Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity: Critical Writing 1984–1999 by Fred Wah (review)

368 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 its misguided proponents who fail to recognize their disciplinary or professional limitations. >In order to overcome these ... limitations,= Fish writes, >cultural studies practitioners try to have it both ways: they admit their own contextually constrained position (that the Aescape from ideology@ is an illusion), but they then valorize the awareness of that situatedness, as though awareness itself enabled them somehow to gain freedom from ideological constraints.= Yet what of Fish=s own objective truth, his foundational and essentializing claim that all criticism comprehends a set of embodied professional practices whose assumptions are both inescapable and inaccessible? It would seem, Donnelly inveighs, in a rare uncharitable moment, that >the gods of agnosis have become flesh and are dwelling among us as professors of literature.= For Fish, professional literary criticism, like virtue, is its own reward. For Donnelly, it is a species of egoism, the important question being not how or whether we choose our interpretive strategies, but how we live, how we embody our beliefs and values in verbal and nonverbal actions. From this standpoint, professional correctness is not the noblest of teloi. (GREIG HENDERSON) Fred Wah. Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity: Critical Writing 1984B1999 NeWest Press. viii, 280. $20.00 Fred Wah=s Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity is the latest in the >Writer as Critic= series published by NeWest Press and edited by Smaro Kamboureli. Given his track record, however, it is not surprising that in his >Contexts and Acknowledgements= Wah suggests that for him the very notion of the >Writer as Critic= is highly vexed. Although a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Calgary, Wah is suspicious of the >hegemony of constructed institutions.= Moreover, as someone preoccupied with genre-bending in all of his writing, he more often challenges the conventional structure of the critical essay than embraces it. Insisting on a practical and applied poetics that has the potential to subvert academic authority and to >make things happen,= Wah uses his poetics as a disruptive rather than a distancing or descriptive device. >To write critically,= he says, >I=ve always written poetry.= More collage than collection, Faking It includes Wah=s series of previously published >Poetics= essays (>A Poetics of Ethnicity,= >Half-Bred Poetics,= >Racing the Lyric Poetics,= >Poetics of the Potent,= >A Molecular Poetics=), an interview with Ashok Mathur (previously published on-line and in Mathur=s Filling Station), and a short >biofiction= arranged in conjunction with a series of black and white photographs. Interspersed throughout this material are a series of what Wah refers to as >Strangles,= short pieces that further disrupt generic classification by accosting the HUMANITIES 369 boundaries of criticism and autobiography, poetry and prose. >Strang(l)ed Poetics,= for example, offers an inventory of contemporary Canadian poetics that includes descriptions of proprioceptive verse, the contestatory long poem and something Wah calls >Trans=geo-ethno=poetics.= Some of this writing will be familiar to Wah readers. In typical Wah fashion, however, he has rethought and recast individual essays to reflect his own developing sense of an oppositional poetics. Earlier assumptions about estrangement in poetry get qualified by a developing gendered and racialized awareness. Throughout the text, Wah makes it clear that his commitment to pushing the limits of literary form is explicitly political. For example, in >Half-Bred Poetics= he explores the potential of a hyphenated space. In >A Poetics of Ethnicity,= he outlines a poetics of difference and argues how a tactics of refusal and reterritorialization can >enable a particular residue (genetic, cultural, biographical) to become kinetic and valorised.= In >Speak My Language: Racing the Lyric Poetic,= he says, >I=m interested in how the colouring of the negotiations, with whatever thread of the inherited lyric, has consequence for a socially informed poetic (not a politics of identity but a praxis in language).= Three of the pieces in Faking It reflect Wah=s interest in a Chinese avantgarde poetry. These >essays= allow Wah to probe a different cultural context in order to further trouble the role of nation in the making of a nonthematic , non-representational poetics. Grouping together an essay, an interview, and a series of journal entries that document his experiences...