Keegan Cook Finberg is an Assistant Professor of English at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research and teaching focus on poetry and politics, experimental writing, and feminist and critical theory. Her recent scholarship appears in Review of International American Studies, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and Textual Practice and her public criticism and reviews can be found in Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacket2, The Rumpus and elsewhere. She is also the author of the poetry chapbook The Thought of Preservation (Ursus Americanus Press, 2019).
Authors | Keegan Cook Finberg
Articles on Amodern by Keegan Cook Finberg
ASSIMILATING THE ARTS
On Poetry and Difference in Yoko Ono's Grapefruit
This essay argues that Yoko Ono’s midcentury instructions offer a response to changing labor practices and renewed forms of racial capitalism after World War II. I attend to Ono’s instructions written between the U.S. and Japan and perform a reading of her book Grapefruit (Tokyo, 1964), which has previously confounded literary and arts genres. When read as a work of poetry, Grapefruit engages capitalist fictions about race and immigration through attention to scientific management systems promoting shifting productivity and to global models of unevenly distributed life chances. Offering an aesthetic and political philosophy, Grapefruit diverges from both debates about media autonomy, and from philosophies of intermedia, to suggest coalition building across arts and cultures.