Metaphor as Medicine: The Power of Figurative Language to Aid Survival and Healing in Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter

Essay by Louise Cham Art by Keira Innes In his book Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience, critical refugee studies scholar Vinh Nguyen notes that “[f]or many refugees, matters of life and death hang on a single narrative” (xvi). As a determining factor for obtaining political rights and protection lies in how their lived experience of

On Cundrie and Christine de Pizan: Proclamations of the Wild Feminine, and a Call Towards “Advocating Pure Truth”

Essay by Sophia Bucior Art by Alex Hoang Imagine a sorceress.  Imagine her clothing, her hair, her features. Imagine her voice, imagine the words she uses, imagine the purpose behind her words. Imagine wherever it is she comes from — is it far away, or near? Imagine others’ reactions to the sorceress — are they

When Snow Falls into the Caribbean Sea: The Intertwinement of Colonial and Personal Histories in Jamaica Kincaid’s Garden

Essay by Gurleen K. Kulaar Art by Adri Marcano “What to do?” asks Jamaica Kincaid (11). Throughout her autobiographical-botanical text, My Garden (Book):, Kincaid contends with the happiness, vexations, and “series of doubts upon series of doubts” (14-15) she encounters in her garden, grappling with settler colonial legacies as well as personal nostalgias embedded in

Kapok Vocal Cords: Y-Dang Troeung’s Landbridge as Cambodian Memory Work

Essay by M. Chiao Art by Nicole Ma Obscured by Western journalists’ documentation and filmmaking of South-East Asia’s various war during the Cold War era, narratives of the Cambodian genocide often center around trauma, violence, and Western heroism. Many of these narratives act in opposition to its advertised intent, displacing Cambodian experience in lieu of

The importance of music to Black identity and the vitality of ownership in determining music’s significance in David Chariandy’s Brother

Essay by Audrey Kruger Art by Adri Marcano When discussing White supremacy, many only consider the United States and wrongfully exempt Canada from the issue of systematic racial prejudice. In fact, a plethora of scholarship has been published addressing the embodied experiences of Black immigrants in Canada, including Robyn Maynard’s discussion on state-sanctioned violence and

Rejecting rotting humanness: The ecofeminist abject in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

Essay by Emily Mao Art by Natalia Mohar Han Kang’s The Vegetarian uncovers the grotesque and poignant truths of gendered violence and resistance. The story follows Yeong-hye, a Korean housewife who embarks on a journey departing from a patriarchal, hierarchical, and humancentric rendering of humanness that seeks to erase female subjectivity. As she resorts to

Asia Ex Machina

Essay by Avery Man Art by Adri Marcano In her revolutionary feminist essay A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, Donna Haraway posits the political myth of the cyborg whose hybridity of machine and organism, and of reality and fiction, blurs the functions of “mind, body, and tool” (165). Adopting

A Digital Queer Utopia: Full-Metal Indigiqueer

Essay by Royce Uy Art by Karen Zhang Joshua Whitehead’s poetry collection, Full-Metal Indigiqueer, retells experiences of erotic kinship, internalized trauma, and the haunting against Indigenous peoples to animate a nuanced selfhood of queer Indigeneity: the Indigiqueer. According to Belcourt, discourses of reconciliation are often masculine, silencing queer and feminized voices beneath a dominant focus