Sensing Different Worlds: Author Spotlight – Emma Lansdowne
October 6, 2021
Emma Lansdowne is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. A professional horticulturalist-turned-academic, her research explores the intersection of plants and colonial/post-colonial histories with a specific focus on gardens as contact zones and sites of resistance.
Article
Abstract
Anita Rau Badami’s novel Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? gives voice to three female protagonists who spend their lifetimes constructing and negotiating identities shaped by the legacies of multigenerational and cultural traumas. Set against the violent political and sociocultural upheavals of Partition and post-Partition Punjab and its translation to Indian diasporic communities in Canada, the protagonists’ paths of negotiation zigzag through domestic landscapes dotted with plants whose sound, scent, and visual appearance carry the weight of closely-held memories. It is within the novel’s domestic spaces that the women seek expression of their inner and outer selves while they cope with the challenges of a liminal existence. Plants play a key role in contextualizing home in its various iterations and narrating the silences between the novel’s physical, psychological and temporal spaces. This paper explores the role of plants in Nightbird as indicators of violence and evocations of diasporic domestic identity.
Canadian Literature issue 244, Sensing Different Worlds, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.
Sensing Different Worlds: Author Spotlight – Russell Thornton
September 29, 2021
Russell Thornton has published seven books of poetry, most recently The Broken Face (Harbour, 2018). His collection The Hundred Lives was shortlisted for the 2015 Griffin Prize; his collection Birds, Metals, Stones & Rain was shortlisted for the 2013 Governor General’s Award. He has a new collection due out from Harbour Publishing in the fall of 2021 called Answer to Blue. He lives in North Vancouver.
His poem “Paths” can be read on our website at https://canlit.ca/article/paths/.
Canadian Literature issue 244, Sensing Different Worlds, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=244.
Sensing Different Worlds: Author Spotlight – Dougal McNeill
September 22, 2021
Dougal is a Pākehā critic and teacher working in the School of English, Film, Theatre, Media Studies and Art History at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa / New Zealand. Roy Miki’s poetry has obsessed him for many years, and he started thinking with Flow when he was lucky enough to be a visiting fellow in the Centre for Asia and Pacific Studies at Seikei University, Tokyo, in December 2018. Dougal’s teaching covers modernism and Australian, Canadian and New Zealand literatures, and he has published articles and chapters in the Oxford History of the Novel in English, A History of New Zealand Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and the Journal of New Zealand Literature.
Article
“Sounding: Roy Miki’s Tokyo”
Abstract
This paper tracks Roy Miki’s explorations of Tokyo across his poetic career. Reading Tokyo as a “sound city”, the paper considers the ways in which Miki deploys a kind of sonic ekphrasis, representing Tokyo by way of its noises, voices, expressions and sounds in order both to explore the city’s multifarious, energetic realities and to subvert and counter the homogenising narratives of Tokyo’s “Otherness” produced by Orientalist discourse. Miki’s soundings in Tokyo, I argue, initiate his wider project as a poet. It is in Tokyo that he is first called to negotiate his particular place as a racialized subject, and it is through his soundings of Tokyo that his own exploratory, innovative poetic project is developed.
Canadian Literature issue 244, Sensing Different Worlds, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.
Returns: Author Spotlight – Forum Authors
September 15, 2021
Forum: Smaro Kamboureli’s Scandalous Bodies at Twenty
Paul Barrett
Paul Barrett is an Assistant Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph where he teaches Canadian Literature and Digital Humanities. He is the author of Blackening Canada: Diaspora, Race, Multiculturalism and the editor of ‘Membering Austin Clarke. His current research project considers the history of humanism in Canadian literature from the 1850s to the present.
Articles
“Introduction: A New Set of Questions” & “New Correspondence”
Myra Bloom
Myra Bloom is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at York University’s Glendon College, where she teaches Canadian and modern literature. Her current book project, Evasive Maneuvers, examines women’s confessional writing practices in Canada.
Article
“Scandalous Bodies at Twenty: An Interview with Smaro Kamboureli”
Malissa Phung
Malissa Phung is honoured and privileged to live and work as an uninvited guest on the territories of the Huron-Wendat, Mississauga, Haudenosaunee, and Anishinaabe peoples. She is a second-generation settler descendant of Sino-Vietnamese refugees who have resettled on the territories of the Cree, Blackfoot, Métis, Nakoda, and Tongva peoples.
