Xiaoping Li. Voices Rising: Asian Canadian Cultural Activism

Xiaoping Li. Voices Rising: Asian Canadian Cultural Activism. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007. viii + 307 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustr. $85.00 hc. $29.95 sc. Voices Rising: Asian Canadian Cultural Activism is an important and accomplished pioneering work on Asian Canadian cultural activism. It covers three decades, from the 1970s to the beginning of the millenium, documenting a period of deep political and social consciousness among Asian Canadians, whose cultural production/expression signifies a coming-of-age of their cultural activism, and representing a key component of the Asian Canadian political and social movement. Relegated to the periphery by the mainstream English-French centrality, these grassroots community artists and activists utilized their creative agency as a liberating tool to engage in the production of new consciousness, and actively sought to intervene and challenge injustices and disrupt the hegemonic social relations and power structures existing in society. Their efforts have contributed to the betterment of racialized communities, but more importantly, they have informed the democratization and transformation of Canadian society itself. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1, Mapping Asian Canadian Cultural Activism, is comprised of six chapters, detailing the author's theoretical analysis of the Asian Canadian movement. In these chapters, Li discusses the issues of problematizing culture as a site of struggle, the emergence and fostering of Asian Canadian culture, Asian Canadian identity, history as a source of cultural production, community building, and Asian Canadian women activists. Part 2, Voices, is divided into three historical stages: Emergence covers the foundational period of the Asian Canadian movement between 1970 and the mid-1980s; Cross the Threshold covers the late 1980s to the 1990s, a period of identity and cultural politics; and the third stage, Moving Ahead, heralds the beginning of the new millennium in an era of diversity and inclusion. In each stage, she presents in detail the rich narratives from her interviews with cultural activists to capture and illustrate the critical moments and impulses at a particular historical juncture of the Asian Canadian social and political movement. In the Epilogue, the author highlights the need to establish Asian Canadian Studies as part of a critical, transformative discourse by comparing the current embryonic state of Asian Canadian Studies with the well developed Asian American Studies. The author's theoretical framework is informed by postmodernist cultural studies, postcolonial theory, writers such as Stuart Hall, Antonio Gramsci, Edward Said, Canadian scholars such as Roy Miki, Diana Brydon, and Himani Bannerji, as well as globalization, transnational/transcultural, and diaspora theories. …

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