Rob Wilson

Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production

The Pacific, long a source of fantasies for EuroAmerican consumption and a testing ground for the development of EuroAmerican production, is often misrepresented by the West as one-dimensional, culturally monolithic. Although the Asia/Pacific region occupies a prominent place in geopolitical thinking, little is available to readers outside the region concerning the resistant communities and cultures of Pacific and Asian peoples. Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production fills that gap by documenting the efforts of diverse indigenous cultures to claim and reimagine Asia/Pacific as a space for their own cultural production. From New Zealand to Japan, Taiwan to Hawaii, this innovative volume presents essays, poems, and memoirs by prominent Asia/Pacific writers that resist appropriation by transnational capitalism through the articulation of autonomous local identities and counter-histories of place and community. In addition, cultural critics spanning several locations and disciplines deconstruct representations—particularly those on film and in novels—that perpetuate Asia/Pacific as a realm of EuroAmerican fantasy. This collection, a much expanded edition of boundary 2 , offers a new perception of the Asia/Pacific region by presenting the Pacific not as a paradise or vast emptiness, but as a place where living, struggling peoples have constructed contemporary identities out of a long history of hegemony and resistance. Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production will prove stimulating to readers with an interest in the Asia/Pacific region, and to scholars in the fields of Asian, American, Pacific, postcolonial, and cultural studies. Contributors . Joseph P. Balaz, Chris Bongie, William A. Callahan, Thomas Carmichael, Leo Ching, Chiu Yen Liang (Fred), Chungmoo Choi, Christopher L. Connery, Arif Dirlik, John Fielder, Miriam Fuchs, Epeli Hauofa, Lawson Fusao Inada, M. Consuelo Leon W., Katharyne Mitchell, Masao Miyoshi, Steve Olive, Theophil Saret Reuney, Peter Schwenger, Subramani, Terese Svoboda, Jeffrey Tobin, Haunani-Kay Trask, John Whittier Treat, Tsushima Yuko, Albert Wendt, Rob Wilson

From the Sublime to the Devious: Writing the Experimental/Local Pacific

Starting up in Honolulu not so long ago in the downsizing weathers of 1995, the literary journal Tinfish was formed out of a cultural as well as political movement (ongoing in Hawaiai, as in other dispersed sites of local/transnational reimagining) to mix, coalesce, and juxtapose what Susan Schultz, the founding editor and writer in poetics, called in a brief editorial statement ‘‘the two postmodernisms.’’ 1

Email Dialogue/Interview with Pamela Lu and Catalina Cariaga

[>>On Wed, 17 May 2000, Rob Wilson wrote: >>Dear Pamela Lu and Catalina Cariaga: >>When the two of you were recently in Honolulu for readings in the Juliana >>Spahr ‘‘alter English’’ series, I was the loudish aging guy in the audience who >>asked you questions about your poetic syntax a la Henry Adams and Proust (Pamela) >>and about the gap between ordinary speech and poetic utterance (Catalina). >>Perhaps you can remember this, or me . . . >>Anyway, Charles Bernstein, Paul Bové, and I et al. are working on doing more >>poetry reviews for the journal boundary 2: An International Journal of >>Literature and Culture, of which I am an advisory editor. I have gotten >>the editorial green light to do minireviews of your recent books, >>Pamela and Cultural Evidence.

Tracking Voices from "Elsewhere": Entering the Counter-U.S. Poetics of Faye Kicknosway

I have already published essays in Hawai i and in Canada focused on the strange heteroglossia and other-voiced cultural uncanny coursing through Faye Kicknosway’s poetry.1 Far from the U.S. apparatus and its lyric fame-making modes, Kicknosway makes a fresh, estranged antivoice and highly original poetry, taking risks in form and de-habituated technique as she goes on writing about the American dispossessed in a chameleonlike dramatic style that dispossesses her of prior authority and judgment, and voids ‘‘the lyrical interference of the ego’’ in Charles Olson’s Maximus sense.2 As is clear from her ongoing project in creating an unselved poetics,

Tracking Un/American Poetics in Asia/Pacific Experimental Writing: Pamela Lu and Catalina Cariaga

As has been noted in small-press circles, Pamela Lu took the ambiguous ‘‘we’’ of autobiographical narration and deformed it further in the pellucid contortions of Pamela: A Novel, which some underground critics have acclaimed as the ‘‘last masterpiece of the twentieth century.’’ Singular, wry, aloof yet collective in struggle, Pamela offers up a varied, virtualized, and vicarious world of subjectivity-in-formation (autobiography) for ‘‘Pamela Lu,’’ a narrative falling off and feigning forward that is virtually Proustian in its preternaturally eloquent shifts of time, scene, and fashions of selfhood. In ninety-eight well-wrought pages of poetically torqued prose, Pamela proffers a world of self-reflective and tenderly estranged representation and the fatal fall into the language of postmodernity that is, at all places and contexts of daily utterance, discontinuous, wry, twisted, yet drenched in the shifting fashions, creative-destructive dynamics, and cultural codes of the 1980s and 1990s. While not quite Barthes on Barthes,