Elsewhere Home: Hospitality, Affect, and Language in Ying Chen’s Lettres Chinoises and Kim Thúy’s Vi

2021 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-110
Author(s):  
Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Host Society ◽  
Affective Experience ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
Mode De Vie ◽  
Ying Chen ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Chinese Canadian

Though Canada’s Multiculturalism Act (1971) enables migrants to enter the country and keep their values and cultures, in practice this can be a difficult process. This essay focuses on two narratives written by a Chinese Canadian immigrant, Ying Chen’s Lettres chinoises (1993), and a Vietnamese Québécois refugee, Kim Thúy’s Vi (2016), to highlight the ways in which immigrating into a new country can be a highly affective experience. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notion of hospitality, this essay examines the ways in which each writer foregrounds the issues faced by migrants and refugees as they negotiate life in a new society. The emotional and physical experience of being a stranger joining a host society are concomitant and equally problematic. Sara Ahmed’s work is equally significant as it focuses on strangers’ embodied experiences of migration in a host society. Ultimately, this essay examines migration as a transformative experience for protagonists as they come to terms with a new life in Québec. La loi du Multiculturalisme instaurée au Canada en 1971 permet aux migrants de maintenir leurs valeurs et leur mode de vie d’avant le processus migratoire. Or, en pratique, ceci n’est pas toujours vécu sans heurts. Dans la présente étude, nous aborderons deux récits migratoires: le roman Les lettres chinoises (1993) de la Sino-Canadienne, Ying Chen, et Vi (2016) de la Québécoise d’origine vietnamienne, Kim Thúy, afin de mettre en relief la notion de l’immigration comme une expérience affective. En puisant dans les théories de Jacques Derrida portant sur l’hospitalité, nous discuterons la manière dont chacune de ces écrivaines traite des problèmes auxquels font face leurs protagonistes immigrants dans une nouvelle société. De plus, les aspects physiques et émotionnels qu’engendrent l’aliénation demeurent cruciaux et ainsi, nous nous tournerons vers les théories de Sara Ahmed afin de mettre en évidence les perspectives affectives et corporelles de l’immigration lorsque immigrés et réfugiés tentent de s’adapter à leur nouvelle vie au Québec.

Mode de vie et comportement alimentaire pendant et en dehors de Ramadan

2006 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-90
Author(s):  
S. Ennigrou ◽  
F. Ben Slama ◽  
N. Achour ◽  
A. Achour ◽  
B. Zouari
Keyword(s):  
Mode De Vie ◽  
Comportement Alimentaire

If Looks Could Kill

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 81-84
Author(s):  
Karen Chan
Keyword(s):  
Skin Color ◽  
Daily Rhythm ◽  
Significant Rate ◽  
Chinese Canadian ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Way

For me, rhythm means having consistency. The piece highlights my own experience with the disruption of my daily rhythm due to COVID-19. The first half shows my routine and interactions prior to COVID-19 while the second half shows my experiences in the present day. Prior to the virus, I had a day to day routine that was filled with noise. Everyday moved quickly and I established a daily rhythm. However, when COVID-19 spread, it changed everything. I felt like I didn’t have a routine anymore because I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere. Time was moving much slower and worst of all, xenophobia was growing at a significant rate. As a Chinese Canadian, this was the first time I truly felt the weight of the color of my skin. COVID-19 changed the way that I consistently assumed that the color of my skin wasn’t something that strangers would significantly care about. However, as I got on a bus, I unintentionally scared a woman simply because of my skin color. From that point, I knew that xenophobia would affect the way people perceived me everyday. The woman was scared of the virus— which in turn was scared of me—and I was scared that she would thwart her anger towards me because I am Chinese. If looks could kill, then the woman and I ironically both feared each other. Now, due to COVID-19, I am adapting to a new routine. A routine where the color of skin rings louder than any other sound.

Literature in Our Time, or, Loving Literature to Bits

CounterText ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Callus
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
Time Machine ◽  
Paul Auster ◽  
Anne Michaels

In this essay Ivan Callus provides some reflections on literature in the present. He considers the tenability of the post-literary label and looks at works that might be posited as having some degree of countertextual affinity. The essay, while not setting itself up as a creative piece, deliberately structures itself unconventionally. It frames its argument within twenty-one sections that are self-contained but that also echo each other in their attempt to develop an overarching argument which draws out some of the challenges that lie before the countertextual and the post-literary. Punctuating the essay and contributing to its unconventional take on the practice of literary criticism is a series of exercises for the reader to complete, if so wished; the essay makes no attempt, however, to suggest that a countertextual criticism ought to make a routine of such devices. The separate sections contain reflections on a number of texts and writers, among them, and in order of appearance, Hamlet, Anthony Trollope, Jacques Derrida, The Time Machine, Don Quixote, Mark Z. Danielewski, Mark B. N. Hansen, Gunter Kress, Scott's Reliquiae Trotcosienses, W. B. Yeats, Kate Tempest, David Jones, Anne Michaels, Bernice Eisenstein, Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee, Billy Collins, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Tim Parks, Tom McCarthy – and Hamlet again. The essay's length fulfils a performative function but also facilitates as extensive a catalogue of aspects of the countertextual in literature and elsewhere as is feasible or as might be dared at this stage.

Race and Affect: Pleasurable Mixing in Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Carol Mejia Laperle
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Critical Field ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Affective Experience ◽  
Undue Influence ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Racial Impersonation ◽  
Blackface Performance ◽  
Performance Text

The critical field of The Masque of Blackness often annotates Queen Anne and her ladies’ blackface performance with a courtier's eye-witness comment that the “lean cheeked moors” were “loathsome” and “ugly.” Yet Ben Jonson's performance text, when read beside Dudley Carleton's correspondences, resists the undue influence of the aristocrat's anecdotal disparagement. This project refuses to take Carleton's denigration as fact. Instead, it investigates the masque's representation of Niger's daughters to develop the affective experience of pleasurable mixing across racial identities and to show how the opulence, innovation, and beauty afforded by blackface are the means to underwrite arguments of political authority. Rather than a deviation from the performance's magnificent appeal, racial impersonation is constitutive of the masque's demonstration of beauty and invention of pleasure. As such, the allegory of King James I's power hinges on a fiction of idealized incorporation that is ideologically powerful precisely because it is primarily an aestheticized, affective experience. Beyond the ostensible trope of racial transformation, Jonson presents the pleasure of mixing across racial identities as the precondition for Britannia's absorption of migrant bodies. Blackness is a visual reminder of an indelible difference that can be absorbed, incorporated, indeed “salved,” by the monarch's faculties of conversion. The affective experience afforded by blackface is thus an argument for the sovereign's power of unification, underwriting what was a largely unfulfilled and controversial political agenda: the coalition of realms under the aegis of Great Britain.

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