Re-engaging Race

OK. I’ve done it. I’ve re-entered the zone of Writing Thru Race and have been writing thru race… again. It was the big gap in my dissertation, avoided largely because of a certain horror I felt about re-engaging what I experienced in 1994 as a very abject moment. Abject, but important– in some ways a key moment in the community work that gave birth to many incredible, liberatory works of art, literary or otherwise. I’m going to give this paper at Serial Accomodations: Diasporic Asian Women’s Writing, a symposium at UBC that Sneja Gunew is organizing to coincide with International Women’s Day. If you’re interested, please come. I’d especially like to see people who were involved in cultural organizing the the 90s, and even more especially, people who were on the original organizing committee of WTR. Kirsten McAllister and Medha Samarasinghe are speaking on the same panel. It happens at 2:30 on March 10th in the Choi Building at UBC. I’ll be doing a literary reading afterwards– probably some new poetry and may be a bit from Salt Fish Girl, as I think it’s being studied up there right now.

In other news, I’ve organized a reading for the conference Refracting Pacific Canada, which commemorates the 1907 Vancouver Riots, the 1947 Citizenship Act, the 1967 Immigration Act and the 1997 “return” of Hong Kong to China. Readers featured: Rita Wong, Garry Morse, David Chariandy and Phinder Dulai. That’s at the Asian Centre Atrium at UBC, 7:30, Thursday, March 15.

On Friday March 23 at the Kootenay School of Writing/Spartacus Books, I’m reading new poetry with Maged Zaher, a poet from San Francisco. Check out some of his work on Exquisite Corpse: http://corpse.org/issue_9/poesy/zaher.htm

On March 24, I’m off to Regina to act as a respondent for a very cool symposium called transPOSE, that brings together artists, curators, academics, and theorists from both Aboriginal and culturally diverse communities talking about histories of oppression, community and coalition building, art production and non-western canons.

Then to Toronto on March 29 for a reading at York University.

Things are getting busy! There will be some talks in Europe in April, but I’ll tell you about those in another post.

It’d be great to see you at whatever you can make it to!