Research Catalog

Title

Slanting I, imagining we : Asian Canadian literary production in the 1980s and 1990s / Larissa Lai.

Author

Lai, Larissa

Publication

Waterloo, Ontario : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, [2014]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xii, 260 pages; 23 cm.

Summary

"The 1980s and 1990s are a historically crucial period in the development of Asian Canadian literature. Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s contextualizes and reanimates the urgency of that period, illustrates its historical specificities, and shows how the concerns of that moment - from cultural appropriation to race essentialism to shifting models of the state - continue to resonate for contemporary discussions of race and literature in Canada. Larissa Lai takes up the term "Asian Canadian" as a term of emergence, in the sense that it is constantly produced differently, and always in relation to other terms - often "whiteness" but also Indigeneity, queerness, feminism, African Canadian, and Asian American. In the 1980s and 1990s, "Asian Canadian" erupted in conjunction with the post-structural recognition of the instability of the subject. But paradoxically it also came into being through activist work, and so depended on an imagined stability that never fully materialized. Slanting I, Imagining We interrogates this fraught tension and the relational nature of the term through a range of texts and events, including the Gold Mountain Blues scandal, the conference Writing Thru Race, and the self-writings of Evelyn Lau and Wayson Choy."--pub. desc.

Series Statement

TransCanada series

Uniform Title

• Project Muse UPCC books
• TransCanada.
• TransCanada series

Subject

• 1900-1999
• Canadian literature (English) > History and criticism
• Canadian literature (English) > 20th century > History and criticism
• Canadian literature > History and criticism
• Canadian literature > 20th century > History and criticism

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 237-245) and index.

Additional Formats (note)

• Issued also in electronic format.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Introduction: Asian Canadian Ruptures, Contemporary Scandals -- Strategizing the Body of History: Anxious Writing, Absent Subjects, and Marketing the Nation -- The Time Has Come: Self and Community Articulations in "Colour: An Issue and Awakening Thunder" -- Romancing the Anthology: Supplement, Relation, and Community Production -- Future Orientations, Non-Dialectical Monsters: Storytelling Queer Utopias in Hiromi Goto's "Chorus of Mushrooms" and "The Kappa Child" -- Ethnic Ethics, Translational Excess: The Poetics of jam ismail and Rita Wong -- The Cameras of the World: Race, Subjectivity, and the Spiritual, Collective Other in Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" and Dionne Brand's "What We All Long For" -- Conclusion: Community Action, Global Spillage: Writing the Race of Capital.

ISBN

• 9781771120418 (pbk.)
• 177112041X (pbk.)
• 9781771120425 (pdf) (canceled/invalid)
• 1771120428 (pdf) (canceled/invalid)
• 9781771120432 (epub) (canceled/invalid)
• 1771120436 (epub) (canceled/invalid)

OCLC

• 866930850
• SCSB-11985112

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library