TransCanada Series. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014. xii, 260 pp. C$42.99, paper. ISBN 978-1-77112-041-8.
Larissa Lai is a still-all-too-rare being: an Asian Canadian artist, activist and academic. The author of two novels and several poetry collections, a committed long-time activist, particularly for anti-racist, feminist, and queer causes, and an academic whose first critical book, Slanting I, Imagining We, has recently been published, Lai occupies a fairly unique position from which to assess Asian Canadian literary production of the 1980s and 1990s. As she states in the introduction, “the purpose of this book is to interrogate the ways in which the term ‘Asian Canadian’ has been imagined, produced and put to work between approximately 1985 and 2000, and to consider its implications and possibilities in the new millennium” (24). With the success of the Japanese Canadian Redress Movement and the passage of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act in 1988, along with the emergence of writers and artists of colour and Indigenous writers and artists during this period, there was an optimism about belonging to the Canadian nation, sustained debate about the possibilities and terms of such belonging at events like The Appropriate Voice conference of 1992 and the Writing Thru Race conference of 1994, and a growing pessimism with the triumphant rise of the neoliberal state. Lai, who lived through, participated in, and helped to shape much of this cultural history, is especially well placed to write about and assess it. She joins a fairly exclusive group that includes the likes of Roy Miki, Fred Wah and Richard Fung.
In the course of examining the meanings, parameters, usefulness and history of “Asian Canadian,” Lai provides one of the richest, most nuanced discussions of this umbrella term to date, entering into close conversation with Roy Miki’s recent In Flux: Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing (NeWest Press, 2011). Her depth of knowledge and detailed consideration of multiple sides of various issues, ranging from the role of autobiography as a liberatory genre through the value of special journal issues and “ethnic” anthologies to the politics of avant garde poetry, make for compelling arguments. In a move reminiscent of Kandice Chuh’s claim that the term “Asian American” must be approached as a subjectless discourse, a “conceptual tool [that] points to the need to manufacture ‘Asian American’ situationally” (Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique, Duke UP, 2003, 10), Lai states boldly that “the designation ‘Asian Canadian’ is a porous one. It is genealogically produced [in the Foucauldian sense] and deeply relational. The power of the term comes not from a particular essence as such, but from the coalitional work it does” (5). Emphasizing the relational and coalitional dimensions of “Asian Canadian” allows Lai to track the changing valances of this emergent “identity,” and its complex imbrication with other “identities,” especially Indigeneity, queerness, and feminism. Her treatment of Asian Canadian in relation to Indigeneity is especially innovative and illuminating. Her candour in revealing her doubts and uncertainties, her revisions to earlier commitments, is refreshing and still quite rare in academic scholarship.
Lai raises the very important question—one that has plagued academic activists for quite some time—of whether texts that reside under terms like “Asian Canadian” can “retain their liberatory possibility” when they leave the racialized communities in which they were formed and enter the academy, where they may “become a new type of ethnography” (59). She worries that these texts become legitimized because their writers are considered native informants who are mobilized as proof of the arrival of the multicultural nation. This route leads to commodification via institutionalization. Throughout this discussion, however, Lai tends to treat racialized/minoritized communities as if they are always in alignment or agreement with the artists and activists who emerge from them and often speak on their behalf. A binary emerges between supportive racialized/minoritized communities and incorporating institutions (especially universities, but also government agencies) that act on behalf of state multiculturalism. Despite sharing Lai’s concerns, I consider this division to be less clear: as Viet Nguyen observes in Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford UP, 2002), racialized communities can harbour significant reactionary views that are often opposed to those of their artists, while universities have often championed the work of racialized writers and activists, bringing it to wider audiences, as problematic as that incorporation may be.
One of the great strengths of the study is to draw out texts that do not focus primarily on traumatic pasts which induce perpetually melancholic presents, but rather gesture to possible, different futures that can assist in reinterpreting the past and the present. Lai explores different ways of carving out a positive future, questioning the obsessive focus on trauma as well as interrogating the issue of poststructuralist approaches to language as they affect identity politics, and insisting that “There is imaginative possibility here—if we can read the past for that which is hopeful, then we can produce the present in terms that allow for those productivities that Roy Miki has called ‘asiancy’ or ‘ethics’” (211). Writing in “the contemporary context of global capital and unjust war” (210) that mark the ascendancy of neoliberalism, Lai still manages to find idealist hope in the feminist, anti-racist, queer work of such writers as Hiromi Goto, jam ismail, Rita Wong and Dionne Brand. Her readings of individual texts by these writers are always informative and often brilliant.
For all her stress on critiquing nationalist belonging and valorizing relationality as a way of understanding “Asian Canadian,” Lai surprisingly limits herself primarily to a nationalist paradigm and to globalization as nationalism’s other. She doesn’t consider in a truly sustained way how “Asian Canadian” relates to “Asian American” (reciprocal? imperializing?) or to “Asian North American” or to continental American (as in “the Americas”). Nor does she give full consideration to a diasporic or transpacific paradigm, even though diasporas are themselves always already imbricated with the national in complicated ways. This is even more surprising given that Lai the novelist has consciously taken diasporic and continental positions in her fiction, to great effect. She certainly attempts to revisit and revise concepts of the nation, but she is reluctant to imagine outside or beyond it here, perhaps because neoliberal global capitalism sets such a horrific example of what is possible “beyond.” In the end, Lai refrains from offering a plan of action on which to pin the hope she has carefully nourished so that, despite her admirable ability to straddle the positions of academic, activist and artist, the book as a whole stops short of sustaining this balancing act, rather cleaving more to the academic than the other perspectives. Despite this, Slanting I, Imagining We is a compelling and challenging study, certainly among the best to date on Asian Canadian literature.
Donald C. Goellnicht
McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
pp. 685-688