Introduction: The South in the North

Luckily, this cluster of essays did not turn out as planned. The initial idea was to put into dialogue (first at a small 2015 conference in Vancouver, now in this issue) fields marginalized by American studies and its various subspecialties. Asian Southernists and Asian Canadianists would consider the conceptual distortions deriving from Asian American Studies’ heavy emphasis on the west coast of the United States; First Nations/Métis scholars and Native Southernists would do the same for a field centered on the western United States; and scholars of black Canada and the black South would do the same for African American Studies’ continuing emphasis on US northern urban experience. This institutional goal was paired with a methodological one: to extend Jade Ferguson’s counter to the claim underlying Houston Baker and Dana Nelson’s foundational critique of southern exceptionalism, that Malcolm X’s “Mississippi is anywhere in the United States south of the Canadian border.” Ferguson had rightly been asking, “Why stop there?” (6-10).

As it turns out, however, none of the contributors here has been terribly interested in reproducing, in some kind of compare-and-contrast format, ressentiment narratives of continental, much less disciplinary, marginalization. Instead, they have explored the vertiginous, jostling multiplicity of theoretical frames they and their disciplines bring to the issues: postcolonialism; settler colonialism; African, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean diasporas; official and unofficial multiculturalisms; empire; affect theory; critical race studies; strategic or perhaps just tactical essentialisms; relationality; indigenous paradigms; spatial theory and questions of scale; the legacy of Jim Crow on ethnic studies; exceptionalist regional and national paradigms and anti-exceptionalist critiques thereof. And what matters here has turned out to be less putting Canadianists and US southernists in conversation than, as Leslie Bow has observed, the disciplinary border-crossings that have ensued among scholars of indigenous, Asian diasporic, and Black Atlantic experience and expression.

The emphasis of this cluster is thus not on spatialized economic inequality, as it was in a recent, similarly titled special issue of this journal,¹ but on how overlapping, highly particular, and often contradictory racialized affects, ontologies, subjectivities, or histories (depending on your preferred argot) impinge upon, perhaps even largely constitute, how one dwells in a very particular place. Yet the methodologies employed here resist the sort of synthesis or convergence that one expects scholarly introductions such as this one to draw out. Part of the reason is that, as Chris Lee notes, indigenous perspectives are much more visible in the Canadian academy and Canadian politics than in the US, and some influential indigenous theory, as Eric Anderson reminds us, is undergirded by the utopian hope/ethical imperative that settler colonialists leave. Any attempt to synthesize that vision with others—whether via official Canadian multiculturalism or a Truth and Reconciliation Commission—runs the danger Sophie McCall notes of simply arriving at absolution for white people (or, implicitly, other “immigrants”) on the cheap. And as Deanna Reder points out, native theory has a long history of rejecting postcolonial approaches.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the metaphor or frame of “relationality”—in its crudest form, “relative to Natives, we are oppressors, relative to whites, we are oppressed”—governs or perhaps merely haunts virtually all the papers in this issue’s Asianist roundtable: as Chris Lee notes, Leslie Bow’s important notion of “interstitiality” is itself a form of relationality between the two poles of Jim Crow, “the very categories that have made race legible.” Christine Kim, meanwhile, is interested in how Asianness figures within national and regional narratives: the 2014 Serial podcast about Adnan Syed “makes it clear that racial interstitiality produces confusion because it exposes the limitations of US racial optics. In the Canadian context, the minorness of Asian Canada serves to undercut national feelings of pride and instead generates ambivalence and annoyance, small ugly feelings that Sianne Ngai has argued are neither ennobling like melancholia nor able to offer catharsis like rage.” Leslie Bow pushes the question of racial affect further: “When I think about the specific pathos of the Asian in the South, I am struck most forcefully by forms of racialized affect that make southern literature...