TransCanada Series

Chapter 6 The Cameras of the World: Race, Subjectivity and the Multitude in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Dionne Brand's What We All Long For Larissa Lai Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Dionne Brand's What We All Long For present characters who are both deeply abject and radically free of the constraint of Enlightenment subjectivity. The Atwood text returns power tongue-in-cheek to white patriarchy, but the Brand text offers a glimmer of hope in constructing the citizen-subject-reader in historical, bodily and blood kinship with those whom the state, through the logic of exception, seeks to exclude.

10 Jazz, Diaspora, and the History and Writing of Black Anglophone Montreal Winfried Siemerling Through a combination of cultural geography, Jazz Age history, and literary analysis, Siemerling argues for a renewed focus on Montreal’s black diasporas and their cultures as part of the city’s social and cultural architecture.

9 The Cunning of Reconciliation: Reinventing White Civility in the “Age of Apology” Pauline Wakeham Pauline Wakeham’s “The Cunning of Reconciliation: Reinventing White Civility in the ‘Age of Apology’” considers the rhetoric and function of state apologies in Canada. Extending, and ultimately moving beyond, Daniel Coleman’s concept of “white civility,” Wakeham draws on the work of Sákéj Henderson and the field of indigenous legal studies to argue for a more radical form of social change.

Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory is a collection of essays written in honour of Barbara Godard, one of the most original and wide-ranging literary critics, theorists, teachers, translators, and public intellectuals Canada has ever produced. The contributors, both established and emerging scholars, extend Godard’s work through engagements with her published texts in the spirit of creative interchange and intergenerational relay of ideas. Their essays resonate with Godard’s innovative scholarship, situated at the intersection of such fields as literary studies, cultural studies, translation studies, feminist theory, arts criticism, social activism, institutional analysis, and public memory. In pursuit of unexpected linkages and connections, the essays venture beyond generic and disciplinary borders, zeroing in on Godard’s transdisciplinary practice which has been extremely influential in the way it framed questions and modelled interventions for the study of Canadian, Québécois, and Acadian literatures and cultures. The authors work with the materials ranging from Canadian government policies and documents to publications concerning white-supremacist organizations in Southern Ontario, online materials from a Toronto-based transgender arts festival, a photographic mural installation commemorating the Montreal Massacre, and the works of such writers and artists as Marie Clements, Nicole Brossard, France Daigle, Nancy Huston, Yvette Nolan, Gail Scott, Denise Desautels, Louise Warren, Rebecca Belmore, Vera Frenkel, Robert Lepage, and Janet Cardiff.

Chapter 1 Literary and Editorial Theory and Editing Marian Engel Christl Verduyn A hybrid editorial practice that combines literary, feminist, and life writing theories with editorial theory drawn from both Anglo-American and continental European traditions best suits the practical and ethical challenges of two editorial projects on the work of Marian Engel as well as the literary and critical-theory contexts and interests of the writer herself.

Scandalous Bodies is an impassioned scholarly study both of literature by diasporic writers and of the contexts within which it is produced. It explores topics ranging from the Canadian government’s multiculturalism policy to media representations of so-called minority groups, from the relationship between realist fiction and history to postmodern constructions of ethnicity, from the multicultural theory of the philosopher Charles Taylor to the cultural responsibilities of diasporic critics such as Kamboureli herself. Smaro Kamboureli proposes no neat or comforting solutions to the problems she addresses. Rather than adhere to a single method of reading or make her argument follow a systematic approach, she lets the texts and the socio-cultural contexts she examines give shape to her reading. In fact, methodological issues, and the need to revisit them, become a leitmotif in the book. Theoretically rigorous and historically situated, this study also engages with close reading—not the kind that views a text as a sovereign world, but one that opens the text in order to reveal the method of its making. Her practice of what she calls negative pedagogy—a self-reflexive method of learning and unlearning, of decoding the means through which knowledge is produced—allows her to avoid the pitfalls of constructing a narrative of progress. Her critique of Canadian multiculturalism as a policy that advocates what she calls “sedative politics” and of the epistemologies of ethnicity that have shaped, for example, the first wave of ethnic anthologies in Canada are the backdrop against which she examines the various discourses that inform the diasporic experience in Canada. Scandalous Bodies was first published in 2000 and received the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Criticism.

Transnational Canadas marks the first sustained inquiry into the relationship between globalization and Canadian literature written in English. Tracking developments in the literature and its study from the centennial period to the present, it shows how current work in transnational studies can provide new insights for researchers and students. Arguing first that the dichotomy of Canadian nationalism and globalization is no longer valid in today’s economic climate, Transnational Canadas explores the legacy of leftist nationalism in Canadian literature. It examines the interventions of multicultural writing in the 1980s and 1990s, investigating the cultural politics of the period and how they increasingly became part of Canada’s state structure. Under globalization, the book concludes, we need to understand new forms of subjectivity and mobility as sites for cultural politics and look beyond received notions of belonging and being. An original contribution to the study of Canadian literature, Transnational Canadas seeks to invigorate discussion by challenging students and researchers to understand the national and the global simultaneously, to look at the politics of identity beyond the rubric of multiculturalism, and to rethink the slippery notion of the political for the contemporary era.

5 “Grammars of Exchange”: The “Oriental Woman” in the Global Market Belén Martín-Lucas Belén Martín-Lucas, addressing the contemporary politics of the international book market, analyses the “Orientalist marketing tactics” that package the work of “ethnic” writers from Canada in ways that raise their economic value while devaluing their political ones.

The study of Canadian literature—CanLit—has undergone dramatic changes since it became an area of specialization in the 1960s and ’70s. As new global forces in the 1990s undermined its nation-based critical assumptions, its theoretical focus and research methods lost their immediacy. The contributors to Trans.Can.Lit address cultural policy, citizenship, white civility, and the celebrated status of diasporic writers, unabashedly recognizing the imperative to transfigure the disciplinary and institutional frameworks within which Canadian literature is produced, disseminated, studied, taught, and imagined.

10 “We jimmied the radio”: Gillian Jerome, Brad Cran and the Lyric in Public Kevin McNeilly Kevin McNeilly posits Gillian Jerome and Brad Cran, in their collaborative work and in their individual poetry, in dialogue with a lyric tradition. The lyric in Jerome’s and Cran’s poetry, though, foregrounds its public audience, both aurally and politically, and it does so with awareness of how living in Vancouver—at once the site of Canada’s wealthiest and most impoverished postal codes—informs a particularly fraught poetic-public dynamic.