Articles

Abstract: The Transformative Storytelling project was a virtual creative writing workshop for trans, Two-Spirit, and nonbinary authors across Canada, developed in 2021 by the Three Hares Collective in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this essay, co-organizer Markus Harwood-Jones reflects on this project and the use of “messy methods” when working alongside marginalized communities in crisis. Extending this approach to the project’s enrollment process further called for Harwood-Jones and his collaborators to incorporate “emergent” ethical protocols—a shift that also came with its own institutional and interpersonal risks. Situated amid these uncomfortable tensions of researcher responsiveness and responsibility, this article contributes to ongoing debates about solidarity as both a material practice and a negotiated ethos.

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Abstract: This paper provides a reading of two short stories in Chelsea Vowel’s Buffalo is the New Buffalo, “Buffalo Bird” and “Unsettled,” to better understand how peoplehood and transformative potential figure into Vowel’s conception of Métis futurisms. Peoplehood, in this paper, is used as an approach that privileges the connections between Métis people rather than understanding Métis identity on purely racial terms. Similarly, the power of transformation in Vowel’s collection is rendered ordinary, and exceptional acts of transformation are recognized as transformative acts that create an impact. Transformation is also analyzed beyond the literature in Vowel’s innovative use of footnotes within her collection, and how footnotes can function as a form of methodology. Understood as research creation, Vowel’s creative-scholarly stories model Métis ways of knowing and producing knowledge, which creates space for Métis research practices within the academy.

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Abstract: Tungijuq (What We Eat), Igloolik Isuma’s 2009 collaborative film, confounds colonialist seeing via image, sound, and a representational mobility rooted in Inuit practices and complex, non-fixed ontologies. Sealing bans imposing unprecedented poverty and simplistic ontologies on the North have ignored Inuit realities and posited the living seal over disregarded Inuit life. Sidestepping rights-based discourses and settler-state contexts, Tungijuq represents relationalities—in seal hunting, living and dying, human and animal, hunter and hunted—as normative to Inuit life yet unsettling to colonialist seeing. It offers distinct experiences to different viewer-listeners: a grounded representation of embodied Inuit being to those who recognize its ontologies and a decentring experience to settler perception. I consider this as an intersection of impasse, entanglement, and Inuit gift, an affective reminder of reciprocity, relationality, and obligation. As not fully comprehensible to settler positionality, Tungijuq might offer affective bearing for deconstructing settler phenomenology lost in Inuit Territory.

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Abstract: This paper examines the work of several writers affiliated with Vancouver's Kootenay School of Writing (KSW). It was written through original primary research in multiple archives, and takes a new approach to reading this work. I posit that we read the work of the writers affiliated with KSW, which has typically been read through similar critical approaches to those taken to language poetry, as both an archive and a repertoire of a community at a particular historical period, the long neoliberal moment. I discuss several writers whose work has been critically neglected, including Kevin Davies, Jeff Derksen, Lisa Robertson, Colin Smith, and Deanna Ferguson.

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Abstract: With his poems in the book Performance Bond (2004), African Canadian poet and theorist Wayde Compton has remapped the contexts of immigration, history and multiculturalism in British Columbia. This paper will look specifically at how Compton uses the intertexts of history, literary theory and popular culture to challenge official histories and the exclusion of Canada from global black culture.

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Abstract: Using the case study of Lee Maracle’s short story “Yin Chin” (1990) and its uptake in literary criticism on the topic of Asian/Indigenous relation, I argue that a predominant methodological approach in the field—reading characters and plot events as stand-ins for racial positions and histories—is one of the effects of neoliberal deprivation in today’s university, which demands representations of difference while denying us time and space for sustained attention to language. Against the backdrop of these institutional constraints, I look to the anti-essentialist genealogies of feminist literature, theory, and activism to piece together a deconstructive reading of intertextual traces and absences across Maracle’s story and the political scene that produced it. I use these examples to argue for a renewed critical commitment to speculative practices of reading that demand creativity, contingency, and risk, and that counter the institutional appropriation of difference with the irreducibility of literary critique.

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Abstract:

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Abstract:

To read the full article online, visit our OJS site.