Cirrus@Austlit

'Beauty has a quality about it that pretends to neutrality and universality, despite being steeped in asymmetrical constructions of aesthetic judgement. Of course, this is no surprise in a hierarchical world; ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.’ (Bourdieu Distinction xxix) In his poetry collection, Terminally Poetic (2020), Ouyang Yu scathingly critiques hegemonic and Anglocentric aesthetics, raising instead the generative potential of the ugly and the imperfect. Writing in a literary market that moves cosmopolitan capital and commodifies ‘ethnic’ difference, Yu writes to unsettle normative aesthetics that are contingent upon colonially inherited Eurocentric notions of beauty and relegates ‘ethnic’ alterity to easily digestible images of Orientalist fantasy. In this essay, I explore how Terminally Poetic unsettles aesthetic and linguistic whiteness in two parts. I begin by articulating how Yu de-centres Anglocentric aesthetics, contaminating the high cultural register of poetry with an aesthetic of the profane and vulgar. In doing so, he suggests that neutral sounding notions of aesthetic standards and propriety are not so neutral after all. I then argue that Yu’s undermining of Anglocentric aesthetics marries his critique of Australia’s ‘monolingual mindset’, revealing the limitations of Australia’s reliance on colonially inherited linguistic aesthetics in opposition to a plurilingual reality. Analysing his radical poetics through his linguistic play, I suggest that Yu articulates an enmeshed multilingualism that challenges the neutrality of monolingualism.'  (Introduction)