Lily Cho – författare

Under the terms of the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885, Canada implemented a vast protocol for acquiring detailed personal information about Chinese migrants. Among the bewildering array of state documents used in this effort were CI 9s: issued from 1885 to 1953, they included date of birth, place of residence, occupation, identifying marks, known associates, and, significantly, identification photographs. The originals were transferred to microfilm and destroyed in 1963; more than 41,000 grainy reproductions of CI 9s remain.Lily Cho explores how the CI 9s functioned as a form of surveillance and a process of mass capture that produced non-citizens, revealing the surprising dynamism of non-citizenship constantly regulated and monitored, made and remade, by an anxious state. The first mass use of identification photography in Canada, they make up the largest archive of images of Chinese migrants in the country, including people who stood no chance of being photographed otherwise. But CI 9s generated far more information than could be processed, and there is nothing straightforward about the knowledge that they purported to contain. Cho finds traces of alternate forms of kinship in the archive as well as evidence of the ways that families were separated. In attending to the particularities of these images and documents, Mass Capture uncovers the alternative story that lies in the refusals and resistances enacted by the mass captured.Illustrated with painstakingly reconstituted digital reproductions of the microfilm record, Mass Capture reclaims the CI 9s as more than documents of racist repression, suggesting the possibilities for beauty and dignity in the archive, for captivation as well as capture.

Human Rights and the Arts: Perspectives on Global Asia approaches human rights issues from the perspective of artists and writers in global Asia. By focusing on the interventions of writers, artists, filmmakers, and dramatists, the book moves toward a new understanding of human rights that shifts the discussion of contexts and subjects away from the binaries of cultural relativism and political sovereignty. From Ai Wei Wei and Michael Ondaatje, to Umar Kayam, Saryang Kim, Lia Zixin, and Noor Zaheer, among others, this volume takes its lead from global Asian artists, powerfully re-orienting thinking about human rights subjects and contexts to include the physical, spiritual, social, ecological, cultural, and the transnational. Looking at a range of work from Tibet, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, China, Bangladesh, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Macau as well as Asian diasporic communities, this book puts forward an understanding of global Asia that underscores “Asia” as a global site. It also highlights the continuing importance of nation-states and specific geographical entities, while stressing the ways that the human rights subject breaks out of these boundaries.Many of these works are included in the companion volume Human Rights and the Arts in Global Asia: An Anthology, also published by Lexington Books.

"Chicken fried rice, sweet and sour pork, and an order of onion rings, please."Chinese restaurants in small town Canada are at once everywhere - you would be hard pressed to find a town without a Chinese restaurant - and yet they are conspicuously absent in critical discussions of Chinese diasporic culture or even in popular writing about Chinese food. In Eating Chinese, Lily Cho examines Chinese restaurants as spaces that define, for those both inside and outside the community, what it means to be Chinese and what it means to be Chinese-Canadian.Despite restrictions on immigration and explicitly racist legislation at national and provincial levels, Chinese immigrants have long dominated the restaurant industry in Canada. While isolated by racism, Chinese communities in Canada were still strongly connected to their non-Chinese neighbours through the food that they prepared and served. Cho looks at this surprisingly ubiquitous feature of small-town Canada through menus, literature, art, and music. An innovative approach to the study of diaspora, Eating Chinese brings to light the cultural spaces crafted by restaurateurs, diners, cooks, servers, and artists.