CanLit Author Spotlights

Issue 249: Comics Author Spotlight – aman kaur

March 15, 2023

aman kaur is primarily interested in studying anti-colonial discourses in text, media, and art—particularly those that center Indigenous sovereignty and meaningful solidarities between liberation movements, or “constellations of co-resistance” (Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done). She recently received her MA in English from Western University and her BA is in Literature and Rhetoric Studies from the University of Waterloo. As a settler scholar on Turtle Island from the occupied land of Punjab, her research interests oscillate between studying occupation, abolition, and anti-colonialism in multiple contexts, and she hopes to combine these to help develop global frameworks for liberation in future work.

Article: Richard Van Camp’s Three Feathers as a Land-Based Pedagogy for Indigenous Masculinities

Abstract:
This paper explores Richard Van Camp’s graphic novel, Three Feathers, as a pedagogical guide for refusing colonial impositions of masculinity and justice and rooting these in Indigenous ideals instead. The community’s process of restorative justice in the novel shows a land-based pedagogy that teaches the young men how to care and how to be cared for— both of which are essential to their own healing and the healing of their community.

Canadian Literature issue 249: Comics is available to order through our online store at https://bit.ly/CanLit249.


Issue 249: Comics Author Spotlight – Amy Mazowita

March 8, 2023

Amy Mazowita (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montréal, QC (Tiohtiá:ke). Her doctoral research is situated at the intersections of Communication and Media Studies, Comics Studies, and Critical Disability Studies, and is focused on representations of mental illness in auto/biographical comics. She is particularly interested in how readers of print and web comics are engaging with graphic mental illness narratives, and in how readers of graphic texts are using ‘the comics scene’ as a site for developing networks of self- and collective care.

Amy also works on projects related to the environmental humanities and is currently working on a research-creation photo-series titled “Life of Fire: An Ethnography of Smoke, Flame, Ash, and Earth.” This contribution is part of the “Mobilizing Disability Survival Skills for the Urgencies of the Anthropocene” project and is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (PI, Arseli Dokumaci).

Amy is a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow, a core member of Concordia’s Access-in-the-Making (AIM) Lab, a member of Concordia’s Feminist Media Studio, and the Communications Representative for Concordia’s Communication Doctoral Students’ Association.””

Article: Towards a Network of Graphic Care: The Comics, Comments, and Communities of Instagram

Canadian Literature issue 249: Comics is available to order through our online store at https://bit.ly/CanLit249.


Issue 249: Comics Author Spotlight – Lucia CS

March 1, 2023

Dr. Lucia Cedeira Serantes works as an Assistant Professor (LDI) at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, The University of Western Ontario (Canada). Her research focus resides in the interplay between identity, media, and social structures to study the complexity of the everyday practice of reading for pleasure. She has presented her research in library-focus and interdisciplinary conferences and has provided chapter contributions about comics and reading to the 2nd edition of Transforming Young Adult Services (2019), Reading Still Matters (2018), and Young People Reading: Empirical Research Across International Contexts (2018). She published the book entitled Young People, Comics, and Reading: Exploring a Complex Reading Experience, based on her doctoral work, a project that was awarded the John A. Lent Scholarship in Comics Studies (International Comics Arts Forum). She has presented in library-focus and interdisciplinary conferences as well as contributed to talks and workshops at the Toronto Comics Arts Festival and New York Comic Con. In 2020 she wrapped an ALA funded project entitled SEEniors: Visual representations of older age in illustrated materials, hosted at https://comicsandaging.blog in collaboration with Dr. Nicole Dalmer.

Forum: A GLAM Future for Canadian Comics

Canadian Literature issue 249: Comics is available to order through our online store at https://bit.ly/CanLit249.


Issue 249: Comics Author Spotlight – Amie Wright

February 22, 2023

Amie Wright (she/her/hers) is a PhD student in public history at Carleton University (Ottawa, ON). Her SSHRC-funded research explores the under-studied legacy of comics censorship in Canada and its impact on vocational practice and norms in schools and libraries. Other research interests include the teaching of history, visual and popular culture, critical librarianship, and the history of education. Amie is the former manager of school outreach at the New York Public Library and the past inaugural president of the American Library Association (ALA) Graphic Novels and Comics Round Table (GNCRT).

