1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910154965303321

Autore

Lai Larissa <1967-, >

Titolo

Slanting I, Imagining We : Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s / / Larissa Lai

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Waterloo, Ontario : , : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, , [2014]

©2014

Beaconsfield, Quebec : , : Canadian Electronic Library, , 2014

ISBN

1-77112-042-8

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (255 p.)

Collana

TransCanada

Disciplina

810.9895071

Soggetti

Canadian literature (English) - 20th century - History and criticism

Canadian literature (English) - Asian Canadian authors - History and criticism

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (pages 237-245) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: Asian Canadian Ruptures, Contemporary Scandals -- Strategizing the Body of History: Anxious Writing, Absent Subjects, and Marketing the Nation -- The Time Has Come: Self and Community Articulations in "Colour: An Issue and Awakening Thunder" -- Romancing the Anthology: Supplement, Relation, and Community Production -- Future Orientations, Non-Dialectical Monsters: Storytelling Queer Utopias in Hiromi Goto's "Chorus of Mushrooms" and "The Kappa Child" -- Ethnic Ethics, Translational Excess: The Poetics of jam ismail and Rita Wong -- The Cameras of the World: Race, Subjectivity, and the Spiritual, Collective Other in Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" and Dionne Brand's "What We All Long For" -- Conclusion: Community Action, Global Spillage: Writing the Race of Capital.

Sommario/riassunto

The 1980s and 1990s are a historically crucial period in the development of Asian Canadian literature. Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s contextualizes and reanimates the urgency of that period, illustrates its historical specificities, and shows how the concerns of that moment-



from cultural appropriation to race essentialism to shifting models of the state-continue to resonate for contemporary discussions of race and literature in Canada. Larissa Lai takes up the term "Asian Canadian" as a term of emergence, in the sense that it is constantly produced differently, and always in relation to other terms-often "whiteness" but also Indigeneity, queerness, feminism, African Canadian, and Asian American. In the 1980s and 1990s, "Asian Canadian" erupted in conjunction with the post-structural recognition of the instability of the subject. But paradoxically it also came into being through activist work, and so is dependent on an imagined ontological stability. Slanting I, Imagining We interrogates this fraught tension and the relational nature of the term through a range of texts and events, including the Gold Mountain Blues scandal, the conference Writing Thru Race, and the self-writings of Evelyn Lau and Wayson Choy.