Undernarrated Emotional Landscapes in Toronto’s Scarborough: Téa Mutonji’s Shut Up You’re Pretty
Abstract: Téa Mutonji’s short story collection, Shut Up You’re Pretty (2019), follows the coming-of-age process of Loli, a Black Canadian woman from a Congolese immigrant family living in contemporary Scarborough, a low-income, multicultural district of Toronto. Relying on the frameworks of Black feminist geography and narratology, I discuss how Loli’s racialized and gendered body interacts with the urban landscape. After tracing the significance of places and spaces of various scales—from the intimate to the global—in the stories, I demonstrate the interrelatedness of the collection’s ubiquitous narratives gaps with emotional and material landscapes in Shut Up You’re Pretty to argue that the sparseness of narration—what I term undernarration—and the volume’s conspicuous focus on places function as symptoms of the protagonist’s disrupted emotional landscape and comment on Black women’s presence in Canada.
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Une Epoque de Synthese: Quelques aspects des rapports Littéraires entre la France, la suisse romande et le Canada Français
Abstract:
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Une Poesie d’Exil
Abstract: UNE POESIE D’EXIL Gilles Marcotte L LECTEUR FRANÇAIS n’éprouvera généralement, de- vant la poésie canadienne-française d’aujourd’hui, aucune impression de ...
Uninvited Guests and Awkward Hospitality: Unsettling Mormon Claims in Dawn Dumont’s Nobody Cries at Bingo
Abstract: Nobody Cries at Bingo, Dawn Dumont’s humorous and heartfelt portrayal of reserve life in 1980s Saskatchewan, writes against the legacies of Indigenous family separation via residential schools, adoption, and foster programs. This essay considers how these concerns operate in Dumont’s recollection of an awkward night spent with a family of Mormons living on the edge of her family’s reserve. Read in context of Indigenous-Mormon history, Dumont’s incisive and generous narration unsettles colonial ideas about who has the strongest claim to Indigenous lands. While contact with settler Mormons is only marginally important in Dumont’s writing, her perceptive and good-natured handling of such encounters highlights her thematic focus on navigating persistent colonial threats to Indigenous family life.
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Unmasking The Literary Garland’s T.D. Foster
Abstract: This essay is situated at the intersection of nineteenth-century literary history, women’s literature, and print culture. It opens by resolving an admittedly minor debate about the identity of a contributor to the Canadian nineteenth-century journal, The Literary Garland. However, as a result of this resolution, a series of previously unnoted literary connections between Canadian authors and a single U.S. periodical is revealed; networks of Canadian literary women—both as writers and editors—are explored and our understanding of them expanded; and
lostwritings by Canadian authors are identified. Those covered include Harriet Vaughan Cheney, Eliza Lanesford Cushing, Catherine Parr Traill, and Emma Donoghue Grant.
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Unpacking the Baggage: “Camp” Humour in Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage
Abstract: Some lives are only seen through windows beyond which the appearance of laughter and of screaming is the same. .. ...
Unsettling the Canadian Whites: A Writing Back of Indigenous, Black, and Jewish Comics
Abstract: Since its foundation during the Second World War, the Canadian comics industry has championed a settler nationalism that has prioritized whiteness, appropriated Indigeneity, and omitted representations of racialized minorities—including Jews—almost entirely. However, creators from these marginalized groups are reclaiming the comics form. I examine this process from the perspective of a comics researcher and creator. By exploring the devices used in David Alexander Robertson’s The Ballad of Nancy April and The Scout and John Olbey’s anti-racist comics published in NOW Toronto, I establish the contours of a movement of comics makers restorying Canadian history outside of the confines of the white-settler national narrative. My central case study, an autoethnographic reflection of the techniques used in creating Christie Pits, offers insights into the making process and comics specific techniques that may be valuable to other creators writing back against dominant readings of history.
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Unspeakable Verse
Abstract:
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Upsetting Fake Ideas: Jeannette Armstrong’s “Slash” and Beatrice Cullenton’s “April Raintree”
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, ...
Uranium Mining, Interdisciplinarity, and Ecofeminism in Donna Smyth’s Subversive Elements
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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