Does Anglophone Chinese Diasporic Avant-garde Writing Exist?

Abstract

[Opening Paragraph] This essay joins two active interests of mine: Anglophone writing by writers of Chinese descent in the diaspora and avant-garde literary writing. In my forthcoming book, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford UP, 2013), I argue against the prevailing critical practice in the States of reading minority literature, including Asian American literature, for content—ethnic, ethnographic, sociological, autobiographical, and so on—with virtually no attention paid to the form, especially the literary aspects, of this body of literature. Indeed, judging from the criticism, one could almost say that “minority” and “the literary” are mutually exclusive categories for most literary critics, even those of the highest caliber. This mode of apprehending Asian American literary writing as extended Chinatown tour or as the rendered truths of a native informant is particularly problematic when one is reading minority experimental writing—writing, for example, that has no visible markers of ethnicity or a stable autobiographical “I” or other recognizable signs of ethnic writing.