Theory Is Not a Luxury: Literary Studies, Sociology, and Minoritarian Critique
There Is No Bentham Street in Calgary: Panoptic Discourses and Thomas King’s Medicine River
There’s Got to Be Some Wrenching and Slashing: Horror and Retrospection in Alice Munro’s “Fits”
These Shared Truths
These Shared Truths: Taking Back Our Spirits and the Literary-Critical Practice of Decolonization
The original live forum on Jo-Ann Episkenew’s Taking Back Our Spirits: Indigenous Literature, Public Policy, and Healing brought together the author of only the second monograph by an Indigenous literary critic in Canada with three critics, who discussed her recently published work in front of members of the Canadian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (CACLALS) and the Association of Bibliotherapy and Applied Literatures (IABAL). Following the live event, the panelists submitted written versions of their contributions to the convenors of the forum, allowing all centrally involved to reflect further on the thoughts of the other panelists and of those in the audience who offered further ideas.
They Shall Have Arcana
This Issue Is Not Ended: Canadian Poetry & the Spanish Civil War
Thomas Haliburton & Travel Books About America
Thomas King’s National Literary Celebrity and the Cultural Ambassadorship of a Native Canadian Writer
Although Thomas King has never been called a literary celebrity in the popular press or in critical work, his negotiations with the landscape of Canadian cultural production are freighted with questions of public visibility, subjective authenticity, literary canonization, and national consecration. His literary works are readily appropriated by the nation even as he publicly takes on radically resistant notions of national legitimacy and belonging. This essay is located at the intersection of celebrity studies, critical race theory, and CanLit and argues that King’s position as a national literary celebrity gives us an opportunity to explore the nation’s complex and ambiguous appointment of the “cultural ambassador” and the particular success and visibility that King and his work maintain in Canada. It concludes that through his management of his celebrity image, King offers a critique of identity politics as the schema of Canadian cultural production.