Faculty of ArtPlease join us for a special evening with Roy Miki on the occasion of the Vancouver launch of the new journal Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA). A reception will follow the event.
Thursday, May 21, 2015, 7:00pm
The Audain Gallery
Simon Fraser University
Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
149 West Hastings Street
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, Miki’s 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. Miki’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 his 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.
Miki’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, his 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, Miki 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 Miki 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 of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas.
This event is sponsored by the Networked Art Histories Research Group and SFU Galleries, Simon Fraser University.
Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA) is published by Brill (Leiden/Boston) in affiliation with the Asian/Pacific/American Institute, New York University (New York) and the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University (Montreal), and is co-edited by Alice Ming Wai Jim (Concordia) and Alexandra Chang (NYU).
The inaugural issue of the journal is now available. For free individual access:
http://www.brill.com/products/journal/asian-diasporic-visual-cultures-and-americas
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Asian-Diasporic-Visual-Cultures-and-the-Americas/646111668789406
Online submissions: http://adva.edmgr.com/
For inquiries: advaedit@gmail.com
CONTACT: Alice Ming Wai Jim, alice.jim@concordia.ca
