Articles

Abstract: This paper studies the politics of genre surrounding Nalo Hopkinson’s novel Brown Girl in the Ring (1998). Scholarship has widely understood the novel through the lens of generic hybridity—as a hybrid of various genres within and around the speculative fiction title (science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, fabulist fiction, and dystopian and utopian literatures). Generic hybridity has been a useful framework through which to study the novel, but it does not necessarily help account for the ways in which the text can be situated comfortably within the genre of science fiction. This paper argues that the consequences of this scholarly focus, this hesitancy to view Hopkinson’s writing as straightforwardly science fiction, are that such canonization judgments keep science fiction from becoming more epistemologically varied. Redressing the significance of the novel’s technoscientific components, and arguing that the novel’s heart transplant storyline can be read as a commentary on the politics of genre outlined here, this paper seeks to demonstrate the value in and implications of reading Brown Girl in the Ring as science fiction. The paper also addresses the proposals of other scholars who seek to relieve these fraught politics through new genres, and it suggests that any productive transformation might best occur within the form and title of science fiction itself.

Abstract: Markoosie's Harpoon of the Hunter is the coming-of-age story turned survival narrative of Kamik, a young Inuk whose community is attacked by a rabid polar bear. This paper engages with the existing scholarship on the text to show that it has favoured a symbolic interpretation of polar bears and other characters. Though the polar bear surfaces as a potentially symbolic element, I argue that the sequence of multiple bear attacks becomes increasingly literal, stripping away the symbolic resonance and revealing a polar bear character. By layering over the polar bear symbol with a relationship between Kamik and polar bears, Harpoon of the Hunter invites readers to shift from symbolic to literal relationship models. I apply this model to a reading of the final scene, Kamik's suicide, to argue that the text undermines excessive symbolism and demands that material relationships be acknowledged and maintained.

Abstract:   BILAN  D’UNE LITTERATURE  NAISSANTE  Gerard Tongas  Ρ  AOURCELUI qui se sent attiré par les multiples prob-  lèmes de da ...

Abstract: What follows is a catalogue of musings on binder twine, impossibility, and the dynamics of surprise. As I began to write it in the late summer of 2008, I was eighteen months from retirement. I anticipated—albeit ready to be surprised—that after I retired I would write little if any literary criticism. In some mood of brooding nostalgia, I asked myself which, of all the poems I’ve read and taught and loved, would I still and again want to write about. Which do I want to grow into and up in?

Abstract: THESE NOTES are personal, set down with the hindsight not avail- able to me during the dozen years I spent ...

Abstract: ?PIECES IN Eli Mandel’s four major collections, (in Trio, 1954; Fuseli PoemsE,HiE960; Black and Secret Man, 1964; An Idiot Joy, ...

Abstract: This article argues that M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! reshapes language and the page on which it appears as alternate black spaces that expose and disrupt hidden power systems. To do this, Philip creates alternate spaces within the poem which function as what Michel Foucault has termed heterotopias. However, deflecting Foucault’s concept through the racialized theories of scholars such as Alexander G. Weheliye, Ian Baucom, Christina Sharpe, and Denise Ferreira da Silva shows that Philip creates specifically black heterotopic spaces in Zong! These spaces accomplish two major points, one critical and one reparative: they expose language’s role in normalizing inequitable power relations, and they also provide an imaginative space where the story of the murdered Africans can exist in an alternative, disruptively non-normal form.

Abstract: ?IHE PUBLICATION OF “LOW Tide on Grand-Pré” in the Atlan- ??? tic Monthly of March 1887 has been generally recognized ...

Abstract: Some of the most exciting contemporary approaches to settler-nationalist narratives of Canadian identity from postcolonial perspectives involve sustained engagement with non-literary modes of representation. Among the most striking examples of this tendency are literary interrogations of the iconic, overtly nationalist wilderness images of the Group of Seven and their associates. In this paper, I explore the critical potential of ekphrasis (the literary depiction of visual art) as a postcolonial mode in such a setting. Employing detailed formal theories of ekphrasis, I use the example of Jane Urquhart’s 1997 novel The Underpainter to illustrate how the referential ambiguities attached to ekphrastic representation enable its use as a radically destabilizing tool, restoring a temporal, narrative dimension to the spatialized forms of imperialist representation. By repeatedly suggesting and refuting links to the instantly recognizable canvases of the Group, I suggest, Urquhart’s novel fulfils just such a destabilizing (and hence recuperative) function.

Abstract: Sing. Sing, Nöhkomak.Lend me your wind.Over the prairieher Voice rolled (Blue Marrow 56)As marrow runs through bone so do the ...