Transnationalism and Diaspora in American Poetry

Abstract

This article explores how literary-critical understanding of modern and contemporary American poetry is shifting under the pressure of transnational and diasporic forces. Drawing on several case studies aimed at illuminating what it means to read American poetry transnationally, it argues that transnational and diasporic perspectives encourage us to view the United States as a node of political, economic, and cultural exchange, in which the crossing of borders has become constitutive of Americanness rather than external to it, and invite us to examine how such border crossings are registered in the content and it invite forms of modern and contemporary American poetry. In contrast to the seeming solidity of national identities, diasporic identifications are often ambivalent, acknowledging the pull of multiple histories while remaining at a critical distance from any single location.