Echolocating Asian Canadian Studies

 

This talk took up the early-COVID figure of the bat to consider human continuities with nonhuman, near-human, and becoming-human capacities, in order to think through how Asian Canadian Studies as a discipline emerges in the present moment. Larissa Lai considered the wet market as site at which two medicines collide, then turn specifically to the bat's capacity for self location through echolocation, and its attentiveness to many sounds including the echoes of its own voice in order to navigate a precise flight path from moment to moment. Extending her earlier work in Slanting I, Imagining We, she addressed both historical and contemporary emergences (and emergencies) of Asian Canadian formation, and then consider how echolocation might give us a measure of agency (or, as Roy Miki would have it, asiancy) in emergence. In relation to formations seemingly (though not necessarily practically) exterior to Asian Canadian, including Blackness and Indigeneity, as well as formations that obviously overlap with it (queernes and disability, for example), she proposed a fluctuating and imaginative approach to disciplinarity that takes up a complex "poethics" of relation and production; one that listens for voices, echoes and other sounds that might help us make sense of where we are at any given moment on a long journey. Remaining critical of the "echo chamber" as a site of confirmation bias, she considerd how else such a concept and the spaces it gestures towards might be rethought.

 

 

Larissa Lai is the author of nine books including Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s, The Tiger Flu, Salt Fish Girl, and most recently The Lost Century. Recipient of the Jim Duggins Novelist's Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Astraea Award, and the Otherwise Honor Book and twice finalist for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Award, she has also been a finalist for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Sunburst Award , the bpNichol Chapbook Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize, the ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism and the Governor General's Award. She has held a Canada Research Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary, and a Maria Zambrano Fellowship at the University of Huelva. She is currently the Richard Charles Lee Chair of Chinese Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto.