Old/New Stories – Old/New Genre: Canadian Historio-graphic Ethnofiction Revisited in Pik-Shuen Fung’s Ghost Forest
Old/New Stories – Old/New Genre: Canadian Historio-graphic Ethnofiction Revisited in Pik-Shuen Fung’s Ghost Forest

Summary/Abstract: Canadian literature has been marked by a type of writing, which grounded in historiographic recollections of immigration and (ethnic) identity, has been generally classified as ethnic (minority) or diasporic writing. Yet, in the 1990s, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Ukrainian-Canadian writer, suggested the term “historiographic ethnofiction” which offers much more than the customarily applied generic labels as it captures the richness of works discussing ethnicity. Thus, the concept, so far unattended by critics, deserves attention as a productive tool of generic classification that sheds new light on how ethnic writing could be approached in a more systemic way. To illustrate its potential, this article aims at reading a recent Asian-Canadian work, Ghost Forest (2021), by Pik-Shuen Fung, as an example of contemporary Canadian historiographic ethnofiction that both follows and extends Kulyk Keefer’s conceptualization of this generic term.

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