New Issue: 254 — Feminist Critique Here and Now

February 9, 2024

We are thrilled to announce the arrival of Canadian Literature, issue 254. This special issue on Feminist Critique Here and Now is guest edited by Aubrey Hanson and Heather Milne. In their editorial, Aubrey and Heather write:

In recent years, feminism has taken on new urgency in the wake of #ubcAccountable and #MeToo; movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #IdleNoMore have drawn renewed attention to the importance of intersectional feminism; and the covid-19 pandemic has focused attention on questions of class, gender, immigration status, precarity, mental health, and disability rights. These events were at the forefront of our minds as we came together to conceptualize this special issue in the summer of 2021.

– Aubrey Hanson and Heather Milne, “Feminist Critique Here and Now

This issue also features:

The new issue can be ordered through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues. Happy reading!


Announcing the Canadian Literature Newsletter!

January 26, 2024

We’re excited to announce that Canadian Literature now has a newsletter. Sign up for updates about new and upcoming issues, calls for papers, subscriptions, and more!

We publish our newsletters four times a year (once per quarterly issue). We will never share or circulate your personal information without your consent.

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New Issue: 253 — Poetics and Extraction 2

December 22, 2023

We are thrilled to announce the arrival of Canadian Literature, issue 253. This special issue on Poetics and Extraction follows issue 251 on the same theme, guest edited by Melanie Dennis Unrau and Max Karpinski. For this issue, guest editor Max Karpinski writes in his editorial:

Across Turtle Island, this summer has felt like something different and unusual—or, perhaps, something intensified. After the smoke of early June, the first week of July was named the world’s hottest on record; in late July, ocean surface temperatures off the coast of Newfoundland approached ten degrees centigrade above normal; and still, out on the land, the fires continue and the smoke plumes grow. This issue of Canadian Literature, with its special section that extends the work and discussion begun in issue 251, the first special issue on Poetics and Extraction, has taken shape in the context of this summer’s fire season. From threats to life, livelihood, and community to the protracted fallout of smoke pollution, the wildfires crystallize the ways that risk is unevenly distributed in environmental crisis.

– Max Karpinski, “Poetics and Extraction 2

This issue also features:

The new issue can be ordered through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues. Happy reading!


Call for Papers — Swirling into a Field of Life: Works in Conversation with Y-Dang Troeung

October 10, 2023

EXTENDED Deadline: Sat. June 15, 2024 (PT)

Y-Dang Troeung, who passed away at the end of 2022, was always attentive to her own construction as a scholar, writer, and public intellectual. For Y-Dang, these positions were deeply imbricated with her experiences as a refugee, daughter, and mother shaped by the difficult histories of war, genocide, displacement, and resettlement. Y-Dang consistently wove the personal, historical, and political into her wide-ranging work, which included scholarly writings, memoirs, and film. She left behind a small but impactful archive: the academic book Refugee Lifeworlds: the Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia (Temple University Press, 2022); the trade-press book of autotheory, Landbridge [life in fragments] (Knopf, 2023); the special issue in Canadian Literature, “Refugee Worldmaking: Canada and the Afterlives of the Vietnam War;” the exhibition “Remembering Cambodian Border Camps, 40 Years Later: An Exhibition at Bophana Audiovisual Center”; and the short film Easter Epic (2024).

This special issue of Canadian Literature, a publication Y-Dang served as associate editor, seeks to celebrate and engage with Y-Dang’s capacious thinking on themes of migration, memory, diaspora, family, autobiography, war, race, illness, and justice within diverse fields such as Canadian literature, transnational Asian literatures, critical refugee studies, transpacific Cold War studies, and critical disability studies, just to name a few. We are interested in intellectually stimulating engagements, reflections, and musings that are genre-fluid, pushing the boundaries of academic and creative writing in ways that reflect Y-Dang’s own desire to explore (and to create) various forms of genre expression. Pieces may directly take up concepts that Y-Dang developed or utilized (refugee lifeworlds / worldmaking, refugee supercrip, kemleang chet (strength of the heart), muteness and the Kapok Tree (dam-doeum-kor), refugee aphasia, minor anecdotes, fragments, autotheory / family memoir, Cold War episteme, race-ability, asylum, among others). They may also be inspired by the embodied methodologies and the fragmentary, anecdotal writing styles Y-Dang practiced. They may be ignited, more generally, by the spirit of her thought and her way of being.

