Literature and Race in the Democracy of Goods

Book excerpt: Examining three literary traditions – post-1960 Asian American, Asian Canadian and Black experimental poetry – this book reframes contemporary scholarly accounts of post-war North American comparative racial group formation, demonstrating how such poetry investigates contemporary Black-Asian relations and maps the complex co-constitution of race and capitalism at different spatial scales. Offering extended close readings of contemporary Black, Asian American and Asian Canadian experimental poets such as Myung Mi Kim, Erica Hunt, Larissa Lai and Ed Roberson, this book argues that these writers redefine race as a changing and politically contested form of constraint and possibility powerfully shaped by economic history and capitalist globalization. This study retheorizes some basic terms of analysis of contemporary US poetry and poetics, critical race and ethnic studies, racial capitalism and contemporary theories of comparative and relational racialization.