Ash-Memory, (M)other Tongues, and Spectral Poetics in Erín Moure’s The Unmemntioable
Abstract: This paper presents a critical reading of Canadian poet Erín Moure’s The Unmemntiobale (House of Anansi Press, 2012). I employ a close-reading methodology to situate Moure’s text within its historical and geographical context, namely the Holocaust in western Ukraine. In The Unmemntioable, typographical markings map moments of dissonance where the book’s transhistorical and translingual ghosts interrupt and rub up against one another. This spectral poetics requires an engagement with differential reading forms, to elucidate the voices afloat in each sign. I propose the term ‘ash-memory’ to articulate Moure’s themes of language, violence, and cultural memory. Jacques Derrida’s writings on cinders and the shibboleth provide a further theoretical framework. I conclude that it is the spectral traces of the past that connect the body to place and place to language.
Asia/Canada Reframed: Perspectives From a Transpacific Film Location
Abstract: This article examines the limits of approaching Asian Canadian filmmaking in primarily authorial and textual terms. Drawing insights from recent transnational analyses in film studies, the article explores filmmaking practices in the transpacific city of Vancouver and proposes the study of film location as an alternative methodology for Asian Canadian cultural critique.
Asian Canadian Futures: Diasporic Passages and the Routes of Indenture
Abstract: This paper traces possible future directions for Asian Canadian literature within the rubric of Asian diasporic studies and is written ...
Asian Canadian Graphic Autopathographies
Abstract: This article examines two recent graphic autopathographies by Asian Canadian authors arguing that they are important to the development of Canadian graphic novels because they grapple with intersectional issues of race, gender and health. Teresa Wong’s Dear Scarlet: The Story of My Postpartum Depression and Kimiko Tobimatsu and Keet Geniza’s Kimiko Does Cancer: A Graphic Memoir are important because the Asian Canadian community is reluctant to seek help for mental health problems due to cultural issues. These graphic memoirs are important to the development of comics production in Canada as they reveal how comics provides a space to articulate affective feelings that are seen as shameful or debilitating for immigrant Asian women.
Canadian Literature: 252 Canadian Literature (2023): 79-103.
Asian Canadian Studies: Unfinished Projects
Abstract: I In an essay that investigates “why interethnic antiracism matters now,” George Lipsitz asserts that, “while ethnic studies is ...
Asian Kanadian, Eh?
Abstract: As the peculiarly Canadian interrogatory mode of my title indicates, in this paper I raise a number of questions concerning ...
Asian-Indigenous Relationalities: Literary Gestures of Respect and Indebtedness
Abstract: Lee Maracle’s (Stó:lō) “Yin Chin” and SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café have inaugurated a literary tradition of acknowledging and restoring Asian-Indigenous relations in the field of Asian Canadian studies. This study extends their intertextual conversation on the impact of racism and colonialism on Asian-Indigenous relations to consider the ways in which contemporary Asian Canadian settler citizens, migrants, and refugees may inherit not only the legacies of white supremacy, global capital, and settler colonialism but also the historical and ongoing relations of Sino-Indigenous indebtedness. Presenting an allegorical reading of the depiction of Sino-Indigenous indebtedness, this paper suggests that this literary tradition has the capacity to generate a sense of mutuality and self-critique amongst all Asian Canadians today to consider their roles and responsibilities within the structures of settler colonialism, particularly within Asian migrant and refugee communities shaped by an enduring sense of gratitude towards the state for being granted a new life on colonized lands.
Assembly Line Stories: Pastiche in Sylvia Fraser’s The Candy Factory
Abstract: 1Ы HIS STUDY OF FORMULAIC FICTION, Adventure, Mystery and Romance, John Cawelti suggests that “literary formulas assist in the process ...
At the Crossroads of Sympathy and Prophecy: Anna Jameson, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, and the Drummond Island Métis
Abstract: While discussing their community’s relocation, Drummond Island Métis interviewees Lewis Solomon and Jean Baptiste Sylvestre describe how they witnessed British author Anna Jameson steal skulls from an Indigenous grave during her travels in 1837 (The Migration of Voyageurs from Drummond Island to Penetanguishene in 1828 1901). Their testimony provokes a reckoning for Jameson and her travel narrative Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) due to her self-depiction as exceptionally sympathetic toward Indigenous peoples. Their evidence also unsettles earlier scholarship that valorizes Jameson’s sympathy and gestures toward the settler colonial stakes bound up in such readings. This paper re-evaluates Jameson’s travel narrative by demonstrating how her settler sympathy is intertwined with prophecies of “elimination” (Wolfe 2006, 388). It then shows how the narratives of Solomon, Sylvestre, and other members of the Drummond Island Métis community (ancestors of the present-day Georgian Bay Métis community) resist the constraints of such prophecy.
At the Membrane of Language and Silence: Metaphor and Memory in Fugitive Pieces
Abstract: The essence of the metaphor is quiddity. In order for each component to work successfully simultaneously, each must work in ...