Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies

The Time Has Come: Self and Community Articulations in Colour. An Issue and Awakening Thunder

151 The Time Has Come: Self and Community Articulations in Colour. An Issue and Awakening Thunder Larissa Lai Collective Strategies In the late 1980s and early ’90s, special issues of journals offered an imperfect but productive way of bringing into presence histories, experience , and subjects who had little articulated place in the Canadian cultural landscape until that point.These collective,community-based forms of publishing made space for multiple voices to be heard.What was and is productive about the special issue as a form is that it includes a notion of the collective in its conception. Like autobiographies by minoritized subjects, special issues serve the function of “breaking the silence,” creating a forum for marginalized voices to articulate histories and experiences not previously granted legitimacy or space within mainstream Canadian literature. Special issues require host journals whose regular stream of publication is necessarily interrupted by the production of “special” issues.The special issue becomes a disruption in the linear flow of a periodical’s history and continues,paradoxically,to marginalize those voices even as it grants them a forum, as Ashok Mathur discusses in his editorial introduction to Race Poetry, Eh?, a special issue of Prairie Fire (8). Special issues on racialized writers or racialized writing engage the Hegelian“master/slave”dialectic that Monika Kin Gagnon has so clearly articulated in her book Other Conundrums on anti-racist cultural production in the 1980s and ’90s:“My sense of the contemporary dilemma is 152 Lai that naming racism’s operations means naming oneself and others within the very terms and operations that have historically enabled racist discourses to proliferate” (22).In order to free oneself from a history of racism , one must name that history, but in so doing the old colonial binary (“white”/“of colour”) and its attendant social relations are necessarily re-engaged and re-enacted. I will not go so far as to suggest that special issues on the subject of “race” are the only kind of special issue that necessarily engages this binary. But there is always something of the supplement ,in Jacques Derrida’s sense,that is called up in relation to the special issue; in other words, it points to that which, as “other” to the regular stream of periodical publication, is always both greater and lesser than the regular stream.Always already secondary, it bolsters the legitimacy of the “regular stream” even as it asserts its content, as Smaro Kamboureli has noted with regard to the social labour of “ethnic antholog[ies]” in relation to canonical anthologies (Scandalous 134). The flipside of the special issue’s supplementary function, however, is that even while it is “lesser” and debased in relation to the regular stream, it is at the same time “more than” the regular stream—exalted,“special.”The dedication of an entire issue to questions of racialization or marginality points to the importance of the “issue” in the moment of publication, and serves as a fresh reiteration of a subject that has always been with us, albeit valenced differently,and placed in the service of older power structures,but from a non-dialectic logic it may at the same time remain continuous with the regular stream. Significantly, these tensions can co-exist. My objective here is not to offer a statistical survey of the relative absence or presence of racialized voices in the mainstream of Canadian literary magazine publications,though I do take it as a given that marginalization is a historical fact.What I am interested in examining, instead, is exactly what kinds of subjectivities get reproduced1 through the deployment of the special issue as an anti-racist political tactic.2 In this essay, I closely examine two special issues of the 1990s: Awakening Thunder: Asian Canadian Women, a special issue of Fireweed produced in 1991, important because it was the first Asian Canadian women’s special issue; and Colour.An Issue, a special issue of West Coast Line that came out in 1994, important because of its focus on the language of race and racialization. I explore the politics of framing, modes of production, editorial content, as well as creative and critical content to ask what kinds of communities,futures,and models of liberation these The Time Has Come 153 special issues produce. I ask to what extent the strategies of their production are a question of the historical moment and what other factors might play into their differing...