Articles

Abstract: This essay provides the historical contexts of two events: artist Paul Kane's travels in the 1840s, and the publication of Wanderings of an Artist at the end of the 1850s. It then offers an interpretation of the book's anti- and non-USAmerican dimensions before discussing the subsequent production of the image of Kane as solely a Canadian-born figure with no USAmerican connections, and a hero for Canadian expansionists by virtue of his having captured Native lifeways and people in the years before they "vanished" to make way for the emerging dominion.

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Abstract: At the start of the millennium, Vancouver-based video artist Paul Wong was commissioned by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, a state-funded agency, to make a series of brief public service announcements for television, which he titled Refugee Class of 2000 and which form part of the CRRF’s “See People for Who They Really Are: Unite Against Racism” campaign. In the three brief videos, Wong brings the viewer face to face with students from the graduating class at Charles Tupper High School in Vancouver, while also exhuming the history of racism and racist exclusion in Canada. This paper examines the subtle ways in which Wong, working for a state-funded agency, negotiates the complex balancing act between complicity and critique in dealing with issues of national belonging, official multiculturalism, racism, identity politics, citizenship, and transnational or diasporic identity in Refugee Class of 2000. It argues that in Wong’s form of Asian Canadian critique, the transnational identities of the refugee subjects—not all of whom are Asian, and not all of whom are refugees by conventional definitions—bring pressure to bear on nationalist concepts of citizenship and belonging, insisting on the paradoxical notion of refugee citizenship as an alternative to conventional concepts of national belonging.

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Abstract: Ahmad Meree is unique among Canadian playwrights. Bringing influences from the Theatre of the Absurd and the existentialist philosophy that undergirded much of that post-World War II theatrical moment in Europe to bear on his own position as a refugee of the Syrian war, Meree has in his first three plays in Canada introduced a kind of neo-existentialist exilic, or refugee theatre that is grounded, unlike the work of most of the existentialists, in his own experience and in the realities of contemporary global politics and life in Canada. This essay will contextualize his work with an account of his own refugee experience, on which all of his plays to date are based, and try to locate the plays within the realms of existentialist philosophy and of Yana Meerzon’s articulations of “exilic theatre” in the land now called Canada.

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Abstract: I argue that in her book Zong! (2008), which concerns the 1781 massacre of 150 enslaved Africans incarcerated on the ship Zong, M. NourbeSe Philip turns toward lyric and legal concepts of personhood in order to theorize poetic voice as bodily emission. Zong!’s politics lie in this historiographic challenge: it must create forms appropriate to the legal nonperson, and must use them to transform this figure “back into human.” Thus, Philip confronts the longstanding philosophical conception of personhood as the ownership of oneself in three ways: first, through “affective possession,” where personhood is not an effect of property in the self, but is conferred upon others through the investment of affect. Second, Philip uses lyric modes such as apostrophe to confer personhood upon the murdered slaves. Third, she proposes a conception of poetic voice as physical utterance, not as expression of interiority, acknowledging the ways in which the body persists beyond and is shaped by its nonrecognition by regimes of power. Thus Zong! returns to concepts of personhood whose promise remains unfulfilled.

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Abstract:

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