Floating the Boarders: New Contexts in Canadian Criticism ed. by Nurjehan Aziz (review)

humanities 479 writing. The events leading up to Mayakovsky's suicide are too lightly sketched; the nature of mysticism or the role of religious iconography in Russian life needs to be made clear before we can fully appreciate how such concerns inform the work of Pushkin or Lermontov. Alongside the essays on Holocaust-related themes, and those on Russian literature, are a number of short pieces on widely diverse themes: guilt in Under the Volcano; Camus's existentialism; T.E. Lawrence's identity problems. These are, in some way, the best things in Ponomareff's collection, but they are too short truly to do their subjects justice. They include glimmers of satisfying argument, and in the unpredictability of their style one expects to run up against surprising work made of familiar texts. But the overall intention of each doesn't quite come clear. (NORMAN RAVVIN) Nurjehan Aziz, editor. Floating the Boarders: New Contexts in Canadian Criticism TSAR. viii, 280. $24.95 This timely compilation of ten critical essays and twenty-four book reviews reflects and broaches the diversity that constitutes Canadian writing today. The critical essays that make up the first part of the volume approach multicultural writing in two distinct fashions: through racial and cultural categories and through individual authors. The last of the essays deals with the limitations of conventional nationalist discourse in Canada, and is the only paper, and section of the volume for that matter, dealing with First Nations' perspectives. The essays contribute to the challenge that nationalist conceptualizations of Canadian literature and identity have faced since the early 1980s. The book reads particularly well as a collection, considering the numerous echoes between the ten pieces and a prevailing willingness to refashion the notion of national belonging. Rinaldo Walcott treats the appeal and limitations of belonging in the writing of black Canadians, the transgression of a singular conception of the nation-state opening up the possibility of a `multicultural citizenry.' In his reading of M.G. Vassanji's work, John Clement Ball also finds the need for some form of commitment to national belonging, which he opposes to the nomadism advocated by postmodern theory and the `diasporic migrancy' of some postcolonial texts. Leslie Sanders considers the meaning of Halifax's Africville and its artistic renditions that provide an alternative to national and historical hegemony. Arun Mukherjee's essay on Canadian nationalism rejects the deconstruction of nation into mere arbitrariness. But in considering the writing of some Inuit, Mohawk, and racial minority women, Mukherjee critiques the colonial conception of the Canadian nation-state. In looking at the work of Italian Canadian writers, Joseph Pivato takes 480 letters in canada 1999 the notion of plurality in a refreshing direction: raising the question of what is known in Quebec criticism as transculture. Producers of bilingual and trilingual texts, Italian Canadian writers are shown to explore immigrant experience in terms of cultural and linguistic inter-crossings. Recalling the volume's title, Lien Chao contemplates the transgression of formal boundaries in Chinese Canadian poetry. Amin Malak in turn considers oral narrative's role in Rohinton Mistry's novel writing. The relation between poetics and politics is another prevalent theme in Chao's essay as well as in Chelva Kanaganayakam's reading of Rienzi Crusz's poetry. It is the question of labels that resonates most strongly in the essays. Kanaganayakam points to the restrictions involved in the ideological labelling of poets. Bruce Meyer reconsiders the power of nostalgia (a taboo label in much contemporary criticism) and the reinvention of the past in Joseph Skvorecky's fiction. While Ball grapples with the theoretical labels of postmodernism and postcolonialism, Frank Birbalsingh finds much use in labelling in his careful distinction of IndoCaribbean literature from Afro-Caribbean writing. Birbalsingh indeed sets out to determine what makes, and does not make, for `genuinely new voices' in Indo-Caribbean writing. Criticism is always prone to some form of generic, theoretical, and in this case, cultural categorization, and good criticism remains aware of the limitations involved B an awareness that Ball renders more successfully than does Birbalsingh. Finally, Murkherjee warns against the label `immigrant writing' as a racist process of `othering' racial minority Canadian writers. The importance...