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Echolocating Asian Canadian Studies: A Poethical Method for the Long COVID Moment, feat. Larissa Lai
Thursday, Oct. 8 | Noon | 223 Philosophy Hall | RSVP
At the height of the COVID pandemic, the bat emerged from the Wuhan wet market as a racializing figure entangled with tropes of infection and consumption, re-activating late 19th century associations of Asians with disease. This talk reclaims the bat, both as a figure and as an existing animal, to consider how to engage with Asian Canadian Studies in this historical moment. Both racial and state formations are impossible to claim in essentializing or nationalist ways, and yet, “Asian Canadian” remains a productive location from which to do the work of both community building and critique.
This talk considers phenomenological and poethical approaches to cultural embodiment, with a particular focus on the bat’s ability to orient itself in flight by echolocation. Echolocation can be used to consider three possible moments of inception for Asian Canadian Studies – the 1910s, the 1970s, and the 1990s. It can also be used to consider the field’s relationships with Indigenous Studies, Black Canadian Studies, Asian American Studies, and Queer and Gender Studies.
About the Speaker
Larissa Lai is the author of nine books including The Lost Century, The Tiger Flu, Salt Fish Girl, and Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s. Recipient of the Jim Duggins Novelist’s Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Astraea Award, and the Otherwise Honor Book, she has also been a finalist for the ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism, the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Governor General’s Award. She is currently the Richard Charles Lee Chair of Chinese Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto.
Born in California, Professor Lai grew up in Newfoundland. She received her BA from the University of British Columbia, her MA from the University of East Anglia, and her PhD from the University of Calgary. |
