Issue archives

#199 (Winter 2008)
Asian Canadian Studies

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Articles

Guy Beauregard

• Asian Canadian Studies: Unfinished Projects (p. 6 - 27)
• Abstract: Show/hide

  This essay outlines developments in Asian Canadian studies since the late 1990s to ask why Asian Canadian studies projects matter now.  In introducing this special issue, this essay focuses on the question of multicultural governmentality and the case of Chinese head tax reparations to argue for the contemporary significance of Asian Canadian studies as it faces its many and varied "unfinished projects."

• Subjects: Multiculturalism

Christopher Lee

• Enacting the Asian Canadian (p. 28 - 44)
• Abstract: Show/hide

  Inalienable Rice: A Chinese and Japanese Canadian Anthology is a founding text in Asian Canadian literary studies. Taking its critical reception as a starting point, this essay considers the theoretical stakes of articulating an emerging Asian Canadian identity in relation to history, community, and multiculturalism. This essay then turns to Hannah Arendt's notion of "action" in order to rethink the contingent significance of Asian Canadian cultural interventions.

• Subjects: Asian Culture, Multiculturalism

Iyko Day

• Must All Asianness Be American?: The Census, Racial Classification, and Asian Canadian Emergence (p. 45 - 70)
• Abstract: Show/hide

  This essay responds to the ways the emergence of Asian Canadian studies has been caught in the shadow of Asian America and mediated through US conceptions of race.  It examines the historical evolution of race discourse reflected in racial classifications on the US and Canadian censuses since 1960 to argue that "Asian Canadian" arises out of a distinct Canadian racial formation that cannot be seen through the US prism of race.

• Subjects: Asian Culture, Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism

Donald Goellnicht

• Asian Kanadian, Eh? (p. 71 - 99)
• Abstract: Show/hide

  This paper considers the place of Roy Kiyooka and Fred Wah, two highly accomplished writers, in the Asian Canadian literary canon.  Kiyooka's and Wah's peculiarly local and transnational concerns, their often difficult multi-generic experiments, and their innovative uses of language explain in part their belated recognition as Asian Canadian artists, but these concerns and experiments constitute their racial politics.  Reading these writers under the rubric "Asian Canadian" may productively expand our understanding of that term.

• Subjects: Twentieth Century, Twenty-First Century

Marie Lo

• The Currency of Visibility and the Paratext of "Evelyn Lau" (p. 100 - 117)
• Abstract: Show/hide

  This essay tracks the convergence of US model minority discourse and Canadian visible minority discourse by examining the paratextual elements in the work of Evelyn Lau.  By focusing on what Gérard Genette defines as paratextualinterviews, book covers, reviewsthis essay argues that the paratext reveals how the convergence of US and Canadian racial discourse constitutes a racialized Asian identity inseparable from the commodification of visibility and from visibility's presumed transparency and apparent value.

• Subjects: Asian Culture, Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, Twentieth Century

Glenn Deer

• Remapping Vancouver: Composing Urban Spaces in Contemporary Asian Canadian Writing (p. 118 - 144)
• Abstract: Show/hide

  This essay investigates how a new wave of Asian Canadian writers-represented by Madeleine Thien, Nancy Lee, Kevin Chong and Larissa Lai-uses diverse spatial elements to represent the contemporary breakdown of "urbanity."  Greater Vancouver's promises of transparency and mobility are optimistically troped in the new Aberdeen Centre and Douglas Coupland's City of Glass, but Thien, Lee, Chong, and Lai demonstrate that such promises are undermined by loss and globalized violence.

• Subjects: Cultural Studies, Novel, Twenty-First Century, Urban Novel
• PDF available

Roy Miki

• Global Drift: Thinking the Beyond of Identity Politics (p. 145 - 157)
• Abstract: Show/hide

  This paper speculates on the crisis in time in the aftermath of 9.11 as it has affected cultural work in Canada.  In the midst of globalizing processes, this crisis has exposed the limits of the "identity politics" that influenced cultural work during the previous two decades.  In thinking about what lies beyond 9.11, we need to develop a critical understanding of identity formation that accounts for its shifting conditions in the memory of past injustices.

