The 1980s and 1990s are a historically crucial period in the development of Asian Canadian literature. This book contextualizes and reanimates the urgency of that period, illustrates its historical specificities, and shows how the concerns of that moment resonate for contemporary discussions of race and literature in Canada.

Larissa Lai is the author of two novels, When Fox Is a Thousand and Salt Fish Girl. A recipient of the Astraea Foundation Emerging Writers' Award, she has been shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Tiptree Award, and the Dorothy Livesay Prize. Lai is Canada Research Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary.

Table of Contents for
Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s by Larissa Lai

Preface and Acknowledgements

Introduction: Asian Canadian Ruptures, Contemporary Scandals

1. Strategizing the Body of History: Anxious Writing, Absent Subjects, and Marketing the Nation

2. The Time Has Come: Self and Community Articulations in Colour. An Issue and Awakening Thunder

3. Romancing the Anthology: Supplement, Relation, and Community Production

4. Future Orientations, Non-Dialectical Monsters: Storytelling Queer Utopias in Hiromi Goto's Chorus of Mushrooms and The Kappa Child

5. Ethnic Ethics, Translational Excess: The Poetics of jam ismail and Rita Wong

6. The Cameras of the World: Race, Subjectivity, and the Spiritual, Collective Other in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Dionne Brand's What We All Long For

Conclusion: Community Action, Global Spillage: Writing the Race of Capital

Notes

Bibliography

Index