| Literary works by writers who have been racialized as "Asian" in North America constitute discursive sites that materialize the urgent need for redistributing the flow of value from capital towards labour. A focus on cultural labour as a space of potential intervention and partial agency in an ongoing negotiation between fluctuating conceptions of the local and the global can facilitate a generative alignment of cultural production with movements seeking social justice. Critical readings of texts that have been written and published in recent years offer situated efforts to imagine and perhaps prompt enactments of solidarity across fields of labour such as menial, sexual and cultural work. The cumulative effect of bringing together a complex of texts that address these fields---such as Loveruage by Ashok Mathur, China Dog and Other Tales From a Chinese Laundry by Judy Fong Bates, The Excluded Wife by Yuen-Fong Woon, fiction and poetry by Evelyn Lau, This Place Called Absence by Lydia Kwa, Gold by the Inch by Lawrence Chua, Disappearing Moon Cafe by SKY Lee, Baroque-a-nova by Kevin Chong, Exile and the Heart by Tamai Kobayashi, The Very Inside edited by Sharon Lim-Ring, Premonitions edited by Walter Lew, and more---is to value the performance of cultural production as a site from which alliance construction might begin.;A refusal to accept the normalized and institutionalized devaluation of racialized and gendered labour performed by "Asian" bodies can translate into coalitional ways of proceeding which incorporate tactics of reciprocity, affiliation, and conjunction without ignoring or eliding power inequities. Reading menial, sexual, and cultural labour into a rapprochement with anti-imperialist and diasporic modes of consciousness can encourage fluencies and dialogues through situating "Asian" in relation to "Aboriginal" and also through the dispersal and conscientious breakdown of "Asian" in examples of textual coalitions otherwise known as anthologies. In the spirit of proliferation, juxtaposition, and affinities in difference, mobile reading practices can provide a process of producing value and have the potential to meet in synergy with other efforts on the long and necessary trajectory of constructing social justice. |
