Disrupting the National Frame: A Postcolonial, Diasporic (Re)Reading of SKY Lee's Disappearing Moon Café and Denise Chong's The Concubine's Children

Since its emergence in the 1980s and 1890s, Asian Canadian Studies has gained recognition as a field of inquiry that could mount a wide-ranging and radical critique of mainstream Canadian history, society, and culture. Originally inspired by the rights-based movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Asian Canadian Studies grew out of community level activism against race and class oppression (Lai 1). Its principal modality has been to construct a "collective self," or Asian Canadian identity, through which to challenge the representation of Asians as perpetual outsiders or aliens and to rewrite existing Canadian history to acknowledge such racist state policies as the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese Canadian Internment, and the Komagata Maru Incident (Chao 18). In this way, the field has historically unfolded within a nationalist framework, locating the nation-state as the primary interlocutor of the Asian/alien body in Canada and taking up a kind of "strategic essentialism" (Lai 5). Nonetheless, as the field increasingly becomes drawn into the academy, critics have noted some possible limitations of this framework. One such limitation is that the focus on domestic identity politics, and the promotion of citizenship and national belonging as political goals, runs the risk of reinforcing a reductive pluralism which cannot "shake up the systemic historical conditions and … ideologies of normativity that have produced racialized subjects and minoritized cultures" (Kamboureli 64).

In exploring ways to expand on the Canadian national frame, Lily Cho has posited that Asian Canadian Studies could be situated more clearly within a postcolonial, diasporic paradigm. Such a paradigm, she contends, could generate insights into how the construction of Asian-ness in Canada is deeply connected to Asian-ness elsewhere (188). Indeed, Cho points out that there is a need to "think about the formation of the Canadian state through imperialism and colonialism" and to see Asian Canadian history within a wider, global context of capital and labour migration (188). Focusing specifically on Chinese Canadian communities, Cho illustrates how a "diasporic perspective" can highlight the links between Chinese migration and British imperialism (186). That is, a diasporic perspective can consider how early Chinese immigrants to Canada came from South China, where the Opium Wars "had disrupted the local economy [and] provid[ed] much of the push for emigration" (Stanley 56). Furthermore, it can stress how many of these immigrants were indentured workers, imported via the coolie trade which burgeoned in British Hong Kong after the Atlantic slave trade went into decline (Peter Li 20). Importantly, then, a postcolonial, diasporic paradigm can productively complicate the history of Asian Canadians by acknowledging that this history is not only shaped in the Canadian context; rather, it is part of a larger history of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism.

If Cho's arguments gesture to the benefits of a global, historical, and comparative framework, Larissa Lai's book, Slanting I, Imagining We, emphasizes the perils of relying too heavily on a fixed notion of Asian Canadian identity. Lai argues that the tactic of strategic essentialism has become seriously problematic due to the pressures of "state incorporation" currently informing Asian Canadian Studies (6). Underlying these pressures is an investment in liberal multiculturalism that reinforces static notions of racial and national difference and works to "recirculate the logic of colonialism in newly embodied forms" (23). This logic becomes all the more insidious in a post-9/11 Canada, where narratives of citizenship, nationalism, and security have become intertwined in ways that reproduce Orientalist images of Others as unassimilable and anti-democratic foreigners. As Lai points out, the 2010 Maclean's article entitled "Too Asian" suggests that "the trope of the 'yellow peril'" has been reinvigorated in the national imaginary (Lai 17). The article, which proposes that "white students" feel intimidated by the perceived work ethic of "both Asian Canadians and international students" (Findlay and Köhler 76), not only presents a homogenizing construction of Asian-ness but positions it as external to national belonging. Indeed, since the article portrays Canadian-born and newly-arrived Asians...