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.
Introduction
Larissa Lai
In addition to addressing the contents of the book, the Introduction connects two contemporary scandals to debates of the 1980s and 1990s to the present. The Gold Mountain Blues scandal re-animates the dynamics of cultural appropriation. The "Too Asian" scandal re-enacts the discourse of "yellow peril".
Chapter 1
Strategizing the Body of History: Anxious Writing, Absent Subjects, and Marketing the Nation
Larissa Lai
"Breaking the silence", as a strategy, is freeing in that it brings to public voice stories and language repressed in the production of the white settler state. However, under neoliberal capitalism, it can also retrospectively incorporate racialized subjects into a narrative of national belonging while encrypting undigested the histories of exclusion it was supposed to have rectified.
Chapter 2
The Time Has Come: Self and Community Articulations in Colour. An Issue and Awakening Thunder
Larissa Lai
Special issues are exalted in their specialness but debased in that, as interruptions to the regular stream of journal publishing, the never constitute the regular stream. Awakening Thunder produces a history of the present oriented towards a utopic future. Colour. An Issue, aware of historical contingency, emphasizes open-endedness rather than happy arrival.
Chapter 3
Romancing the Anthology: Supplement, Relation and Community Production
Larissa Lai
Anthologies, though they appear to produce identities, are profoundly dependent on relation across categories to make meaning. While the counter anthology, related as it is to the canonical anthology, might appear to produce heroic subjects, in fact it produces complicated affects and temporalities that allow communities to form, disperse and reform, always differently.
Chapter 4
Collective Bodily Storytelling in Hiromi Goto's Chorus of Mushrooms and The Kappa Child
Larissa Lai
Emerging from activist and cultural gatherings in the 1980s and 1990s, Hiromi Goto's first two novels interrogate the relationship between language and racialized bodies. She enacts radical carnival narratives that transform the geographies from which they come and into which they are propelled.
Chapter 5
Ethnic Ethics in Excess of Capital: The Poetics of Rita Wong and jam ismail
Larissa Lai
In the poetry of both Rita Wong and jam ismail, the relationship between text and its "real world" referents is of tantamount importance because both are invested, though differently, in social change. Both engage a poetics the sees language as both material and ideological, and attempt to re-valence it from and for their own hybrid, embodied locations.
Chapter 6
The Cameras of the World: Race, Subjectivity and the Multitude in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Dionne Brand's What We All Long For
Larissa Lai
Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Dionne Brand's What We All Long For present characters who are both deeply abject and radically free of the constraint of Enlightenment subjectivity. The Atwood text returns power tongue-in-cheek to white patriarchy, but the Brand text offers a glimmer of hope in constructing the citizen-subject-reader in historical, bodily and blood kinship with those whom the state, through the logic of exception, seeks to exclude.
Conclusion
Community Action, Global Spillage: Writing the Race of Capital
Larissa Lai
The 1994 conference Writing Thru Race marks a turning point in cultural race politics. The controversy that erupted around it was symptomatic of Canada's shift from its formation as a liberal democratic state to a globalized, neoliberal one. Contemporary critics and cultural producers need this analysis to retain the justice work of the category "Asian Canadian."