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Call for Papers — Emerging Scholars: Knowledge Production in Crisis
Deadline: Feb. 28, 2025 (Pacific Time)
Submission length: 5,000-8,000 words (including works cited and notes)
Guest Editors: Z. N. Dylan Jackson, amanda wan, Emma Gilroy (University of British Columbia)
In “Mistaken Identity: ‘Asian Indigenous Relation’ and the Afterlives of Feminist Critique” (2023), Rusaba Alam observes that close textual analysis has “fallen out of favour in a contemporary scholarly field conditioned by precarity and by the ever-diminishing time and space available for sustained attention to language” (79). Even as analytical methods—in Alam’s example, deconstruction—have facilitated feminist, queer, and other liberatory critiques, those of us who would practice them find ourselves stymied by the demands of the very institutions that would enable us. To be an emerging scholar in Canada or Canadian literature would seem to be exciting: an honour, an opportunity, an affective praxis of intellectual home- and community-making. To work as an emerging scholar, however, is an increasingly difficult proposition.
We gesture here to the so-called crisis in the humanities, or the vocational stress that has been steadily increasing in academia over decades. Literary study in its own right often attends to crises of content, form, or milieu. Yet the impossibility of containing scholarly crises within conventional scholarly contexts grows more obvious, and more pressing, every day. The three of us—Z. N. Dylan Jackson, amanda wan, and Emma Gilroy—are ourselves emerging scholars, currently studying in or having recently graduated from the English department at UBC and working as members of CanLit’s editorial collective. Working at CanLit and in CanLit has driven us to reconsider how to join ongoing conversations within, and in response to, the academic institution. For example, the 2024 Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities at McGill University saw dozens of Canada’s scholarly organizations gather for an event whose host stood at odds with its own students and faculty. This controversy signalled the material dimensions of making and finding home and community on already politicized ground, illuminating tensions among the university and genocide, carcerality, colonialism, protest, mutual aid, and solidarity.
Here, then, is a crisis: our knowledge production mediates the colonial and debilitating institutions of the university and, as the writers and editors of Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (2018) have shown, CanLit itself. Some of us have long negotiated or worked to mitigate these hostilities, while others among us may see the vocational ideal of knowledge production newly demystified amid the COVID-19 pandemic or the escalation of genocide in Palestine. In both cases, recent and ongoing crises have crystallized and lent urgency to the tensions of knowledge production in or about Canada as an embodied, emplaced, and affiliated practice.
In this special issue, we invite emerging scholars—graduate and postdoctoral students, early-career scholars, and anyone else who might consider themself an emerging scholar—to reflect on the scholarly crises into and out of which we emerge. How might we navigate the tangle of literary study, knowledge production, and the moral and ethical imperatives of our current cultural moment?
We welcome reflections on the field, praxis-oriented proposals, and other engagements with the matter outlined above. Literary or textual analysis as a mode of engagement is particularly encouraged. We offer the following possible starting points:
- The home institution: Amid anticolonial encampments for Palestine, graduate worker strikes, an ongoing pandemic, and other events, how does the university as an ambivalent site of knowledge production affect our work and understanding of ourselves as scholars? How might such ambivalence generate possibilities for reshaping both harmful and life-giving practices of home-making within institutions?
- Poetics and, of, against production: How might we read poetry as a mode of knowledge production? How does poetry produce knowledge differently, produce different knowledges, or speak to more conventional sites of knowledge production?
- Assimilation and resistance: What happens to alternative ways of knowing when we introduce them into the university? How can we honour these epistemologies by, or rather than, institutionalizing them? What works help you grapple with these questions?
- Knowledge in, of, and out of place: How are you incorporating land-based pedagogies and methodologies into your knowledge production? How do such modalities attune us to the possibilities of knowledge out of place? How do we reckon with CanLit as a field conditioned by encounters with Indigenous knowledges, in addition to conceptions of Indigeneity that vary throughout the many iterations of settler colonialism and empire?
- Scholarship beyond the academy: How have you encountered scholarship in, or brought scholarly work into, nonacademic contexts? What texts guide your own visions for non- or new academic models of scholarly home, labour, or community?
