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

Abstract

Larissa Lai. Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in 1980s and 1990s. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier up, 2014. 260 pp. $42.99. It has been twenty years since Writing Thru Race conference ignited a series of conversations about race and Canadian literature in Canada. In conclusion to her book, Larissa Lai recalls this conference as a pivotal moment: As an organizer and a participant in this conference, I experienced it as a devastating turning point in anti-racist cultural organizing in (214). Lai's book tracks urgency of debates and desires that lead up to this devastation and productivity of its aftermath. Slanting I, Imagining We identifies and unfolds a crucial two-decade period in Canadian literary history. Differentiating this period from 1970s and early 1980s that were marked by labour of breaking silence, Lai understands that the late 1980s and 1990s are marked by a recognition of difficulty in speaking and writing, not because of any lack of ability of talent on part of racialized writers, but because of problems inherent in racialized formations (9). Lai shows how difficulties of race and writing that explode out of this period illuminate crucial relationship between literary production and activism. This book articulates necessity of anti-racist critical practice as part of Asian Canadian literary criticism. In so doing, she calls attention to specificities of this historical period. Importantly, Lai's investigation of this period marks indispensability of activist practices that come out of coalitions built across and between racialized and minoritized communities. For example, she recalls for us that Lenore Keeshig-Tobias's work on initiating debates on appropriation of voice preceded organizing work that lead to Writing Thru Race, and, as this book definitively shows, contemporary Asian Canadian literature is shaped by Writing Thru Race and dialogues that it generated. That is, Lai tracks way that contemporary Asian Canadian literature emerges out of connections with broader conversations about race in Canada that in turn come out of engagements with questions of indigenous literature and voice. For Lai, Asian Canadian literary production must be understood within this context of this intersection of multiple communities. Further, Lai resists a linear history of Asian Canadian literary production. She recognizes that such a narrative ... inadvertently denies discontinuities, reversals, and aporias in experience, self-understanding, self-sameness, and writing, as well as ongoing racisms and injustices that can so easily be erased through myths of origins and myths of arrival (7). With impressive astuteness, this book refuses progressivist histories. It does not track movements for sake of identifying them as historical events but in order to understand their historicity. Thus, first chapter identifies way in which very myths of origins and arrivals that Lai resists in her criticism can, in context of literary production, become vulnerable to becoming incorporated in name of nationalism. …