Reflections on the coming of history: Revisiting the makings of a "Chinese Canadian" identity and community.

详细信息   

• 作者：Koh ; Karlyn Y-Mae.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：1999
• 导师：Miki,Roy,eadvisor
• 毕业院校：Simon Fraser University
• ISBN：9780612518810
• CBH：NQ51881
• Country：Canada
• 语种：English
• FileSize：8536742
• Pages：221

文摘

The growing body of literary and artistic works by Asian Canadians has yielded critical examinations which have typically focused on uncovering the experiences,histories and humanity of different racialized subjects that the dominant history of a nation has suppressed or falsified. However,does an authentic and knowing subject called "Chinese Canadian" come into being by appealing to an unmediated experience in history and by relying on the same kind of history which had excluded it in the first place? Theorists of history like Michel de Certeau argue that "experience" and fixed notions of the "real" serve to mask historys essential vulnerability to the fact it is,afterall,a writing and is susceptible to the unstable relation between words and that which is named and represented. De Certeau suggests that conventional history does not have a feeling for its own time and in fact hides the vulnerability of its own place in time. A theorist contemplating the making of an identity such as "Chinese Canadian" and the possibility of Asian Canadian studies is thus obliged to recall history to language and to the exterior conditions of historys own possibility,that is,an experience of time. Furthermore,if the "Chinese" is a construct which has become an object and a categorical fiction within an Orientalist and colonial discourse,what then does it mean to be a "subject" that is a fiction? Theorists examining the limits of subjecthood like Judith Butler,Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy offer insights to a re-thinking of subjection,self-invention and an ethics of responsibility towards others in the grey and precarious areas of identity politics in our time. The frontiers of identity,it seems,are haunted by a loss of self-identity and ideals which perhaps never existed. The writings of community by Chinese Canadian critics and artists respond to this hauntedness in different ways. In publications such as Yellow Peril: Reconsidered a catalogue of the landmark 1990 exhibition of Asian Canadian artists) and Self Not Whole a collection of essays accompanying a major Chinese Canadian exhibition in 1991),and Fred Wahs poetic-prose work Diamond Grill 1996),the decision to contain self-difference or to welcome the foreign at the limits of a hard won recognition of identity is never easy or clear. These writings reveal the boundaries of identity politics,an exposure which may lead to the formation of a new "subject," but also,more radically,to a question of who might come after it.