Articles

Abstract: West Coast poet Jeff Derksen is a leading critic of the relationship between neoliberalism and culture and literature in Canada, but his engagement with neoliberalism extends to his creative work as well, particularly his 2003 poetry collection Transnational Muscle Cars. Drawing on examples from across the range of the collection, this article examines how—for all its hyper-referential elusiveness, ambivalence, and ambiguity—a key part of the texture of Transnational Muscle Cars is an incisive grappling with the economic, political, cultural and existential dimensions of the neoliberal order.

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Abstract:

In sybil unrest, Rita Wong and Larissa Lai bring the techniques of avant-garde formalism and the sensibility of the transnational subject together in their project to "re-subject" the "i." Their book-length poem is a sharp critique of twenty-first century local-global scales of capital flow that provocatively proposes the figure of the Asian female body as a more robust figure of humanist universality than, say, Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. This playful provocation is not quite a call to a representational coup, but an illumination of the cultural specificity of wholisms underwriting discourses of species and interspecies interaction. In their pursuit of a strategy of ethical (self)-representation,Wong and Lai fortuitously produce a critique of “human” as the species and identity category whose ideological underpinnings inform and are informed by Euro- and androcentric post-Enlightenment humanist values. Ultimately, Wong and Lai propose political action as occurring at the moments where the subject literally composes herself—nutrionally, affectively and narratively—as living material.

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Abstract: Though many discussions of diaspora emphasize metaphors of mobility, Brand’s Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging uses moments of fixity and excess to think through the epistemological and embodied effects of the history and ongoing effects of slavery and to challenge the limitations of dominant readings of these approaches. To make this argument, I read Map in relation to auto/biography studies to see the parallel ways in which it emphasizes the importance of “illegitimate” sites of knowledge, but I then move to emphasize the moments that the text exceeds the genre of auto/biography when Brand moves to write about larger scale histories and memories to which she would not have literal access, but to which she certainly has experiential access. Relatedly, I consider the ways that the text uses fixity to emphasize how histories are written on the body, whether they were directly experienced or not.

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Abstract: A child’s positive attitude towards his surrounding environment, as Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd express in their collection on children’s culture and ecocriticism, becomes crucial in the act of environmental planning and activism; and this paper will explore that very connection by following the Canadian child figure’s growth to maturity in Québécoise writer Monique Proulx’s Wildlives. By tracing the formative moments in young Jérémie’s environmental experience, the personal change and self-discovery he undergoes deeply informs the role he will be inspired to take up as an adult—to become a caretaker of nature through the act of conservation. In understanding his connection with his surrounding environment, Jérémie’s emergent feelings of responsibility towards the natural world accentuates the powerful hold the wild places of childhood can have on our sense of self, sense of place, and sense of duty to the very bioregion that shapes those ideas.

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Abstract: This article addresses inner-city Métis and Indigenous Masculinities in Métis novelist, documentary filmmaker, and poet Katherena Vermette’s The Break. The critical reception of Vermette’s novel has focused on the strength and resilience of the women in the text. While this novel primarily focalizes Indigenous and Métis women, Vermette is also interested in masculinity, and in articulating ways of being male that will allow Indigenous and Métis women not to need to be as strong and resilient. Vermette rejects models of Indigenous and Métis masculinity that focus on perceived deficits in Indigenous and Métis men while showing the impacts of “good men” on Indigenous women. She contrasts this with the impact of toxic settler masculinities, masculinities that create fragility. In this way, this is a novel about masculinity and the North End of Winnipeg, and the way that growing up in living in the North End complicate Indigenous and Métis masculinity.

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Abstract: The Governor General’s Literary Awards were created in 1936 and run by the Canadian Authors Association until 1959. During this period in Canadian literature, the concept of Canadian authorship was being heavily interrogated, with the C.A.A. often disagreeing with modernist writers. This essay argues that during these twenty-five years, the C.A.A.—and more specifically William Arthur Deacon—attempted to use the awards to encourage authors and literature that supported their ideology of authorship. Specifically, Deacon attempted to influence the judging of the awards to champion middlebrow writing, living wages for authors, and a national literary culture, and in doing so, attempted to discourage highbrow, modernist literature.

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Abstract: This paper reframes Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red in the context of Jean Baudrillard’s “Fetishism and Ideology” (1970) in order to locate the tensions experienced by her protagonist, Geryon, between interiority and exteriority, the self and the world. Carson’s anxiety about the link between representation and reality is expressed in Geryon’s relationship to writing, which simultaneously recognizes and denies the gap between a (potentially) resistant interiority and an ever-encroaching exterior reality. I trace how the imbrication of subject and object makes Geryon’s writing of his autobiography gradually impossible, leading him to turn to the photographic essay as a means of realizing a more productive synthesis of interior and exterior worlds.

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Abstract: The return of the repressed is a pervasive trope in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach and it has been well theorized in the criticism surrounding the novel—from a Freudian perspective. However, in order to fully understand the aesthetics and politics of this important text more work is needed to develop the ways in which readers can engage with repression and its return from an Indigenous—and more specifically—Haisla, point of view. Via close reading and historical analysis, this essay locates the return of the repressed in relation to settler colonialism and traditional Haisla storytelling and fundamentally reframes arguments concerning psychoanalytic critique and Indigenous literature.

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Abstract: Pointedly engaging the centuries of settler-invader attempts to dispossess and destroy Indigenous communities, Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel makes appropriation and erasure his central thematic and formal preoccupations in The Place of Scraps (2013). The text itself is a series of erasure poems and collages that takes much of its source material from the Québécois anthropologist and salvage ethnographer Marius Barbeau’s canonical Totem Poles (1950). Barbeau, both in Totem Poles and throughout his career, studied a number of Pacific Northwest tribes, including the Nisga’a. At the same time as The Place of Scraps represents a defiant assertion of resistance, it also illustrates a regenerative desire, responding to recent and urgent calls, by Indigenous scholars and activists such as Taiaiake Alfred, for the reassertion and resurgence of Indigeneity in the present moment.

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Abstract: Cecily Nicholson’s 2014 documentary long poem From the Poplars takes up the history of a small island in the Fraser River delta. This island is the original territory of the Qayqayt peoples; it contains their ancestral burial grounds, yet they are denied access due to the island’s current designation as Crown land. Nicholson’s text posits that “there is no hierarchy of oppressions” (Lorde) wrought by the condition of perpetual “second-class citizen status” (Thornhill 324) bestowed upon certain bodies in the Canadian state by drawing together the long-standing pain of two of Canada’s most historically marginalized groups through a shared “affective public” (Papacharissi) of grief (Cecily Nicholson qtd. in Chariandy et al. 75). The island’s currently perceived emptiness of Black and Indigenous presences is actually an “optical illusion” (Compton 105)—From the Poplars brings these “strange fruits” into view. Just as Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” instigated waves of protest and stoked anti-segregation movements in the United States (Davis; Fields; Hobson; Lynsky), From the Poplars as political ballad signals to new and radical futures for Black and Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.

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