A “Kundiman Generation”? Networking Asian American Literary Orgs in the 21st Century

A “Kundiman Generation”? Networking Asian American Literary Orgs in the 21st Century

Presented by the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society

In recent decades, the field of Asian American literary production has expanded considerably, with writers and poets winning major US literary prizes, and publishing literary and commercial fiction and poetry in major publishing houses like Penguin/Random House and Harper Collins. What has conditioned the prominence and placement of “Asian American literature” we see today? Few accounts have explored the mediating role of Asian American literary organizations and grassroots collectives in this literary boom. In this talk, I introduce my oral history archive and a digital humanities project, “Networking Asian American Poetry,” which maps the relationship between literary organizations and Asian American poets in the 21st century, and I focus on the literary nonprofit, Kundiman, as a key case study for understanding the role of literary orgs as mediating institutions between the minority writer and larger structures of publishing and MFA programs that undergird contemporary literature. Given Kundiman’s size and influence (250+ workshop participants over its 20-year existence, with 331 books and chapbooks collectively published among its fellows), I theorize a “Kundiman generation” of Asian American poets in the 21st century, a label which is less about a unified aesthetic or identity than it is about these poets’ modes of relation and community-building that critically reorients Asian American poetics away from MFA, craft-focused ideologies.