Entangled Environments

In a recent special issue of Canadian Literature on the theme of poetics and extraction, editors Max Karpinski and Melanie Unrau draw attention to “Canada as referring, always problematically, to the land on and with which we live, the settler-colonial nation-state, and an ideological cultural project” (5). Considering Canada as an ongoing colonial and ideological environment, they ask: “[I]n what ways might cultural production and scholarship in the field of ‘Canadian literature’ address the unfolding, intensifying, and deeply entangled environmental and social crises that mark the present moment?” (5). They approach environment through a focus on extractivism, which perceives “not only so-called inanimate resources such as furs and oil but also Indigenous, Black, and People of Colour as extractible” (7). To counter extractivism, which they deem tied to racial capitalism and colonialism, Karpinski and Unrau engage with the pieces in their special issue for how they “contribute to envisioning good, nonextractive ways of living and being in relation” (8). The five articles in this general issue take up the particularities of environment quite differently, addressing place in terms of labour newspaper circulation, rural homosocial community, labour protests, mediated nature, and transnational poetic networks. And yet, each article also engages with the question of what it means to “live and be in relation” in these particular environments.

Our first two articles explore the new relationships of labour and care that can emerge despite hostile social or imaginative environments. Billy Johnson’s “The Maritime Labor Herald (1921–1926) and the Genealogy of Socialist Feminism in Canada” turns to a communist labour newspaper from the 1920s to trace a feminist genealogy of socialism in Canada. Contending that the paper’s Women’s Column speaks to a translocal, heterosocial history of radical organizing in North America, Johnson provides valuable insights into the kinds of literary, publishing, and editing contributions by women in this period, and the ways these contributions highlight the importance of feminist, socialist textual communities that thrived—however briefly—in spite of the hostile environment of patriarchal capitalism. Gemma Marr’s “‘we’se’ll stick togedder always’: Male Desire in Frank Parker Day’s Rockbound” also attends to the interwar Maritimes. Examining the novel Rockbound (1928) for its depictions of the intimacies between male characters in a rural fishing village, Marr strives to read the novel in terms of queer desire without resorting either to a language of authenticity or to the cultural scripts that marry authenticity with established, culturally legible codes of homosexuality. Paying careful attention to the romantic friendship at the novel’s core, Marr argues that the story’s generic, heterosexual marriage plots are less signs that such communities were unwilling to accept queer relations, and more signs that “Day worried his readers [might] judge these interactions harshly” (20).

In “‘Bloody Sore’: Eugenic Rhetoric and the Production of the Universal Worker in Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage,” Valerie Uher reads Baird’s Waste Heritage (1939) for its depictions of labour struggles in Vancouver and on Vancouver Island. In contrast to Johnson and Marr, Uher invites us to consider the ethics and consequences of an author who neither resists nor anticipates but creates a hostile imaginative environment and projects it onto a radical history of left labour organization in Western Canada. Noting that Baird strove to write her subjects objectively and authentically, Uher nevertheless argues that the novel ultimately offers a eugenic logic of labour, with Baird critiquing striking and malcontent workers as falling short of an ableist ideal of productivity. Although Waste Heritage has enjoyed a (sometimes ambivalent) reputation for sympathy and evenhandedness, Uher concludes that Baird finally envisions society as best served not by justice, but by a cure.

Our fourth and fifth articles turn to the fostering of creative and natural environments across boundaries. Zane Koss’s “Margaret Randall and Transnational Domestic Space: Translating George Bowering in El corno emplumado” examines the publication and translation of George Bowering’s poetry in Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondrag.n’s magazine, El corno emplumado. Operating out of Randall and Mondrag.n’s home in Mexico City, the magazine sought to foster a transnational, bilingual community of artists and writers in the 1960s. While this network operated in the private, domestic sphere rather than the normative, public one, it was still shaped by the patriarchal order. The Randall-Mondrag.n home’s porous boundary between masculinized publicity and feminized domesticity reveals that, as Koss argues, “[t]he very conditions for such poetic communities are precisely this—the invisible and unacknowledged labour of often racialized women working in the ongoing wake of colonial, racial, sexual, and other forms of violence and exploitation” (17).

In our fifth article, “The Media of Environmental Listening in Don McKay’s Songs for the Songs of Birds,” Joel Deshaye considers Don McKay’s audiobook, Songs for the Songs of Birds (2008), in relation to Murray Schafer’s Patria Cycle for what they illuminate about the politics of environmentalism and the media of listening. The boundaries in question ostensibly divide both species and nature-culture, as McKay plays with recordings and imitations of birdsong at the intersection of natural soundscape and technological artifice. By drawing on Dylan Robinson’s critique of emplacement and concept of “guest listening,” Deshaye reads McKay’s idea of poetic attention as offering a “critical listening positionality” that encourages the reader to consider the artistic affordances of more-than-human nature in the age of digital reproduction (11).

