Reading Community: Grieving, Remembering, Inheriting Roy Miki

Hosted by SFU’s Global Asia Program, this event explores the legacies of Japanese Canadian artist, organizer, and scholar Roy Miki, who passed away in fall 2024.

Through close engagement with Dr. Miki’s body of work, Phanuel Antwi (UBC), Cornel Bogle (SFU), Joanne Leow (SFU), Angela May (McMaster), and Kirsten McAllister (SFU) will reflect on the diverse, expansive, and unexpected ways that Asian Canadian pasts live on as we queerly and collectively dream our way forward.

About the speakers:

Phanuel Antwi (he/him) is an artist, an organizer, a curator, and an associate professor of English concerned with race, poetics, movements, intimacy, and struggle. He works with text, dance, film, and photography to intervene in artistic, academic, and public spaces. Dr. Antwi holds a Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. His recent book, On Cuddling: Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace, is from Pluto Press. He’s currently finishing a manuscript called “Currencies of Blackness: Faithfulness, Cheerfulness and Politeness in Settler Writing.”

Cornel Bogle (he/him or they/them) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Their research focuses on Caribbean literatures, cultures, and diasporas, with particular interests in masculinities, poetics, literary archives, historiography, and life writing. Their scholarly and creative work has appeared in various journals and edited collections. They are co-editor of “Recognition and Recovery of Caribbean Canadian Cultural Production,” a special issue of Canada and Beyond, and serves as the Book Reviews Editor for the Journal of West Indian Literature.

Joanne Leow (she/her) is Associate Professor and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair of Transnational and Decolonial Digital Humanities in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Her creative work and research lie at the intersections of the environmental humanities, transnational and diasporic cultural production, global Asia studies, autotheory, and decoloniality. She is the author of Counter-Cartographies: Reading Singapore Otherwise (Liverpool University Press, 2024). She is also a poet and writer with a collection of poetry, Seas Move Away (Turnstone Press, 2022), and a hybrid memoir, Exhumations: Inside the Body of a Petro-State (Alchemy Press, 2026).

Angela May (she/her or they/them) is a mixed Japanese Canadian scholar, writer, and artist from Vancouver, British Columbia. Now a PhD Candidate studying under the supervision of Dr. Amber Dean in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Angela's doctoral project examines the politics of Japanese Canadian loss in the contemporary Downtown Eastside. Her academic work has been published in Memory Studies, the Urban History Review, the Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research, and Canadian Literature. Her creative and community writing has been published in The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (eds. Brynn Saito and Brandon Shimoda), The Bulletin/Geppo, Nikkei Images, The Volcano, Nikkei Voice, and elsewhere.

Kirsten Emiko McAllister (she/her) is a Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Her work focuses on political violence, racism, migration and settler-colonialism. Her interdisciplinary approach draws on Memory Studies, Visual Studies, Ethnography, Critical Race Studies and Indigenous Studies. The politics of knowledge informs her use of creative non-fiction and autoethnography in addition to her community collaborations and community-based research in national and transnational contexts. Kirsten’s publications include The Geography of Asylum: Art Activism and the City of Glasgow (forthcoming, Palgrave-MacMillan); After Redress: Indigenous and Japanese Canadian Struggles for Justice (2025, UBC Press; co-editor Mona Oikawa with Roy Miki); Migration and the Politics of Methodology: Doing Fieldwork, Decentring Power, and Foregrounding Migrants’ Perspectives (2025, Routledge; co-editors Ayaka Yoshimizu and Daniel Ahadi); Terrain of Memory: a Japanese Canadian Memorial Project (2010, UBC Press); and Photographic Acts: Locating Memory (2006, Berghahn; co-editor Annette Kuhn). Her current SSHRC project examines settler stories, climate change and Indigenous rights in the colonial jurisdiction of British Columbia.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Please join us on Sunday, November 8th from 4-6pm.

SFU Harbour Centre, Segal Rooms 1400-1410
515 West Hastings St, Vancouver

Tranportation to the event:

• Bike parking is available at the Hastings entrance of SFU Harbour Centre. Visit the Vancouver campus’s Cycling Resources for details on bicycle racks and cages.
• The nearest SkyTrain station to SFU's Vancouver campus is Waterfront Station. Waterfront Station is also served daily by SeaBus and the West Coast Express commuter train, and numerous buses serve the downtown area.
• Parking is available at 450 West Cordova Street (Impark) and 443 Seymour Street (Diamond Parking). Metered street parking can also be found nearby.