These lines from Janice Mirikitani's 1995 poem “We, the Dangerous” form the ground of Timothy Yu's major reassessment of Asian American literature. Yu returns to Mirikitani, an icon of the Asian American literary scene from the 1970s movement period onward, to recover an originary diasporic framework. “The link,” Yu writes, “between these three locations—the site of a US atomic bombing, the location of the then-current US war, and a camp where the US government imprisoned Japanese Americans—cannot be made through ancestry or through any common point of origin.” Instead, these sites propose a political solidarity, and it is Yu's contention that “we must employ the broader, racialized appellation of ‘Asian’ in order to make Mirikitani's grouping coherent” (18). In calling forth a reactivation of this term, Diasporic Poetics explores the resonance of this broadened “Asian” as a transnational political coalition in three national locations—Canada, Australia, and the United States.
Yu's...
