Without Togetherness: The Intersectional Impasse of Syd Zolf’s Collaborative Poetics1
Abstract: In order to open up the possibility for a radical genealogy of feminist poetics in and beyond contemporary Canadian writing, I introduce the successes and failures of: radical citation, the proliferation of intersectionality, and the reproductive capabilities of cyborgs. The transformative potential of innovative and conceptual poetry practices and the ways in which they illuminate the productive flailing of feminist critique is demonstrated through attention to the collaborative and appropriative poetics of contemporary Canadian poet Syd (formerly Rachel) Zolf. In order to approach a situation—a praxis of feminist critique and theory—in which “the errors of face-to-face ethical recognition” (Janey’s Arcadia 116) can be rendered readable, I position Zolf’s innovative strategies alongside the interventions in genre of Lisa Robertson and M. NourbeSe Philip. The paper seeks to address how feminist critics can productively address the ethical discomfort of our entanglements in issues of racialized and gendered violence, Indigenous sovereignty, and experimental cultural production.
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Witness, Signature, and the Handmade in Rahat Kurd’s Cosmophilia
Abstract: Rahat Kurd’s witness poetry examines the poet’s mark and proposes that this mark differs from the more easily recognizable signature. The poet’s mark is essential to witness as that aspect of the poem (a different aspect in every poem) that demonstrates the relationships among poem, poet, reader, and tradition. In Cosmophilia, Kurd writes about the traditions she inherits through her familial connections to Kashmir and Pakistan and through her Muslim identity. Her poems witness political conflict and violence alongside the beauty of cultural creations, including Persian script and Kashmiri embroidery. Cosmophilia means “love of ornament,” and Kurd’s collection suggests such loving looking is implicated in witness. I pursue this argument with Carolyn Forché’s defining comments on the genre of poetry of witness, Paul E. Losensky’s study of the ghazal, and Jonathan Culler’s and Peggy Kamuf’s engagements with the concept of the signature.
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Woman as Object, Women as Subjects, & the Consequences for Narrative: Hubert Aquin’s Neige noire and the impasse of post-modernism
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Woman/Body/Landscape: Imaginary Geographies in the Writing of Karen Connelly
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Women in Canadian Literature
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Canadians – Conscious or Self-Conscious? Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 62 (Autumn 1974): 69-78.
Wondering into Country: Dionne Brand’s A Map of the Door of No Return
Abstract: Drawing on theories of affect and reterritorialization, this article examines Dionne Brand'??s interrogation of national belonging in A Map to the Door of No Return. Brand's reflections, in Map, on her experiences as a black woman and diasporic subject repeatedly exceed the boundaries of Canada as she explores the possibilities of diasporic community, political community, and artistic community. Nevertheless, as she muses on the possibility of a "country" where she might belong, Brand remains keenly attentive to the country she calls "home," repeatedly engaging in creative, provisional reterritorializations of spaces within the Canadian nation.
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Word and Fact: Laurence and the Problem of Language
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Words & The World: “The Diviners” as an Exploration of the Book of Life
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Working-Class Intruders: Female Domestics in Kamouraska and Alias Grace
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Write Me a Film?: A Symposium by Canadian Filmmakers
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