Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being

Amy Fung

• Publisher: Book*hug Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781771665056
• eBook ISBN: 9781771665063
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Literature

In that moment, I felt closer to whiteness than not. I was completely complicit and didn?t think twice about entering a space that could cover their walls with images of contemporary Indigenous perspectives, but exclude their physical bodies from entering and experiencing. In that moment, I felt like a real Canadian.

Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being is the debut collection of nonfiction essays by Amy Fung. In it, Fung takes a closer examination at Canada's mythologies of multiculturalism, settler colonialism, and identity through the lens of a national art critic.

Following the tangents of a foreign-born perspective and the complexities and complicities in participating in ongoing acts of colonial violence, the book as a whole takes the form of a very long land acknowledgement. Taken individually, each essay roots itself in the learning and unlearning process of a first generation settler immigrant as she unfurls each region's sense of place and identity

Table of contents

• Copyright
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Prologue
• Harbour
• Sprawl
• The Bridge
• Treaties 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10
• The Cairn
• Choke
• Witness
• The Tour
• The Island
• Difficult People
• 375
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Reading List
• Dedication
• Colophon