Articles: Page 4

Abstract: This essay by Joey Mauro explores the aesthetic practices of survivance in Indigenous and Black cultural production through the lenses of Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance and Tiffany Lethabo King’s notion of the shoal. By analyzing Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen and David Chariandy’s Soucouyant, the essay examines how these novels perform survivance by engaging Cree and Trinidadian knowledge systems that resist the representational mechanisms of Western humanism. The analysis focuses on how these texts activate more-than-humanist ways of knowing—i.e., Cree cosmologies in Kiss of the Fur Queen and Trinidadian mythology in Soucouyant—that disrupt colonial epistemologies and create spaces for alternate socialities. Rather than grounding relation in commensurable politics, the essay locates possibilities for solidarity in uncommonality: in the performed survivance of alternative ways of knowing and being that exceed the violent schema through which the settler state makes “the human” legible. The shoal, a provisional and fluid meeting place for distinct but converging Indigenous and Black epistemologies, serves as a metaphor for the generative potential of these texts, where difference is preserved without domination.

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Canadian Literature 262 (2025): 57-78.

Memoirs of a Romantic Ironist

by Elizabeth Brewster

Abstract:

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Themes and Variations in Criticism. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 70 (Autumn 1976): 23-31.

Novel

Memories, Manifestation, and Finding a Way Forward: Developing Agency through Spiralling Time in Michelle Good’s Five Little Indians

by April McInnes

Abstract: The frequent linear framing of Indigenous identity in relation to residential schools as one of before, during, and after continues to be reinforced through literary analyses of residential school narratives. This paper argues that Cree author Michelle Good disrupts such thinking in her novel Five Little Indians by deploying “spiralling time” in her narration of Clara, a residential school survivor character. Building from Paula Gunn Allen’s theory of ceremonial time, I demonstrate how spiraling time complicates the “coming full circle” model that is often presented to learners by settler educators. Good’s use of this temporality permits an exploration of the past that informs the present and future with greater integrity, acknowledging the fragmentary dimensions of Clara’s residential school experiences while simultaneously refusing the premise that those experiences deny her access to knowledges and ways of being that, in Good’s narration, precede and exceed the coercive interventions of the state.

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Canadian Literature 260 (2025): 101-121.