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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 depended on an imagined stability that never fully materialized. 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.
Larissa Lai is the author of The Lost Century; The Tiger Flu; Salt Fish Girl; Iron Goddess of Mercy; Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s; and four other books. Recipient of the Jim Duggins Novelist’s Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Astraea Award, and the Otherwise Honor Book and finalist for seven more, she holds a Canada Research Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary and directs The Insurgent Architects’ House for Creative Writing there. She is currently a Maria Zambrano Fellow at the University of Huelva in Spain.
Table of Contents for Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s by Larissa Lai
Preface and Acknowledgements
Introduction: Asian Canadian Ruptures, Contemporary Scandals
1. Strategizing the Body of History: Anxious Writing, Absent Subjects, and Marketing the Nation
2. The Time Has Come: Self and Community Articulations in Colour. An Issue and Awakening Thunder
3. Romancing the Anthology: Supplement, Relation, and Community Production
4. Future Orientations, Non-Dialectical Monsters: Storytelling Queer Utopias in Hiromi Goto's Chorus of Mushrooms and The Kappa Child
5. Ethnic Ethics, Translational Excess: The Poetics of jam ismail and Rita Wong
6. 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
Notes
Bibliography
Index