This chapter argues that queering concepts of literary type provides an approach for cultivating queer readings in the field of early Asian American literature that do not rely on recourse to a search for timeless queer identities. The chapter provides a prospective inventory of queer types within the field of early Asian American literature through readings across five nation/diaspora formations: the Philippines, Korea, Japan, India, and China, with special and initial focus on queer types in the political novel.

Exponential growth can be a head-scratcher. Accounts and taxonomies that seem inviting near the start of a growth curve can seem like fool’s errands afterwards. And the story of queer—or gay and lesbian, or queer and trans, or LGBTQ+, or LGBTQIA+– poetics since the late 1960s is a story of exponents, of proliferation from stigmatized rarity to celebrated (but still endangered) ubiquity. Does Randall Mann share linguistic goals with Pat Parker? Chen Chen with Samuel Ace? Reginald Shepherd with Carmen Giménez Smith? A sampling offered by me (a white, prosperous, midcareer, polyamorous, Northeastern trans woman with kids) may be more likely to include poets who share my identities, as well as my tastes, and to overlook those who do not. But there is—at least in the arts—no view from nowhere: one informed view is better than none.

Is queerness coeval with American-ness, or with the American version of neoliberalism? The writers explored in this chapter, many of whom have close ties to countries other than the United States, are all preoccupied with these questions. Some, such as Tomasz Jedrowski and Garth Greenwell, implicitly accept queer identity as an American export. Others, including Chinelo Okparanta and Zeyn Joukhadar, fight to carve out small, temporary spaces of resistance to queerness’s entanglements with a certain brand of Western-ness. Others still, such as Shyam Selvadurai and Akwaeke Emezi, create interstitial queer identities that draw on non-Western understandings of selfhood and set them in conversation with mainstream Western queer culture. Focusing on the novel, this chapter engages with writers who identify as gay, lesbian, genderqueer, and trans/ogbanje, hailing from Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Germany/Poland, and Syria as well as the United States; while most of them are Anglophone, it also considers some examples of non-Anglophone representations of Western notions of queerness, such as Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile.

Focusing on the history of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1865 abolitionist poem “Christmas Bells,” this chapter argues that the mediation, reproduction, and circulation of poetry in the digital age are best understood in relation to a longer history of poetry's technological mediation and reproduction by print and older nonprint media. Analyzing how the text of “Christmas Bells” has been edited, cut, reformatted, repurposed, and reproduced for a wide range of media and media platforms over a period of 150 years (via print periodical, postcard, rubber crafting stamp, musical performance, gift tag, television broadcast, YouTube video, dinner menu, souvenir plate, Wikipedia page, and more) reveals not only the common and ongoing mutability of the poetic text in the age of its mechanical reproduction but also the need for new critical models that reassess notions of the poem, author, reader, and book as cardinal points of poetry studies. Reimagining poetry studies in the digital age also means reimagining the study of poetry produced centuries before; it means reconsidering the longer history of poetry's remediation that the digital age inherits, extends, and remakes.

This chapter examines the concept of style in terms of language and of representation. The style of a poem may first be understood as a problem of language at the level of the sentence. The analysis of style is then concerned with diction, syntax, meter, and other such linguistic features, and analysis can approach style as either a conscious choice or an unconscious reflex. But style is therefore also a problem of representation. For example, style may index the poet's character, gender, class, or any other aspect of their identity, and in this way, style is entangled in the specificities of social and historical life. Through detailed readings of poems by Margaret Cavendish and Harryette Mullen, the chapter then argues that the concept of style, both as language and representation, mediates between the one poem and the many. On the one hand, style customarily links one poem to other poems and indeed to other discourses and artforms. On the other, precisely because styles are shared and repeated a given poem may allude to or incorporate styles as part of its material and may, through this very process, affirm its own difference or even singularity.

This chapter provides background information about the literary mode known as regionalism and explains what is queer about New England regionalism. It analyzes White-authored New England regionalist fiction from the 1865-1915 period, using Sarah Orne Jewett’s novel Deephaven as its primary example, to argue that White-authored New England regionalism imagines independent, queer lives for White women characters, living outside of the heteronuclear family. The chapter then turns to examine the underacknowledged African-American women’s tradition of New England regionalism, a tradition that reworks conventions of the earlier, White-dominated one. This African-American tradition begins in the nineteenth century and extends well into the twentieth: Harriet Wilson, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Dorothy West, and Ann Petry all limn the contours of New England life for Black women, engaging and claiming an inheritance of defiant, queer New England character while exploring the limitations and violence of that inheritance when understood as only available to White people.

This chapter argues that the concept of singularity is particularly helpful in examining what is distinctive about the reader's or listener's experience of a poem of literary quality. The chapter compares singularity to comparable concepts, such as difference, uniqueness, and originality, and it argues that singularity has two especially important features: a relation to generality and a relation to the event. This means that singularity is something that happens, something that the reader or listener experiences, rather than an unchanging object independent of readers and listeners. As something that happens, the singularity of a poem may work with, as well as against, conventions shared by other poems. Treating examples by Andrew Marvell, Christina Rossetti, and others, the chapter concludes that a singular poem is singular precisely through its arrangement of poetic conventions, shared social discourses, and general linguistic codes.

Comics that represent nonheteronormative sexualities and diverse genders make up part but not the whole of the vital history of queerness in the medium. The emergence and uptake of comics in feminist and LGBTQA spaces tell important, divergent stories about the politics of cultural production and interpretation. A queer account of comics history recalls the development of the medium as a staging ground for fantasies and for challenges to prevailing mores; controversies over the availability of sexually provocative material in print and digital formats; the changing significance of longstanding icons amid generational shifts in youth cultures.

Throughout the history of European colonization of the American continent, which continues today, European visitors and settlers have produced records of their encounters with Indigenous Peoples they regarded as nonheteronormative or queer. Native people have decried the ways such documentation lends itself to cultural misrepresentation and appropriation. In 1990, a group of LGBTIQ+ identified Native American and First Nations people coined the autonym Two-Spirit to insist on Indigenous Peoples’ sovereign rights of self-determination, self-definition, and self-naming. Contemporary Native communities use Two-Spirit as an umbrella term that references gender-expansive Indigenous traditions and identities that exceed colonial logics. This chapter focuses on Two-Spirit/queer Native authors who create literature by and for Two-Spirit people, thus representing the past, present, and imagined future of queer Indigeneity. Proposing that decolonization movements to reclaim queer(ed) Indigenous “gender” traditions and revitalize Indigenous languages are interrelated, this essay reads works by Two-Spirit authors who incorporate Indigenous languages into their writing.

This chapter first considers the conceptual complexities involved in any reference to “the poem.” The poem can, for instance, be defined as a particular instantiation of a universal, called “poetry,” or it can be defined in opposition to other kinds of literary genre, linguistic artefact, or linguistic performance, from verse treatise to political slogan. The term “poem” may also be normative as well as descriptive, a marker not only of genre but also of success. Finally, the poem has sometimes been conceived in opposition to conceptual thinking itself, from which perspective the discourse of poems differs radically from the discourse of ideas. Treating examples by W. S. Graham, Ben Jonson, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Wallace Stevens, this chapter argues that, given this situation, poems continually strive to overspill their concept, whether by achieving the status of The Poem or of Poetry Itself, by breaking out of the confines of “mere” poetry and becoming part of the fabric of reality, or by changing what “poems” can be and what “poem” can mean.