Transcultural Intertextuality: Reading Asian North American Poetry.

Abstract

Studying Asian North American poetry since the 1960s, this dissertation defines “transcultural intertextuality” as a border-crossing practice that engages with multiple histories and interweaves elements from a wide range of cultural and literary traditions. Specifically, I read four poets—Agha Shahid Ali, Kimiko Hahn, Fred Wah, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha—and argue that studying this practice expands the scope of Asian North American literary criticism, as it urges us to rethink ethnicity beyond domestic boundaries of the nation. Analyzing the poets in various intertextual relationships, this study demonstrates how poetic analysis can enhance our understanding of the transcultural impulse of Asian North American literature. This dissertation pays particular attention to these poets’ formal strategies as ways of negotiating with dominant social discourses on national history, international relations, gender, and ethnic identities. The organization of the chapters follows a trajectory of poetic form, moving from traditional verse to experimental texts. Chapter one examines Ali’s writing on home and the world through his deployment of traditional forms such as the ghazal, which allow for both the historical and contemporary theorizations of “cosmopolitanism.” Chapter two studies Hahn’s criticism and practice of translation in her innovative poetry by drawing upon the theories of Walter Benjamin, Gayatri Spivak, and l’écriture feminine in order to understand how her transcultural feminist poetics challenges self/other dichotomy. By invoking Jacques Derrida’s and Judith Butler’s theorization of the “performative,” chapter three examines Wah’s avant-garde, performative poetic language and shows how it interrogates the usual ways in which language works in defining racial and ethnic identity. Finally, chapter four reads Cha’s intermedia “visual poetry” in relation to art criticism and feminist film criticism of the 1970s. The chapter examines the dynamics between her aesthetic concerns and critique of imperial power in rewriting Korean and Korean American history. These poets do not merely write about exilic and diasporic experience; they foreground the very process of border-crossing through their formal and theoretical experimentation. Ethnic identity in this process reveals itself to be a dynamic concept that needs to be understood in complicated international and intercultural relations.