Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations (review)

This collection of essays represents a continuation of Winfried Siemerling’s and Sarah Phillips Casteel’s previous investigations into the issue of hemispheric studies from the vantage point of Canada. Siemerling’s previous studies, especially The New North American Studies, and Casteel’s hemispheric approach in Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas, among their other work, makes this collaborative work particularly suitable.

The central goal of Canada and Its Americas is to insert Canada into discourses about hemispheric studies in the Americas. In their introduction, the editors note that ‘Canadian writers remain notably absent from [the] corpus’ of hemispheric studies, an insight that parallels the general recognition that Canada tends to garner little attention outside of our borders. This insight is paralleled by the further suggestion that ‘for the most part, hemispheric projects have been received by Canadianists with skepticism and, on occasion, hostility.’ While ‘hostility’ is a major claim to make, Siemerling and Casteel’s investment in this issue may well have yielded some such responses in their interdisciplinary fields of study. Working in any interdiscipline is, of course, a fundamentally challenging act.

The goal of breaking down the silos within which academics study is then pursued in four sections: ‘Defending the Nation?,’ ‘Indigenous Re-mappings of America,’ ‘Postslavery Routes,’ and ‘Quebec Connections.’ In each section, the silo announced in the section title becomes the ground for crossing into the hemisphere. In the first section, Cynthia Sugars and Herb Wyile provide queries into approaches to Canadian literary studies in terms of their strengths and challenges. Wyile, in particular, makes ‘the cases for Canadian literary studies.’ These contributions reflect Siemerling and Casteel’s concerns in their introductions, which are further pursued in David Leahy’s intelligent investigation of counter-worlding in the subsequent chapters.

The following sections then pursue their specific grounds: Amaryll Chanady, Sarah Phillips Casteel, and Albert Braz investigate indigenous issues across the hemisphere; Maureen Moynagh and Winfried Siemerling query the Americas’ post-slavery contexts; and Sherry Simon, Monika Giacoppe, Patricia Godbout, Hugh Hazelton, and Catherine Khordoc situate Quebecois discussions in a larger framework. In each case, the chapters provide focused case studies that demonstrate the function of a hemispheric approach. Casteel’s chapter is a case in point: she looks at how Chief Sitting Bull has been approached in a variety of literary contexts – in particular, in works by Joy Kogawa, Bernard Malamud, and Derek Walcott. This grouping of writers is unexpected but is prompted by ways in which all of these writers make use of Sitting Bull – and, more broadly, figures of indigeneity – in their works in order to tell stories of ‘other dispossessed peoples.’

The editors are surely correct in their assertion that hemispheric studies have not been institutionalized in Canada as they have been elsewhere (especially the United States). Canada has taken other routes – postcolonial, transnational, and otherwise – into similar issues. This book represents an attempt to change that circumstance.