Element

This chapter follows the element of water through various works of Asian American poetry, art, and performance, using its transformations to challenge the logic of stable and contained identity. The chapter analyzes a set of texts, including Candice Lin’s art installation A Hard White Body, A Porous Slip (2018), a dance/poetry triptych by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Theodora Yoshikami created at the Basement Workshop in the 1980s, and Craig Santos Perez’s (CHamoru) poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier” (2016; 2020). Through readings of water’s distillation, sublimation, and other processes of change, the chapter situates Asian American embodiment as environmentally responsive, not fixed and intrinsic. In particular, the chapter recovers the lost arts activist history of the dance/poetry collaboration. The chapter reframes Asian American identity from a quality of an individual body to an environmental relation.