College Literature

ABSTRACT:

This essay offers a reading of poems by contemporary South Asian diasporic poet Imtiaz Dharker as a literary response to the situation of refugees and migrants through a postcolonial experimental poetics. The first part of this essay situates Dharker's poems in the context of current debates on migration in Europe and the technologies of recognition adopted to track the movements of migrants and refugees across the EU. The second part interprets works from her 2009 collection Leaving Fingerprints as a poetic resistance against the politics of identity produced by technologies of recognition. The representational strategies adopted by Dharker oppose what might be called "biometric reading" and prevent the creation of a stable sense of belonging through literary writing. The concluding sections of this essay expand on the aesthetic implications of Dharker's poems and connect them to critical discourses on postcolonial experimentalism and peripheral modernism. The interplay of image and text in Dharker's works suggests a postcolonial reimagining of the poetic figural as expression of the contradictions of peripheral subjects caught in the power dynamics of capitalist globalization.