Global Weirding Guest Lecture #4 - Larissa Lai (University of Calgary)

Global Weirding Lecture #4

Weird Habitat: Feral Space as Contact Zone in The Tiger Flu and Salt Fish Girl

Larissa Lai (University of Calgary)

January 11, 4:40pm (CET), ZOOM, for link please contact: global.weirding@tu-dresden.de

Recognizing the weird as liveliness at sites where inertness is expected, Larissa Lai takes up Anna Tsing and others' concept of feral space, as those spaces where "nonhuman invasions are tightly coupled with human projects of conquest, whether political or commercial" and adds to it Mary Louise Pratt's older notion of the "contact zone" as a site where cultures clash in highly asymmetrical relations of power. Understandings of "the human" are not as homogenous as critics of the anthropocene would sometimes have it. Lai recognizes the ways in which Asians, queers and women are oriented towards the human as a category and to full human subjectivity as a stance. Insofar as Asians have human agency (or, as Roy Miki would have it, "asiancy"), they also have access to non-Western orientations to so-called "nature"-- genealogically accessible ways of knowing that might disrupt the existing structures. Insofar as Asians are inert-- objects of the Western gaze-- they have much in common with the nonhuman: they are livelier than expected and continuous with other lively things. In this talk, Larissa Lai discusses the spaces and places of two of her novels, The Tiger Flu and Salt Fish Girl, as well as the lively beings who inhabit them.  

Larissa Lai has written eight books, including Iron Goddess of Mercy, Salt Fish Girl, The Tiger Flu, and a Nomados chapbook, Eggs in the Basement. Recipient of the Jim Duggins Mid-Career Novelist's Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Astraea Award, and finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, the Books in Canada First Novel Award and seven more, she's been involved in cultural organizing, experimental poetry and speculative fiction communities since the late 1980s. She feels at home in both Vancouver and Calgary, and holds a Canada Research Chair at the University of Calgary where she directs The Insurgent Architects' House for Creative Writing.