Cathy Song’s Poetic Pursuit Of The Reconstruction Of Ethnic Identity

Contemporary Asian-American poetry plays a vital role in the construction of contemporary Asian-American cultural identity.Under the assimilative sway of American culture,Cathy Song,as a third-generation Asian immigrant whose remarkable pieces of poetry have helped her enter the mainstream,overtly demonstrates that Asian culture characterized by Confucianism has been greatly diluted in her.Yet being cut from her ancestral origins,excluded from political competition and deprived of economic privileges,the tag of ethnic minority ineluctably haunts her and exerts forces on her poetic creation.Her oeuvre,which comprises Picture Bride(1983),Frameless Windows,Squares of Light(1988),School Figures(1994),The Land of Bliss(2001)and Cloud Moving Hands(2007),exhibits the poet’s efforts at challenging and re-negotiating the stereotyped image imposed on the Asian while she traverses between multiple cultural domains in a violent struggle to construct singular subjectivity.On the basis of previous academic achievement,this paper,through the lens of post-colonial theories,provides an analysis of Song’s cultural identity and examines her conscious attempts intended to discredit the overly homogenized Other.The thesis starts with discussions on the in-between-ness of Song’s cultural stance.The improper citation of Tu Fu’s poem reveals the alienating influence of American cultural legacy on the ancestral culture.Song’s faith in the rhetoric of American Dream further confirms the dominance of American culture.Yet,instead of accepting a determined concept of ethnic identity,Song situates herself at an unstable point,scrutinizing in"in-between" spaces the conflicts and cleavages within the Asian community that originate from oppressive dominating discourses(essentialism).The paper continues to explore the leitmotif of "escape" in Song’s poetry and explicate how she represents Freudian flights in her revisions of classic Anglo-Western literary works,in order to subvert the stereotyped conception of the Asian as unconditionally submissive and willing to sacrifice themselves for the maintenance and consolidation of the patriarchal system.The last part analyzes the alternative familial past Song contributes to the dismissal of authoritative history,as well as the adoption of romantic devices that aim at rectifying the generalized impression of the first-generation Asian immigrants as willful victims.Song finally points to the possibility of reconciliation between heterogeneous cultures if the subject acknowledges the inherent otherness that coexists with the self.Song actively utilizes Western cultural tradition in her poetic creation to reconstruct for the Asian American an identity beyond any conceptualization,which not only adds richness to American literature,but also upsets the substratum of hegemonic discourses.