Finally, we return to the Maritimes with Sarah Dorward’s Opinions & Notes contribution, “A Working Bibliography of Texts by May Agnes Fleming.” Expanding upon earlier accounts of Fleming’s prodigious textual output, Dorward traces the intracontinental and transatlantic distribution of licit and illicit editions of Fleming’s work. The resulting updated bibliography and accompanying short essay resonate with many of the larger themes across this issue: Fleming’s literary and commercial success as a female author arose both from her own creativity, productivity, and market savvy, and from publishers’ and printers’ exploitation of legal loopholes that left Fleming without remuneration but not, Dorward argues, without long-term gain.

Read together, Billy Johnson, Gemma Marr, Valerie Uher, Zane Koss, Joel Deshaye, and Sarah Dorward move us through not only nearly a century of Canadian literature, but also take us from one coast of Canada to the other and beyond, to Mexico City and London. Within this broad geographical and temporal expanse, the contributors in this general issue focus on writers and texts that have had major impacts on the Canadian literary landscape, whether by generating debates among literary and cultural critics or helping to grow writing communities. Canadian scholars, institutions, and publics have occasionally recognized these works and their writers: by bestowing the Governor General’s Award for Poetry on George Bowering and Don McKay, crowning Frank Parker Day’s Rockbound the winner of the Canada Reads competition in 2005, creating courses and research clusters on women’s print culture, and making Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage the subject of much scrutiny within scholarly discussions of Canadian modernism and labour struggles. But at other times, as these articles remind us, these same texts and authors have experienced fallow periods in which much less attention was devoted to them. The authors in this issue return to these texts with a shared preoccupation with environments—newsprint, rural, labour, domestic, and natural—and the legibility of bodies within them. In considering the interactions between bodies and environments, the articles draw attention to different forms of power, systems of representations, and multiple forms of engagement.

In navigating these diverse socio-geographical and natural/simulated environments, our contributors also examine dynamics of imbalanced relation through the lenses of socialist feminism, queer desire, eugenics, gender, and technology. To borrow Mel Chen’s language, we can see these relations in terms of “deep mutual entanglement” (3). In Intoxicated, Chen’s focus is directed towards the relations between race and disability, noting that “the nexus” is one that “vibrates, has vibrated, quite resoundingly” (3). I turn to Chen’s work in part because I’m interested in how they frame relations to environments, and also in part because of how they write about these framings. Chen offers a model for approaching histories without seeking to clearly define and encapsulate thoughts, instead reflecting on intimacies and how sites and systems are affected and rearranged. Honouring this desire to hold onto the slipperiness of concepts requires resisting scholarly tendencies to pin down ideas and offer them up to readers as discrete definitions. And while I find this sometimes frustrating as a reader, I also appreciate the honesty of this scholarship that lays out the complexity of ideas and encounters as it engages with their instability. This honesty extends to what is referred to as a method of encounter; Chen shares memories of an awkward, racially tinged encounter with an archivist that occurred before they entered an archive central to the writing of Intoxicated and reflects on how this encounter influenced the research that they were conducting. Such encounters within institutional, let alone colonial archives, are far from rare, but it is rare for such impressions to become part of the scholarship that is produced from these spaces. Instead of sharing this experience only with a handful of friends and colleagues, Chen writes the affective conditions of research into Intoxicated, and thus illustrates the “difference between editing and editing out” (21).

I find Intoxicated provocative for how it makes transparent the processes of writing and thinking as it brings to light the autobiographical traces of how we arrive at our research and the questions we encounter on the way to writing and editing a piece of work. This transparency includes moments in Intoxicated when Chen explains that they know the reader may hold certain expectations at a particular moment in the book, but that they have deliberately decided not to fulfill these expectations and chosen instead to take a different path (23). By reflecting on the writing process and also the decisions made throughout, Chen offers a method of writing useful for reflecting upon the changing shape of literary and cultural criticism. In addition to tracing the shifting shape of scholarly fields, such a method of writing makes visible the investments, intentions, and resistances of a writer as they ask particular questions or refrain from following conventions. For the field of Canadian literature, being more open with our own conditions of scholarly writing could help as we think through the constant reshaping of Canadian literary production and understand why certain texts draw readers at particular moments in time, only to be discarded as uninteresting or irrelevant at others.

Works Cited

Chen, Mel. Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy Across Empire. Duke UP, 2023.

Karpinski, Max, and Melanie Unrau. “Editorial: Poetics and Extraction.” Poetics and Extraction, special issue of Canadian

Literature, no. 251, 2022, pp. 5–12.