- Undisciplining: How does interdisciplinarity and the undisciplining of literary and textual studies inform your work? What media artefacts help you think through a practice among or beyond disciplines? How might we think about undisciplining as the refusal of discipline?
Submission Guidelines
We hope to help alleviate the pressures of scholarly knowledge production in two ways. First, we are happy to consider shorter (~5000-word) and collaboratively authored articles. Second, we will offer workshop support to authors whose articles are accepted for publication.
Submissions should be sent online through our Open Journal Systems (OJS) portal.
Articles should follow current MLA style and formatting (MLA Handbook, 9th ed.).
Please limit images accompanying submissions to those receiving substantial attention in the article. Contributors will be required to obtain permission to reproduce images in their article and pay for any permission costs. The journal will provide a template for permission requests; such requests must be completed before publication. Please send high-quality images as separate attachments along with your article file.
For full submission guidelines, please visit canlit.ca/submissions.
Contact Us
If you have questions or wish to discuss ideas ahead of time, please feel free to reach out to us:
Guest Editors / General Inquiries: Z. N. Dylan Jackson, amanda wan, Emma Gilroy (can.lit@ubc.ca)
Editor-in-Chief: Christine Kim (cl.editor@ubc.ca)
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Call for Papers — Swirling into a Field of Life: Works in Conversation with Y-Dang Troeung
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
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Call for Papers — How to be at Home in Canada: Placemaking in Indigenous, Diaspora, and Settler Texts
— 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
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Call for Papers: “Feminist Critique Here and Now”
— SUBMISSIONS CLOSED —
What is the continued role of feminist theory and feminist analysis in literary studies today in these lands claimed by Canada? How and why is feminist analysis still relevant to our work? We seek contributions for a special issue of Canadian Literature on feminist critique and/in Canada today.
In the 1980s and 1990s, feminist theory transformed many aspects of literary scholarship in Canada and beyond. The introduction of French feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory gave us new tools to think about identity in relation to language. The bilingual feminist journal Tessera became a vital venue of feminist experimentation and theorizing in Canada. Women’s Press and Press Gang became important venues for feminist publishing. Texts like This Bridge Called My Back and Lee Maracle’s I Am Woman offered vital and engaged sites of intersectional feminist thinking and creation. Filmmakers like Deepa Mehta and Patricia Rozema began to explore filmmaking from a feminist perspective, and women’s and gender studies became established as a discipline.
In recent years, feminist analysis and feminist critique have taken on new urgencies in the wake of scandals like #ubcaccountable and #metoo, and in response to the rise of popular anti-feminist and transphobic celebrities and the rise of misogynistic rhetoric on social media. Movements like #Blacklivesmatter and #idlenomore have raised renewed and urgent questions for feminism. The COVID-19 pandemic has created crises around affective labour and service work that have returned attention to questions of class, gender, immigration status, precarity, mental health, and age. These events act as powerful reminders that feminism is still vital and necessary and that we must continue to find ways to advance a feminism that is intersectional, anti-racist, decolonial, and affirming of LGBTQ2S lives.
However, many of us tend to not centre feminism as a methodology in our work. As an entry point to feminism in the introduction to the recent volume In Good Relation, Sarah Nickel points to “a general anxiety around the term itself” among Indigenous feminists and “a desire to explain” how they arrive as feminists (2). Amidst contextual complexities, many scholars adopt what Rosi Braidotti calls a “nomadic feminism,” which she describes as
an opening outwards of the process of redefining female subjectivity . . . that calls for a broadening of the traditional feminist political agenda to include, as well as the issue of women’s social rights, a larger spectrum of options which range from cultural concerns related to writing and creativity, to issues which at first sight seem to have nothing to do specifically with women. (83)
However, as Chandra Talpade Mohanty reminds us, “imperialism, militarization, and globalization all traffic in women’s bodies, women’s labor, and ideologies of masculinity/femininity, hetero-normativity, racism, and nationalism to consolidate and reproduce power and domination” (9). Given these perspectives, we are interested in exploring the continued resonance and urgency of feminist thinking in the twenty-first century.
