Call For Papers

Y-Dang Troeung, who passed away at the end of 2022, was always attentive to her own construction as a scholar, writer, and public intellectual. For Y-Dang, these positions were deeply imbricated with her experiences as a refugee, daughter, and mother shaped by the difficult histories of war, genocide, displacement, and resettlement. Y-Dang consistently wove the personal, historical, and political into her wide-ranging work, which included scholarly writings, memoirs, and film. She left behind a small but impactful archive: the academic book Refugee Lifeworlds: the Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia (Temple University Press, 2022); the trade-press book of autotheory, Landbridge [life in fragments] (Knopf, 2023); the special issue in Canadian Literature, “Refugee Worldmaking: Canada and the Afterlives of the Vietnam War;” the exhibition “Remembering Cambodian Border Camps, 40 Years Later: An Exhibition at Bophana Audiovisual Center”; and the short film Easter Epic (2024).

This special issue of Canadian Literature, a publication Y-Dang served as associate editor, seeks to celebrate and engage with Y-Dang’s capacious thinking on themes of migration, memory, diaspora, family, autobiography, war, race, illness, and justice within diverse fields such as Canadian literature, transnational Asian literatures, critical refugee studies, transpacific Cold War studies, and critical disability studies, just to name a few. We are interested in intellectually stimulating engagements, reflections, and musings that are genre-fluid, pushing the boundaries of academic and creative writing in ways that reflect Y-Dang’s own desire to explore (and to create) various forms of genre expression. Pieces may directly take up concepts that Y-Dang developed or utilized (refugee lifeworlds / worldmaking, refugee supercrip, kemleang chet (strength of the heart), muteness and the Kapok Tree (dam-doeum-kor), refugee aphasia, minor anecdotes, fragments, autotheory / family memoir, Cold War episteme, race-ability, asylum, among others). They may also be inspired by the embodied methodologies and the fragmentary, anecdotal writing styles Y-Dang practiced. They may be ignited, more generally, by the spirit of her thought and her way of being.

We welcome works that “converse” with Y-Dang in the Latinate meanings of conversari, “to keep company with,” and versare, “to raise or hold suspended.” We seek to create a collection of pieces (3,000-5,000 words), a chorus dwelling in togetherness, suspended on the page. We welcome works about reading and teaching Y-Dang’s work. We welcome works that flout conventions. We welcome works that are generatively experimental. We welcome works that show how Y-Dang’s work makes possible other kinds of works.

In Landbridge, Y-Dang decribes the aftermath of war and displacement as a spiral, a swirling into a “lifeworld, a meditative, repetitious space of beauty, creativity, and regeneration” (258). We hope this special issue can move with this swirl that was Y-Dang’s life and works, and can open further ongoing conversations with her.

Submission Guidelines

All submissions to Canadian Literature must be original, unpublished work. Essays should follow current MLA bibliographic format (MLA Handbook, 9th ed.).

Word length for articles is 3,000-5,000 words, which includes endnotes and works cited.

Please limit images accompanying the submission to those receiving substantial attention in the article. Note that contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce images in their article, and must pay any permission costs. The journal can provide a sample template for permission requests. Permissions must be cleared before publication. Please send low resolution images (small jpegs), in separate attachments. If the article is accepted, high quality images will be required.

Submissions should be uploaded to OJS by the deadline of March 15, 2024 (Pacific Time). Our Submission Guidelines can be found at canlit.ca/submissions.

Contact

Feel free to contact us to discuss ideas ahead of time:

Journal Editor: Christine Kim (cl.editor@ubc.ca)

Guest Editors: Chris Patterson (c.patterson@ubc.ca) and Vinh Nguyen (vinh.nguyen@uwaterloo.ca)

General Inquiries: can.lit@ubc.ca

— SUBMISSIONS CLOSED —

EXTENDED Deadline: January 19, 2024 (PT)

In the landmark 1997 Delgamuukw land claim brought before the Supreme Court of Canada (Delgamuukw v. British Columbia), the Court ruled that traditional Indigenous story was admissible in court as evidence of land ownership, legitimizing a kind of literary land claim. This special issue of Canadian Literature examines the way literary texts claim space and explore questions of belonging for Indigenous, diaspora, and settler populations.