We welcome works that “converse” with Y-Dang in the Latinate meanings of conversari, “to keep company with,” and versare, “to raise or hold suspended.” We seek to create a collection of pieces (3,000-5,000 words), a chorus dwelling in togetherness, suspended on the page. We welcome works about reading and teaching Y-Dang’s work. We welcome works that flout conventions. We welcome works that are generatively experimental. We welcome works that show how Y-Dang’s work makes possible other kinds of works.

In Landbridge, Y-Dang decribes the aftermath of war and displacement as a spiral, a swirling into a “lifeworld, a meditative, repetitious space of beauty, creativity, and regeneration” (258). We hope this special issue can move with this swirl that was Y-Dang’s life and works, and can open further ongoing conversations with her.

 

Submission Guidelines

All submissions to Canadian Literature must be original, unpublished work. Essays should follow current MLA bibliographic format (MLA Handbook, 9th ed.).

Word length for articles is 3,000-5,000 words, which includes endnotes and works cited.

Please limit images accompanying the submission to those receiving substantial attention in the article. Note that contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce images in their article, and must pay any permission costs. The journal can provide a sample template for permission requests. Permissions must be cleared before publication. Please send low resolution images (small jpegs), in separate attachments. If the article is accepted, high quality images will be required.

Submissions should be uploaded to OJS by the deadline of Sat. June 15, 2024 (Pacific Time). Our Submission Guidelines can be found at canlit.ca/submissions.

 

Contact

Feel free to contact us to discuss ideas ahead of time:

Journal Editor: Christine Kim (cl.editor@ubc.ca)

Guest Editors: Chris Patterson (c.patterson@ubc.ca) and Vinh Nguyen (vinh.nguyen@uwaterloo.ca)

General Inquiries: can.lit@ubc.ca


Congratulate Donna Chin on her Retirement!

September 6, 2023

Cake design by Sharon Engbrecht (2023)

Canadian Literature wishes to congratulate Donna Chin on her forthcoming retirement. After many years and achievements at our journal, Donna will be stepping down from her position as our Managing Editor.

We are pleased to invite friends and community of Donna to share messages of tribute, congratulations, and best wishes as she continues this next part of her life.

We also welcome messages from friends of CanLit—local and international—including editors (current and former), associate and assistant editors, acting editors, members of our editorial board, staff and students, and the many others who have benefited from Donna’s professionalism over the years.

Fill out the form below, and your message will be shared with Donna!

 

Contact Us

If you have any questions, please email us at can.lit[@]ubc.ca.

Find us on our website, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.

Read more about Donna’s impact on the journal


    Staff members of Canadian Literature will have access to your responses for our records. We may also post excerpts or the entirety of your tribute message and name on our website and social media (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, newsletter). We will NOT circulate your e-mail address anywhere.
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Call for Papers — How to be at Home in Canada: Placemaking in Indigenous, Diaspora, and Settler Texts

August 25, 2023

— SUBMISSIONS CLOSED —

EXTENDED Deadline: January 19, 2024 (PT)

In the landmark 1997 Delgamuukw land claim brought before the Supreme Court of Canada (Delgamuukw v. British Columbia), the Court ruled that traditional Indigenous story was admissible in court as evidence of land ownership, legitimizing a kind of literary land claim. This special issue of Canadian Literature examines the way literary texts claim space and explore questions of belonging for Indigenous, diaspora, and settler populations.

The issue will consider narratives from communities in Canada that assert or contest relations between land, story, ownership and belonging—whether it be in rural or urban environments, and in forms as varied as traditional Indigenous stories or hip hop’s practice of paying tribute to home through “reppin’.” Processes of claiming or challenging narratives of belonging are clearly different for Indigenous, diaspora and settler populations, since one consists of original inhabitants; another of immigrants with ties to elsewhere; and a third of settler populations who examine an uneasy colonial relationship to the land, which ultimately contributes to either a sense of national belonging or alienation. Okanagan scholar, author, and activist Jeannette Armstrong writes, “I am claimed and owned by this land, this Okanagan” (174), and her poetry and prose embody that relationship. In Literary Land Claims (2015), settler scholar Margery Fee traces how texts use strategies to claim – or problematize the act of claiming – land, story, and belonging. How do other populations describe their belonging in territories claimed by Canada?

