In Flux: Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing

In this collection of essays edited by the University of Guelph’s Smaro Kambourelli, Roy Miki—poet, scholar, and member of the Order of Canada—investigates the shifting currents of citizenship, globalization, and cultural practices facing Asian Canadians today through the connections of place and identity that have been forged through our developing national literature.

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"In these deeply compelling and original essays, Roy Miki charts the past and future of the Asian Canadian writing while contending with the urgency of the present. Through a series of brilliant arguments on a range of Asian Canadian fiction and poetry, Miki tackles crucial questions of the relationship between Asian Canadian writing and Canadian literature, post-colonialism, transnational studies, globalization. This book is indispensable for any consideration of Asian Canadian writing."
—Lily Cho, Associate Professor, Department of English, York University; author of Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada

"In this new book, Roy Miki turns his focus to the lively possibilities that arise from the impossibilities of Asian Canadian literature. In Flux gathers together essays by a poet and scholar who has spent a long career working the seams of what he calls "Can Asian Adian" writing. Together, these essays argue for the ethics of keeping each of these key terms moving—"Asian," as an identity that can never be finally specified or settled; "Canadian," which must negotiate the matrix of asymmetrical transnational and intranational neoliberalism; and "literature," which only breathes when it's being read by living readers. And this is the point: the kind of creative critical reading Miki models in these essays aims to keep categories like nation, race, or literary form from hardening into commodities we can unthinkingly assume or consume. Flux, then, is not just a quality, it is also a practice—a reading practice."
—Daniel Coleman, Professor, Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University; author of In Bed with the Word: Reading Spirituality, and Cultural Politics

Download a sample of the book here