Abstract: This article examines the significance of eugenic rhetoric in Irene Baird’s 1939 novel
Waste Heritage. I argue that Baird uses rhetorical strategies consonant with eugenic movements popular at the time, rendering the labour unrest in 1930s British Columbia as a sickness in need of a cure. My analysis reveals the prevalence of a rank and sort metric for assessing bodily fitness in the novel’s depiction of its main characters, inducing readers to understand the labour strife the novel depicts through a eugenic framework. I show how this framework permeates the novel and positions the strikers as incapable of enacting meaningful political change. Drawing from the work of disability theorists and the history of eugenics in Canada, I explore how concepts such as the “universal worker” and the “bodily norm” provide useful tools for understanding the novel’s depiction of race, ability and unemployment.
This article was a recipient of the
ACQL Barbara Godard Prize (2023).
Abstract: Indigenous literary scholarship and teaching in the Canadian university often involves a simultaneous and sometimes conflicting obligation to foreground settler-colonial relations of power while also emphasizing sovereign Indigenous intellectual histories. I offer a discussion of two very different texts through which I have approached this dilemma in my own teaching practice: the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) advertisement for Vancouver 2010 winter Olympic-wear, “Timeline,” and Syilx writer and philosopher Jeannette Armstrong’s poem, “History Lesson.” While the HBC advertisement supplies an instructive example of settler-colonial tropes arranged according to a linear-progressive view of history and time, Armstrong’s free-verse poem storytells colonial exploitation and violence outside of traditional Western practices of chronology and the naturalization of progress narratives. That is, “History Lesson” centers Indigenous thought in its engagements with settler-colonial history and time, and asserts balanced and regenerative lifeways for the health of Indigenous futures.
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Abstract: In forage, Rita Wong explores the subversion and lexicon of “familiar” cultural narratives—that is, status quo stories—with its less-familiar affects. Calling upon her skillful use of poetics, Wong challenges material interconnectedness by revealing how neoliberal ideology supports and inextricably links status quo stories to the socio-political and the cultural; that is, identity is not only surrounded but also rendered by constructs of commodification that is determined through language and physical bodies. In this essay, invoking protean assemblages of mattering in relation to identity, I explore how “foraging” and “fodder” are in tension in Wong’s collection, highlighting the search for (intellectual) sustenance, and yet how being caught within a capitalist system and its deployment of “status quo stories” is used in turn as “fodder” for the functioning of neoliberal machinery.
Errata:
Instead of how they appear in issue 244, notes 2 and 3 of Morgan Cohen’s article “Foraging and Fodder” should read as follows:
2) Karen Barad distinguishes between phenomena, as opposed to phenomenon, in “Posthumanist Performativity.” She claims that phenomena considers the meaning of an object in relation to the affect of its situation; it considers all elements of space including the positioning of the observer, writer, storyteller, and so forth, whereas phenomenon is a fixed observation.
3) In "Posthumanist Performativity," Barad relays Haraway's juxtaposition of diffraction and reflection in Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. Whereas reflection is a direct reproduction of difference, diffraction analyzes the effects of difference through relations of space.
We apologize to author Morgan Cohen and our readers for this error and for any confusions it may have caused.
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