• Subjects: Cultural Studies
• PDF available

Rita Wong

• Decolonizasian: Reading Asian and First Nations Relations in Literature (p. 158 - 180)
• Abstract: Show/hide

  Representations of Asian and First Nations relationships in literature offer a discursive space from which to speculate upon the building of interracial alliances that work towards decolonizing the imagined community of "Canada." This article investigates the possibility of aligning the signifier of "Asian" towards decolonization and indigenous land rights to sustain a growing body of work that values solidarity with First Nations cultures.

• Subjects: Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism

Lily Cho

• Asian Canadian Futures: Diasporic Passages and the Routes of Indenture (p. 181 - 201)
• Abstract: Show/hide

  This paper explores Asian Canadian literary criticism within the rubric of diaspora studies. Approaching Asian Canadian literature within this rubric of diaspora studies encourages interventions such as: comparative work between multiple sites of Asian migration; comparative work between minority communities; and an exploration of the relationship between slavery and indenture as formative features of certain diasporic subjectivities.

• Subjects: Cultural Studies, Diaspora

Henry Yu

• Afterword (p. 202 - 207)
• Subjects: Literary Criticism

Guy Beauregard, Lily Cho, Iyko Day, Glenn Deer, Don Goellnicht, Christopher Lee, Marie Lo, Roy Miki, and Rita Wong

• Epilogue: A Conversation on Unfinished Projects (p. 208 - 211)

Poems

Tim Mook Sang

• Mill Houses¹ (p. 212)

Dale Lee Kwong

• Ng Shu Kwong: (1869-1929) (p. 213)

Terry Watada

• August Light (p. 214 - 215)

Angela Long

• Where are you from? (p. 216)

Changming Yuan

• Birdkeeping: A Play Poem (p. 217 - 218)

Book Reviews

Celluloid Reelities (p. 219 - 220)

by Victor Liang

Book(s) reviewed:

1. Reel Asian: Asian Canada on Screen by Elaine Chang

Subjects: Film

Autobiographical Acts (p. 220 - 221)

by Rocío G. Davis

Book(s) reviewed:

1. Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Autobiographies of Childhood. by Rocío G. Davis

Subjects: Life Writing

What Poetry Does (p. 221 - 223)

by Aaron Giovannone

Book(s) reviewed:

1. Forage by Rita Wong
2. Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City by Pier Giorgio Di Cicco
3. Muybridge's Horse by Rob Winger

Subjects: Poetry

CanLit Inter-nationally (p. 223 - 226)

by Debra Dudek

Book(s) reviewed:

1. Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature by Roy Miki and Smaro Kamboureli
2. Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, Canadian Writings in Context by Marta Dvorak and W. H. New

Subjects: Canadian Studies, Postcolonialism, Short Fiction

Scrawled with Histories (p. 226 - 227)

by Kyo Maclear

Book(s) reviewed:

1. The Letter Opener by Kyo Maclear

Subjects: Novel

Une Chine pas si douce (p. 227 - 228)

by Félicia Mihali

Book(s) reviewed:

1. Sweet, Sweet China by Félicia Mihali

Subjects: Francophone

(in)Visible Subjects (p. 228 - 229)

by Sachiko Murakami

Book(s) reviewed:

1. Away by Andrea MacPherson
2. The Invisibility Exhibit by Sachiko Murakami
3. What if red ran out by Katia Grubisic

L'amour d'un père (p. 229 - 230)

by Anne Marie Miraglia

Book(s) reviewed:

1. La Frontière tatouée by Fulvio Caccia
2. Voyage au Viët Nam avec un voyou by Alain Olivier

Subjects: Francophone