Article
Andrea Davis
Andrea A. Davis is Associate Professor in Black Cultures of the Americas in the Department of Humanities at York University. She holds cross-appointments in the graduate programs in English; Interdisciplinary Studies; and Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies. Her research focuses on the literary productions of Black women in the Americas. She is particularly interested in the intersections of the literatures of the Caribbean, the United States, and Canada, and her work encourages an intertextual cross-cultural dialogue about Black women’s experiences in diaspora. She is the author of the forthcoming Horizon, Sea, Sound: A Cultural Critique of the Nation.
Article
“Which Scandalous Bodies? Black Women Writers Refuse Nation Narratives”
Asha Varadharajan
Asha Varadharajan is Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University in Canada. She is the author of Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak. Her current research reconceptualizes the category of the refugee and the realm of “refugeedom.” Her most recent publications comment on the crisis of the humanities, the subaltern in contemporaneity, violence against women and the discourse of human rights, decolonizing pedagogy, postcolonial temporalities, humanitarian intervention, and the legacy of the Frankfurt School. The most fun she has had writing was while composing her entry on Eric Idle for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The most chuffed she has been lately was when she received the Queen’s University 2021 Principal’s Promoting Student Inquiry Teaching Award.
Article
“Justice, Not Identity: What a Woke Multiculturalism Looks Like”
Sarah Dowling
Sarah Dowling is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Victoria College at the University of Toronto. A literary critic as well as a poet, Sarah is the author of Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood under Settler Colonialism, as well as Entering Sappho, DOWN, and Security Posture.
Article
“Grief, Bodies, and the Production of Vulnerability”
Kit Dobson
Kit Dobson is a Professor at Mount Royal University. He is most recently a co-editor of the books Dissonant Methods: Undoing Discipline in the Humanities Classroom and All the Feels / Tous les sens: Affect and Writing in Canada / Affect et écriture au Canada (both U of Alberta P, 2020).
Article
“The Scandal of Bodies: Scandalous Bodies at Twenty”
Libe García Zarranz
Libe García Zarranz is Associate Professor of Literature in English in the Department of Teacher Education at NTNU (Norway), working at the intersection of feminist and trans writing in Canada and affect studies. She is also Research Affiliate for the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta. She is the author of TransCanadian Feminist Fictions: New Cross-Border Ethics (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017). In 2018, she co-edited a special issue on affect and feminist literary production for Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture and Social Justice. Her article “Feeling Sideways: Shani Mootoo and Kai Cheng Thom’s Sustainable Affects” appeared in the University of Toronto Quarterly (2020).
Article
“2020 and All’s Well: On Positionality, Transtemporality, and Scandalous Bodies”
Smaro Kamboureli
Smaro Kamboureli is the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. The author of Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada, winner of the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Literary Criticism, she has edited and co-edited many volumes. Her most recent publications include her article “Diaspora” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature; a bilingual English/Italian edition of her 1985 poetry book, in the second person, in seconda persona; and the co-edited special issue “Literary Solidarities / Critical Accountability: A Mikinaakominis / TransCanadas Special Issue” of the University of Toronto Quarterly to which she has contributed an introduction, “Literary Solidarities: ‘Should I be here?’”
Canadian Literature issue 243, Returns, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.
Returns: Author Spotlight – Botao Wu
September 8, 2021
Botao Wu received his doctoral degree in Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He has published traditional academic articles and poems in North America and Asia. He is a poet and academic researcher, doing research both creatively and critically. Currently, he is searching for a home, in a non-religious and apolitical way.
Opinions & Notes Title
“A Narrative Inquiry in Search of My Home”
Abstract
I write about my ordinary life to reconstitute my life, to express my regard for my ancestors, and to search for a home. I explore the notion of home in five dimensions: my actual home, my rented home, my intellectual home, my emotional home, and my spiritual home. This narrative inquiry concludes that a human being’s home is not terrestrial but cosmic and spiritual.
Canadian Literature issue 243, Returns, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.