Article: Alberta’s Forgotten Censor: The Advisory Board on Objectionable Publications (1954-1976) and the Continued Campaign Against Comics Post-1954

Abstract:

The postwar public health crisis afflicting children was not just polio. Across North America concerned citizens met to discuss the public health ‘emergency’ of comic books. Restrictions under the “”Fulton Bill”” (1949), followed by Senate hearings in Canada (1952) and the United States (1954) argued that comics contributed to illiteracy and delinquency. Previous scholarship has focused on the US Senate hearings overlooking what happened after 1954—specifically the continued work of citizen committees. In Alberta this took the form of the Advisory Board on Objectionable Publications (1954-1976) which functioned 1) to control the sale of objectionable comics, tabloids and magazines in the Province and 2) to foster a public awareness of the danger inherent in permitting young people to read unwholesome material. Based on previously unpublished sources from the Provincial Archives of Alberta, this paper illuminates an under reported chapter in Canadian history and the history of comics censorship.

Canadian Literature issue 249: Comics is available to order through our online store at https://bit.ly/CanLit249.


Issue 249: Comics Author Spotlight – Jamie Michaels

February 15, 2023

Jamie Michaels is a writer, educator, and filmmaker from Winnipeg. He researches the potential of historically informed graphic novels to generate social change as a SSHRC Bombardier Doctoral Fellow, Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, and Killam Laureate at the University of Calgary. His most recent graphic novel Christie Pits unpacks the tensions between immigrants and proto-fascists in 1930s Toronto that culminated in the Christie Pits Riot. The project has been adapted as a documentary in partnership with Historica Canada and is forthcoming as an animated film.

Article: Unsettling the Canadian Whites: A Writing Back of Indigenous, Black, and Jewish Comics

Abstract:

Since its foundation during the Second World War, the Canadian comics industry has championed a settler nationalism that has prioritized whiteness, appropriated Indigeneity, and omitted representations of racialized minorities—including Jews—almost entirely. However, creators from these marginalized groups are reclaiming the comics form. I examine this process from the perspective of a comics researcher and creator. By exploring the devices used in David Alexander Robertson’s The Ballad of Nancy April and The Scout and John Olbey’s anti-racist comics published in NOW Toronto, I establish the contours of a movement of comics makers restorying Canadian history outside of the confines of the white-settler national narrative. My central case study, an autoethnographic reflection of the techniques used in creating Christie Pits, offers insights into the making process and comics specific techniques that may be valuable to other creators writing back against dominant readings of history.

Canadian Literature issue 250: Comics is available to order through our online store at https://bit.ly/CanLit249.


Issue 248: Author Spotlight – Andre Furlani

February 8, 2023

Andre Furlani is a Professor of English at Concordia University and the author of Beckett after Wittgenstein and Guy Davenport: Postmodern and After (both Northwestern UP). Forthcoming are Pilgrim’s Gress: The Beckett Walk (Cambridge UP) and Foot Prints: The Return of the Pedestrian in Contemporary Literature and Art (Bloomsbury). Recent essays on modern and contemporary literature have appeared in PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Philosophy and Literature, Essays in Criticism, Bréac, and Canadian Literature, as have chapters in The Oxford History of the Classical Reception in English Literature (Oxford UP), The Routledge Guide to Translation in the City (Routledge), and Speaking Memory: How Translation Shapes City Life (McGill-Queen’s UP).

Forum: Mordecai Richler Was Here: Quebec’s Richler

Canadian Literature issue 248 is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues.


