We are pleased to congratulate the winner of the 2014 Canadian Literature Essay Prize, Sam McKegney, for his article “‘pain, pleasure, shame. Shame’: Masculine Embodiment, Kinship, and Indigenous Reterritorialization” in Canadian Literature #215.
Jury Citation: In focusing “on the coerced alienation of Indigenous men from their own bodies by colonial technologies such as residential schooling,” Sam McKegney makes an eloquent case for seeing how this work “served and serves the goal of colonial dispossession.” Indeed, he suggests these “coercive alienations lay at the very core of the Canadian nation-building project.” McKegney raises vital questions about reintegration and deterritorialization as well as about the ways in which settler scholarship may engage with and honour the testimony of residential school survivors.
Honorable mention goes to David Williams, for his article “Spectres of Time: Seeing Ghosts in Will Bird’s Memoirs and Abel Gance’s J’accuse” in Canadian Literature #219.
Jury Citation: David Williams’ “Spectres of Time” is about ghosts in machines. Comparing Will Bird’s First World War memoir, How We Go On (1930), with Abel Gance’s silent film, J’Accuse (1919), it traces a series of psychological and artistic inversions:
- the invasion of modern military technology by the technology of film;
- the invasion of trench warfare by uncanny apparitions, as reported by soldiers;
- the invasion of these spirits through the artifice of silent cinema into a hallucinatory temporality evoking a new intensity of mourning.
This is a sophisticated and interdisciplinary study: clearly written, clearly argued, provocative, and always engaging.
Our thanks to ACQL for allowing us to make the announcement at their reception, to the judges—Cecily Devereux, Jon Kertzer, Patricia Merivale, Linda Morra, Laura Moss, and Deena Rhyms—who thoughtfully assessed the essay nominations, and especially to Linda Morra for chairing the panel.