Deadline: March 31, 2025 (Pacific Time)
Submission length: 3,000-5,000 words (including works cited and notes)
Guest Editors: Smaro Kamboureli (University of Toronto)
If man is ever to solve the problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.
Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man
Leanne, I’m with you here: we deserve forms of homespace that allow life, in all of its forms, to proliferate. This belief—a shared politic—is what grounds my solidarity with you and yours. It is not contingent on reciprocity. I will forever choose to align, politically, with those who would continue to work toward liberated territories, bodies, lives, and homespaces, in whatever form that takes. Against any form of governance that relies on land dispossession, that renders some of us criminal, alien, or forced to the constitutive outside of belonging.
I believe in forging a shared politic.
Robyn Maynard to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rehearsals for Living
Solidarity: Aesthetics, Politics, Pedagogies aims at examining how solidarity as a product of imagination and praxis might help scholars address the incommensurability of conflicts inside and outside texts as well as inside and outside the classroom and academia at large. Although it is famously difficult to theorize solidarity or describe it as lived experience, it is commonly understood as a condition of relationality and intersectionality—being in relation with different human and non-human communities. Historically considered a response to crisis, especially in the arenas of politics and labour relations, solidarity promises transformation in the name of justice. Yet it can also find itself mired in ambiguity, moral complicity, even controversy. Thus, engendered by and responsive to crisis, solidarity responds to vulnerability, but can also become vulnerable itself (Kamboureli 2).
This special issue invites contributions that focus on the analytic value of solidarity as the prism through which we situate ourselves in academia as teachers, critics, students, or administrators, especially during times marked by competing calls for solidarity. Here, aesthetics is offered not in its Kantian sense of aesthetic disinterestedness, but in relation to the term’s Greek origin, namely, aesthesis (αισθησης), meaning perception through the senses, feeling, affect, sensation, lived and imagined experience. In this light, the aesthetic is what brings together the individual and community, and it is through this alliance that it can engage with politics. If solidarity is to gesture toward emancipatory politics, it needs, to evoke Roy Miki, “an aesthetics that both acknowledges the colonialism embedded in Canadian cultural nationalism and draws attention to a ‘present-tense’ relationship to the lands that were appropriated” (164).
This special issue welcomes single-authored or collaborative scholarly articles, but also submissions that push against the boundaries of conventional academic writing by blending, for example, the theoretical and the autoethnographic. The contributions need not be limited to the study of literature or to the present moment. The topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Professing literature and criticism while being engaged with or remaining mindful of the crises outside the classroom at any given moment
- Reading texts, literary or not, that transform rather than represent the world
- Inscriptions of solidarity in literatures in Canada
- Discursive formations and practices of solidarity, especially in relation to academia
- Influences on your decision to teach or not to teach “difficult” texts (e.g., texts that may trigger various kinds of discomfort)
- Negotiating your sense of bearing witness and accountability with the heterotopic spaces of the classroom or social media
- Whether solidarity can be fostered pedagogically
- Negotiating different “regimes” of attention and engagement
- The pleasures and perils of declaring, or not declaring, solidarity
- Solidarity, unspoken threats, and the culture of intimidation
- From empathy to solidarity
- Solidarity with/between specific communities
- Collective and individual expressions as practices of solidarity in relation to cultural production
- What to do with “ugly feelings” (Sianne Ngai) in texts and/or classrooms, committee rooms, public assemblies, etc.
- Performing social justice, woke culture, and/or cancel culture on or off the campus
- The ethics, politics, and aesthetics of vulnerability
- Reflections on supporting, or just visiting, or staying away from, a pro-Palestinian student encampment
- The aesthetics of pro-Palestinian student encampments and/or the aesthetics of pro-Israeli presence on campus
- The Palestinian exception (suppressing Palestinian advocacy) on campuses
- Solidarity and the politics and aesthetics of visuality
- The aesthetics, politics, and limits of EDI policies
Submission Guidelines
Submissions should be sent online through our Open Journal Systems (OJS) portal.
All submissions to Canadian Literature must be original, unpublished work. Essays should follow current MLA bibliographic format (MLA Handbook, 9th ed.).
Please limit images accompanying submissions to those receiving substantial attention in the article. Contributors will be required to obtain permission to reproduce images in their article and pay for any permission costs. The journal will provide a template for permission requests; such requests must be completed before publication. Please send high-quality images as separate attachments along with your article file.
For full submission guidelines, please visit canlit.ca/submissions.
Contact Us
Please feel free to contact the journal editor, Christine Kim (cl.editor@ubc.ca), or the special issue guest editor, Smaro Kamboureli (smaro.kamboureli@utoronto.ca), to discuss ideas ahead of time. General questions about the special issue may be directed to can.lit@ubc.ca.
Works Cited
Kamboureli, Smaro. “Introduction I: Literary Solidarities: ‘Should I Be Here?’” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 89, no. 1, winter 2020, pp. 1–22.
Miki, Roy. “Afterword: Roy Kiyooka as/in Tom Thomson.” The Artist and the Moose: A Fable of Forget, by Roy K. Kiyooka, LINEbooks, 2009, pp. 135–77.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard UP, 2005.