Journal Article

Asian Kanadian, eh?

Goellnicht, Donald C

2008

Overview

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).

• Publisher: The University of British Columbia - Canadian Literature,The University of British Columbia/Canadian Literature
• Subject: Art history / Asian Canadians / Authors, Canadian / Canadian art / Canadian literature / Civil rights / Criticism and interpretation / Cultural identity / Diaspora / Ideology / Kiyooka, Roy / Language dominance / Literature / Lowe, Lisa / Multiculturalism / Occupations / Poetry / Political activism / Politics / Portrayals / Race / Wah, Fred / Wah, Fred (1939- ) / Works