Angela May
PhD Candidate, Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University
Vancouver, Canada
Actions
Angela May (she/her or they/them) is a mixed Japanese Canadian (gosei [fifth generation]) PhD Candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University studying under the supervision of Dr. Amber Dean. Originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, Angela has familial and community roots in the city’s Powell Street neighbourhood (Paueru Gai, “Powell Town”), the largest historic home of Japanese Canadians—which is also a central part of the present-day home of the Downtown Eastside community. Angela’s doctoral work thus focuses on the Japanese Canadian and Downtown Eastside communities, particularly as they overlap. Examining the last decades of the twentieth century, Angela interrogates established narratives in the Japanese Canadian community—about returning to Powell Street (1970s), about federal Japanese Canadian Redress (1980s), and about trauma, pain, and drug use (1990s)—to ask new questions about what it means to be a good neighbour in the Downtown Eastside today. Angela holds a BA in English (University of Victoria), an MA in the Socio-Cultural Studies of Health (Queen’s University), and a Creative Writing Certificate (Simon Fraser University, The Writer’s Studio Online). Her academic work has been published in the Urban History Review, the Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research, and Canadian Literature. For more, see www.angelamarianmay.com.
Links
Area of Expertise
Topics
The Legacies and Limits of Asian Canadian Activism: Complicating the Myth of Powell Street Festival
In 1977, inspired by the Asian American and Civil Rights Movements in the United States, young nikkei living in Vancouver, British Columbia organized a celebration of Japanese Canadian arts and culture called Powell Street Festival. Since its inauguration in 1977, the Festival has taken place in Paueru Gai (“Powell Town”), the largest historic home of Japanese Canadians, and has been widely celebrated as a kind of Japanese Canadian ‘homecoming.’ However, even as the Festival’s location—in Paueru Gai—places it within Vancouver’s poorest neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside, little work has considered the Festival’s (or indeed the Japanese Canadian community’s) relationship(s) to the Downtown Eastside. In this paper, as a mixed gosei Japanese Canadian, I do so. Drawing on oral histories, archival records, and my own experiences, I argue that there is such a thing as the myth of Powell Street Festival, an unwritten but well known and popular cultural text in the Japanese Canadian community that advances—via its roots in the radical politics of the Asian American and Civil Rights Movements—Japanese Canadians’ supposed ‘right to return’ to Paueru Gai, to the relative exclusion of present-day Downtown Eastside residents. I therefore problematize the myth of Powell Street Festival, showing how it romanticizes Japanese Canadians’ return to Paueru Gai and (if unwittingly) disavows the more radical ‘trouble-making’ politics which inspired the Festival in the first place. I conclude by calling for a return to Japanese Canadian ‘trouble-making,’ one that centres the legacies of dispossession and ongoing violence in the Downtown Eastside.
Angela May
PhD Candidate, Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University
Vancouver, Canada
Links
Actions
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top