The issue will consider narratives from communities in Canada that assert or contest relations between land, story, ownership and belonging—whether it be in rural or urban environments, and in forms as varied as traditional Indigenous stories or hip hop’s practice of paying tribute to home through “reppin’.” Processes of claiming or challenging narratives of belonging are clearly different for Indigenous, diaspora and settler populations, since one consists of original inhabitants; another of immigrants with ties to elsewhere; and a third of settler populations who examine an uneasy colonial relationship to the land, which ultimately contributes to either a sense of national belonging or alienation. Okanagan scholar, author, and activist Jeannette Armstrong writes, “I am claimed and owned by this land, this Okanagan” (174), and her poetry and prose embody that relationship. In Literary Land Claims (2015), settler scholar Margery Fee traces how texts use strategies to claim – or problematize the act of claiming – land, story, and belonging. How do other populations describe their belonging in territories claimed by Canada?

Black scholar Rinaldo Walcott, in his essay “Towards a Poetics of Black Space(s) in Canada,” signals the importance of such an undertaking: “It seems that one of the challenges facing contemporary Black Canadian art is to move beyond the discourse of nostalgia for an elsewhere and toward addressing the politics of its present location” (46-7). By centring the politics of the present, this issue seeks to demonstrate the ways writers address the politics of place through literary land claims. Connecting community to place in the multiple national imaginaries both engenders and demonstrates belonging, helping us redress systemic racism and assert the right to safe spaces. We will consider the politics of claiming stolen land, and the ways that class, race, cultural practice, gender, sexuality, and disability intersect into questions of territorial belonging, nationhood, and connection to place.

All papers examining space and place in relation to belonging in Canada are welcome, in particular those examining questions of race, cultural practice, gender, sexuality and disability. Papers dealing with “third space” or “liminal space” are also encouraged.

We particularly encourage submissions from emerging scholars. In an effort to include a wide range of perspectives and approaches, this issue will include shorter-form submissions combined with longer forms, and an opportunity for emerging scholars to engage in a mentorship process in implementing editorial comments after the double-anonymized peer-review process.

EDIT: A previous version of the poster for this call includes a typo for the word “Indigenous.” Please note that the link to learn more still works, but the title of the issue will feature the corrected spelling rather than the misspelling in the previous poster.

Submission Guidelines

All submissions to Canadian Literature must be original, unpublished work. Essays should follow current MLA bibliographic format (MLA Handbook, 9th ed.). Word length for articles is 4,000-8,000 words, which includes endnotes and works cited.

Please feel free to contact the journal editor, Christine Kim, at cl.editor@ubc.ca, or the special issue guest editors, Heather Macfarlane (hcm1@queensu.ca), Sophie McCall (smccall@sfu.ca) or Basmah Rahman (13bsr@queensu.ca) to discuss ideas ahead of time. Submissions should be uploaded to OJS by the deadline of January 1, 2024. Our Submission Guidelines can be found at canlit.ca/submissions. General questions about the special issue may be directed to can.lit@ubc.ca.

Please limit images accompanying the submission to those receiving substantial attention in the article. Note that contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce images in their article, and must pay any permission costs. The journal can provide a sample template for permission requests. Permissions must be cleared before publication. Please send low resolution images (small jpegs), in separate attachments. If the article is accepted, high quality images will be required.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Jeannette. “Land Speaking.” Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing, edited by Simon Ortiz, U of Arizona P, 1998, pp. 174-95.

Fee, Margery. Literary Land Claims: the “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2015.

Lamer, Chief Justice. “Delgamuukw vs. British Columbia.” Canadian Native Law Reporter, vol. 1, 1998, pp. 14-97.

Walcott, Rinaldo. “‘A Tough Geography:’ Towards a Poetics of Black Space(s) in Canada.” Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada. 2nd revised ed., Insomniac Press, 2003, pp. 43-56.

