lyricism, and History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999) and Linda A. Kinnahan , Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004). 5. See for instance, Charles Altieri’s discussion of the self and subjectivity in his two books, SelfandSensibilityinContemporaryAmericanPoetry and Subjective Agency: A Theory of First-Person Expressivity and Its Social Implications. 6. It should be noted that Shelley Wong raises those questions in a note to her essay. The limited space of a note does not allow her to further explore the questions. 7. Scholars, especially feminists, who engage with Emmanuel Levinas’s views on ethics have made significant contributions to the debates on subjectivity and otherness. See for instance, Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, Jill Robbins, Simon Critchley, Tina Chanter, and Ewa Pionowska Ziarek. 8. See for instance, Emmanuel Levinas’s discussion of art in Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), particularly chapters 3 and 4. In her book, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), Jill Robbins offers a thorough, insightful analysis of the apparent contradictions in Levinas’s charges of the aesthetic pertaining to the ethical, particularly in chapters 3–7. chapter one 1. For detailed and well-documented discussion on racialization of the body and American identity, see David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American:Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999), chapters 3 and 4. 2. Helen Vendler, for example, defines lyric poetry in terms of the lyric moment when the disembodied self “is alone with itself” and gives voice to the “soul.” See Vendler, Soul Says: On Recent Poetry (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999), 6–7. 3. For a thoughtful, close reading of “The Cleaving” from a different perspective from mine, see Jeffrey F. L. Partridge, “The Politics of Ethnic Authorship : Li-Young Lee, Emerson, and Whitman at the Banquet Table,” in SLI:StudiesintheLiteraryImagination, a special issue on “Cross Wire: Asian American Literary Criticism,” 37.1 (Spring 2004): 101–24. My reading of Lee focuses on his difference from Emerson and Whitman, whereas Partridge emphasizes his similarity with them. 4. According to Li-Young Lee, in a brief conversation with the author in 1995, he read Emerson’s remarks about the Chinese features in his journals . For more information about and analysis of that particular entry of Emerson’s journal, see Partridge, 115–118. chapter two 1. See Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943 (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1994); Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (New York: Oxford UP, 1990); and Maxine Hong Kingston, “The Laws,” in China Men (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 152–59. 2. Chin’s words in a telephone conversation with the author, May 12, 1998. 282 | | | Notes to Pages 12– 68 [3.237.31.131] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:46 GMT) 3. Ch’an is a school of Buddhism influenced by...