Disrupting the National Frame: A Postcolonial, Diasporic (Re)Reading of SKY Lee's Disappearing Moon Café and Denise Chong's The Concubine's Children

Abstract

SINCE ITS EMERGENCE IN THE 1980s AND 1890s, Canadian Studies has gained recognition as a field of inquiry that could mount a wide-ranging and radical critique of mainstream Canadian history, society, and culture. Originally inspired by rights-based movements of 1960s and 1970s, Canadian Studies grew out of community level activism against race and class oppression (Lai 1). Its principal modality has been to construct a collective self, or Canadian identity, through which to challenge representation of Asians as perpetual outsiders or aliens and to rewrite existing Canadian history to acknowledge such racist policies as Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese Canadian Internment, and Komagata Maru Incident (Chao 18). In this way, field has historically unfolded within a nationalist framework, locating nation-state as primary interlocutor of Asian/alien body in Canada and taking up a kind of (Lai 5). Nonetheless, as field increasingly becomes drawn into academy, critics have noted some possible limitations of this framework. One such limitation is that focus on domestic identity politics, and promotion of citizenship and national belonging as political goals, runs risk of reinforcing a reductive pluralism which cannot shake up systemic historical conditions and ... ideologies of normativity that have produced racialized subjects and minoritized cultures (Kamboureli 64). In exploring ways to expand on Canadian national frame, Lily Cho has posited that Canadian Studies could be situated more clearly within a postcolonial, paradigm. Such a paradigm, she contends, could generate insights into how construction of Asian-ness in Canada is deeply connected to Asian-ness elsewhere (188). Indeed, Cho points out that there is a need to think about formation of Canadian through imperialism and and to see Canadian history within a wider, global context of capital and labour migration (188). Focusing specifically on Chinese Canadian communities, Cho illustrates how a diasporic can highlight links between Chinese migration and British imperialism (186). That is, a perspective can consider how early Chinese immigrants to Canada came from South China, where Opium Wars had disrupted local economy [and] provid[ed] much of push for emigration (Stanley 56). Furthermore, it can stress how many of these immigrants were indentured workers, imported via coolie trade which burgeoned in British Hong Kong after Atlantic slave trade went into decline (Peter Li 20). Importantly, then, a postcolonial, paradigm can productively complicate history of Canadians by acknowledging that this history is not only shaped in Canadian context; rather, it is part of a larger history of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. If Cho's arguments gesture to benefits of a global, historical, and comparative framework, Larissa Lai's book, Slanting I, Imagining We, emphasizes perils of relying too heavily on a fixed notion of Canadian identity. Lai argues that tactic of strategic essentialism has become seriously problematic due to pressures of state incorporation currently informing Canadian Studies (6). Underlying these pressures is an investment in liberal multiculturalism that reinforces static notions of racial and national difference and works to recirculate logic of colonialism in newly embodied forms (23). This logic becomes all more insidious in a post-9/11 Canada, where narratives of citizenship, nationalism, and security have become intertwined in ways that reproduce Orientalist images of Others as unassimilable and anti-democratic foreigners. As Lai points out, 2010 Maclean's article entitled Too Asian suggests that the trope of 'yellow peril' has been reinvigorated in national imaginary (Lai 17). …