Articles

Abstract: Performatively exhibiting its argument for “t(h)inking”—para- the usual verb “think,” a process that meditates on, critiques, and undoes extractive Euro-Western logics by which stitched meaning becomes undone, unfurled to fray—this study communes with Dionne Brand’s Land to Light On. It t(h)inks with apposite “tinker,” fiddling to no particular end, with specific regard to themes of language, place, and extraction in Dionne Brand’s collection of poems. Intertwined with deeply personal vignettes on its author’s first return to Trinidad after moving to so-called Canada, this unconventional prose/poem/essay avers that we might understand what has been noted as “ambiguity” by literary scholars in readings of Land as instead representative of para/ontological notions of Blackness: movings across, along, outside, adjacent to ontological nothingness and paraontological fugitivity for Black meaning-making energy in the Western world.

Abstract: ‘That Rose you write about? Is that supposed to be you?'”1 The Genesis of Who Do You Think You Are? ...

Abstract: This article focuses attention on an interesting, overlooked contributor to early twentieth century Canadian writing, Frank Burnett, whose collection of South Pacific artifacts formed the nucleus of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. It draws upon scholarship of travel narratives about science as well as middlebrow print culture to introduce and elaborate a particular class of texts identified here as "the ethnographic middlebrow." These texts, this paper argues, inhabited a peculiar and culturally variable space in relation to the academic fields of science and literature and popular tastes for adventure, escape, and celebrity. Reading Burnett’s early twentieth century writing about the South Pacific in relation to the mid-century Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl illuminates a variety of national and international dynamics at work in positioning each of these writers in relation to highbrow literature, ethnographic science, late colonial modernity, and the middlebrow.

Abstract: As For Me and My House has been read as a documentary about the Depression, an unreliable narrative by a deceived and self-deceiving wife, and a narrative of gender, power, and creativity, to name only a few recent approaches. It has rarely been read seriously as what it purports to be: a story about the consequences of unbelief. Sinclair Ross had himself been offered the chance to attend university if he would commit to becoming a minister and had refused; his imagining of what such a life could become was the germ of the novel. I read the narrative as a sustained account of the loss of God in which misplaced yearning for the infinite (for an immortal art in Philip’s case and a transcendent love in his wife’s) condemns the two main characters to loneliness and self-loathing. Examining the novel’s biblical references and images-from its ironic title to its motif of idol worship-I explore how the problem of meaning without faith is at the heart of the novel’s resonance and enduring interest.

Abstract: You’re not going to get it. I didn’t. And I read the whole book. —RICHARD VAUGHAN Coming near the end ...

Abstract: FOR YEARS, MADMEN and madwomen have been spotlighted by Quebec dramatists, a fact which has not gone unnoticed by critics. ...

Abstract: Olfactory signatures mark memories and shape relationships to the world, including relationships to oil. Yet despite smell’s omnipresence and evocativeness – and despite the fact that writers use scent to represent oil encounters – few studies examine smell’s significance in oil writing. Following the scents in Cariou’s “Tarhands: A Messy Manifesto," this essay asks: What does the language of stench offer writers like Cariou who use aesthetic experimentation to interrogate the neo-colonial capitalist logic of resource extraction? How does Cariou reimagine the language of scent for his creative, ethical, and political goals? What does the language of smell offer readers, who have diverse and complex relationships to oil and environmental risk? I argue that Cariou's language of stink constitutes an irrepressible trace of the petrostate's rotten core, exposes how the body politic becomes habituated to (un)common scents/sense, and "makes manifest" the psychological structures of the "wastewest."

Abstract: span style=”font: 14.0px Helvetica;”>In Dionne Brand’s novel What We All Long For, the identity of diasporic characters in the hostland ...

Abstract: This essay looks at early work by two members of the so-called Calgary School of political philosophy, Barry Cooper and Tom Flanagan. I examine how these Western intellectuals draw on Canadian literary conventions and structuralist narratology to construct an extractivist and myth-critical settler colonial historiography that works to maintain the objective normativity of settler culture by assimilating Indigeneity into white supremacy. Cooper and Flanagan's work, I argue, effects cultural genocide by figuring settlers as the originary indigenes of the West in the territories currently called Canada; moreover, Flanagan's work, in which he argues Indigenous peoples are the originary genocidal settlers, is crucial to understanding how extractivism works according to a logic of elimination.