Slanted Allusions: Transnational Poetics and Politics of Marilyn Chin and Russell Leong

This essay takes issue both with scholars who consider Chinese allusions in Asian American literature as Orientalist and with critics who advocate wholesale reclamation of an Asian (heroic) tradition. It shows through a detailed analysis of two poems how Chinese American writers could resort to bicultural interplay to convey transnational critique, and it contends that such deliberate filtering and revisioning of cultural legacies is in fact one of the hallmarks of Chinese American writing.