Articles

Abstract: W’HATEVER YOU MAY make of it, I think you have to admit that one of the more astonishing features of ...

Abstract: I”UST AS HAROLD CARDINAL’S The Unjust Society (1969) re- sisted Trudeau’s vision of the “Just Society,” so Jeannette Armstrong’s narrator, ...

Abstract: Donna Smyth’s Subversive Elements, published by The Women’s Press in 1986, is a multi-generic, postmodern, ecofeminist, Maritime novel. One of the novel’s narrative threads recounts real-life resistance to uranium mining in Nova Scotia in the early 1980s. The other dominant narrative thread takes place in mid-twentieth century Europe and tells the story of the loves and lives of Beatrice and Lewis. This essay examines the rich intertextuality and heterogeneity of Subversive Elements, analyzing themes of silence, language, and gender in relation to the novel’s ecofeminist stance. Set against the backdrop of late Cold War anti-nuclear activism, Subversive Elements is a compelling addition to literary representations of resource extraction in Atlantic and Canadian literature.

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Abstract: This paper reads Kim Barry Brunhuber’s novel Kameleon Man as an important exploration of different heterotopian spaces offering a reflection of our contemporary society in terms of the production and consumption of culture, racialization and identity. Stacey Schmidt, a twenty-one year-old black student, appears as a modern flâneur moving in urban landscapes from one heteretopia to the next in his quest for success in the fashion industry as a mixed-race model. He is also acutely aware of his own shifting positionality hinging on the ambiguous sign and site of the hyphen, which has been described by Fred Wah as that marked (or unmarked) space that both binds and divides. This heno-poetic (Grk heno-, one) punct, this flag of the many in the one, yet 'less than one and double' (Bhabha 177), is the operable tool that both compounds difference and underlines sameness (Faking 72-73). Using an interdisciplinary methodology, I will draw from the European philosophical tradition of Foucault and Benjamin as well as from urban studies, and will put these in conversation with some recent Canadian critical mixed-race theory in order to bring into view the specificity of Stacey’s experience as an urban, racialized, mixed-race Canadian man.

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Abstract: “A Berlin Chronicle,” Walter Benjamin’s exploration of the spaces that house his childhood memories, contains a passage that resonates profoundly ...

Abstract: At roughly the same cultural moment in which La Rivière sans repos was set, one of Canada’s most prominent economic ...

Abstract: Mais si, sans se laisser charmer, Ton oeil sait plonger dans les gouffres, Lis-moi, pour apprendre à m’aimer. BAUDELAIRE “The ...

Abstract: M I C H E L VAN SCHENDEL is one of Quebec’s leading poets, but he is little known in ...

Abstract: The history of artist’s spaces in Vancouver (since the 1960s) is, in some ways, a history of bureaucratic forms: Intermedia failing to cope with one; Iain and Ingrid Baxter’s N. E. Thing Co. having one readymade in the structure of the family; the Western Front and artist-run centres adopting an owner-operator bureaucracy as a stabilizing strategy, in order to hold space; and independent spaces organizing themselves around and through precarity. How these artists’ spaces emerge, survive, dissolve, and re-emerge is imbricated with issues of affordability, national and provincial arts policy, and shifting expectations of what art can and should do. In Jeff Derksen’s excellent history of the Vancouver-based Kootenay School of Writing (KSW), he cautions that “a history of an artist-run space can unfortunately become a history of its governmental funding” (288). Such an emphasis on funding structures, particularly in the case of the KSW, he argues, can diminish the agency of artists and writers, particularly those involved with the Kootenay School of Writing, in their collective to the material conditions created by changes in government policy. But I want to argue that there is a valuable history of artist spaces in Vancouver that can only be told through an analysis of the role that public funding has played in sustaining, constraining, and forming art practices and subjectivities over the past half-century.

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Abstract: Get up in the morning, pull on yesterday’s clothes, instant coffee in a dirty cup, smoke a cigarette. In other ...