Articles

Abstract: In this essay I argue that in order to fully challenge the nationalism assumed in many approaches to Asian Canadian studies we must consider the roles of francophone Asian Québecois authors and their works. These authors often find themselves at a cultural impasse by living and working in the province of Québec—a quasi-nation-state animated by a competing sovereign impulse, and an entity that deliberately and continuously interrupts Canadian nationalism as a whole. I ask: what does it mean to be a francophone Asian Québécois writer living and working in the language of a competing nationalism, and particularly a competing nationalism that defines itself overtly in terms of language but inferentially through an exclusionary Europeanness that harkens back to French settlements and the mythologies of white labourers, explorers, and settlers. I turn to Kim Thúy’s Ru (2009) and Ook Chung’s La Triologie Coréenne (2012) first to interrupt the anglo-centricism of Asian Canadian literary studies and second to consider the ways that the theme of language appears in notably ambivalent ways. I draw on images of in-betweenness and themes of colonialism in both novels arguing that these representations parallel the ambivalent and precarious statuses of francophone Asian Québécois writers, both within the framework of Asian Canadian literature and Québécois’ competing nationalism. Put another way, while these writers disturb Canadian nationalism by speaking the language of a competing nationalism, they also recognize the ways in which they are never fully included in the sovereigntist project despite the fact that they are writing in French. Thus, by writing in French, these authors disrupt one nationalist project while also exposing the limitations (and contradictions) of another.

Abstract: 1HERE ?? TURN MYSELF IN. The guilt has become too much to bear. For more than 35 years I have ...

Abstract: Au printemps 1997, Radio-Canada diffusait une télésérie fictionnalisée intitulée Les Bâtisseurs d’Eau qui retraçait en six épisodes l’histoire et l’évolution ...

Abstract: LA VILLE, acceptée comme espace définitif de vie, est entrée tardivement dans les littératures canadiennes d’expression française et d’expression anglaise. ...

Abstract: IN 1637, DESCARTES PREDICTED that man’s reason and knowl- edge would enable us “to render ourselves the lords and possessors ...

Abstract: Lr’ÉCLOSiON DU ROMAN QUÉBÉCOIS au cours des années cinquante semble coïncider avec l’arrivée dans ce pays des idées existentialistes. C’est ...

Abstract: ?ÍLIZABETH COOK-L YNN (Crow-Creek-Sioux) writes that during her formative years she read everything from the Sears catalogue to Faust, from ...

Abstract: This article argues that Glenn Gould’s celebrated Solitude Trilogy— when framed in relation to Gould’s lesser-known documentary “The Search for Pet Clark”— displays a Canadian response to Cold War tensions realized through Gould’s contrapuntal form. “The Search for Pet Clark” has traditionally been classified as a piece of music criticism, but the documentary is simultaneously preoccupied with the effects of Americanization on Canadian space. The article demonstrates that Gould refused to simply equate the United States with democratic pluralism and the USSR with totalitarianism, instead viewing totalitarianism as a politics that circulated in manifold ways and that affected Canadian space through the homogenizing forces of post-war American capital. For Gould, the antidote to totalitarianism was a multitudinous and simultaneously isolationist inclination, an expression Gould readily found in a long-idealized notion of Canadian space that allowed him to expand on and make more manifest the political possibilities of the contrapuntal.

Abstract: ?lo EXAMINE CONCEPTS OF self, creativity, and feminism in Margaret Atwood’s se?v?en?th novel, Cafs Eye (1988), is tempting but tricky: ...

Abstract: L? ES ANNÉES 1764 ET 1806 marquent des étapes importantes dans les lettres canadiennes. En 1764, l’imprimerie et la presse ...