Speaker: Doctor Larissa Lai, The University of British Columbia

Chair: Doctor Tan Zheng

Professor🤙🏼，School of Foreign Languages and Literature

Director, Center for Studies in Foreign Literature

Fudan University

 

Date: 1:30, Friday, March 6, 2009

Venue: Room 101, Sub-east Wing, Guanghua Tower

Larissa Lai is an Assistant Professor in. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Calgary and an MA from the University of East Anglia. She is the author of two novels When Fox Is a Thousand (Press Gang 1995 and Arsenal Pulp 2004) Salt Fish Girl (Thomas Allen Publishers 2002), and a collaborative long poem with Rita Wong called sybil unrest, published by Line Books in the Fall of 2008. Forthcoming in  2009 are a chapbook called Eggs in the Basement from Nomados, and a full length poetry book entitled Automaton Biographies.  

“This talk situates my novel Salt Fish Girl within the context of its production. I begin with a brief discussion of anti-racist organizing in Canada in the early 90s, with its focus on the status of the marginalized other within the discourse of the nation state. I offer suggestions for new directions in the globalized post 9-11 period with regards to fictive imagining, which is, of course, also political imagining. I locate Salt Fish Girl within a history of travel, dislocation, memory loss and the return of the repressed. I also locate it within the context of the new global world order with its gated communities, its accelerated migrations, its human cloning and other corporate incursions into the realm of the biological. The discussion closes with a brief discussion of my newer poetry projects and a contemplation of   what ‘hopefulness’ might mean in a world order where oppositional rebellion is too easily bought and sold. ”