Public Service Alliance of Canada BC

Active Geographies, Embodied Chronologies: Women And Struggle On The Left Coast

How do struggles for place connect to struggles for justice? What connects social and cultural activists across the decades? We invite your creative and critical responses to these questions of how women define our own relations over space and time.

B.C. has a longstanding history of colonization, whether it takes the form of land theft, the uprooting of culturally specific groups and underserved communities, or the effects of globalization on residents in the Downtown Eastside and Strathcona, to name a few examples.

This anthology follows up on discussions which began at a workshop entitled A Walk with Women Warriors: a re-mapping of Activism, that took place at the Strathcona Community Centre in 2004. That workshop opened up a dialogue in an attempt to bridge generations of west coast women activists, starting with but not necessarily limited to “East Asian Canadian” communities on urbanized Coast Salish land, particularly the neighbourhoods now described as Strathcona and the Downtown Eastside. Situated around the idea of space,’place,’ and time, the event acknowledged the role of women of colour and their allies in claiming place and identities in their struggle for a just world.

Participants at the workshop heard how powerful women’s urban activism was. It opened up intergenerational dialogue around strategies for change. Panelists at that time included Midge Ayukawa, Jo-Anne Lee, Bessie Lee, Cindy Piper,Wendy Au, Dorothy Christian, Larissa Lai, Cecilia Diocsan, and Rita Wong.

While the anthology will document some of the workshop participants’ contributions, we would like to open the invitation to more women activists in order to broaden and deepen the ongoing need to connect our struggles and build alliances. There is an urgent need for a collection that subverts categorical, temporal and geographical borders.

This anthology project is being coordinated by Jo-Anne Lee (associate professor in Women Studies at University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C.) and Rita Wong (assistant professor in Critical + Cultural Studies at Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, Vancouver, B.C).

We invite you to submit a piece of writing (essay, interview, dialogue, poetry, fiction, drama) linked in some way to the book’s themes. Please send no more than 5-10 pages to rwong@eciad.ca and jalee@uvic.ca by September 30, 2006. Visual art is also welcome (for black and white reproduction).

Note: we had originally issued this call back in 2004, but as multi-tasking and busy women, it has taken us a while to return to this task. This will be a volume that acknowledges and records women’s historical and political work. We urge you to think seriously about contributing to the collection. We are devoted to compiling a book that supports and documents the activist work everyday women do, work that is often undervalued and unrecognized, but which sustains and enriches our communities. This is a labour of love.

Thanks for your attention,

Rita Wong and Jo-Anne Lee