Links

Read more about Canadian Literature‘s Submission Guidelines

Submit your work through Open Journal Systems (OJS)

Canadian Literature seeks contributions for a guest-edited special issue on “the Vietnam War and its Afterlife in Canadian Literature.” As a descriptor, “the Vietnam War” signifies differently across spatial, temporal, and geographical boundaries. Some of its variants, metonymies, proxies, “sideshows,” and “postscripts” include: the American War in Vietnam, the Second Indochina War, the Cold War in Southeast Asia, the Secret War in Laos, the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, and the Cambodian Genocide. Collectively, these asymmetrical wars of empire contributed to the suffering of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong people on a scale that Michel Foucault described in 1979 as “unprecedented in modern history.” These wars also disproportionately enlisted the labour of Black, Indigenous, and brown bodies to fight on the frontlines of the war in the name of securing the extractive economies of Southeast Asia for U.S.-led global capitalism.

Canada’s involvement in the Vietnam War was marked by both complicity with and resistance to empire. On the one hand, Canada sent thousands of troops to Southeast Asia, provided the U.S. military with war material, and allowed the testing of chemical weapons on indigenous lands in Canada. On the other hand, Canada offered sanctuary to 30,000 U.S. war resisters and 60,000 Southeast Asian refugees, more refugees per capita than any other nation in the world. At local levels, Canadian groups mobilized in support of Southeast Asian refugees (e.g. Operation Lifeline) while others (the majority of the Canadian public polled at the time) were against the government’s asylum policies.

How might we begin to reconcile Canada’s humanitarian image of benevolence with its complicitous actions? How do the literary and cultural works that have been routed through Canada—including Denise Chong’s The Girl in the Picture, Kim Thuy’s Ru, Vincent Lam’s The Headmaster’s Wager, Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter, Dionne Brand’s What we All Long For, Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists, Philip Huynh’s The Forbidden Purple City, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s All the Broken Things, Tian Veasna’s Year of the Rabbit, Greg Santos’s Ghost Face, FONKi’s The Roots Remain, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguy?n’s The Making of an Archive, and Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife, among others—engage with the recurring presence of the Vietnam War and its afterlife? To what extent does the Vietnam War as an imperial formation offer possibilities for rethinking the paradigm of Canadian literature as a field? How might this rethinking coalesce alongside contemporary movements in Asian, Black and Indigenous studies in Canada?

In particular, the journal welcomes bipoc, de-colonial, feminist, queer, trans, transpacific, and/or critical refugee studies approaches. Essays and contributions that blend the creative and the critical, as well as the theoretical and the autotheoretical, are welcomed and encouraged. Contributions need not be limited to the study of “literature” in its conventional sense.

Possible essay topics may include, but are not limited to, the following as they intersect with the theme of the Vietnam War and its Afterlife in Canadian Literature, broadly conceived:

• The Vietnam War (or variant) as an unsettling method or analytic
• Southeast Asian refugee memories, lifeworlds, and knowledges
• Black / Indigenous / Asian formations of the Vietnam War
• Soldiering, empire, and Canada as “minor empire”
• Militarism, slow violence, and ecological aftermaths
• Sponsorship, humanitarianism, and humanitarian violence
• Canadian civility, complicity, and “quiet complicity”
• Migrant affects: gratitude, anger, empathy, apathy
• Aesthetics, form, multimedia, and art
• Narratives of “good” and “bad” refugees
• Resettlement in the rural versus the urban
• French Indochina-Quebecois-Canada triangulations
• Parallel imperial formations (e.g. wars in Korea, Lebanon, Somalia, Syria)
• Refugee routes via militarized spaces (e.g. camps in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Canadian bases)
• Spaces of refuge and carcerality: boat, camp, asylum, prison, deportspora
• Sanctuary in relation to health, disability, and neurodiversity
• Refugee patriots and complicities
• Military industrial complex and war machines
• Food cultures, memory, and community
• Anti-racist, anti-colonial, bipoc solidarities and futures

All submissions to Canadian Literature must be original, unpublished work. Essays should follow current MLA bibliographic format (MLA Handbook, 8th ed.). Word length for articles is 7,000-8,000 words, which includes endnotes and works cited.

