Introduction “Of Being Numerous”

Abstract

At a recent panel on “Transfrontier” writing, held at the conference for the study of Multi-Ethnic Literatures in the United States (MELUS), audiences were prompted by a compelling question. Put deceptively simply, the question was, “Is it ethnic, or is it poetry?” This admittedly odd choice between identity politics, on the one hand, or aesthetics, on the other—between such seemingly incommensurate categories—nonetheless reveals something important about the study of poetry as the ages of postmodernism and multiculturalism come to a close. The question takes as its point of departure a central tension within contemporary U.S. poetics: the question concerning whether poetry should be primarily conceived as a means for the expression of preexistent identity or as a process of complicating or even reconsituting identity.

The only obvious escape from paradox is to cut loose from the monistic assumption altogether, and to allow the world to have existed from its origin in pluralistic form, as an aggregate or collection of higher and lower things and principles, rather than as an absolutely unitary fact. Now the gospel of healthy mindedness…casts its vote distinctly for this pluralistic view.

—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience