Articles

Abstract: IAM OLD ENOUGH to remember the older members of the previous generation and the much older members of the generation ...

Abstract: M,CONSTANTCOMPANIONFOROVERFORTYYEARS,my closest friend, my wife Esther, is an archivist. For several years she worked in the Provincial Archives of the ...

Abstract: ISYSIPHUS WERE A SAINT he could serve for my patron, and perhaps for a good many others of my generation ...

Abstract: This paper makes the rhetorical move to consider narratives of “refugee success” outside the framework of liberal nationalism and multiculturalism. It focuses not on how such narratives are produced for and deployed by the state and its apparatuses to bolster ideological ends, but on the ways in which these stories are integral to the intertwined processes of survival and subject formation for those who have experienced intense struggle, loss, and trauma. Through an analysis of Kim Thuy’s novel Ru, I argue that “success” – as articulated through gratitude – can become a critical tool for “post”-refugee subjects to make sense of their oftentimes fraught and incongruous experiences and selves. The expression of gratitude, I suggest, enables a process of intersubjectivity, whereby the “post”-refugee can (re)construct a life and a sense of identity, and link that self with others to create an understanding of the individual and individual success as mutually constitutive, shared, and collective.

Abstract: In its final form, this will be a piece of autotheory, reflecting on refugee affect at two different points in time: one in the immediate aftermath of the Trump election, the other four years later, but still in the timeline rerouted/revealed by that event. The essay asks what refugee as ontology means in a historical present in which environmental catastrophe comes for us all, but political catastrophe presents an erratic menace. In its first round, the essay asks: Which genre is this unfolding? When do affective systems primed by the Vietnam War resilient vs. maladaptive? Will we know when it is time, again, to go? In its second, sifting the accretions of fifteen hundred days of headlines, the questions have not abated but morphed and grown: What is Canada to this new American vision of the self? Four years in, are those of us still here inured or recommitted? As settler refugees, what is our duty to this land? As BIPOC allies, what is our duty to those communities whose apocalypse has been here for generations, and who have stayed?

Abstract: This essay examines examples of transpacific Cambodian cultural memory in The Roots Remain (2015) and Daze of Justice (2016) that approach the afterlife of the Cambodian Genocide with mutual affection, commemoration, and creative adaptation. The stakes of memory in these two documentaries are different than in the Cambodian documentary films of Rithy Panh (S21, The Missing Picture) or Thet Sambath (Enemies of the People) that bear witness to trauma in order to resist forgetting through the testimony of victims and perpetrators. These films also differ from Asian American documentaries about 1.5 generation SE Asian refugees resettling in North America such as AKA Don Bonus (Spencer Nakasako/Sokly Ny, 1995), Kelly Loves Tony (Nakasako, 1998), or returnee documentaries about subjects uncovering family memory in order to understand and reshape their own identifications as seen in Refugee (Nakasako, 2003). Both Daze of Justice and The Roots Remain are not fact-finding missions like their predecessors in New Cambodian Cinema and Asian American film and media. Through a process of reconciling and recuperating collective memory that I describe as regenerative remembering, the Cambodian Canadian and Cambodian American subjects of these films work to restore communal relations severed by generational difference, transpacific migration, and silence.

Abstract: This essay produces a queer examination of Vancouver’s poetry newsletter Tish. Although narratives and scholarship of Tish have predominantly valorized the experiences of the first male editors and continue to commemorate their efforts (e.g. Davey’s When Tish Happens and Wah’s Permissions: TISH Poetics 1963 Thereafter), this article challenges this trend that dismisses later Tish issues and marks them as failures. Specifically, by engaging with Sarah Ahmed’s and Jack Halberstam’s studies between failure and social spaces and art failure, respectively, I argue that Tish’s later issues (20-E [45]) deviated from the first nineteen issues’ masculinist social relations and ideology by including more marginalized people’s voices, such as women’s and gay men’s works. I demonstrate how the second phase addressed the first phase’s erasure of women, the third phase published radical feminist poetry, and the fourth phase published gay poetry. However, these phases were limited by the first phase’s androcentricism. Instead of disqualifying its later issues, this article’s alternate socio-cultural history of Tish challenges a limited and heteronormative perspective of Vancouver’s poetry newsletter to demonstrate the contributions of women and gay men that have previously been disqualified.

Abstract: THE HEROES OF ROBERT KROETSCH’S NOVELS stagger hugely into myth, roaring across the West in an endless quest that ends ...

Abstract: On a abondamment commenté—geste paradoxal s’il en est—le silence de Réjean Ducharme, cette troublante absence qui ne cesse encore aujourd’hui ...

Abstract: IN ROBERT NORWOOD’S DEVOTIONAL VERSE-TEXTS of the first decades of the century, a cleavage between priestly service and poetic practice ...