We invite contributors to respond to one or more of the following questions through an engagement with fiction, poetry, oral traditions, film, music, graphic novels, performance, and/or visual arts in lands claimed by Canada. Contributions might think through diverse feminist theoretical frameworks, including but not limited to, affect, critical race, dis/ability, decolonial, ecological, Indigenous, Marxist, new materialist, post-anthropocentric, postcolonial, posthumanist, psychoanalytic, and queer/trans theory.
- What dialogues are taking place among feminists of different generations? What intergenerational dialogues need to take place? What can we learn from previous generations of feminists? Conversely, what can we learn from younger generations?
- How might it be useful to think about your work in relation to feminism, even if you have not previously identified your work through feminist concerns? What kinds of trouble and/or alliances might be made by pairing your work with feminism?
- What forms of cultural production and activism are occurring at the nexus of trans and/or 2S/queer and feminist studies? What kinds of relations exist? What can trans and/or 2S/queer theory and feminist theory learn from each other?
- How is feminism imagining ways out of racialized and gendered violence or articulating forms of resilience and resistance? What does anti-racist feminism look like in twenty-first-century Canada?
- How do we envision decolonial feminisms? What are the implications of applying a feminist analysis to questions of Indigenous sovereignty? How do Indigenous knowledge systems and community wisdoms step into relation with feminisms? How might feminisms and Indigenous sex and gender systems co-conspire?
- What are the gendered effects of pandemics (COVID-19 or otherwise), specifically with regard to affective labour and care work? How do economics, class, labour, and dis/ability inflect this question?
- How have neoliberal discourses co-opted and adopted feminism? How has feminism resisted, or capitulated, to neoliberalism?
- How does feminism manifest in, through, with, and beyond the body?
- How does feminism help us to understand ecological relations, kinships, and/or trans-species solidarities?
- How are experimental forms or particular generic concerns shaped/catalyzed/exploded in relation to feminism?
- What is the relationship between feminist activism and cultural production?
How does literary work bring us to think through, about, or with these clustered concerns? How have writers and other cultural workers responded to these questions in their literary and artistic practice? We encourage contributions from emerging, diversely positioned, and established scholars. We welcome standard academic essays as well as submissions that take on unconventional or creative forms.
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 6,500-8,000 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, Aubrey Hanson (ajhanson@ucalgary.ca) or Heather Milne (h.milne@uwinnipeg.ca), to discuss ideas ahead of time. Submissions should be uploaded to OJS by the deadline of 31 August 2022. 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 editors can provide a sample template for permission requests and 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
Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Polity, 2002.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, “US Empire and the Project of Women’s Studies: Stories of Citizenship, Complicity and Dissent.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, vol. 13, no. 1, Feb. 2006, pp. 7-20.
Nickel, Sarah. Introduction. In Good Relation: History, Gender, and Kinship in Indigenous Feminisms, edited by Nickel and Amanda Fehr, U of Manitoba P, 2020, pp. 1-19.
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Call for Papers for a Special Issue on Poetics and Extraction
— SUBMISSIONS CLOSED —
In “Tarhands: A Messy Manifesto,” Métis scholar Warren Cariou rewrites William Carlos Williams’ poem “This Is Just to Say” into a time capsule to be opened in a hundred years:
This is just to say
We’ve burned up all the oil
and poisoned the air
you were probably hoping to breathe.
Forgive us.
It was delicious
the way it burned
so bright and
so fast.
Cariou’s poem is an extraction poem in several senses. It is about oil and the petrostate, and it mirrors the modes and moods of a petro-capitalist imaginary. It is also an act of extraction—of mining, cracking, and refining Williams’ poem and the literary tradition. Cariou sums up the history and the poetics of the settler-colonial extractive state, with its illegitimate literal and literary land claims, its pretenses of conservation and of wondering “where is here” while occupying stolen land, and its always failing repression of the wilderness. For Cariou and his imagined reader, it all amounts to “just” a selfish and short-sighted folly. Situated within the manifesto form, the poem becomes available as one mode or element of a larger argument for cultural and social change.
