History in The Second Scroll
Abstract: ONE METHOD OF UNRAVELLING The Second Scroll is to examine the beginning of “Gloss Aleph,” Klein’s “Autobiographical,” for it con- ...
History versus Geography in Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
Abstract: Perhaps no text published in the last ten years qualifies as a better example of “historiographic metafiction” than Wayne Johnston’s ...
History, Memory, Home: An Exchange with M. G. Vassanji
Abstract: SF: I want to begin by talking about your 1999 novel Amriika, which certainly seemed like a departure from your ...
Holding Home Together: Katherene Vermette’s The Break
Abstract: This article reads Métis writer Katherena Vermette's 2016 novel The Break in order to examine urban Indigenous women's resilience in relation to understanding of home. As the women in this text gather around young Emily, who has endured a violent sexual attack, they embody a strength that resides in their kinship as well as in interconnected conceptions of home. This reading is significant given the issue of violence against Indigenous women and girls in Canada, as well as the growing numbers of Indigenous people finding home in cities. As a Métis woman, I also read this text through my own experience. Through these analyses, this paper contends that portrayals of strong Indigenous women can help to shift dominant understandings of Indigenous people, making space for Indigenous women's well-being in urban spaces. This article offers a timely and Métis-focused consideration of Vermette's novel.
Home “[H]eart-sweet” Homeland: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s Domestic Decolonial Literary Methodology
Abstract: Building on Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s argument that Anishinaabe women’s personal experience can constitute a critical methodology (2017), this article contends that nineteenth-century Ojibwe poet and storyteller Jane Johnston Schoolcraft applies domestic experiences related to her Ojibwe culture as a decolonial methodology in her writing. This methodology corresponds with the criticism of contemporary Indigenous feminist scholars who write about the impact of colonialism on Indigenous women, their homes, and their families (see Anderson 2010; Goeman 2009, 2013; Huhndorf and Suzack 2010; and Lajimodiere 2013). By interweaving the home, Ojibwe knowledges, and Euro-Western literatures in writings that speak to her role as a host for European tourists, settler travellers, and government officials, Johnston Schoolcraft engages what Ann Laura Stoler terms colonial hierarchies of credibility (2009) in an Indigenous feminist framework to reconceptualize Indigenous and settler relationships in the Great Lakes region.
Home Truths
Abstract: Is ONE’S BIRTHPLACE CANAAN, or the land that God gave Cain? Every writer born in the Maritimes must answer that ...
Hosting the Crosser: Janette Turner Hospital’s Borderline
Abstract: The article layers out the different vectors converging on the U.S.-Canadian border in JT Hospital’s Borderline. Hospital anatomises the space of the border as a complex site of collision between and among different narratives and laws (or the absence of them). Drawing from Julia Kristeva, Giorgio Agamben, and Emanuel Levinas, the article claims that the border is the site of abjection as well as exception, the space that produces the figure of the homo sacer. At the same time, the geopolitical boundary is the stage of an act of unconditional hospitality towards an unnamed immigrant woman. Through their hospitable response, however, Hospital’s protagonists turn into persecuted guests. Thus the writer shows the blurry boundaries of concepts such as refugee, host, guest, as she illustrates how the stable narration of a country is disrupted by a flexible border.
How “The Studhorse Man” Makes Love: A Post-Feminist Analysis
Abstract: ROBERT KROETSCH IS A WRITER who “effs” the ineffable. He “screws up” or parodies our attempts to speak (of) a ...
Howard O’Hagan’s “Tay John”: Making New World Myth
Abstract: S’ITTING IN THE ROCKIES in the fall of 1913, Rupert Brooke reflected on the differences between the Old World and ...
Howells’ Canadian Sister
Abstract: IN MARCH OF 1873, William Dean Howells wrote to his younger sister Annie to discourage her from making a short ...