Diasporic Avant-Gardes - by C Noland & B Watten (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Diasporic Avant-Gardes draws into dialogue two differing traditions of poetic practice: the diasporic and the avant-garde. This interdisciplinary collection examines the unacknowledged affinities (and crucial differences) between avant-garde and diasporic formal strategies and social formations. The essays foreground the creation of experimental forms and investigate the specific contexts of cultural displacement and language use that inform their poetics.

Review Quotes

"This is an important, indeed a crucial project. It will constitute a formative contribution to the discussion of an expanded field of contemporary poetics. The claim the essays make, quite properly, amounts less to a positivity than a negative solidarity that respects the radical particularity of writers and/or movements while noticing their common refusal of traditional forms and identity politics. The aim in bringing these essays together is to create dialogues across difference that expose, nonetheless, important strategic similarities among a variety of radical experimental writings." - Adalaide Morris, John C. Gerber Professor of English, University of Iowa

"Diasporic Avant Gardes opens up innovative ways of reading diasporic poetic texts in terms of avant garde experimentation and goes even further to suggest that avant gardes need to be read diasporically. It demonstrates convincingly the importance of avant garde negation to the earliest poetic experiments in the diaspora as well as the close relation of avant garde movements to the dislocations of European colonization and global displacement. The result is a superb collection of essays that imaginatively merges the experimental and the theoretical, a globalized imagination and critical daring." - J. Michael Dash, Professor of French, New York University

"This is an important book, among the best critical anthologies I've read in recent years. It is welcome proof that border crossing, of any kind, is a creative act. In rich, varied ways the contributors find form and feeling in what is articulated along the border lines. Most impressively, this volume itself, like the subject it describes, functions as a contact zone, where innovation as much as alienation perform their dizzying, difficult dance." - Amitava Kumar, author of Passport Photos

"The thirteen splendid essays collected in this volume delineate how surprising and unexpected affinities link together diasporic and avant-garde poetry: art forms that have emerged from very different social locations and seem to have incommensurable and irreconcilable goals. Noland and Watten s generative collection enables us to see that diasporic and avant garde poets alike view domination, displacement, and dispersal as central aspects of modernity, that both groups resort to formal experimentation in response to social instability. By comparing and contrasting the similar (although not identical) ways that these poets artfully render the foreign as familiar and the familiar as foreign, Diasporic Avant Gardes shows how the people of the world can be strangely united by the very things that seem to divide us." - George Lipsitz, author of Footsteps in the Dark and Time Passages

"This book fills a gap that many literary scholars may not have perceived: it addresses the role of avant-garde writing among transnational writers... a fine resource for those interested in postcolonial studies... Recommended." - CHOICE

About the Author

CARRIE NOLAND is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, USA.
BARRETT WATTEN is Professor of English at Wayne State University, USA.