BARS Blog

Joey S. Kim is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Toledo. Her research considers global Anglophone literature, with a particular focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; she also writes on aesthetics, global Asian culture and multiethnic U.S. literatures, and practices as a creative writer. She published her first book of poems, Body Facts, in 2021. Her work has been published in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Essays in Romanticism, Pleiades: Literature in Context, The Keats-Shelley Review, The Keats-Shelley Journal and American Periodicals. Her first book, Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation, which we discuss below, was published in September by Edinburgh University Press.

1) How did you come to realise that you wanted to write Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation?

I write about this in my book’s conclusion. As an Asian American woman who has been called “Oriental” too many times, I came to this project affectively—in response to the accrual of my own feelings upon hearing and reading the word throughout my life. I first encountered the liberatory and revolutionary imaginations of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and William Blake as a college student, and their words gave me hope and inspiration. However, once I read poems like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” I noticed an othering of the East that did not sit well with me. Later in my graduate studies, I found more and more cultural references to the “East” and the “Orient” throughout Romantic works that disenchanted and troubled me. Manu Chander writes in Brown Romantics that he loves the works of writers like Coleridge, John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Byron, but he is “incapable of forgetting that they would not have loved me in return” (105). These writers, I soon realized, would not love me but fetishize, objectify, and misunderstand me and my very personhood as an English-speaking woman of color. It is from this unreciprocated and ambivalent space that this book germinated—the tension between my own literary appreciation and the urge to critically respond to the chasm between me and these writers.

2) In your introduction, you describe the poetics of orientation as ‘a mode of positioning self, subject, and object within and towards different, oftentimes competing, cultural and aesthetic norms’. What were the most important new affordances of this mode for Romantic-period writers?

I coin the term “poetics of orientation” to describe a poetics newly aware of cultural difference as a site of aesthetic contes­tation and ambiguity of representation. By contestation, I refer to the ways in which Romantic writers themselves transformed the notions of the subject while centering their own whiteness. This double move—transformation and centering of white subjects—consolidated a Romantic poetics founded on Orientalist ambivalence. A “poetics of orientation,” rather than situating the lyric subject in assumed claims of whiteness, repositions the lyric subject within heterogeneous and shift­ing notions of self, place, race, and culture. This repositioning frames the lyric subject within discussions of Orientalism and racial formation, tracing the white supremacist logics that have for too long been dismissed as inessential or non-consequential to Romantic studies.

For the writers in my book, the affordances or utility of a poetics of orientation include the consolidation of a white poetic subjectivity through the backdrop of a continually reimagined East/“Orient.” The white authors in my study rely on an individual imagination that codifies Orientalism, but not only this. Orientalism was one of many racial and racist systems of the period working to consolidate whiteness as the dominant race. The period birthed a model that subjugated not only the Oriental subject but the entire non-white world. These authors represent a gathering around and toward whiteness as the racial sine qua non of anglophone poetic subjects. This extension of white self and subject beyond Britain became a poetics of not only world-facing but also world-building an Orient during a period of political and cul­tural revolution. I argue that Anglophone literature as we imagine it today is a product of this Orientalist inheritance

3) How does reading the literary archive of Romantic Orientalism through the critical mode of orientation expand upon and nuance previous scholarship on Orientalism?

Romanticism and the Poetics of Orientation traces shifting poetic orientations—cultural, geographical, aesthetic, racial, and gendered—through Orientalist sites, subjects, and settings. It also traces the etymological links between “orientation” and “Orientalism” to show the mutability and affective nature of the “Orient” as a site of willful imagining and embodiment. Through a critical mode of orientation, I am not fixed on one perspective or line of reading. I show how Romantic writers from Sir William Jones to Lord Byron seek multiple, oftentimes contradictory routes of Orientalism and racial representation. These contradictions show the messiness of Orientalism, racial logics, and the imperial imagination. For too long in Romanticism, Orientalism has been delinked from critical race and ethnic studies, making it abstract, theoretical, and depoliticized. Through a poetics of orientation, I hope to have reckoned more directly with race and ethnicity in Romantic poetics.

4) The most prominent figures in the later chapters of the book are Byron, Phillis Wheatley, Felicia Hemans and Blake.  How did you select these writers as particularly appropriate means for exploring your subject?

I was working in the spirit of Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy Wong’s call for “undisciplining” across field boundaries in their special issue of Victorian Studies (Spring 2020). They write that the work of “undisciplining” can “yield opportunities for different aesthetics that will no longer uphold racial hierarchies” (380). Thus, this book was intentional in disrupting a traditional Romantic hierarchy and chronology. To challenge racial hierarchies within Romantic women’s poetry, I brought in Phillis Wheatley for my chapter on Romantic women poets. I disorient a neat chronology of Romantic women’s writing and seek a rereading of the transatlantic poetess tradi­tion through Wheatley’s poetics. Her poems cross boundaries of race, gender, culture, time, and space, invite double meaning and paradox, upend expectations, mingle new forms and images, and forge a Black lyrical tradition that speaks back to histories of antiblackness and erasure.

I chose Byron and Hemans as representative examples of second-generation Romantics working with and not against Orientalism and its racial logics. I left the earliest Romantic in my study, William Blake, for the last chapter in my book. In this final chapter, I argue that Blake’s composite art—printing technique, handwriting, and visual art—offers a site of imaginative multimodality that moves Romantic poetics toward new paradigms, contours, and shapes of relation. In doing so, Blake’s works propose alternative aes­thetic horizons beyond the lyric poem and an openness to new, shifting orientations beyond an East/West binary. Ending his prophetic books in the literary “East,” Blake’s works transport the literary topography of British Romantic Orientalism to speculative futures.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

As a poet as well as literary scholar, I am working on my second book of poems, Pork Belly, which is a lyrical account of growing up Korean American in Ohio. It discusses childhood traumas, cultural confusion, Korean history, and living as an Asian American woman. The title is based on a poem that discusses Korean American family dynamics over a dinner of Korean barbecue pork belly. This book fits within my larger body of work which weaves together Korean history and aesthetics, the speaker’s childhood/family stories, U.S. foreign policy with North and South Korea, the COVID pandemic, and the pressure we place on our bodies. My poetry serves as a vessel to give form to the untranslatable experience of the longest modern war, the Korean War.

In terms of scholarship, I am working on two separate projects—a second book on Romanticism and my first on Asian and Asian American representations in transatlantic nineteenth-century literature. My Romanticist book will focus on women writers and antiblackness, specifically with a focus on the anonymous novel, The Woman of Colour: A Tale (1808). My Asian American work is interested in representations of Asian American people in newspapers and other periodicals during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras.

Finally, I’m expecting my first child in January 2024, so I will take a break from research and embrace motherhood, which I know comes with its own unique set of challenges, joys, and adventures!

Works Cited

Chander, Manu S. Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2017.

Chatterjee, Ronjaunee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong. “Undisciplining Victorian Studies.” Victorian Studies 62.3 (Spring 2020): 369–91.