New Issue: 249 – Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Canadian Comics

November 23, 2022

We are thrilled to announce the arrival of Canadian Literature, Issue 249, Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Canadian Comics. Candida Rifkind and Zachary J. A. Rondinelli write in their editorial:

Canadian cartoonists have been prominent voices within the global comics landscape for quite some time, recently their renown has grown thanks to numerous prizes and honorifics. Seth was awarded the Prix Spécial du Jury in 2020 during France’s Festival d’Angoulême and was recently honoured as Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French minister of culture. Joe Ollman’s recent work, Fictional Father, received the distinct honour of becoming the first comic or graphic novel to be nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and in 2022 Julie Doucet was awarded the Grand Prix at the forty-ninth Angoulême International Comics Festival (the highest award in European cartooning). As Anderson so eloquently puts it in his keynote with Pauls, “[Canadian] work is world-class,” and these recognitions remind us of this important fact. Of course, with this prestige comes a renewed interest in understanding the different traditions and influences that have shaped individual cartoonists and asking how—perhaps even if—their identities as Canadians matter to their art. This special issue represents what we hope will be a reorientation of the Canadian comics conversation, which has long languished in the rhetoric of nationalism and patriotism ignited during the WECA era and refueled in the 1970s when Leishman and Comely’s Tom Evans pulled up his red and white spandex to become Captain Canuck. We say this to reiterate that the story of where Canadian comics began is not the same as when Canadian comics publishing began; contrary to how it might look today, the multi-faceted, aesthetically diverse, and globally networked histories of Canadian comics have yet to be fully captured.

– Candida Rifkind and Zachary J. A. Rondinelli, “Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Canadian Comics”

This issue also features:

The new issue can be ordered through our online store. Happy reading!


New Issue: 248, General

September 16, 2022

We are thrilled to announce the arrival of Canadian Literature Issue 248! This is a special issue, as it ushers in our new design updates!

Christine Kim writes in her editorial:

The five articles in this issue pose intriguing questions about archives, storytelling, ways of knowing, language, and metaphor as they examine Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen, David Chariandy’s Soucouyant, Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang, Jordan Scott’s poetry, and Don McKay’s The Book of Moonlight. As a general issue, there was no set of questions for these articles to respond to, and consequently no expectation that there would be a shared focus. The range of scholarship is demonstrated through the subjects, texts, critical approaches, genres, and themes with which the authors engage. And yet, there are still many rich overlaps and shared lines of inquiry that run through these articles—shared lines that are suggestive for reflecting on the field of Canadian literary studies and its connections to other scholarly fields. Reading these articles together reveals how scholars are thinking alongside each other (although not necessarily with each other) about shared interests that span transnational sites, genres, and critical approaches. It also offers a way of conceptualizing the field of Canadian literary studies at this moment.

Focusing on moments of critical coherence is a very different method for approaching the field than most of us have been trained to perform. Such a method compels us to question how we are to define the field of Canadian literature and, moreover, what constitutes the position of the Canadianist. Such an endeavour returns us to questions about how we are to understand the relationship between what we teach in the classroom, the material we research and produce scholarly writing about, our critical approaches (which often extend beyond national borders), and how we define the field of Canadian literary studies itself. Other issues include how we perceive our scholarly and pedagogical interests as being in dialogue with or different from other scholars (contemporary or otherwise) in the field.

—Christine Kim, Reconceptualizing Canadian Generalists

 

This issue also features:

 

 

The new issue can be ordered through our online store. Happy reading!

 


Past Editor Eva-Marie Kröller Order of Canada Appointee June 2022

July 8, 2022

We are pleased to share that our past Editor-in-Chief Eva-Marie Kröller was appointed to the Order of Canada in June 2022. She is recognized for her contributions to Canadian literature and her achievements as an educator. She holds the position of Professor Emerita at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC).

(left to right) Laurie Ricou, Eva Marie Kröller, W. H. New

Kröller came to the journal in 1995 and worked to recruit an editorial board of distinguished scholars from Canada and abroad and formalized the peer review process used by the previous editors. In order to introduce a diversity of opinions and expertise to the journal, she began a tradition of having guest editors plan and supervise special issues, such as the Contemporary Poetics issue (guest edited by Associate Editor Iain Higgins in 1997) and Gabrielle Helms’ and Susanna Egan’s 2002 Auto/biography issue. Her commitment to representing Canada’s francophone

Photo credit: Michelle Mayne
L – R: Coral Ann Howells, Laura Potter, Eva-Marie Kröller

writers led Kröller to appoint Alain-Michel Rocheleau as Associate Editor of francophone writing. Gradually French-language content increased, and the efforts of Associate Editor Réjean Beaudoin, who became the Associate Editor (Francophone) in 2003, have produced the notable special issues Littérature francophone hors-Québec / Francophone Writing Outside Quebec (2005) and Gabrielle Roy Contemporaine / The Contemporary Gabrielle Roy (2007). Kröller was also responsible for the journal’s transition to electronic publishing, and under her direction the upcoming book reviews were added to Canadian Literature’s website. Kröller edited 32 issues and held the position of Editor-in-Chief until 2003. She won the Council of Editors of Learned Journals’ Distinguished Editor award in 2004, becoming the first Canadian to receive the honour. She became a fellow of the Royal Society in 2006.

