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

Reviewed by: Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s by Larissa Lai Lily Cho Larissa Lai. Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier up, 2014. 260 pp. $42.99. It has been twenty years since the Writing Thru Race conference ignited a series of conversations about race and Canadian literature in Canada. In the 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 Canada” (214). Lai’s book tracks the urgency of the debates and desires that lead up to this devastation and the productivity of its aftermath. Slanting I, Imagining We identifies and unfolds a crucial two-decade period in Canadian literary history. Differentiating this period from the 1970s and early 1980s that were marked by the labour of “breaking the silence,” Lai understands that “the late 1980s and the 1990s are marked by a recognition of the difficulty in speaking and writing, not because of any lack of ability of talent on the part of racialized writers, but because of problems inherent in racialized formations” (9). Lai shows how the difficulties of race and writing that explode out of this period illuminate the crucial relationship between literary production and activism. This book articulates [End Page 209] the necessity of anti-racist critical practice as part of Asian Canadian literary criticism. In so doing, she calls attention to the specificities of this historical period. Importantly, Lai’s investigation of this period marks the 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 the debates on the appropriation of voice preceded the 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 the dialogues that it generated. That is, Lai tracks the 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 the discontinuities, reversals, and aporias in experience, self-understanding, self-sameness, and writing, as well as the 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 the sake of identifying them as historical events but in order to understand their historicity. Thus, the first chapter identifies the way in which the very myths of origins and arrivals that Lai resists in her criticism can, in the context of literary production, become vulnerable to becoming incorporated in the name of nationalism. As she shows in her investigation of Asian Canadian autobiography, individual narratives of origins can become quickly assimilated with the national body politic. Here, she is particularly concerned with the ways in which Evelyn Lau’s autobiographical work might reproduce rather than trouble dominant narratives of race in Canada. In contrast, she notes that Wayson Choy’s use of the “doubleness” of language allows for the constant work of rupture that Lai sees as necessary for anti-racist literary practices (53). Lai also attends to the necessity of editorial work in literary production, by devoting two chapters to examining special issues of journals and anthologies. In particular, she takes up the unique work of special issues of journals such as West Coast Line and Fireweed. In the following chapter, Lai discusses two ground-breaking anthologies, Inalienable Rice, edited by Garrick Chu, Sean Gunn, Paul Yee, Ken Shikaze, Linda [End Page 210] Uyehara Hoffman, and Rick Shiomi, and Many-Mouthed Birds, edited by Jim Wong-Chu and Bennett Lee. In these chapters, Lai focuses on the theoretical and...