Nerveless Heathens

a workshop with

Steven Yao

Thursday, April 27, 2006
Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center
4:00-6:00 PM

Respondent: Doris Madrigal, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Stanford University

Background reading for Professor Yao's talk is an essay entitled "To Be (or Not to Be) the Poet: Maxine Hong Kingston and the Cultural Politics of Verse in Asian American Literature." Electronic copies of that essay and of "Nerveless Heathens" will be distributed to the regular workshop members via email. For an electronic copy of the readings, please contact Julie Minich at jminich@stanford.edu.

Abstract: Over the last couple of decades, the category of "race" has come to be seen as at once logically incoherent and yet still instrumentally rational. This paper seeks to address the apparent "paradox" of "race," with specific reference to the historical construction of Chinese racial identity within the United States, by exploring the potential utility of poetics as an informal system of analysis for modes of rhetoric and conception that most decidedly do not operate strictly or even primarily within the constraints of logic. This paper is part of my current project, Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse and the Counter-Poetics of Difference in the U.S., 1910-Present.

Steven Yao is the author of Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (Palgrave Macmillan 2002), and an Associate Professor of English at Hamilton College (as of this coming July 1), where he teaches Anglo-American Modernism, translation history and theory, and Asian American literature. His current project, Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse and the Counter-Poetics of Difference in the U.S., 1910-Present, seeks to develop a literary history of Chinese American verse as the articulation of a "counter-poetics" of difference given in response to dominant constructions of Chinese racial and cultural identity in the U.S. from the early twentieth century to the present. He is co-editor of Sinographies (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2007), as well as of a special issue of Wasifiri: Journal of Caribbean, African, Asian and Associated Literatures in English. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Textual Practice, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory and Representations.

Doris Madrigal is a fourth-year Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University specializing in Chicana/o literature and sociolinguistics. Her additional research interests include heritage language pedagogy and bilingualism.