Chapter 14 - Revolutionary Formalisms

Summary

In this chapter, I argue that Asian American modernists Yone Noguchi, Sadakichi Hartmann, and José Garcia Villa experimented with the orientalist styles that were made popular by poets Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound. Writing during the period of Asian exclusion in the USA (1882-1946), these three poets responded to the ideological contradictions between elitism and universalism that were present in Whitman’s and Pound’s poetry by calling for a more democratic and egalitarian America. Noguchi’s and Hartmann’s Japanese American haiku and tanka and Villa’s style of “reversed consonance” — “a new method of rhyming…which has never been used in the history of English poetry” — also articulate a queer diaspora that exposes heteronormative structures of power and calls on the USA to be more inclusive of racial and gay others. They do so by using nonbinary motifs in their poetry which critique the binary structure of racial exclusion: native/foreign. These nonbinary motifs are what theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call “rhizomatic,” which is a theoretic concept that organizes ideas through nonhierarchical multiplicities. The rhizomes of their poetry are composed of “deterritorializing” the normativity of Asian exclusion and heterosexuality and “reterritorializing” the American landscape through inclusion. Despite their politics of inclusion, their works problematically objectify women.