Shifting Sensibilities (New Approaches to Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna)

The first Chinese North American woman to achieve popular literary acclaim, Winnifred Eaton initially wrote under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna to circumvent anti-Chinese prejudice. She rose to prominence through ten “Japanese” romances, later wrote Canadian western fiction, reinvented herself as a Hollywood screenwriter, and helped shape Calgary’s early theatre movement.

Shifting Sensibilities offers a fresh interdisciplinary reassessment of Eaton’s transnational career and illuminates the remarkable breadth of her contributions to literature, theatre, and film. This timely volume examines her strategies of racial and professional shape shifting, revealing how she navigated racism, exclusion, and literary gatekeeping while laying important foundations for Asian North American literary and cultural production. Chapters explore four interrelated themes – (auto)biography; Chinese, Japanese, and diasporic influences; Eaton’s moves to Alberta and Hollywood; and the innovative potential of pedagogical and archival practice for recovering and reanimating her legacy. In the first half of the twentieth-century, Eaton, of mixed race heritage, unsettled conventional racial and social norms while forging new possibilities for creative expression in the cultural worlds of Canada and the United States.

As the intellectual and political contexts shaping literature’s reception continue to shift, the scholars, teachers, and archivists who re-examine Eaton’s work demonstrate its enduring significance for understanding the politics of race and identity.