Cariou’s intervention also belongs to traditions of resource, extractive, oil, and land poetics in so-called Canada. These traditions include Indigenous poetics as “land speaking” (Jeannette Armstrong) and resistance literature (Emma LaRocque); Confederation-era poetry like Isabella Valency Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie; Robert Service’s mining ballads; the logger poetry of Robert Swanson and Peter Trower; oil poetry from Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk to Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons; diasporic poetics on place, identity, property, and land, including Dionne Brand’s Land to Light On, Canisia Lubrin’s The Dyzgraphxst, and Brandon Wint’s Divine Animal; plastic poetry by Fiona Tinwei Lam and Adam Dickinson; activist and anti-pipeline poetry such as Rita Wong’s undercurrent and The Enpipe Line; climate change poetry as in Watch Your Head; Indigenous, Black, and speculative futurisms such as Tanya Tagaq’s Retribution and Kaie Kellough’s fiction and sound performances; and myriad other examples not listed here.
In tying varied poetic forms and modes together under the sign of resources or extraction for a special issue on “Poetics and Extraction,” we do not mean to impose a particular framework as universally portable to a range of specific contexts and histories. Rather, we ask, what does an attention to resources and/or extraction animate in our analysis of cultural, literary, and poetic responses to this place, the land on and with which we live? This special issue engages the theme of poetics and extraction broadly, considering poetry, poetics, and aesthetics in, of, and against extraction and the extractive state. It highlights historical, contemporary, innovative, and experimental poetics related to energy, resources, and land. It uses the lens of extractive poetics to consider how we got to the intersecting crises of global warming, environmental racism, ecocide, and genocide in Canada, and also to envision decolonial, reciprocal land relations for a just energy transition.
We are especially interested in contributions that examine energy or resource poetry, poetics, and aesthetics from the perspectives of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour and critical race theory, 2SLGBTQQIA and queer theory, workers and labour studies, women’s and gender studies, and poets, artists, and cultural workers.
We welcome submissions of scholarly articles on poetry, poetics, visual art, cultural texts, performance, and aesthetics. We also welcome poetry, essays on poetics, and hybrid/creative forms.
Possible topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Poetry, visual art, performance, aesthetics, popular culture
- Extractive industries, including coal, oil and gas, mining, logging, nuclear energy, industrial farming, and hydro
- Renewable and reciprocal energy systems (traditional/Indigenous lifeways, wind, solar, sustainable hydro, biopower, animacy)
- Poetics and aesthetics of the staples trap, the oil patch, climate change
- Ambience, affect, anxiety, and the energy unconscious of the petro-state
- Comparative analyses of Canadian, Indigenous, and diasporic texts alongside texts from other places
- Poetry, poetics, and aesthetics of environmental racism in Canada
- Poetics and aesthetics of just energy transition in Canada
- Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour poetics related to energy, resources, or land
- Texts related to the oil and gas industry, including practices such as extraction, production, transport, marketing, pollution, combustion, capture, and sequestration
- Texts about plastics, polymers, toxicity, and the ubiquity of oil
- Extractive poetics; poetics of extraction; resource aesthetics and poetics; petropoetics; energo-poetics
- Anti-oil or pro-oil poetics, aesthetics, and culture
- Extraction and the poetics and politics of gender, transgender, sex, and purism
- Class and extractive culture
- Disability and extractive culture
- Climate despair as it relates to anxieties about the efficacy of poetry/cultural production
- The oil sensorium, infrastructure, and petropoetics beyond poetry
- Theorizing petropoetics in petrocultures/the energy humanities
- Methods/ethics for the study of extraction; the limits of extraction as a theoretical framework for literary study
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 6,500-8,000 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 activists.
Please feel free to contact the journal editor, Christine Kim, at cl.editor@ubc.ca, or the special issue guest editors, Max Karpinski (kmax@ualberta.ca) and Melanie Dennis Unrau (melaniedunrau@gmail.com), to discuss ideas ahead of time. Submissions should be uploaded to OJS by the deadline of 15 April 2022. 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 editors can provide a sample template for permission requests and 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.