Black scholar Rinaldo Walcott, in his essay “Towards a Poetics of Black Space(s) in Canada,” signals the importance of such an undertaking: “It seems that one of the challenges facing contemporary Black Canadian art is to move beyond the discourse of nostalgia for an elsewhere and toward addressing the politics of its present location” (46-7). By centring the politics of the present, this issue seeks to demonstrate the ways writers address the politics of place through literary land claims. Connecting community to place in the multiple national imaginaries both engenders and demonstrates belonging, helping us redress systemic racism and assert the right to safe spaces. We will consider the politics of claiming stolen land, and the ways that class, race, cultural practice, gender, sexuality, and disability intersect into questions of territorial belonging, nationhood, and connection to place.

All papers examining space and place in relation to belonging in Canada are welcome, in particular those examining questions of race, cultural practice, gender, sexuality and disability. Papers dealing with “third space” or “liminal space” are also encouraged.

We particularly encourage submissions from emerging scholars. In an effort to include a wide range of perspectives and approaches, this issue will include shorter-form submissions combined with longer forms, and an opportunity for emerging scholars to engage in a mentorship process in implementing editorial comments after the double-anonymized peer-review process.

EDIT: A previous version of the poster for this call includes a typo for the word “Indigenous.” Please note that the link to learn more still works, but the title of the issue will feature the corrected spelling rather than the misspelling in the previous poster.
Submission Guidelines

All submissions to Canadian Literature must be original, unpublished work. Essays should follow current MLA bibliographic format (MLA Handbook, 9th ed.). Word length for articles is 4,000-8,000 words, which includes endnotes and works cited.

Please feel free to contact the journal editor, Christine Kim, at cl.editor@ubc.ca, or the special issue guest editors, Heather Macfarlane (hcm1@queensu.ca), Sophie McCall (smccall@sfu.ca) or Basmah Rahman (13bsr@queensu.ca) to discuss ideas ahead of time. Submissions should be uploaded to OJS by the deadline of January 1, 2024. Our Submission Guidelines can be found at canlit.ca/submissions. General questions about the special issue may be directed to can.lit@ubc.ca.

Please limit images accompanying the submission to those receiving substantial attention in the article. Note that contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce images in their article, and must pay any permission costs. The journal can provide a sample template for permission requests. Permissions must be cleared before publication. Please send low resolution images (small jpegs), in separate attachments. If the article is accepted, high quality images will be required.

 

Works Cited

Armstrong, Jeannette. “Land Speaking.” Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing, edited by Simon Ortiz, U of Arizona P, 1998, pp. 174-95.

Fee, Margery. Literary Land Claims: the “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2015.

Lamer, Chief Justice. “Delgamuukw vs. British Columbia.” Canadian Native Law Reporter, vol. 1, 1998, pp. 14-97.

Walcott, Rinaldo. “‘A Tough Geography:’ Towards a Poetics of Black Space(s) in Canada.” Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada. 2nd revised ed., Insomniac Press, 2003, pp. 43-56.

Links

Read more about Canadian Literature‘s Submission Guidelines

Submit your work through Open Journal Systems (OJS)

 


New Issue: 252 — General

July 18, 2023

We are thrilled to announce the arrival of Canadian Literature, Issue 252. For this general issue, Sharon Engbrecht (Marketing, Outreach, & Communications Coordinator) and Sarah-Nelle Jackson (Assistant to Editor-in-Chief) write in their editorial:

When our Editor-in-Chief Christine Kim graciously agreed to let Sarah-Nelle and me write this editorial, she was interested in our perspective as graduate students on the production of Canadian Literature. As PhD candidates in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia (UBC), we bring different experiences to the production of both the journal and the field of CanLit. The term production registers different modes of meaning: as an action of manufacturing raw materials, as a process of management, and as a larger project of providing ideas for consideration.  . . . In being a part of the production of Canadian Literature, [we are] cognizant of the politics involved in producing an enduring object of study that, on the one hand, helps promote our collective critical understanding of important texts and phenomena about Canada and, on the other, canonizes the right kind of critical attention through the production process.