Her contributions to Canadian Literature are listed under her author page here.

Many congratulations Eva-Marie!


New Issue: 247, General

May 13, 2022

We are thrilled to announce the arrival of Canadian Literature Issue 247!

Christine Kim writes in her editorial:

How might we begin imagining a utopia from our present moment of overwhelming challenges?  The first essay in this issue of Canadian Literature, Pamela Bedore’s “The Aesthetics of Utopian Imaginings in Louise Penny’s A Trick of the Light,” opens with this provocative question. In addition to the pandemic, she lists climate change and deep inequality as concerns that have preoccupied the first decades of the twenty-first century. How then can we conceive of a future that is utopic for all, given that we are living in times that seem to hold “a contempt for joy that makes utopia seem not only impossible but perhaps also undesirable” (Bedore)? Imagining a utopia, one that is collectively desired, is a project that seems out of sync with the prevailing pandemic atmosphere of isolation, uncertainty, and division. Indeed, as many people have commented in casual conversation, these are times that feel like they have come out of the pages of dystopian or even speculative fiction. Not only do such fleeting insights respond to the bleakness of the past few years, but they also draw attention to the seemingly shifting relations between fact and fiction as our realities become more surreal and our memories fuzzier.

—Christine Kim, Imagining Endemic Times

 

This issue also features:

The new issue can be ordered through our online store. Happy reading!


Verse Forward 3: A Poetry Reading Series

April 7, 2022

Activist. Decolonialist. Experimental Poetics.

Verse Forward: Poetry on the Front Lines is a Canadian Literaturepoetry reading series featuring diverse poets speaking to the urgent themes of home, race, identity, and the environment we live in.

We are excited to present award-winning poets Junie Désil, Fiona Lam, and Lillian Allen in the third iteration of Verse Forward, emceed by author Phinder Dulai.

We’ll begin the evening in conversation with the poets, followed by readings, including new work, and an audience Q & A.

The event will be hosted on Zoom. Details will be sent out prior to the event.

Author Bios:

Junie Désil is a poet. Born of immigrant (Haitian) parents on the Traditional Territories of the Kanien’kehá:ka in the island known as Tiohtià:ke (Montréal), raised in Treaty 1 Territory (Winnipeg). Junie’s debut poetry collection Eat Salt | Gaze at the Ocean (TalonBooks, 2020) was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.

Fiona Lam is Vancouver’s 6th Poet Laureate. Her poems are featured in Best Canadian Poetry, in the League of Canadian Poets’ Poem in Your Pocket program, and thrice with BC’s Poetry in Transit. Lam won The New Quarterly’s Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Prize and was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award. Odes and Laments (Caitlin Press, 2019) is her third collection of poetry.

Lillian Allen is a professor of creative writing at Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD). Her most recent poetry collection is Making the World New (Wilfrid UP, 2021). Multi-disciplinary and experimental, Allen’s creativity crosses many genres including radio, theatre, music and film; as writer, featured artist and producer/director and national radio show host.

To learn more about the history of CanLit’s Verse Forward, please visit: https://canlit.ca/article/verse-forward-a-canadian-literature-poetry-reading-series/.

To see past readings, visit: https://canlit.ca/resources/events/verse-forward-poetry-on-the-front-lines/.


A Forum on “Poetics, Energy, and Extraction”

March 18, 2022

Canadian Literature‘s CFP for Poetics and Extraction is out now! As a prelude to the issue, our guest editors Melanie Dennis Unrau and Max Karpinski are participating in a forum on “Poetics, Energy, and Extraction.”

Date: Monday, March 21, 2022

Time: 7:00-8:30 pm CDT

Location: Zoom

Registration: email umih (at) umanitoba.ca for more details!

Hosted by Warren Cariou (U of Manitoba), Melanie Dennis Unrau (U of Manitoba), and Max Karpinski (U of Alberta), with presenters Kazim Ali, Madhur Anand, Lesley Battler, Warren Cariou, Cecily Nicholson, and Douglas Walbourne-Gough.


