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Post-National Arguments: Global Poetics

Volume 32, Number 2 (2007)

Transnational Subjectivities: Roy Miki’s Surrender and Global Displacements

  • Kit Dobson
Submitted
December 5, 2008
Published
2007-06-06

Abstract

The conceptualization of subjectivity in Roy Miki's poetry collection Surrender (2001) challenges the political structures of capitalist imperialism. In so doing, Surrender suggests that the anti-imperial politics of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's books Empire and Multitude, which are founded upon open, rhizomatic, and immanent modes of being, may not account for the disciplinary mechanisms of the contemporary state, what Michel Foucault calls its "biopower." Miki's position suggests that a radical disruption of static modes of being might prove liberatory, and hence usefully dangerous, in the contemporary world.