As a journal led by non-Indigenous scholars that explores how Canadian identity creates and contests itself through literature, Canadian Literature cannot resolve the alchemical fiction of Canada any more than CanLit as a literary category or Sharon and I as individual settlers can. Following the authors in the present issue, rather, we might take the aporia of CanLit not as a problem demanding resolution, but as a potentially fruitful space to face Canada’s inherent tensions and contradictions. As readers, scholars, and editors of Canadian literature, we might seek to build on past successes and failures of those similarly situated—not to settle questions, but to be transformed by them.

– Sharon Engbrecht and Sarah-Nelle Jackson, “Producing Canadian Literature

This issue also features:

The new issue can be ordered through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues. Happy reading!


New Issue: 251 — Poetics and Extraction

April 12, 2023

We are thrilled to announce the arrival of Canadian Literature, Issue 251: Poetics and Extraction. Guest Editors Melanie Dennis Unrau and Max Karpinski write in their editorial:

The articles, statements of poetics, poems, and book reviews collected in this special issue on poetics and extraction speak to the theme from a range of perspectives—positioned, variously, as critical of, observing, opposed to, entangled in, harmed by, mimicking, enacting, subverting, averting, transforming, and finding alternatives to extraction and extractivism. As literary scholars, we are interested in the many ways these works apprehend and critique extractivism as a mode of racial capitalism (Gómez-Barris xvii), as a resource relation (Liboiron 145), and as a poetics; yet we are also interested, cautiously, in attending to what they contribute to envisioning good, non-extractive ways of living and being in relation. This would be to think of the work of literary scholarship in the face of ecological and social injustice as not only “the difficult task of understanding the character of [the] barriers” to materializing livable futures (Szeman and Wenzel 519), but also, with Liboiron again, as orienting ourselves “toward an ‘ought’ rather than an ‘is’” (154). Generalizing and speculating, we see a secondary theme both in the content of the issue and in our work and learning as editors: an ethics of care and love that emerges, like Whitehead’s formulation of “making love with the land,” as a poetics running against the current of extraction.

In the texts that follow, you will see instances of radical care, self-care, and love as responses or alternatives to extraction. These take the forms of land and water defence, care for family, harm mitigation, self-protection, refusal, reclamation, revision, manifesto, survival, learning what it means to be beholden to Indigenous law in the places where we live, and more. These submerged and emergent poetics, which must themselves be handled with respect and care, offer clues for how to orient ourselves and our critical and creative work toward new, more just horizons.

– Melanie Dennis Unrau and Max Karpinski, “Poetics and Extraction

This issue also features:

The new issue can be ordered through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues. Happy reading!


New Issue: 250 — General

February 9, 2023

We are thrilled to announce the arrival of Canadian Literature, Issue 250. Nicholas Bradley writes in his editorial:

For whatever reason, I’ve been in a funk, a slump, all year. But in May, in the midst of a cool, damp late spring, no summer in sight, I travelled twice to sunny destinations. First I visited Kamloops and then I flew to Orange County. Two locations with comparable topographies of hills and canyons, a shared palette of tans and greens. Two places in different countries with vastly different populations. Two settings, nearly two and a half thousand kilometres apart, linked by the happenstance of travel. In the lingering era of COVID-19, any trip is unusual, for me at least, and my double excursion took on more significance than I should have allowed. It promised too much.

. . .

The city of Kamloops occupies the traditional territory of Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc. The former Kamloops Indian Residential School sits across the river from where I sat to do some work. A few years ago I might have guessed that most Canadians, if they had heard of Kamloops at all, associated it with a minor-league hockey team. (English professors think of Wilson’s Swamp Angel [1954].) But now it has become widely known as Canada engages, however haltingly, with its past and present as a colonizing entity. Since the terrible summer of 2021, Kamloops has become synonymous with unmarked graves—their existence and the dismissal thereof—and with the atrocities of that School and the national system of which it was a part. The prime minister expressed regret for the deaths associated with the School, and for choosing to spend the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on holiday in Tofino rather than at Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc. Being sorry, saying sorry: it was possible once to joke about a reflexive Canadian deference, but now public apologies have become a central part of governmental attempts to atone for injustices perpetrated by the state (and foibles committed by its representatives). Such gestures can be seen as both necessary and empty. Sorry: in everyday speech, that stereotypically Canadian word is an almost phatic term. Just something we say.

– Nicholas Bradley, “Feeling Sorry”

This issue also features:

The new issue can be ordered through our online store at canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues. Happy reading!


