| Summary: | Chinese Canadian anthologies are sites for negotiating community boundaries,
positing coalitions, deconstructing social and literary institutions, and asserting
legitimacy. They pose the question, What do we have in canon?, by interrogating the
representation of Chinese Canadian writers in the existing canon and by offering an
alternative canon for consideration. I propose the term "ethno-national literature" to
account for the ethno-racial and national distinctiveness of the literary category "Chinese
Canadian." While recent scholarly work has been directed toward conceptualizing
"Asian Canadian" and "Asian North American" as disciplinary areas of study within
English, it does not address the issue that specific ethno-racial groups continue to identify
themselves in categories such as "Chinese Canadian" or "Japanese Canadian." This
thesis considers the theoretical potential of Chinese Canadian anthologies as texts which
articulate rhetorical community. I examine five anthologies of Chinese Canadian
literature, Inalienable Rice (a collaboration between Chinese and Japanese Canadian
artist-activists, 1979), Many-Mouthed Birds (1991), Jin Guo (1992), Swallowing Clouds
(1999) and Strike the Wok (2003), in comparison with three Oxford anthologies of
Canadian literature to consider how Chinese Canadian anthologies act as culturally-resistant,
canon-forming texts. === Arts, Faculty of === English, Department of === Graduate
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