2026/03/26 by Lauri Scheyer, Juan Wang · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #American and British Literature Analysis #Asian American and Pacific Histories #Caribbean and African Literature and Culture
paper · doi:10.1080/0013838x.2026.2635937
openalex publication_date 2026/03/26 · openalex created_date 2026/03/27 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
Chinese American poet Marilyn Chin has been the subject of extensive critical study during a long and illustrious career, but a previously underexplored topic is the strong influence of African American literature and culture. As a self-described “brown girl” whose youth was filled with self-doubt, some of Chin’s most formative influences come from African American social activism, literature, feminism, and music. Focusing on interviews conducted between 2019 and 2024, this article integrates Chin’s statements with critical analysis of her poetry, which is shown to be dramatically inflected with African American literary and cultural influences. This fresh perspective provides new insights on a renowned poet by revealing the major impact of African American aesthetics and social agency on her poetics and identity. In turn, this approach exemplifies the modernist transnational and cross-cultural fertilisation that increasingly has become an integral part of English poetry in the late twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.