Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s by Larissa Lai (review)

The title of Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s announces Larissa Lai’s interest in the particular: two decades in Asian Canadian literary and cultural history. Indeed, one of the book’s important achievements is its analysis of the development of Asian Canadian literature during this period on its own unique terms. But what is even more striking is Lai’s careful attention to how Asian Canadian literary production must be read not only for its emergence out of opposition to histories of oppression and exclusion but also via coalition across different communities. The book as a whole, therefore, uses Asian Canadian literature and the 1980s and 1990s as a case study to explore broader questions about the vexed intersections of art and activism, theory and politics, and aesthetics and ethics.

Alongside an analysis of literature, Slanting I, Imagining We is also a history of artistic and activist resistance and coalition building. Lai’s introduction offers a lucid discussion of pivotal points in the development of Asian Canadian studies. Rather than tracing a “linear and heroic history for Asian Canadian literature,” Lai focuses instead on examining what she calls ruptures and relations. Her opening paragraph, for example, begins by contextualizing the rise of Asian Canadian studies amid the context of the Japanese Canadian redress movement, the 1988 Multiculturalism Act, the formation of ‘Asian Canadian’ as an identity in the 1960s and 1970s, and poststructural theory. These developments were, without question crucial to Asian Canadian literature, but Lai also contends that Asian Canadian studies has a history that must be viewed as “profoundly relational.” The book resists a persistent strategy of comparison (between the origin of Asian Canadian Studies in comparison to Asian American studies, often with the assessment that Asian Canadian studies lacks the activist core so central to its American cognate). In contrast, Lai contends that the series of ruptures imagined by Asian Canadian literature must be read on their own terms, and as shaped by Canada’s own unique history of artistic and activist coalitions. To that end, Lai-alongside scholars such as Smaro Kamboureli and Iyko Day-memorably highlights the intersection of indigenous and feminist studies as important for theorizing Asian Canadian literature and as critical to its development.

The timeliness of this study is urgent. Lai focuses on the 1980s and the 1990s, but she also frames her intervention by recalling two more recent “scandals” that reveal the continued complexities of studying Asian Canadian literature. The first is the 2010 publication of the “Too Asian” article in Maclean’s magazine, regarding student perceptions about number of Asian students at Canadian university campuses. The second is the plagiarism lawsuit filed against Ling Zhang, author of Gold Mountain Blues, by SKY Lee, Wayson Choy, and Paul Yee, who argued that Zhang’s novel, published in the People’s Republic of China and later translated into English, included significant similarities to books previously published by Lee, Choy, and Yee. In Lai’s reading, these cases and the media attention attached to them underscore how conversations about race, culture, and identity are hardly resolved, and continue to emerge in print.

Lai is a fiction writer who was actively involved in activist, artist, and community movements, and she has a capacious and incisive understanding of the literary scene of the 1980s and 1990s. The first half of the book is especially compelling. Chapters One to Three analyze institutional and structural developments that affected Asian Canadian literature: the turn to autobiography as a genre, special issues devoted to race and literature, and the creation of anthologies of Asian Canadian literature. Lai reads these moments for their promise, but she also carefully highlights their possible shortcomings. While she recognizes that the publication of autobiographies, special issues, and anthologies created what Sau-Ling Wong called a textual politics of coalition in that they drew attention to Asian Canadian literary production...