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Engaging current debates within the studies of life writing and of the nation-state,Writing the Roaming Subjectfocuses on a group of Canadian writers who pose questions about cultural difference and national identity while writing about their own lives and their own experiences of displacement. Joanne Saul uses the term 'biotext' to describe the unique form of writing that challenges critical practices regarding both life writing and immigrant and ethnic minority writing by blurring the borders of biography, autobiography, history, fiction and theory, as well as poetry, prose, and visual representation. In her readings of selected contemporary Canadian biotexts - including Michael Ondaatje'sRunning in the Family, Daphne Marlatt'sGhost Works, Roy Kiyooka'sMothertalk, and Fred Wah'sDiamond Grill- Saul suggests that by crossing generic boundaries, these works illuminate the complex relationships between language, place, and self as they are manifested in textual form.Writing the Roaming Subjectexplores issues of identity formation, representation, and resistance in Canada and suggests that these are particularly crucial questions during a period of Canadian literary history when so many writers are insisting on new, more diverse cultural performances that resist the pull of the national imaginary.

Miki's own treatment of Wheels-part of a considerable body of work on Kiyooka-considers how the text, and in particular a pivotal scene in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in which Kiyooka recalls his own racialization during the internment period, is symptomatic of the minoritized subject who is produced through externalization as the perennial alien . . . the Asian in Canadian who is both of and not of a nation formation\" (\"The Difference\" 24). According to Dean MacCannell, sightseeing is meant to \"overcome the discontinuity of modernity\" (13) by creating a sense of identity, meaning, and purpose. [...]the word \"tourist\" becomes \"a derisive label for someone who seems content with his [sic] obviously inauthentic experiences\" (94), encompassing both desire and alienation. Beginning in Kyoto, the trio travels mostly by train along the Sea of Japan, following the coast westward before looping back to the old capital via Hiroshima. Because Kiyooka's route is dictated by rather restrictive rail lines, he inevitably stops at spots already designated to be points of interest, such as an event (Hiroshima), a famous historical building (Itsukushima shrine), or a natural feature (Tottori sand dunes).

A copy of Roy Kiyooka’s Transcanada Letters (Talonbooks, 1975) sits in a beam of sunlight upon my desk. Canada Post delivered the book from Vancouver to Montreal after I ordered it from an online bookseller. My desire to own a copy of Transcanada Letters arose after a first visit “out West” to the Contemporary Literature Collection at Simon Fraser University, where Kiyooka’s papers are housed. My trajectory, moving east to west, echoed the coast-to-coast narrative of Canadian nationhood. In this narrative, Vancouver currently plays the role of a thriving twenty-first century metropolis, which evolved from its earlier image as a “fantasy dream” at the edge of British Dominion and American Western expansion. Since the 1970s, when Transcanada Letters was published, Vancouver has increasingly adopted the identity of a Pacific Rim city. In this alternate narrative, the city plays the role of an essential node in global trade routes reaching out to Asia, just as its artists are tangled up in the complex cultural, political, and economic factors folded into the term “globalization.” The imaginary space mapped throughout the pages of Transcanada Letters, however, troubles the attempt to link the locality of its narrative, or the identity of its author, to a defined territory.

On the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities toward wider publics (124). [...] by engaging with the rhetorics of a counterpublic, one can begin to trace the articulation of histories, experiences, and forms of agency, which are not recognized by dominant structures of political representation.

Kiyooka's and Wah's careers pose a number of significant questions about canon formation and about the efficacy of being identified under a rubric - \"Asian Canadian literature\" defined by race/ethnicity and by cultural nationalism and grounded in identity politics, at a time when the postnational, the transnational, the postethnic, and the global appear to be in the ascendancy, at least in academic circles. The formation of a literary canon is, of course, a complex and ongoing process involving a number of forces - cultural, political, social, economic, and ideological - whose interplay results in the valuing and reproduction of certain verbal artifacts and the devaluing and ignoring of others.1 According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the formation of a \"minor literature,\" by which they mean an ethnic minority literary tradition, depends upon a particularly heightened set of characteristics that include \"the deterritorialization of language,\" or the use of the dominant language by the diasporic minority, \"the connection of the individual to a political immediacy\" so that \"everything in [minority literatures] is political,\" and \"the collective assemblage of enunciation\" so that \"literature finds itself positively charged with the role and function of collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation\" against the hegemony of the dominant culture (59-61).