May 21st, Faculty Club
12:00 noon

Led by Audrey Wu Clark

The final Bancroft Round Table of the Spring Semester will take place on Thursday, May 21st at noon in the Lewis-Latimer Room of the Faculty Club. Bancroft Study Award winner Audrey Wu Clark will give a talk entitled ""Little Postage Stamps of Native Soil": The Modernist Haiku during Japanese Exclusion."

Beyond historical concurrence, what is the correlation between the Anglo-American modernist preoccupations with the haiku and Japanese exclusion in the U.S.? By focusing mainly on turn-of-the-century Japanese American poets, their racialization within avant-garde circles and the evolution of their modernist haiku forms, Audrey Wu Clark demonstrates that the modernist assimilation of Japanese poetics, namely the haiku form, is a dialectical expression of melancholic racial particularity and manic universality.

The campus community is invited to take some time off from finals and graduations to hear Ms. Clark's reflections upon this strange cultural anomaly through which an artistic form is welcomed while the people who created the form are rebuffed. Bancroft Round Tables strive to showcase the rich resources The Bancroft Library offers scholars for myriad avenues of research.