Articles

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: IN THE ORIGINAL FOREWORD TO The Gucci Bag (published by Mosaic Press) Irving Layton remarked that this could “quite possibly” ...

Abstract: IN ? 1971 INTERVIEW with Donald Cameron, Timothy Find- ley attempted to articulate the theme which obsessed him in his ...

Abstract: “But Could I Make A Living From It”: Jeff Derksen’s Modular Form Peter Jaeger Jeff Derksen’s poetics articulate the political ...

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.

Abstract: ?»VER SINCE ITS PUBLICATIONin England nearly twenty-five years ago, Canada Made Me by Norman Levine has been excluded from the ...

Abstract: DEE: Lionel, have some more brandy. (to Mack) What are you thinking? MACK: I was thinking . . . about ...

Abstract: LrONGTEMPS, ON A REPROCHÉ à l’oeuvre de Marie-Claire Biais une monotonie née de la répétition obsédante de certain thèmes. Jean ...

Abstract: “Everybody knows that song”: The Necessary Trouble of Teaching Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water Tanis MacDonald …beneath the bridge, ...

Abstract: This article argues that Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel’s The Place of Scraps not only manipulates the English language in general but strategically acts upon the language of White-settler ethnographer Marius Barbeau’s Totem Poles in a manner that addresses settler colonial acts of violence that mirror the very poetic techniques Abel uses to construct his poetry: extraction, excavation, and erasure. Abel’s poetry resists Barbeau’s efforts via salvage ethnography to confine Indigenous people and cultures to the past while simultaneously refusing to allow the political effects of Barbeau’s work to be imagined only as relevant to the past; Abel turns poetic techniques of extraction into artwork that highlights continuance by demanding that readers reckon more rigorously with the relationship between our present and our past, in efforts, ultimately, toward a more just future.