New Issue: 246, Refugee Worldmaking: Canada and the Afterlives of the Vietnam War

February 15, 2022

We are thrilled to announce the arrival of Canadian Literature, Issue 246, Refugee Worldmaking: Canada and the Afterlives of the Vietnam War. Guest Editor Y-Dang Troeung writes in her editorial:

 

To what extent do the unresolved inheritances of past wars and conflicts become legible only insofar as they offer “lessons” for the contemporary moment? And to what degree is it even possible to cite Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos as a meaningful lesson or cautionary tale for the present when we have yet to adequately look at the example itself, on its own terms? Such rationales also rely upon liberal positivist assumptions of Enlightenment progress, which as critical theorist Alexander Weheliye argues, presuppose “that suffering must always follow the path of wounded attachments in search of recognition from the liberal state” (14). This “liberal notion of wounding” (14) confers legitimacy onto the site of injury only insofar as it illuminates a larger structural pattern. The “exampling” or “lessonification” of suffering also temporally demarcates the event of wars abroad as something that is over and done with, rather than something that is structurally endemic to the enduring imperial conquests of US empire.

– Y-Dang Troeung, “On Refugee Worldmaking

 

This issue also features:

 

The new issue can be ordered through our online store. Happy reading!


Laura Moss to give McLean lecture

February 10, 2022

Past editor, Laura Moss, will be giving the prestigious annual David and Brenda McLean lecture at Green College Coach House, “Climate Warnings: The Power of Canadian Environmental Art, Literature, and Creative Activism.” The event will also be live streamed March 2, at 7:30 pm PST.

In this year’s McLean Lectures, Laura Moss will concentrate on creative responses to the global environmental emergency in Canadian art and letters. 
 
As the climate crisis continues, many artists and writers have raised their voices for awareness, change, and justice. Professor Moss will trace imagined representations of the wounded environment from historical context to the present in order to question the power and the limits of turning to art in a time of crisis. She will focus on works that draw on physical materials from the land and water themselves as they write back to the changing environment. From examining photographs created out of Alberta bitumen to sculptures constructed out of plastic salvaged from the Pacific Ocean to poetry that imagines the consequences of deforestation on West Coast ecosystems, the series will explore the efficacy of art and activism.
 
This year’s series will be comprised of two evening events. On March 2, Professor Moss will present a public lecture and on March 17 she will be joined by several of the creators whose work she features in the lecture to discuss the relationship between art and activism, the climate emergency, and the limits of art in driving change.

 

The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion with Laura Moss, Warren Cariou, Stephen Collins, and Rita Wong on Art Activism, and Climate Justice, March 17, at 7:30 pm PST.

To find out more, please see the event poster: Laura Moss McLean Lectures

 

 

 

followed by a panel discussion


Canada Reads 2022 Long List

January 14, 2022

Canada Reads has announced their longlist! As always, it’s an excellent collation of CanLit content.

Find out more about the selections on the CBC page.


Call for Papers: “Feminist Critique Here and Now”

December 22, 2021

— SUBMISSIONS CLOSED —

What is the continued role of feminist theory and feminist analysis in literary studies today in these lands claimed by Canada?  How and why is feminist analysis still relevant to our work? We seek contributions for a special issue of Canadian Literature on feminist critique and/in Canada today.

In the 1980s and 1990s, feminist theory transformed many aspects of literary scholarship in Canada and beyond. The introduction of French feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory gave us new tools to think about identity in relation to language. The bilingual feminist journal Tessera became a vital venue of feminist experimentation and theorizing in Canada. Women’s Press and Press Gang became important venues for feminist publishing. Texts like This Bridge Called My Back and Lee Maracle’s I Am Woman offered vital and engaged sites of intersectional feminist thinking and creation. Filmmakers like Deepa Mehta and Patricia Rozema began to explore filmmaking from a feminist perspective, and women’s and gender studies became established as a discipline.

In recent years, feminist analysis and feminist critique have taken on new urgencies in the wake of scandals like #ubcaccountable and #metoo, and in response to the rise of popular anti-feminist and transphobic celebrities and the rise of misogynistic rhetoric on social media. Movements like #Blacklivesmatter and #idlenomore have raised renewed and urgent questions for feminism. The COVID-19 pandemic has created crises around affective labour and service work that have returned attention to questions of class, gender, immigration status, precarity, mental health, and age. These events act as powerful reminders that feminism is still vital and necessary and that we must continue to find ways to advance a feminism that is intersectional, anti-racist, decolonial, and affirming of LGBTQ2S lives.

