History x Literature

In an interview with Christopher Lee featured in this issue, renowned author Paul Yee says, “archives will never provide the answers to all our questions—and that is why we need fiction” (46). I find Yee’s assertion to be a provocative one for how it frames the relations between history and literature, and how it raises questions about what we hope to learn by reading and writing historical fiction. For Lee and Yee, historical documents are prompts to engage with the complexity of Chinese Canadian lifeworlds, whose messiness and discomforts often contradict the fantasies of ethical, and even heroic, behaviour we want to ascribe to early migrants. Archives, within their incomplete records, offer entry points into historical imaginings, but ones that come with formal problems. Lee raises the question of how these stories of Chinese Canadian pasts can be written when he shares that, in the classroom, “I often tell my students that some writers have to reinvent their entire narrative language and form in order to tell a story properly,” or to better capture a time period (49).

Many of the other contributions to this issue also offer ways of rethinking the ways in which history and literature inform each other. By turning to Indigenous literatures and languages, diasporic writing, and canonical Canadian literature, the essays and forum pose generative questions about the reading, writing, and teaching of Canadian literatures and histories. The essays by Allison Hargreaves, Johanna Lederer, Cara Schwartz, and David Kootnikoff can be read as engaging in a dialogue about positionality, settler-colonial projects, and Indigenous literatures and histories. Hargreaves’ contribution grapples with how the teaching of Indigenous literatures and settler-colonial histories are two related, but different, projects. While they are often assumed to be intertwined, she reveals how their goals are often at odds with each other. Her essay offers many valuable insights about positionality and pedagogical projects, the need to interrogate assumptions about the linearity of time and the appearance of progress, and the need “to move beyond instrumental and merely content-based modes of inclusion in order to embody more radically relational forms of understanding and accountability” (70). Schwartz also foregrounds questions of positionality in her scholarship, as she opens by thinking about the relations between individuals and wholes through Robin Kimmerer’s metaphors of baskets and braids. The braid offers a powerful means of engaging with the importance and challenges of connectivity, given the degree of tension required to produce a braid. Noting that parts of strands are tucked away in a braid and therefore not visible to the eye, she shares that as a settler scholar, part of her reading practice is to acknowledge there are readings that she does not have access to. Kootnikoff also contributes to these topics by turning to Michael Ondaatje’s celebrated In the Skin of a Lion, rereading it through the lens of settler colonialism. He frames the novel in terms of the debates around multiculturalism that marked its publication, observing that both the novel and the Multiculturalism Act share a tendency to render invisible Indigenous peoples, and that the novel uses the conventions of romance to “normalize Indigenous dispossession” (146). Lederer’s essay explores Indigenous language revitalization, and examines the teaching and learning of Indigenous languages as land-based knowledges and localized practices. While the other pieces in this issue direct our attention towards the intersection of literature and histories, Lederer reframes this nexus in terms of futurity. She argues, via a reading of Chelsea Vowel’s futurist writing, that, “[a]t the core of Indigenous future imaginaries, the presence of Indigenous languages in the future speaks to the future presence of Indigenous people, stories, and knowledges” (94–95).

The forum on islands also adds to this exploration of history and literature, querying which histories are central to our conceptions of Canadian literary studies and how this centrality influences the framing of the field. Guy Beauregard, Eva Darias-Beautell, Cornel Bogle, and Joanne Leow advocate for conceptualizing Canadian literature in terms of islands, rather than in terms of a nation-state, by demonstrating the kinds of questions such an analytic is capable of yielding. Collectively, they engage with Indigeneity, colonialism, transnationality, diaspora, spatiality, and global capitalism, concepts that have long been central to Canadian literary studies. In the introduction to the forum, Guy Beauregard invokes Pacific poet and scholar Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa’s call to use island as a verb, rather than a noun, in order to “develop what might be called ‘islanding’ perspectives” (10). To engage with island as it acts, rather than is acted upon, he argues, “has profound ethical implications for how we might learn to relearn received notions of
which places, which spaces, and whose stories matter” (10). Beauregard’s own contribution to the forum examines Jessica J. Lee’s non-fiction for how it writes Taiwan’s ecology from the perspective of a Taiwanese diaspora in Canada and, moreover, how the distance between these sites produces problems of knowledge production and interpretation. Extending Teaiwa’s method, he writes that, “[b]y thinking of ‘island’ as a verb, we may learn to attend more carefully to the often violent impacts of such motion and their varied aftermaths in Taiwan and Canada and beyond” (41). Eva Darius-Beautell adds another important layer to this exploration of island as Canadian literary method by offering a critique of imperialism from the Canary Islands. This is a positioning that enables her to move through the interlinked problems of global tourism, green capitalism, and social injustice via Michael Christie’s novel Greenwood. Cornel Bogle argues that if we think of the island “as more than a physical space—as a critical lens—scholars can engage in the grouping and reinterpretation of texts that defy conventional categorization” (20). As he considers how Caribbean Canadian literature is positioned within the field of Canadian literature, Bogle traces how islands are central to conceptions of modernity and, in turn, Canada’s sense of self. And finally, Joanne Leow’s contribution positions Canada in relation to Singapore, highlighting diaspora, settlement, migration, and imperialism as connective tissue with site-specific histories. She situates islands within the context of colonialism and Canadian literature in order to trace the material and conceptual histories of islands through literary traditions that include Wayde Compton, E. Pauline Johnson, and Lee Maracle, and via practices of resource extraction, transportation across pipelines and waterways, and labour migration. Their dialogue reveals what is at stake in the angle at which we approach these histories, as well as the methodologies we employ to analyze them. Taken together, these essays and forum contributions push us to reflect upon the stories we construct about the past and the histories we routinely draw upon, the conventions that guide these storytelling practices, and our positionality as teachers, writers, and readers.