Issue 248: Author Spotlight – Judith Weisz Woodsworth

February 1, 2023

Judith Weisz Woodsworth is a translator and former university professor of translation studies at Concordia University. She is the recipient of the 2022 Governor General’s literary award for translation for History of the Jews in Quebec (University of Ottawa Press, 2021). She has also translated novels by Pierre Nepveu (Still Lives, Signature Editions, 1997) and Abla Farhoud (Hutchison Street, Linda Leith Publishing, 2018). She has published widely on translation history and theory, including Translators through History, with Jean Delisle. Her recent scholarly publications include the monograph Telling the Story of Translation: Writers Who Translate (Bloomsbury, 2017), and the edited volumes The Fictions of Translation (John Benjamins, 2018) and Translation and the Global City: Bridges and Gateways (Routledge, 2021). She was founding president of the Canadian Association for Translation Studies and has served as a senior administrator at universities in Halifax, Sudbury and Montreal. Judith Weisz Woodsworth lives in Montreal, Quebec.

Forum: Remaking Richler for French Canada: Translation as Remaniement

Canadian Literature issue 248 is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues.


Issue 248: Author Spotlight – Jason Camlot

January 25, 2023

Jason Camlot is Professor of English and Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. His recent critical works include Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford 2019) and the co-edited collections, Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books (with Jeffrey Weingarten, WLUP, 2022), Collection Thinking: Within and Without Libraries, Archives and Museums (with Martha Langford and Linda Morra, Routledge, 2022), and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Katherine McLeod, McGill Queen’s UP, 2019). He is also the author of five collections of poetry, most recently, Vlarf (McGill Queen’s, 2021). Jason is principal investigator and director of the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb research partnership that focuses on the history of literary sound recordings and the digital preservation and presentation of collections of literary audio.

Forum: Poem Found in an Inventory of the Library of Mordecai Richler

Canadian Literature issue 248 is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues.


Issue 247 Author Spotlight – Owen Torrey

January 18, 2023

Owen Torrey is a writer from Toronto. His poetry and non-fiction have recently appeared with CBC Books, Canadian Literature, League of Canadian Poets (poets.ca), The Literary Review of Canada, Exclaim!, Hello Mr., and elsewhere. He has been long-listed for the CBC-Radio Canada Poetry Prize, featured at the Toronto International Book Fair, and awarded the Roger Conant Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry. Owen currently lives in Toronto, where he works for the editorial department of Knopf Canada.

His poem “The Last Elk in Burwash, Ontario” can be read on our website at https://canlit.ca/article/the-last-elk-in-burwash-ontario.

Canadian Literature issue 248 is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues.


Issue 248: Author Spotlight – Eric Schmaltz

January 11, 2023

Eric Schmaltz holds a PhD in English from York University and, from 2018-19, he was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is co-editor of the critical edition I Want to Tell You Love by bill bissett and Milton Acorn (University of Calgary Press) and author of Surfaces (Invisible Publishing). His academic writing has appeared in Jacket2English Studies in CanadaCanadian PoetryCanadian LiteratureForum and the edited collection All the Feels / Tous les sens. He is a sessional lecturer in English at York University (Glendon College).

Article

“Stutter, Chew, Stop: Three Mandible Modes in the Poetry of Jordan Scott”

Abstract

Scholar and artist Brandon LaBelle (2014) positions the mouth as an integral “contact zone where language performs as a powerful agent” that brings forth the voice to locate the vocalizing subject as an autonomous being within a network of human, posthuman, and nonhuman assemblages. It is a complex site wherein language is both produced and obscured by its many bodily modalities—stuttering, speaking, chewing, biting, stopping, and so on. Thus, the mouth is undeniably a vital apparatus for meaning-making. The mouth is prominently featured in the oeuvre of Canadian poet Jordan Scott, whose works present formidable case studies for investigating the significance of mouth-based meaning-making. Scott’s work engages the powers of mouthing and, in particular, presents readers with compelling contiguity between mouth and ecology. Pursuant of these topics, this article focuses on three of Scott’s poetic texts to examine the mouth as it manifests and is mobilized within his poetry, with a particular interest in how he places language under the pressure of external grammars to challenge the power dynamics of linguistic communication and the ways that environmental considerations and verbal expressivity shape one another.

Canadian Literature issue 248 is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues.