Promising transnational births: The womb and cyborg poetics in Asian Canadian literature

Up until this point, 2006, Asian Canadian criticism has sought legitimacy within a national framework in its efforts to carve out a distinctive Asian Canadian identity space. However, Canada is now explicitly "transnational"; it has been and continues to be a site of interconnected local and global movements that come together to produce particular spatial, political, and cultural configurations. Asian Canadian criticism has the potential to leverage itself as a critical medium for disturbing and deterritorializing constructed borders. The permeable critical lens of the present rereads the nation as a womb-space whose naturalized borders have allowed the nation-state to obscure its heterogeneity with the myth of stable identity reproduction. Literary texts like SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe, Denise Chong’s The Concubine’s Children, Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, and Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field have a tendency to write according to national confines because they have yet to break out of naturalized domestic borders. Other texts like Anita Rau Badami’s Tamarind Mem and Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony claim belonging within the nation by reproducing dominant paradigms that reify constructed borders. However, recent works like Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child, Ashok Mathur’s The Short, Happy Life of Harry Kumar, and Kerri Sakamoto’s One Hundred Million Hearts have moved beyond claiming the nation to using present transnational contexts to rethink supposedly fixed identity spaces. Hiromi Goto’s Hopeful Monsters and Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl are examples of texts that further denaturalize the borders of the nation by claiming materiality and productivity within ambivalent subject positi ons. Donna Haraway’s "cyborg" is a crucial term for thinking about these recent Asian Canadian texts that negotiate the multiple material and discursive forces that shape their subjectivity. The cyborg exposes Asian Canadian as a fundamentally mixed and intersectional subject position. Asian Canadian criticism moves beyond a national framework through this critical performance that mobilizes the category as a productive rereading medium. Works like Laiwan’s "notes towards a body," "notes towards a body II," and Remotely in Touch presage a future for Asian Canadian literature in which it can leverage its own cyborg power for performing and producing change.