Preface And Acknowledgements

O f course this is a personal project.How could it be otherwise?The 1980s and 1990s appear to me as an extraordinary moment in Canadian cultural politics because they were also the moment of my own emergence from the sleep of invisibilization into a subject with a measure of public voice.The first anti-racist project I worked on was the 1990 exhibit Yellow Peril: Reconsidered, organized by the video artist and curator Paul Wong and his collaborator Elspeth Sage, through their production company On Edge, which Paul housed in his Main Street apartment on Vancouver's East Side.It was a national exhibition that travelled to six artist-run centres across the country, showcasing the works of twenty-five Asian Canadian artists working in contemporary media.Through a reclamation of the racist name "yellow peril," the show was, for me, a moment of inauguration into an oppositional politics of race that was both empowering and unsettling.I lived it out at work and at play, in intellectual and creative modes as much as personal ones.It drew me into a consciousness of my own subjectivity and agency (or lack thereof ), in ways that I had not considered before, perhaps in ways that were not available for consideration until this cultural moment.For me, the "reconsideration" of the "yellow peril" occurred before its overt "consideration."The problem with race for the duration of my childhood growing up in Newfoundland in the 1970s was that it was a repressed but very much live force beneath the surface of Canadian cultural life.Both "consideration" and "reconsideration" were a huge relief, as though one could finally point out the tiger sleeping in the corner of the room.In the years after the implementation of the Multiculturalism Act, so much was possible-not because of the act itself, but because communitybased artists', writers', and activists' responses to its limitations added to an organic energy that was already there in racialized Canadian communities.It was a moment in which the Japanese Canadian Internment, the Chinese Head Tax and Chinese Exclusion Act, the Indian Act, and the Komagata Maru incident could be spoken of and interrogated for their social, cultural, and political effects as much as for their legal ones.Mainstream reaction

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