New Sustainable Bodies in Transit: Transnational Affects in Some (South-East Asian) Canadian Women Writers

This paper studies the articulation of aesthetics of affects by some Southeast Asian Canadian refugee collectivities  beyond state designations. Souvankham Thammavongsa's aesthetics of heterogeneity in her last collection of stories How to Pronounce Knife shows its belongingness to a plurality of immigrant voices with various perspectives, interests and drives. I look at the centrality of affective relations in the transformation of subjectivity under processes of a growing (un)happiness in the diasporic homeSpace. I will try to conceptualize this refugee labour of challenging, transforming, asserting, and carving out ways of living as acts of "refugee worldmaking" after the suffering of people on a scale that Michel Foucault described in 1979 as "unprecedented in modern history."