-Cathy Park Hong, from “Black & Asian American Solidarity: Exchanging Ideas, Sharing History”

This panel takes as its starting point the current political climate in the United States, whose extreme violence is exclusively targeting people of color. Ever since the beginning of Donald J. Trump’s second term, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been arresting and deporting both documented and undocumented immigrants of color back to “their countries,” destroying families and fragmenting communities. This special session attempts to facilitate conversations on how interracial solidarity is urgently needed by offering Asian scholars’ perspectives on how we learn from and work with one of the most prominent resistant, anti-racist literary traditions: Black poetry.

By doing so, this panel participates in the ongoing conversations on, first, the long history of poetry as an institutionalized genre and, second, the existing comparative scholarship on Black and Asian American literatures. These works are often historicist by nature: scholars such as Mark McGurl, Evan Kindley, and Juliana Spahr have shown how poetry has been intertwined with state politics and its institutional constraints during and after the Cold War; writers like Jodi Kim and Tao Leigh Goffe highlight historical and cultural convergences between the two ethnic groups. Drawing upon these historical frameworks, our panel attempts to take this conversation further formally by engaging the actual poetic texts and focusing on what they, by way of close reading, teach us in our fight against various layers and entities of institution today. By zooming in on how texts not only respond to the history but herald changes at the formal level, we attempt to reinvoke language and form as poetry’s main mode of intervention in the political world, while staying alert to what the historicist approaches afford in producing new understandings and possibilities.

The panel hosts four speakers—two scholars and two poet-scholars—with one presiding as chair. Each speaker will have twelve minutes for their presentations, and a discussion will follow.

We open with Ji Nang Kim’s talk on Black and Asian poets’ responses to state violence that targets people of color. Reading Reginald Dwayne Betts’s “When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving” and Ocean Vuong’s “Toy Boat,” Kim offers distinct perspectives on Black-Asian solidarity through their commemoration of Tamir Rice. This paper investigates how Betts and Vuong provide complementary insights on future Black and Asian alliances: while Betts reveals a realistic view on the limitation of solidarity, Vuong introduces collective trauma and suffering as points of connection.

Eunice Lee explores another type of Black-Asian response to institutional violence: alternative institutions. Lee’s paper analyzes an audio recording of poetry readings by Amiri Baraka and Lawson Fusao Inada at the multicultural literary performance event Ubiquitous Incantations. Co-sponsored by the Basement Workshop and the Before Columbus Foundation, this exemplar of alternative institution, Lee argues, allows us to not only hear cross-racial formal and affective similarities, but also to access curatorially synthesized conflicting ideological approaches to the problem of American race relations.

The panel then moves on to test viability of this cross-racial poetics in prose. Hoon Lee reads lyric essays by Ross Gay and Patrick Rosal to examine the university classroom as a space of resistance from within. Universities necessarily imply and impose a narrative of linear progress. However, in their classrooms, these poet-teachers disrupt the fantasy of temporal linearity by creating temporal alterity through sonic imageries. Lee specifically focuses on how they address the problems of institutionalized learning through an act of listening that slows down, stops, or ends narrativization, complicating narrative’s linear time and countering the university’s goal-oriented timeline.

Finally, Jang Wook Huh pushes this question of time further in the direction of media poetics. Building on Cathy Park Hong’s emphasis on the spontaneous creativity of Black humor and the genre of stand-up comedy, Huh examines the intersection of Hong’s concept of “minor feelings” and the improvisation of agency as theorized by Nathaniel Mackey. By illuminating Mackeyan subtexts within Hong’s book Minor Feelings, Huh argues that Black improvisation has the potential to encourage Asian American writers to creatively transform hierarchical social arrangements into provisional entities, amenable to rearrangement, revision, and reinvention.

Throughout these talks, we expect to facilitate discussions around themes of cross-racial, interdisciplinary solidarity. By hosting Asian scholars and poet-scholars and showcasing their diverse perspectives, this transdisciplinary special session will speak to scholars whose work operates in Black and ethnic studies, while also welcoming poets and creative writers.