We are pleased to invite you to the Northrop Frye Centre Lecture given by Mary Chapman from the University of British Columbia. Her lecture is entitled 'Reparative Archival Work: Sharing the Stories of Chinese North America's First Families', and it will be hosted on Monday, January 8th at 4:00 p.m. in Alumni Hall (Old Victoria College, First Floor). A reception will follow!
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This is a hybrid event; a Zoom link will be sent to those who register for a virtual attendance ticket.
About the talk...
Since the “biographical turn,” scholars of the African diaspora have recovered diasporic Black lives that fill in an abstract and anonymous Black Atlantic history, but Asian North Americanist scholars have struggled to uncover personal stories of the earliest Chinese immigrants to Canada that write back to the dehumanizing bureaucratic records collected during the Exclusion Era.
On the centenary of Canada’s Chinese Exclusion law and during a period of heightened anti-Asian violence, this lecture shares research about 1890s Chinese families living in Montreal. Drawing on her biographical research on Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton (1865-1914), the first Asian North American writer, her journalism about these families, and research done collaboratively with students and descendants, Chapman traces efforts to repair the archives of the earliest Chinese Canadians.
About the speaker...
Mary Chapman is a Professor of English at the University of British Columbia and Director of The Winnifred Eaton Archive, which was granted an Honorable Mention for the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI) Open Scholarship Award. She is the author of Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and US Modernism (2014), which won the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Prize and the Canadian Association of American Studies Robert K. Martin Book Prize and was one of four finalists for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. Her edited volumes Becoming Sui Sin Far: The Uncollected Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing of Edith Eaton (2016) and (with Angela Mills) Treacherous Texts: US Suffrage Literature 1846-1946 (2011) were both awarded the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association’s Susan Koppelman Award for best edited feminist book in American Popular Culture. Chapman is currently writing a biography of Sui Sin Far’s family.
WAIT! There is more...
In addition to her lecture, Mary Chapman will be running a workshop on Wednesday, January 10th at 1:00 p.m. in the E.J. Pratt Library. It is geared towards students interested in interactive storytelling. This 90-minute workshop will teach students how to find GIS locations and historical images so that they can add “pins” to a StoryMap that traces the world tour of the “Chinese Magicians,” a mid-nineteenth-century Chinese acrobatic troupe that featured a 6-year-old tightrope dancer who grew up to be the mother of Sui Sin Far, the first Asian Canadian writer.
If you're interested, you can visit the event page linked here.
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