Racial Things, Racial Forms Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry

In the poets’ various treatments ofthings(that is, objects of art), one witnesses a confluence of heretofore discrete factors: the avant-garde interest in objecthood and the racial question of objectification. By refashioning avant-garde investigations ofthingsinto questions about how American discourse visualizes raceinandonthe body, these poets implicitly critique dominant modes of racial visibility, seeking alternatives to the unreflective stances that identity politics often unwittingly reproduces. At the heart of Jeon’s project is the assumption thatracial form is continually recalibrated to elide ideological ambiguities and ambivalences in contemporary culture. Thus, rather than focusing exclusively on the subject—on interiority and individual experience—Racial Things, Racial Formsalso uses the calculated strangeness of the avant-garde art object as an occasion to emphasize the physical and visual oddness of racial constructs, as a series of everchanging, contemporary phenomena that are in conversation with, but not entirely determined by, their historical legacy. In this critical study, Jeon argues that by invoking theforeignnessof an avant-garde art object as a way to understand racial otherness, these writers model the possibility of a post-identity, racial politics that challenges how race is fundamentally visualized. In addition to appealing to those interested in Asian American studies and race in American literature,Racial Things, Racial Formsaddresses readers interested in contemporary poetry, art, and visual culture, paying particular attention to the intersections between literary and visual art.