In Memory of Y-Dang Troeung

November 27, 2022

Y-Dang Troeung at the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver campus.

It is with heavy hearts that we grieve the passing of our friend, colleague, and Associate Editor, Dr. Y-Dang Troeung. She was a brilliant, insightful, observant, caring, funny, and courageous scholar. Her interventions within the field of Canadian literature—which included profoundly honest writing, a deep mentoring of students, and advocating strongly for BIPOC students, communities, and colleagues—will be felt for many years to come.


Working at the intersection of Canadian literary and cultural studies, transpacific studies, Cold War studies, transnational Asian literatures, critical disability studies, and critical refugee studies, Y-Dang produced a fiercely beautiful and extensive body of writing. We were fortunate to publish some of it in the journal, including
an essay on Madeleine Thien’s Certainty (206, 2010), an interview with Omar El Akkad (with Phanuel Antwi, 240, 2020), and a contribution to a forum on Souvankham Thammavongsa (242, 2020). 

More recently, Y-Dang edited a special issue of Canadian Literature called “Refugee Worldmaking: Canada and the Afterlives of the Vietnam War” (246, 2021) which draws together single-authored work and collaborative forum conversations by scholars, educators, photographers, artists, filmmakers, and poets based in Canada, the US, Cambodia, Hong Kong, and France. This scholarship does not just seek to make space for the stories of refugees, migrants, and racialized subjects; rather, it demands that we centre these narratives as we reconceptualize Canadian literature and interrogate the scholarship that is produced through and as part of Canadian literary and cultural studies. Y-Dang continued this work throughout her career, most notably in Refugee Lifeworlds (Temple UP, 2022), “Easter Epic” (forthcoming, 2023), and Landbridge (forthcoming, 2023).

Chris Patterson, Y-Dang Troeung, and Kai, 2021. Photo used with permission from Chris Patterson.

Y-Dang published one other short piece in Canadian Literature as part of a forum on Asian Canadian studies. “Alice Munro Country and Refugee Havens,” originally published in Canadian Literature 227 (Winter 2015): 193-194, brings together Asian American studies, Canadian literature, and autotheory. It challenges liberal narratives of Canadian benevolence and opens up space for the stories of refugee families, including her own. Written in a voice that is vulnerable, direct, thoughtful, and uniquely Y-Dang’s, this essay poses crucial questions about the relations between Canadian “havens” and what she calls the “continuous wars of empire” as well as the cruel kindnesses they produce.

Please find below Y-Dang’s short essay “Alice Munro Country and Refugee Havens.” Beneath this essay, we share a tribute by her partner, Chris Patterson, and links to statements about Y-Dang’s passing from UBC’s Department of English Language and Literatures, the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program, the Social Justice Institute, and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. A full list of Y-Dang’s scholarly publications, collaborations, interviews, and multimedia and creative work can be found at the bottom of the statement from the Department of English Language and Literatures.

 

Alice Munro Country and Refugee Havens

By Y-Dang Troeung

If it is now desirable for Asian Canadian critique to move beyond the nation, what does this mean for the interrogation of local genealogies of Asian Canadian identity that continue to remain invisible? I have been thinking in particular about the history of Southeast Asian refugees in small-town southwestern Ontario, a region of Canada that has for the most part been left of out of discussions of Asian Canadian transnationalism, globalization, and transpacific exchange. Scholar Eric Tang has recently called for a rethinking of transnational methodology in Asian American studies by focusing on those whose migration has been produced not by economic circuits but rather by state war and violence. Whereas Tang examines refugee presence in spaces such as the urban hyperghetto, I’m interested in how the transnational may be accessed through the attention to the rural, and specifically to the presence of the Asian Canadian refugee in the rural.

When Alice Munro won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pride that a writer from the place “where I was from” had received such world recognition. Having lived the first 18 years of my life in Goderich, Ontario, a small port town on Lake Huron (named after the Huron Indigenous people of North America), I grew up immersed in the world of Alice Munro and her stories. The town of Goderich often appears in Munro’s fiction disguised as Walley, Tupperton, Tiplady, Wawanosh, or Mock Hill. Munro’s stories undeniably helped inspire my deep love of literature at a young age. In the turmoil of my adolescence and the alienation I felt as one of the only Asian bodies in my small town of 7,000 people, I took refuge in her engrossing tales of family betrayal, sexual rebellion, and the strangeness of a familiar place. Hiding away reading in a corner of the only public library in town, Munro’s stories carried me away to an imaginative place, and yet I felt a mixture of recognition and dissonance in how she portrayed the landscapes, rhythms, and feelings of small-town life.

