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2005-2006 Fellows

Steven Yao

Hamilton College
Department of English

Steven Yao, Assistant Professor of English at Hamilton College, is the author of Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (Palgrave 2002), and of several articles on Asian American poetry.  He is also co-editor of a collection of essays, Sinographies: Writing China, forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press. 

Project Summary

Combining extensive social contextualization with an analysis of the rhetorical and formal strategies by which various Chinese American writers have sought to incorporate Chinese culture and especially language in constructing an ethnic subjectivity, Foreign Accents seeks to delineate an historical poetics of Chinese American verse from its beginnings in the early twentieth century to our contemporary moment.  Alongside this literary historical dimension, the study will track developments in poetry against changes in the dominant U.S. legal and cultural approaches to characterizing the notion of “Chineseness,” first by means of the discursive category of race, and subsequently through that of ethnicity.  This project shows how Chinese American verse variously articulates a “counter-poetics” of difference in response and challenge to hegemonic discourses about the terms of minority identity in the U.S.