Renovating Vancouver: Transnational Constructions and Mortgages in Sachiko Murakami's Rebuild

Abstract

This article examines how Asian diasporic Vancouverite poetry explores the implications of living in an Asian North American city that has yet to come to terms with the genealogies of its lands and communities, and its contemporary role as a prototype of capitalist urbanism. Through a brief examination of the socioeconomic history of the city alongside a close reading of the poetics of Japanese-Canadian poet Sachiko Murakami's collection Rebuild (2011), I argue that literary innovation is a crucial lens through which to view capitalist spaces of intentional abstraction and repetition, and the ever-growing glass and steel constructions of Vancouver's globalized cityscape. Rebuild interrogates what it means to inhabit a city that has been thoroughly and repeatedly transformed by transnational capital. In much of the collection, Murakami's own half-Japanese heritage and her awareness of the "colonized" nature of Vancouver are placed in dialogue with the hypermodern architectural construction of condominiums, and the unabashedly capitalist property market.

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