Paperwork Poetics: Southeast Asian Diasporic Poetry’s Expropriation of Imperial Bureaucracy
Jasmine An
Assistant Professor of English
University of Oregon
Anida Yoeu Ali’s “The 1700% Project” installation at Sullivan Galleries
The paperwork of US empire has material consequences: identity documents control movement, classified cables authorize clandestine bombings, and questionnaires determine the outcome of asylum applications. Paperwork is the administrative infrastructure that undergirds the overt violence of imperialism. This talk highlights the work of contemporary, Southeast Asian diasporic poets who incorporate paper documents into their poetry. As part of the project of developing “paperwork poetics” as a literary methodology to trace connections across global Southeast Asia and its many diasporas, I ask: What possibilities for reimagining histories of empire and colonialism does the creative labor of poets make possible when the medium on which the poets write is not the blank page but rather immigration court summons, hate crime reports, and declassified military memos—paper facsimiles of empire itself? I suggest that by incorporating the state’s language back into their poetic works, these writers expropriate the bureaucratic power of governmentality to build a shared aesthetic practice across national, cultural, and geographical boundaries. Their formally innovative poetic practice both reveals and critiques the effects of US empire in Southeast Asia during the Cold War era and the lasting echoes of that cultural, military, and economic violence that remain in the Southeast Asian diasporas.