The journal recognizes that the current moment is full of challenges and precarities for the Canadian Literature community. We are open to considering submissions that go outside the bounds of conventional research articles, especially collaborative efforts and submissions from graduate students, early career scholars, artists, and members of the community. Please feel free to contact the journal editor, Christine Kim, at cl.editor@ubc.ca, or the special issue guest editor, Y-Dang Troeung, at y-dang.troeung@ubc.ca, to discuss ideas ahead of time. Submissions should be uploaded to OJS by the deadline of February 28, 2021. Our Submission Guidelines can be found at canlit.ca/submissions. General questions about the special issue may be directed to can.lit@ubc.ca.

On March 11, 2020, the WHO officially declared the outbreak of COVID-19 to be a global pandemic. Similar to many other countries around the world, Canada closed its schools, borders, businesses, and other facilities and implemented measures such as social distancing and restricted gatherings as it tried to slow the spread of coronavirus and equip hospitals and other sites with sufficient amounts of personal protective equipment. Amongst other things, the pandemic has highlighted the challenges of balancing the physical and mental wellbeing of individuals and communities with the economic needs of individuals, families, and businesses. During this time, much of the labour of caring for the sick, elderly and other vulnerable populations, staffing grocery stores and meat production plants, harvesting crops, and delivering food has come from low-paid, racialized, and/or temporary migrant workers. And as we look towards the future, government and public health officials warn us that a second wave of the virus could take place since a vaccine has yet to be developed. The pandemic has dramatically changed our social and political landscapes; for example, we now routinely rely on new forms of technology to maintain intimate and professional relationships as we avoid physical contact with those outside of our ‘bubble.’

Over the past couple of months, our collective vocabularies have grown as we hear from public officials about the fact that we are now in ‘uncertain and unprecedented times’ and that we need to adjust to the ‘new normal.’ But what exactly do phrases like these mean? What role does storytelling play in dealing with the complexities of this moment? What historical precedents can we turn to? From Kevin Kerr’s play Unity (1918) to novels such as Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Larissa Lai’s recent The Tiger Flu and films like Don McKellar’s Last Night, Tony Burgess’ Pontypool, and Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum, issues around pandemics, contagion, and quarantine are not new to Canadian culture. How can Canadian literary and cultural production help us understand this moment, our shifting realities, and changing national and global imaginaries? Can we historicize our current crisis by, for example, turning to earlier discourses of disease, outbreaks, and the disciplining of racialized and Indigenous bodies? What new global understandings can we gain by comparing Canada to other nations as we all respond to this pandemic? How does the current pandemic exacerbate the precarities of academic life in the humanities and beyond? How have writers and artists configured pandemics in the past? In the present?

This special issue invites contributions that reflect critically upon pandemics and Canadian cultural production, which includes literature and many other forms of cultural expression. We are particularly interested in submissions that offer new forms of cultural critique and that investigate the cultural logics of pandemics. Possible topics and themes may include but are not limited to:

• Contagion, disease, and outbreaks
• The problem of borders
• Curtailment of transnational movement / migration
• Rise in nationalism and a return to protectionism
• Global capital and the postwar welfare state
• States of vulnerability with regards to age, gender, sexuality, class, race, precarious and mobile labour
• Dystopic imaginaries
• Reimagining space and spatial relations
• Affective dimensions of self-isolation and pandemics
• Temporalities such as the COVID-19 timeline, times of emergency, fear of the future, nostalgia for pre-pandemic time, the unmarked sense of time during isolation
• Racist group blame and the rise of anti-Asian violence
• New forms of creativity and expectations of productivity
• Online teaching and rethinking pedagogy
• Social justice in the time of pandemic
• Surveillance, technology, contact tracing, and public health
• Narrative medicine, rhetoric of health and medicine, and medical humanities

All submissions to Canadian Literature must be original, unpublished work. Essays should follow current MLA bibliographic format (MLA Handbook, 8th ed.). Word length for articles is 7,000-8,000 words, which includes endnotes and works cited.

