Allen Ginsberg’s “China”

Abstract

When visiting China in 1984 as a member of the American writers’ delegation, Allen Ginsberg composed a “Series of Poems on China,” which sought to record what he saw, heard, and felt. The documentary urge of these later poems may be contrasted with his earlier understanding of China, from a distance, as primarily a set of contrary ideological images used to critique Western (primarily American) hegemony in politics and culture. As such, Ginsberg’s views on China developed from the naïve use of Other images toward a more affective—hence poetically effective—understanding of Chinese peoples as agents of their own modernity, a change that at once foregrounds his increasingly transcendental sympathy for “China” as well as acknowledges the limits of such an appreciation. By refusing to impose images of China upon a corresponding Chinese “reality,” then, Ginsberg came to acknowledge the naïveté of all image-making. He sought, in a word, to encounter China as the transcendence of its particular images.