Postmodernism and Subversive Parody: John Yau's "Genghis Chan: Private Eye" Series

Abstract

This article examines the subversive strategy of parody in John Yau's poetic series entitled "Genghis Chan: Private Eye," by situating Yau's work in the contexts of postmodern poetics, Hollywood films, and Asian American history and culture. While engaging with some major critical views on Yau's poetry, its reading of Yau's "Genghis Chan"series breaks away from those critical approaches to postmodern poetry and minority literature, which assume a false dichotomy that renders agency of the Othered subject and postmodern poetics mutually exclusive.This essay argues that Yau's historically situated and ethnically inflected postmodern poems enact a critical engagement with postmodern aesthetics and poststructuralist theories—an engagement which at once interrogates and reinvents the private self and raced subject. Its close-reading of Yau's poems foregrounds the ways in which Yau deploys postmodern aesthetics to expose the constituent historical, conceptual, and representational elements of ethnicity, and to re-articulate an Asian American Otherness that refuses to be defined.