INTRODUCTION

In the title poem of her collection Crossfire, Staceyann Chin critiques the categorical imperatives that often shape colonial knowledge. Using a dialogic structure of question and response, of interrogation and retort, Chin’s poem demonstrates how asymmetries of power structure knowledge while also revealing the necessity of resisting the binaries that emerge from and within discourses of difference. 1 Chin (2019, p. 10) inscribes the imperative of response as one way of unsettling the ʼnot-so-credible cultural assumptions of race and religion,' but also those of gender and sexuality, that all too often function as part of everyday encounters. In the poem, she writes: and there is no such country called the Islands and no-I am not from there. (Chin, 2019, p. 10).