Labour Asian Can: Grammar, Movement and the Institution

This paper considers the grammatical status of ‘Asian Canadian’ and its permutations ‘Can Asian’, ‘Asian Can,’ ‘Asiancy’ and ‘Asian Canadian Literature’. My purpose is to think through both the potential and the already accomplished entry of Asian Canadian Studies or Literature into the academy, and, somewhat elliptically, my own place within it as a writer, organizer and academic at this particular historical juncture. To be given power through a term by which one has been historically oppressed puts one in a altered relationship to that oppression, and that is the problem I want think through here.