Returns: Author Spotlight – Clayton Longstaff
September 1, 2021
Clayton Longstaff is a writer of poetry and prose currently in the process of completing his first chapbook. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in publications including Soliloquies Anthology, Spadina Literary Review, Contemporary Verse 2, Prism and elsewhere. In addition to writing, Clayton works as a childcare support worker. Visit him virtually at claytonlongstaff.com or in person on the unceded territory of the Lekwungen & W̱SÁNEĆ nations.
His poem “Gesture” can be read on our website at https://canlit.ca/article/gesture/.
Canadian Literature issue 243, Returns, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.
Returns: Author Spotlight – Thomas Hodd
August 25, 2021
Thomas Hodd is an Associate Professor of English at Université de Moncton. His recent publications include Mary Melville, the Psychic: A Critical Edition (2019) as well as an article on English-language women poets for Parallel Universe: the Poetries of New Brunswick (2018). He is also editor of A Soldier’s Place: the War Stories of Will R. Bird (2018).
Article
“A Casualty of Genre: The War Short Stories of Will R. Bird”
Abstract
With the recent re-issuing of works by Canadian war writer, Will R. Bird, scholars are being invited to reconsider his contribution to Canadian war literature of the inter-war period. Although chiefly known for his soldier-memoir, And We Go On (1930), Bird also knew considerable success as a writer of war short stories. Building on Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the short story as a “fragment or excerpt of a life,” as well as the genre’s displacement of time in favour of other narratological considerations, this introductory essay to Bird’s war short story corpus examines a handful of representative stories in order to illustrate how he privileged the humanity and brotherhood of soldiers over their combat deeds. As a result, Bird’s short stories functioned as a form aesthetic therapeutics for the thousands of veteran readers who not only identified with the situations he described, but also with the emotional and psychological turmoil of his soldier protagonists.
Canadian Literature issue 243, Returns, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.
Returns: Author Spotlight – Neil Surkan
August 18, 2021
Neil Surkan is the author of the poetry collections Unbecoming (forthcoming Fall 2021) and On High (2018), both from McGill-Queen’s University Press, and the chapbooks Their Queer Tenderness (Knife-Fork-Book, 2020) and Super, Natural (Anstruther Press, 2017). He lives in Calgary.
His poem “Pathetic” can be read on our website at https://canlit.ca/article/pathetic/.
Canadian Literature issue 243, Returns, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.
Returns: Author Spotlight – Vikki Visvis
August 11, 2021
Vikki Visvis is a lecturer for the Department of English at the University of Toronto, where she teaches Canadian literature. She has published on Canadian and American fiction by Elizabeth Hay, Eden Robinson, Joseph Boyden, Kerri Sakamoto, Dionne Brand, David Bergen, Michael Ondaatje, and Toni Morrison in Canadian Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature, Mosaic, ARIEL, and African American Review.
Article
“Deaf Canada: Disability Discourses and National Constructs in Frances Itani’s Deafening”
Abstract
Although the historical realism of Frances Itani’s Deafening offers accurate representations of Deaf people and communities excluded from the nation on the basis of stigmatized bodily difference, the novel simultaneously engages in subtle historical revisionism by mobilizing disability discourses to suggest deafness as able-bodied is foundational to Canada’s national identity in the early twentieth century. Specifically, Itani’s novel uses its central deaf character, Grania, as a national allegory to reimagine the nation as highly able—whether through a critique of silence as deficit, a challenge to the separation of the senses, or the rehabilitation of the wounded World War One soldier—that changes the contours of the nation in ways which unsettle strict historical realism. The novel, therefore, offers a revised model of the Canadian nation, premised on the Deaf, that is inclusive, not exclusive, of difference.
Canadian Literature issue 243, Returns, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.
Returns: Author Spotlight – John Reibetanz
August 4, 2021
John Reibetanz lives in Toronto. His twelfth collection, By Hand, was published by Brick Books in 2019, and his latest collection, Earth Words: Conversing with Three Sages, is forthcoming from McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2021. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming from Grain, The Windsor Review, and The Antigonish Review.
His Poem “Song and Dance” can be read on our website at https://canlit.ca/article/song-and-dance-2/.
Canadian Literature issue 243, Returns, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.