A Poetics of Diaspora in Myung Mi Kim’s Dura

Abstract

This paper aims to explore how Dura describes transnational capitalism, colonialism and human experience under the largest possible terms through sociopolitical engagement with the diasporic landscape, focused on the expansiveness, openness, and non-sequential continuity of the hybridization of language and culture. Kim’s poetry writes on the historical moments of diaspora, evoking that the speaker dwells in the diasporic experience, displacement, exile, and suffering. Kim’s theory about poetic form as “interplay of mobile elements” opens up new possibilities for reading Dura as a salient example of how she moves beyond fixed subjectivity and finds an adequate assemble in heterogeneity, through an innovative poetics of diaspora. Portraying the transformations and dislocations created by the diasporic reality, Kim’s fragmented and disjunctive poetic lines bring out diasporic language which is irreducible to or uncontainable by any totality.