TY - JOUR AU - Sugars, Cynthia PY - 2001/01/01 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - “The Negative Capability of Camouflage”: Fleeing Diaspora in Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill JF - Studies in Canadian Literature JA - SCL VL - 26 IS - 1 SE - Articles DO - UR - https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/view/12871 SP - AB - If an articulation of diasporic identity threatens to embroil one in a reductive essentialism, a number of recent writers and theorists have attempted to deconstruct this delimiting configuration by applying a non-paradoxical vision of resistance and reconciliation to the diasporic experience itself. Fred Wah's <em>Diamond Grill</em> is one such text, striving to articulate a non-paradoxical vision of identity and evade the restricting designations of a narrow-identity politics. Wah effects a "de-diasporization" by which the traditional colonialist insistence on spatializing other worlds is reclaimed in the postcolonial emphasis on that space as the locus of newly asserted and shifting hybridized identities. This de-diasporization is undertaken in three ways: through the mixed ancestral inscriptions on the "diasporic body," through the narrator's ontological introjections of Canada as it was experienced by his displaced ancestors, and through the de-ontologized locale of the <em>Diamond Grill</em> itself. Wah shows how diasporic locations can be viewed as sites of radical reorientation — of language, subjectivity, emplacement, identity, and inheritance. ER -