“Look! Listen! Speak! Eat ! : Chinese Pride on the Table” by Yao Xiao
(André Elias Mazawi, discussant )
Abstract: I take this presentation as an opportunity to share with you how “decolonization” might be Sinicized, and how a Chinese subject like myself might engage with decolonization differently. Based on autobiographical stories, research projects, and informal conversations with community friends, I unpack the affect of Chinese pride for its decolonial relevance in at least two landscapes: (1) in a landscape of international intellectual work, the anxiously ascending Sinophone interests in dealing with/learning beyond Euro-American academic influences; (2) in a landscape of grassroots lives and activism, the mixed compassion, commitment, as well as confusion in speaking with/learning from people who situate and still struggle in webs of metropoles and margins.
Yao Xiao is a migrant, a poet, and has earned his Ph.D. with a project titled Chinese pride? Searching between gendered diasporas and multicultural states. He has worked with migrant communities in Guangdong’s metropolises and Vancouver’s Chinatown, critically engaging with old and new tensions of labour migration, intergenerational learning, and cross-cultural dialogues. He has published in international journals such as Cultural Studies, and has taught in The Department of Educational Studies and The Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at UBC. Personally and intellectually he is interested in Cantonese identities, global Sinophone cultures, and non-Western-centric knowledge and alternative worldviews.