Activity: Talk or presentation types › Invited talk
Description
For generations migrants attempted to hide themselves away, to make themselves small, to bury their stories. It is the storyline of many a diasporic story-teller attempting to write the story of those who never spoke.
Whether recounting personal, family stories, or attempting to address collective, national and global wrongs, the weight of the present often seems even heavier than the past. Added to such obstacles, the current geopolitical configuration and the changed perception of China in the Western imaginary renders inaudible voices seeking the West’s reassessment of its own historic mistreatment of China and its people.
As for the USA’s nineteenth-century exclusion from entry and citizenship of Chinese, the UK’s forced repatriation of thousands of Chinese seamen after World War 2, and more generally xenophobic hate campaigns against an imagined Yellow Peril, and more recently COVID-related anti-Asian hatred, the prospects of wrongs done to Chinese people in the diaspora being righted or even simply addressed becomes more difficult.
Against the odds, can story-tellers, playwrights and poets make a difference in illuminating the woes suffered by those now long dead?