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This chapter examines the legacy of high modernism in the work of avant‐garde Asian American artists at the end of the 20th century. Returning to a history of transpacific alliances in their work, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim explore the costs of such ties in formal terms by newly invoking modernist forms. This chapter argues that their experimental poetry dissects modernist aesthetics in order to interrogate U.S.‐East Asian alliances.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee is an experimental visual autobiography in which she thematizes her parents’ experience of the Japanese Occupation of Korea, their immigration to the United States, as well as her own sense of being in perpetual exile and grappling with the transgenerational trauma that threatens to overwhelm her. This chapter argues that Dictee’s cinematic style arises from Cha’s work in experimental film, correspondence art, and conceptual art. It depicts Cha as a disembodied female voice struggling to visualize embodied speech on the page, all the while offering a self-reflexive commentary on the autobiographical process and her struggle to find a suitable conclusion to her narrative of trauma. Finally, the chapter discusses Dictee’s serial conclusions and Cha’s endlessly deferred return. Rather than narrate a romantic, nostalgic return, Cha visually and textually performs its impossibility in the pages of Dictee

This chapter focuses on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1995) and its use of biblical language or biblical intertexts. It argues that the novel’s multi-multiplicities—its language (heteroglossia), postmodern tendencies, and hypertextual sensibilities—are manifestations of a radical intertextuality; and that the Bible functions precisely as one irreducible intertext to accomplish Cha’s simultaneous protest against colonial, patriarchal, racial, religious, and cultural oppression. One must remember that the Bible is a main part of all these discourses, and particularly so in the United States, where biblical rhetoric has been absorbed into a nationalist one. The chapter puts forward a certain relevance that intertexts may carry for immigrants in light of Cha’s Dictee.

The introduction uncovers the centrality of repetition to this study’s three areas of investigation: the politics of identity and recognition central to liberal multiculturalism; the racializing discourses that construct Asian American identity; and the formal structures most prevalent in contemporary ethnic literature. It establishes the dialectical character of repetition by showing how it governs the self-canceling, nonprogressive logic of contemporary identity politics while also forming a structure of creative invention for Asian American writers responding to the contradictory social conditions that enfold them. It explores these dialectical possibilities of repetition through new readings of political and literary criticism and consolidates them through an intensive reading of Theresa Cha’s text Dictee.