However, many of us tend to not centre feminism as a methodology in our work. As an entry point to feminism in the introduction to the recent volume In Good Relation, Sarah Nickel points to “a general anxiety around the term itself” among Indigenous feminists and “a desire to explain” how they arrive as feminists (2). Amidst contextual complexities, many scholars adopt what Rosi Braidotti calls a “nomadic feminism,” which she describes as

an opening outwards of the process of redefining female subjectivity . . . that calls for a broadening of the traditional feminist political agenda to include, as well as the issue of women’s social rights, a larger spectrum of options which range from cultural concerns related to writing and creativity, to issues which at first sight seem to have nothing to do specifically with women. (83)

However, as Chandra Talpade Mohanty reminds us, “imperialism, militarization, and globalization all traffic in women’s bodies, women’s labor, and ideologies of masculinity/femininity, hetero-normativity, racism, and nationalism to consolidate and reproduce power and domination” (9). Given these perspectives, we are interested in exploring the continued resonance and urgency of feminist thinking in the twenty-first century.

We invite contributors to respond to one or more of the following questions through an engagement with fiction, poetry, oral traditions, film, music, graphic novels, performance, and/or visual arts in lands claimed by Canada. Contributions might think through diverse feminist theoretical frameworks, including but not limited to, affect, critical race, dis/ability, decolonial, ecological, Indigenous, Marxist, new materialist, post-anthropocentric, postcolonial, posthumanist, psychoanalytic, and queer/trans theory.

  • What dialogues are taking place among feminists of different generations? What intergenerational dialogues need to take place? What can we learn from previous generations of feminists? Conversely, what can we learn from younger generations?
  • How might it be useful to think about your work in relation to feminism, even if you have not previously identified your work through feminist concerns? What kinds of trouble and/or alliances might be made by pairing your work with feminism?
  • What forms of cultural production and activism are occurring at the nexus of trans and/or 2S/queer and feminist studies? What kinds of relations exist? What can trans and/or 2S/queer theory and feminist theory learn from each other?
  • How is feminism imagining ways out of racialized and gendered violence or articulating forms of resilience and resistance? What does anti-racist feminism look like in twenty-first-century Canada?
  • How do we envision decolonial feminisms? What are the implications of applying a feminist analysis to questions of Indigenous sovereignty? How do Indigenous knowledge systems and community wisdoms step into relation with feminisms? How might feminisms and Indigenous sex and gender systems co-conspire?
  • What are the gendered effects of pandemics (COVID-19 or otherwise), specifically with regard to affective labour and care work? How do economics, class, labour, and dis/ability inflect this question?
  • How have neoliberal discourses co-opted and adopted feminism? How has feminism resisted, or capitulated, to neoliberalism?
  • How does feminism manifest in, through, with, and beyond the body?
  • How does feminism help us to understand ecological relations, kinships, and/or trans-species solidarities?
  • How are experimental forms or particular generic concerns shaped/catalyzed/exploded in relation to feminism?
  • What is the relationship between feminist activism and cultural production?

How does literary work bring us to think through, about, or with these clustered concerns? How have writers and other cultural workers responded to these questions in their literary and artistic practice? We encourage contributions from emerging, diversely positioned, and established scholars. We welcome standard academic essays as well as submissions that take on unconventional or creative forms.

All submissions to Canadian Literature must be original, unpublished work. Essays should follow current MLA bibliographic format (MLA Handbook, 9th ed.). Word length for articles is 6,500-8,000 words, which includes endnotes and works cited.

Please feel free to contact the journal editor, Christine Kim, at cl.editor@ubc.ca, or the special issue guest editors, Aubrey Hanson (ajhanson@ucalgary.ca) or Heather Milne (h.milne@uwinnipeg.ca), to discuss ideas ahead of time. Submissions should be uploaded to OJS by the deadline of 31 August 2022. Our Submission Guidelines can be found at canlit.ca/submissions. General questions about the special issue may be directed to can.lit@ubc.ca.

Please limit images accompanying the submission to those receiving substantial attention in the article. Note that contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce images in their article, and must pay any permission costs. The editors can provide a sample template for permission requests and permissions must be cleared before publication. Please send low resolution images (small jpegs), in separate attachments. If the article is accepted, high quality images will be required.

 

Works Cited

Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Polity, 2002.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, “US Empire and the Project of Women’s Studies: Stories of Citizenship, Complicity and Dissent.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, vol. 13, no. 1, Feb. 2006, pp. 7-20.

Nickel, Sarah. Introduction. In Good Relation: History, Gender, and Kinship in Indigenous Feminisms, edited by Nickel and Amanda Fehr, U of Manitoba P, 2020, pp. 1-19.