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Call for Papers for a Special Issue on “80 Years and Beyond: The Past, Present, and Future of Canadian Comics”
DEADLINE EXTENDED: January 31st by 11:59 pm PST
The Canadian Parliament passed the War Exchange Conservation Act (WECA) late in 1940 to preserve its currency for the war effort by limiting the importation of nonessential goods. Periodicals, including popular American comic books, were one casualty. Within a few months, Canadian artists and entrepreneurs responded by launching a domestic comic book industry often regarded as Canada’s golden age of comics. This industry produced four publishing companies and six years of original Canadian comics production, including Robin Hood Comics and Triumph-Adventure Comics, which featured Adrian Dingle’s Nelvana of the Northern Lights, one of the earliest female superheroes in comics.
The eightieth anniversary of the first comic books published in Canada, now known as the WECA comics era, celebrates one important milestone in a long history of comics production in Canada, from early editorial cartoons to newspaper strips to serials, bandes dessinées, graphic novels, manga, and web comics, and in multiple languages. This special issue invites scholarly articles that reflect the breadth and depth of Canadian comics history before and after the WECA comics, across a diversity of forms and platforms. We are particularly interested in submissions that offer meaningful critical insights into the history, present state, and potential future of Canadian comics studies, as well as contributions engaging in Indigenous, settler colonial, critical race, decolonial, feminist, trans, queer and/or disability studies approaches. Articles that blend the creative and the critical, as well as the theoretical and the auto-theoretical, are welcomed and encouraged.
Possible essay topics may include, but are not limited to, the following as they reflect the issue’s focus on the past, present, and future of Canadian Comics:
- How do we tell the story of Canadian comics from the early 20th century to now?
- Do Canadian WWII comics have any relevance to today’s comics culture?
- Which artists, genres, and formats has the dominant historical narrative of Canadian comics, including publications and exhibitions, hidden from visibility?
- How have Canadian comics of the past stereotyped, excluded, obscured, or ignored certain Canadian voices and stories?
- How does the current state of Canadian comics both reflect its past and direct its future?
- Whether or not there is a “national tradition,” or specific regional styles and schools, within Canadian comics.
- How contemporary Canadian comics can amplify the voices of Canadians and communities who were traditionally (and may still be) excluded from the conversation.
- Canadian comics publishing, marketing, audience, and reception.
- The role of translators and translation in Canadian comics (both translations of Canadian comics and translated comics in Canada).
- The role of exhibitions, comic cons, festivals, and retailers in shaping Canadian comics as a cultural and academic field.
- Children’s and Young Adult comics.
- What might the future of Canadian comics and Canadian comics studies look like?
- How should we be telling the story of Canadian comics?
- Will the future of Canadian comics, and Canadian comics studies, look different from the past or present?
- What local/national/global factors will influence the future of Canadian comics?
- How can we understand Canadian comics today within larger shifts to digital cultures?
- How can comics studies support comics pedagogy and the teaching of Canadian comics (K-12 and post-secondary)?
- Comics as labour and the precarity of the profession for comics artists and comics scholars.
- How have Canadian comics gone “global”?
- Transnational artistic influences and cross-border collaborations.
- Canadian cartoonists working in the US and elsewhere outside Canada.
- Global audiences and the critical popularity of Canadian comics, graphic novels, webcomics, and Quebec BDs outside Canada.
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 6,500-8,000 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 comics community.
Please feel free to contact the journal editor, Christine Kim, at cl.editor@ubc.ca, or the special issue guest editors, Zachary J.A. Rondinelli (zrondinelli@brocku.ca) and Candida Rifkind (c.rifkind@uwinnipeg.ca), to discuss ideas ahead of time. Submissions should be uploaded to OJS by the deadline of January 5, 2022. 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 editors can provide a sample template for permission requests and 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.
- How do we tell the story of Canadian comics from the early 20th century to now?
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Call for Papers for a Special Issue on “The Vietnam War and its Afterlife in Canadian Literature”
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.
Duffin’s Donuts in Vancouver, BC, run by former Cambodian refugees.
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.
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EXTENDED: Call for Papers for a Special Issue on “Pandemics”
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.’
Photo by Laura Moss, Vancouver BC, April 2020
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.
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Call for Papers for a Special Issue on “Emerging Scholars, Redux”
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!
Photo by Alex Radelich on Unsplash
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.
