On January 11th, join us for a compelling reading of excerpts from the memoirs, Landbridge by Y-Dang Troeung and Carmen Aguirre's Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter. Both Y-Dang and Carmen’s works resist traditional forms of the refugee memoir and examine the problematic image of the “grateful” refugee’s arrival in Canada.
Carmen will be in attendance and Y-Dang's work will be read by her husband and collaborator, Chris B. Patterson (aka Kawika Guillermo). The readings will be followed by a conversation with Dr. Amanda Cheong from UBC’s Sociology department.
The authors’ books will be on sale at the event.
This programming is part of our engagement with Pier21’s travelling exhibition Refuge Canada—on view at the MOV until February 2nd, 2024.
Date: Thursday, January 11, 2024
Time: 6:30 – 8:30pm
Schedule:
Doors Open - 6:00pm
Event and readings begin - 6:30pm
Moderated panel + audience Q&A - 7:00pm
Book sales and signing - 8:00pm
Event ends - 8:30pm
Tickets: Suggested donation $5 - $20 (Plus fees and taxes)
Tickets include free admission to the Museum.
About the Series:
ResiStories is a collaboration between the Museum of Vancouver and the UBC Vancouver Public Humanities Hub. This series of programming aims to bring scholars of intersectional equity-seeking work and identities together in mutual learning and solidarity with communities in the public space of the city’s oldest (and initially Eurocentric) cultural institution to resist colonial narratives. Each program features ongoing histories and acts of resistance in conversation with the Museum’s exhibitions.
Authors and Presenters
Carmen Aguirre
Carmen Aguirre is an award-winning theatre artist, author and an Electric Company Theatre Core Artist. She has written and co-written over 25 plays, including Anywhere But Here and The Refugee Hotel. Carmen is the author of the #1 international bestseller Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter (2012 CBC Canada Reads winner) and its bestselling sequel, Mexican Hooker #1 and My Other Roles Since the Revolution. Electric Company Theatre will produce the world premiere of her new play Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project in the fall of 2024 in Vancouver. She is developing an adaptation of Euripides’ Medea at Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach, writing The Consent Club (an adaptation of Moliere’s The Learned Ladies), commissioned by Toronto’s Factory Theatre, and adapting Linebaugh and Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra for the Stratford Festival. She directed Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding at Vancouver’s Studio 58, which ran from November 23 through December 3, 2023. Carmen has over 80 film, television, and stage acting credits, and 20 theatre directing credits. She is a 2020 Siminovitch Prize finalist and a graduate of Studio 58.
Y-Dang Troeung
Y-Dang Troeung (張依蘭) (ទ្រឿងអ៊ីដាង) (pronouns: she/her/hers) was a writer and scholar based in Vancouver, who passed away in the fall of 2022 of pancreatic cancer. She was an Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia and was an Associate Editor of the journal Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism Review and a Faculty Affiliate of the Asian Canadian Studies and Migration Program (ACAM). She researched and taught in the fields of transnational Asian literatures, critical refugee studies, transpacific Cold War studies, and critical disability studies. From 2012 to 2018, she lived and worked in Hong Kong as an Assistant Professor at City University of Hong Kong.
Her recent publications include a guest-edited special journal issue, “Refugee Worldmaking: Canada and the Afterlives of the Vietnam War" (Issue 246, 2022, Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review) and the book Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia (Temple University Press, 2022). Her book Landbridge [life in fragments] was released in September 2023 with Knopf Canada.
Chris B. Patterson/Kawika Guillermo
Chris B. Patterson/Kawika Guillermo is an Associate Professor of Social Justice at the University of British Columbia, and an award-winning author of two academic books, two novels, and a prose-poetry work, Nimrods. He writes creatively under his matrilineal name, Kawika Guillermo. Chris/Kawika was Y-Dang’s partner and will be presenting her work at this event.
Moderator
Dr. Amanda R. Cheong
Dr. Amanda R. Cheong is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her research explores how legal status and documentation shape people’s lives by working with stateless, undocumented and refugee communities. Learn more about her work, teaching and publications here.
In collaboration with
