Chinese Whispers: A Transpacific Journey in Poetics and Politics

Asian American / Asian Research Institute (AAARI) - The City University of New York (CUNY)

For this talk, Dr. Yunte Huang will speak on his new book, Chinese Whispers: Toward a Transpacific Poetics, which explores the dynamics of poetry and poetics in the age of globalization, particularly questions of translatability, universality, and risk in the transpacific context. Chinese whispers refers to an American childrens game dating to the years of the Cold War, a period in which everything Chinese, or even Chinese sounding, was suspect. Taking up various manifestations of the phrase in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Huang investigates how poetry, always to a significant degree untranslatable, complicates the transpacific production of meanings and values.