Race and the Avant-Garde investigates the relationship between identity and poetic form in contemporary American literature, focusing on Asian American and experimental poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Ron Silliman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and John Yau.
Timothy Yu is Associate Professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"Explores how conflicts, anxieties, and confusions fuse with aesthetics, ideologies, and social formations in the unsettling project of a syncretic Asian American poetics. In order to fully engage such poetics, Yu looks at roots but also rootlessness, lineages as well as misalignments. Yu takes risks; the welcome result is a provocatively informative excursion into the productive synergy of race and aesthetic innovation."