One reviewer comments that Canada’s “dominant author of short fiction, after all, is so identified with small-town Ontario that the rural countryside beyond Toronto is known as Alice Munro Country” (Armstrong 1). Whenever I hear the term “Alice Munro Country,” I feel uneasy about the myths that it perpetuates about this region, myths of white settler inhabitance and homogeneity that make it seem frozen in time. That “Alice Munro Country” continues to be seen as an exceptional space of rural, Canadian whiteness is troubling to me.

As a former refugee from Cambodia whose family, along with that of many other Southeast Asian refugees throughout the 1970s and 1980s, resettled in Huron County in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, I have often wondered, over the years, if my family’s story would ever make into Alice Munro’s fiction. After all, she was well known for drawing inspiration from historical sources, and we made national headlines in December 1980 when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau held a ceremony on Parliament Hill to officially welcome my family, the last of the 60,000 Southeast Asian refugees to be sponsored to Canada as a part of a special government program (“Pierre”). Later, we made it into the history books. As one scholar notes, “St. Peter Catholic’s Church in Goderich sponsored two brothers and their families in December 1980” (McLellan 38). In many small towns or villages across Huron County, from Goderich to Vanastra to Exeter, I knew other Cambodian, Lao, or Vietnamese families who had crossed the Pacific as refugees. Within our communities, stories circulated about the forms of kindness shown to us by our sponsors, as well as the cruel forms of hate and aggression against which we had to constantly steel ourselves. From the factories to the graveyards to the card parties, we established networks of local exchange and leisure to survive.

Over thirty years later, some of these families continue to reside in the county and have put down roots in the region, yet I continue to wait for their stories to be written into the national imaginary. In the literature of new writers such as Kim Thúy, Vincent Lam, Madeleine Thien, and Souvankham Thammavongsa, some of these stories have begun to emerge. On a website called Compassionate Canada, a group of Southeast Asian Canadians have mobilized through social media to provide testimonial accounts of a time when Canada seemed more compassioned towards incoming refugees. These days in Goderich, storefront shop signs in English and Arabic read, “Ah-I-an wan San-I-an Welcome” and “Mar-ha-bun welcome,” and I recently read a story in the town’s local newspaper, the Goderich Signal Star, about how some members of the community had banded together to sponsor a family of Syrian refugees (Broadley n.pag.).

Alice Munro’s 2012 story “Haven” is a subtle and sensitive meditation on the terror of domesticity felt by a regretful white, middle-class woman in the seventies. I’m interested in producing a different kind of narrative about rural southwestern Ontario as a “haven,” one in which the figure of the Asian Canadian refugee, past and present, is central. How have these rural havens been produced through continuous wars of empire? Which refugee affects circulate within these spaces? And what kinds of circuits and economies of exchange help sustain these refugee lifeworlds? These are some of the questions Asian Canadian critique should make room for.

 

Tribute by Dr. Chris Patterson (UBC GRSJ):

I am sad to give this devastating news that I know will come as a shock to many. My partner and wife, Y-Dang Troeung (張依蘭) (ទ្រឿងអ៊ីដាង), died yesterday, November 27, after a long struggle with pancreatic cancer. She was a brilliant author, educator, and the most caring and loving partner, mother, daughter, sister and companion. We have been dealing with her disease for over a year, and much longer without knowing it. Since her diagnosis, her life was enriched daily by friends and family, and we have felt lucky to have so many people come forward and support us with food, discussions, advocation, advice, and most of all, warmth and love. She leaves behind all these loving people, including me, our son Kai, her parents, brothers, and extended family. Her life has been a gift to all of us, and she leaves us with one of her greatest gifts: her book Refugee Lifeworlds. In the coming months, we will receive more gifts from her brilliant and compassionate mind: a short film, “Easter Epic”; a family memoir, Landbridge; and other projects she was able to complete before her death. 

 

Links:

UBC English Language and Literatures Department’s Statement

Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program’s Statement

Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies’ Statement