Cultural criticism and change: new directions in Asian Canadian writing

Abstract

Asian Canadian writer Larissa Lai reflects, in an article written eight years after the publication of her first novel, When Fox Is a Thousand, that the central character, Artemis, ‘is a product of my thinking through what happens to young Asian Canadian women in the absence of a radical community-based identity politic. She has some awareness of colonialism and white privilege, and some awareness of how her body is read within mainstream white society, but she does not really have any useful tools to deal with this knowledge’ (2005: 168). This article explores Lai's ‘thinking through’ the issue of white visualising practices that ‘read’ the Asian female body as a hyper-feminised, doll-like other in her most recently released book, Automaton Diaries (2009). This article will focus upon the consistent return within her body of fiction and poetry to the figure of the Replicant Rachel from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Lai's implicit questioning of Rachel's fixed subject positioning in Blade Runner indicates ...