Queering Asian Canada: Archives, Fantasies, and Utopic Counterpublics

Roland Sintos Coloma
Senior Curator of the Canadian Photography Institute at the National Gallery of Canada

This presentation will examine the interlocking pivots of race, sexuality, and diaspora to delineate the conceptual and agentic possibilities of queering Asian Canada. The notion of queering Asian Canada refers not only to the analysis of the experiences and representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Asians in Canada, but also to the deconstruction of normalized discourses and structures that condition and produce minoritized subjectivity. Analysis will include Joella Cabalu’s documentary It Runs in the Family (2015), Richard Fung’s film Re:Orientations (2016), and the South Asian Visual Arts Centre’s Not a Place on a Map: The Desh Pardesh Project (2016).

Roland Sintos Coloma is professor of Cultural Studies and chair of the Department of Teacher Education at Northern Kentucky University (USA). Previously he was a faculty member at the University of Toronto, where he taught the university’s first courses on “Asian Canadian History” and “Theorizing Asian Canada.” His publications include over 30 journal articles and book chapters, and two books, including Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility (2012) and Postcolonial Challenges in Education (2009). He is working on two book manuscripts: Imperial Fix, a history of empire and education; and From Grief to Grievance, a study of social justice movements as public pedagogy in Canada, USA, and the Philippines. Coloma is co-editor, with Gordon Pon, of the Asian Canadian Studies Reader (University of Toronto Press, 2017), the first interdisciplinary textbook about Canada’s largest racialized minority group.