Historically, yellowface was a Hollywood phenomenon. The portmanteau, like the offense it characterizes, is hideously obvious, wherein a white actor transforms into an Orientalist caricature for racist comic relief. On the page, however, this minstrelsy is more subtle. The fraudulence is professional, encased within a name.
Since the 1990s, at least two instances of literary yellowface have arisen in the world of American poetry. The poet Kent Johnson contrived an exhaustive biography and body of work for a fictitious Japanese poet named Araki Yasusada. Johnson never expressly admitted to fabricating the persona, but served as its “executor,” overseeing all matters of correspondence and even compiling a volume of his poetry. Similarly, Michael Derrick Hudson adopted the Chinese moniker Yi-Fen Chou to submit poems previously rejected under his real name, a move that apparently increased his work’s prospects for publication. Hudson only admitted to doing so in 2015 when one of his poems was selected for that year’s Best American Poetry.
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