Reading: Roy Miki: Framed as/in Asian Canadian

Thursday, May 21 2015, 7pm
Audain Gallery 

Please join us for an evening with Roy Miki on the occasion of the Vancouver launch of a new journal: Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, co-edited by Alice Ming Wai Jim, Concordia University, and Alexandra Chang, New York University.

As a critic and a poet, Roy Miki has carefully built a body of work that defines many of the cultural and political questions that are faced by writers and artists today. Written in an acutely clear relationship to the residual modernist state and to the neoliberal state, Roy Miki work has countered the management and dehumanization of aesthetics, knowledge, communities and bodies with a critical voice that is both pointed and productive. He has done this through every medium – poetry, critical essays, pedagogy, and community organizing – to leave a mattering map of what is urgent to contemplate and counter today. Roy's work leads to the gift of new forms of agency that bloom out of language, ways of living, and a generative aesthetics based on the multiplicity of the inevitable results of critique – his work is positive, useful, and searing. The critical template that emerges from Roy's work has defined new ways of reading and writing against the grain of the state, but in rhythm with new forms of social organizing and being in the world. 

Roy's groundbreaking critical works –such as Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing and In Flux: Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing -- have laid the basis of a North-American Asian studies that is both intersectional and reflexive to its own institutionalization. Addressing many of the same questions regarding subjectivity, race and the nation, Roy's poetry, in books such as Saving Face, Surrender, There and Mannequin Rising, gives us public poetry that reworks the grounds of what publicity can aim towards. And, as an editor, Roy has brought critical attention in particular to the work of bpNichol and Roy Kiyooka and developed a critical poetics with the magazine Line. At the national level, the work that Roy spearheaded with the Japanese Canadian redress movement -– analyzed in his Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice – is a key moment of the articulation of a social justice movement with cultural critique within Canadian history – a moment that is itself articulated to Indigenous, feminist, and migrant calls for social justice today. Roy Miki is on the Board of Advisors for the Journal Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas.

A reception will accompany the event.

The event is sponsored by the Networked Art Histories Research Group and SFU Galleries.

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