Mona Oikawa is a writer. An active player in the 1980s and 1990s in Toronto in the lesbian and Asian Canadian literary scene with various publications of poems and short stories, she is now best known as an academic, particularly for her book Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory and the Subjects of Internment, which examines the intergenerational memories of Japanese Canadian internment from women survivors and their daughters. She is an Associate Professor at the Department of Equity Studies at York University, where she teaches and researches critical race studies, gender, and cultural studies.
Her current project is focused on Japanese Canadians and their relationship to settler colonialism in Canada, the historical construction of relational racial formations in Canada, and coalition building among racialized communities in Canada.
