From Qallunaat to James Bay: An Interview with Mini Aodla Freeman, Keavy Martin, Julie Rak, and Norma Dunning
Abstract: This interview speaks to Mini Aodla Freeman’s Life Among the Qallunaat, a memoir that interlaces vignettes about her childhood in James Bay, Nunavik with her adult life in Hamilton and Ottawa. The book has been published in two editions to date: the 1978 edition with Hurtig Publishers, which heavily revises the memoir, and the 2015 edition with the University of Manitoba Press, which restores the original manuscript. The interviewers met with Aodla Freeman and the editors, Keavy Martin, Julie Rak and Norma Dunning, on June 9, 2015 at Rak’s home in Treaty 6 territory. We discuss the editorial processes of the original and restored publications, as well as the community protocols and conditions of visibility that go into writing and publishing a book. Aodla Freeman shares new stories about James Bay, reflects on the republication of her memoir, and unveils her plans for future projects.
From The Business of Ramón García’s Disappearance
Abstract: Thinking of him, writing this, I wonder—has our dis- agreement with his politics delayed him? Does our opposition put us ...
From the Dark Territories of Pain and Exclusion to Bright Futures?: Rawi Hage’s Cockroach
Abstract: Combining feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives, the proposed article analyzes and critically interrogates Cockroach by Arab-Quebecois writer Rawi Hage, focusing in particular on the writer’s orientation toward the past and his fascination with dark themes relating to destitution, abjection, delinquency, unhappiness, and violence. It relies on recent feminist and particularly queer cultural studies theoretical elaborations that have explored the potential of backward trajectories and dark affects to envision bright futures (Halberstam, 2011; Brooks, 2006; Love, 2007; Ahmed, 2010). In particular, the essay analyzes the ways in which Hage intersects past traumatic experiences of war and violence with more recent forms of racial discrimination and oppression, to show that Cockroach draws a continuum across temporal and geographical borders. It argues that by venturing into the dark territories of violence and abjection, Hage disturbs what we normally perceive as familiar, and powerfully reveals what usually remains unseen within our multicultural democracies: the contradictions, limits, and failures of the assumption of happiness (Ahmed, 2010). Finally, it claims that by observing Canadian multiculturalism from the vantage point of his ‘wretched’ character, we suddenly realize that happiness may also be a bad, “ugly” feeling (Ngai, 2007), particularly when it is imposed by power in an attempt to hide the asymmetries, injustices, and discriminations that still persist in today’s democracies.
From the Past, For the Future: An Interview with Paul Yee
Abstract: Among writers who have focused on early Chinese immigrants, few have had as much impact as Paul Yee. Trained as a historian, Yee became deeply involved in Asian Canadian activism while he was a student. Over his prolific career, he has written more than twenty-five books with a particular emphasis on fiction for children and young readers. He has received numerous honours, including the City of Vancouver Book Award and the Governor General's Literary Award for Children's Literature. The following interview, which began as a conversation recorded in November 2023, addresses Yee's long career in Asian Canadian cultural activism, his novel, A Superior Man (2015), and the significance of the centenary of the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act, which was observed in 2023.
From These Uncouth Shores: Seventeenth-century Literature of Newfoundland
Abstract: Behold, e’en from these uncouth shores, among Unpeopled woods, and hills, these straines were sung. (George Wither on Hayman’s Quodlibets) ...
From Transnational Politics to National Modernist Poetics: Spanish Civil War Poetry in New Frontier
Abstract: By attending to the Spanish Civil War poems in New Frontier by A. M. Stephen, Margaret Day, Leo Kennedy, Dorothy Livesay, and Kenneth Leslie, this paper outlines an instance when Canadian literary production responds to a transnational event and transforms Canadian articulations of a national modernist poetics.
Frye in Place
Abstract: INVITED TO CONSIDER THE PLAGE of Northrop Frye in Canaadian intellectual history, one is dumbfounded. Canadian what? The lesson that ...
Frye’s Theory of Symbols
Abstract: IN A RECENT NUMBER OF Poetics, Tzvetan Todorov dismisses almost peremptorily Northrop Frye’s re-interpretation of the medieval doctrine of four ...
Fuir le regard de l’Autre ou apprendre à habiter l’espace d’immigration : la quête du Soi dans Ce pays qui est le mien de Didier Leclair
Abstract: Fuir le regard de l’Autre ou apprendre à habiter l’espace d’immigration : la quête du Soi dans Ce pays qui ...