The journal recognizes that the current moment is full of challenges and precarities for the Canadian Literature community. We are open to considering submissions that go outside the bounds of conventional research articles, especially collaborative efforts. Please feel free to contact the journal’s incoming editor, Christine Kim, at canlit.editor@ubc.ca, to discuss ideas ahead of time.

Submissions should be uploaded to OJS by the deadline of October 30, 2020. Our Submission Guidelines can be found at canlit.ca/submissions.

General questions about the special issue may be directed to can.lit@ubc.ca.

In the five years since the first call for our inaugural Emerging Scholars issue, both the world and the field of Canadian literature have changed. A climate emergency has been declared. There has been a global rise in dangerous and exclusionary forms of nationalism. There have been wars and humanitarian crises. Large-scale public protest has become the norm. There has been a spotlight on the pervasiveness of sexual violence, intimidation, and bullying. Social media has both helped create communities and become a place for sharp dissent. We seem to be living in a state of sustained urgency. Urgent times prompt us to want to hear from emergent voices. The submissions for the first two Emerging Scholars issues (226, 228/9) dynamically showed the state of the field five years ago. How are researchers who will shape the field and its future engaging with it today?

How do emerging scholars critically engage with works of fiction, drama, poetry, intermedia, memoire, creative nonfiction, or adaptation today. Whether through a lens of environmental, energy, public, or medical humanities, or by way of critical race, decolonial, migration, refugee, or gender studies, or any other approach, what are newer scholars contributing to contemporary scholarship? Why study the history of literature and the historical contexts of cultural production and reception today?

We again turn to people who are (relatively) new to the field to call attention to new work in the field of Canadian literature. This issue will highlight the work of Emerging Scholars and showcase the directions the field is taking. We welcome submissions on any topic in English or French from senior graduate students, postdocs, and those who might consider themselves to be Emerging Scholars (we place no time limit on this category).

We are actively seeking submissions for this issue NOW, so please help spread the word!

All submissions to Canadian Literature must be original, unpublished work. Essays should follow current MLA bibliographic format (MLA Handbook, 8th ed.). Word length for articles is 6,500-7,000 words, which includes endnotes and works cited.

Submissions should be uploaded to OJS by the deadline of January 31, 2020. Our Submission Guidelines can be found at canlit.ca/submissions.

Questions about the special issue may be directed to canlit.editor@ubc.ca or can.lit@ubc.ca.

It is now commonly accepted that Canadian literature has become a global literature, implying that any understanding of textual localities is traversed by vectors that exceed, complicate, and extend the nation in physical, historical, and cultural ways. But the gaze is seldom reversed and little attention has been paid to the role of international scholarship in the current transformation and development of the field.

How are Canadian texts read and circulated beyond the national borders? What is the place of Canadian literature in the institutional spaces of universities outside Canada? How do those transnational contexts negotiate the relationship between texts and readers? Are there defining differences in the ways non-Canadian scholars approach CanLit? How does transnational scholarship influence, challenge, enrich, and rescale Canadian literary production?

This special issue invites scholars of Canadian literature from around the globe to engage critically with any aspect of Canadian literary production, dissemination, or reception. Essays should implicitly bring to view the two-way direction of reading and writing Canadian literature globally, demonstrating the porosity of transnational scholarship as well as advancing innovative perspectives that may contribute to the rescaling of the field.

All submissions to Canadian Literature must be original, unpublished work. Essays should follow current MLA bibliographic format (8^th ed).
Articles should be between 6500 and 7000 words, including endnotes and works cited.

Submissions should be uploaded to Canadian Literature’s online submissions system (OJS) by the extended deadline of June 1, 2018. 

The guest editor of this issue will be Eva Darias-Beautell of University of La Laguna, Spain.