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:l?) “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: 1? 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 ...
Atlantic Cosmopolitanism in John Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright
Abstract: This article reads John Steffler’s 1992 novel about British explorer George Cartwright under the frame of transatlanticism. I argue that Steffler’s Cartwright dramatizes the late eighteenth century shift from feudalist to capitalist economy, the rise of speculative finance and international trade, and the links between cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and the epistemological violence of slavery. Cartwright is cast into a global trade network and comes to occupy a cosmopolitan sensibility, which is demonstrated in the novel through a system of metaphors linking land, sea, and textiles. Cartwright’s cosmopolitanism is continually challenged by different versions of nation-state politics, including nascent American nationalism and the American revolution. His status as a ghost in an eternal present forges a link between historical imperialism and contemporary, American-dominated globalization. Ultimately, the novel poses significant questions about how ideas about transatlantic trade and cosmopolitanism circulate within the Canadian national imaginary.
Attic Shapes and Empty Attics: Patrick Anderson – A Memoir
Abstract: ?IHE SPEAKER is G.?. CHESTERTON, not P. Anderson. Yet it IHE reminds me irresistibly of Patrick. Not just because pubs ...