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Call for Papers for a Special Issue on “Decolonial (Re)Visions of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror”
Deadline extended to July 1, 2019 from May 15, 2019.
This special issue will address Black Canadian and Indigenous work in/with the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, both genre fiction proper and slipstream fiction. While there has been quite a bit of attention to African American SF and increasingly to the burgeoning of genre fiction on the African continent, and while Indigenous SF has been growing and attracting more attention, there has not been as much attention to the relationships between Indigenous and Black SF in Canada or to the particular ways Canada’s settler colonial past and present inform the ways Black Canadian and Indigenous writers engage with science fiction, fantasy, and horror. How do Black and Indigenous writers respond to the different positions colonialism historically imposed on those who were subjected to alien abduction versus alien invasion? How do these genres re-present histories of slavery, genocide, displacement, and dispossession? While the dynamic between Black and Indigenous histories is at play across the Americas, as Nalo Hopkinson’s work illustrates nicely, we ask whether there is something specific about the Canadian iteration of that hemispheric history. What does it mean to engage in a comparison of Black and Indigenous writing in the genres from this location, the settler-colonial formation called Canada? How else might we think of the relations and relays between blackness and indigeneity in modes other than the comparative? How do the genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror attend to the historically triangulated relations among settler, Indigenous, and racialized immigrant peoples, including, for instance, Asian Canadians? What might be different about Asian Canadian engagement with this settler-colonial history? Whether in outer space, an alternate universe, a haunted house, or a mythic time, the worlds built in genre fiction seem to open up and provoke questions of how to both represent and transform the colonial conditions of our shared and still incommensurable world. How do Indigenous and Black Canadian writers working in or with these genres explore the possibilities for alternative kinds of social and political power—in other words, how do they take up the utopian impulses of conventional SF? This is the challenge of finding “new ways of doing things” that Nalo Hopkinson describes as the possibility in science fiction that is taken up by “the colonizee” as a form of critique.
Photo by Cassi Josh on Unsplash
We ask, further, how this comparative focus might allow for a critical engagement with Fredric Jameson’s claim that science fiction returns us to history by representing it as a speculative future, thus helping us to imagine ways past current political impasses. What does an Indigenous / Black novum look like? How do works of Afro- and Indigenous futurism also complicate the temporality of the novum by at times exploring what-could-have-been and what-always-has-been? In writing of recent African science fiction, Matthew Omelsky argues that it engages with a new form of biopolitics that he calls “neuropolitics,” by which he means the extension of power to “the control of memory and thought”; to what extent does Black / Indigenous SF exhibit a similar set of concerns?
Across these speculative, weird, and fantastic modes of storytelling, world-building and theorizing, how do Black and Indigenous authors grappling with the histories and the present of Canada find space to write within, persist within and demand the impossible?
For this special issue, we seek both scholarly essays on these questions and contributions from writers reflecting on their own work in/with these genres. In engaging with the questions outlined above, contributors might address, without feeling constrained by, the following specific themes:
- Land and colonization
- Contact and encounter
- The postcolonial and the decolonial
- Indigeneity and diaspora; sovereignty and belonging
- Comparisons between Canadian decolonial and US / diasporic / African / antipodean (re)visions
- Comparisons between Asian Canadian and Indigenous and/or Black-Canadian SF
- Contemporary ‘race science,’ scientific studies of ‘race’ and Black / Indigenous SF
- Speculative / racialized revisionings of gender and sexuality
- Critical utopias
- Temporality: how does Indigenous and Black Canadian SF do the ‘future’ differently?
- Enlightenment critique: scientific rationalism vs. non-European epistemologies
- Tensions between Indigenous design/technologies and those introduced from without
- Publishing media for genre fiction
- Film and graphica
- Monstrosity
- Haunting
- Possession and/or dispossession
- The different modalities of fantasy, SF, horror
- The apocalyptic
Special Issue editors: Lou Cornum, Suzette Mayr, and Maureen Moynagh
The deadline for submissions is May 15, 2019. Please consult canlit.ca/submissions for instructions on how to submit via Open Journal Systems. All papers submitted will undergo a formal peer review process through Canadian Literature. 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. All correspondence will go through the CanLit office.