In this Book

summary

What are the fictions that shape Canadian engagements with the global? What frictions emerge from these encounters? In negotiating aesthetic and political approaches to Canadian cultural production within contexts of global circulation, this collection argues for the value of attending to narratorial, lyric, and theatrical conventions in dialogue with questions of epistemological and social justice. Using the twinned framing devices of crosstalk and cross-sighting, the contributing authors attend to how the interplay of the verbal and the visual maps public spheres of creative engagement today.

Individual chapters present a range of methodological approaches to understanding national culture and creative labour in global contexts. Through their collective enactment of methodological crosstalk, they demonstrate the productivity of scholarly debate across differences of outlook, culture, and training. In highlighting convergences and disagreements, the book sharpens our understanding of how literary and critical conventions and theories operate within and across cultures.

1

Introduction: Negotiating Meaning in Changing Times

Diana Brydon and Marta Dvořák

This co-written text introduces the argument of the book, the contexts out of which it arises, and the intervention it makes.

2

“Whirlwinds Coiled at My Heart”: Voice and Vision in a Writer’s Practice”

Olive Senior

Poet and short story writer Olive Senior meditates on the creative interplay between voice and vision in her work and the metaphors for creativity it offers. Her previously unpublished text is accompanied by one or two of the innovative postcard poems in which she collocates image and verb to catalyze poetic production.

3

Voicing the Unforeseeable: Improvisation, Social Practice, Collaborative Research

Ajay Heble and Winfried Siemerling

Taking as a point of departure performance practices that cannot readily be scripted, predicted, or compelled into orthodoxy, Ajay Heble and Winfried Siemerling explore intersemiotic practices of musical patterns in writing as forms of cross-talk that illuminate and model the potential creative advantages of improvisatory social practice and methodological intermediality.

4

Epistemological Crosstalk: Between Melancholia and Spiritual Cosmology in David Chariandy’s Soucouyant and Lee Maracle’s Daughters Are Forever

Daniel Coleman

Through his readings of novels by David Chariandy and Lee Maracle, Daniel Coleman engages debates about epistemological justice by considering the challenges spiritual cosmology poses to the secular economy circulating within and beyond Canadian studies today.

5

Native Performance Culture, Monique Mojica, and the Chocolate Woman Workshops

Ric Knowles

Ric Knowles considers the theatre workshop production of translocal native performance culture, and studies notably how Monique Mojica’s The Chocolate Woman theatre project rejects models of victimization in favour of “story-weaving,” drawing its stories, its deep structure, and its performance form from traditional cultural production.

6

Collaboration and Convention in the Poetry of Pain Not Bread

Alison Calder

Alison Calder examines the ways that the poetry of the collaborative group Pain Not Bread unsettles readerly expectations of a conventional lyric voice, challenging notions of the individual poet and re-viewing the relation between artist, material, and audience.

7

Rejoinders in a Planetary Dialogue: J.M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Lloyd Jones et al. in Dialogue with Absent Texts

Marta Dvořák

Marta Dvorak engages with the mechanics of fabricating art as technè, notably the vocal and perspectival techniques on which visual and audial as well as discursive media draw. Her close readings placing Canadian writing in dialogue with international texts argue for the notion of transnational creation rooted in different canons which have always migrated, mixed, and mutated.

8

Not Just Representation: The Sound and Concrete Poetries of the Four Horsemen

Frank Davey

Frank Davey reaches out to a broad international scene of experimental collaborations, and provides an illuminating diachronic, cross-cultural scrutiny of the overlapping spheres of the visual, textual, and audial.

9

Portraits of the Artist in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For and Madeleine Thien’s Certainty

Pilar Cuder-Domínguez

Pilar Cuder-Dominguez explores the usefulness of postmemory as a frame for considering how authorship works at the communal level within novels by Dionne Brand and Madeleine Thien.

10

Unsettling Voices: Dionne Brand’s Cosmopolitan Cities

Sandra Regina Goulart Almeida

Sandra Almeida considers the ways in which Dionne Brand's representations of Toronto complicate cosmopolitan idealizations of the global city and contribute to contemporary theorizations of diaspora, citizenship and multiculturalism.

11

Questions of Voice, Race, and the Body in Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand

Charlotte Sturgess

Charlotte Sturgess considers the implications for diasporic citizenship generated by the ways in which fictions by Hiromi Goto and Larissa Lai undermine the stability of a singular narrative voice to promote contact zones between diverse cultural discourses: of myth and fable, history and sensory perceptions.

12

The Artialisation of Landscape in Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool

Claire Omhovère

Using Urquhart’s novels as exemplars of landscape writing, Claire Omhovère examines the aesthetic transactions through which a portion of space becomes invested with interest and value, and through which artists call attention to the uncertain zone where, on the periphery of focalization, everything that remains outside the scope of perception begins presencing itself.

13

Ghostly Voices and Arctic Blanks: From Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to Jane Urquhart’s Changing Heaven

Catherine Lanone

By focusing on the dialogue between Jane Urquhart’s Changing Heaven and the Brontës as a case in point, Catherine Lanone draws attention to the ways in which novelistic attention to landscape illuminates understandings of space and place, and their co-construction within circulating discourses of literature and culture.

14

“You must see to understand...”: Orientalist Clichés and Transformation in Robert Lepage’s The Dragons’ Trilogy

Christine Lorre-Johnston

Christine Lorre interrogates the intercultural values performed through Robert Lepage’s collective work-in-progress The Dragons’ Trilogy to examine the zones of cross-cultural encounter that theatre can create, and the interrelated questions of reception and viewpoint connected in turn to the mechanics of cliché and stereotype.

15

Diasporic Appropriations: Exporting South Asian Culture from Canada

Chelva Kanaganayakam

Focusing on cultural adaptation and innovation among South Asian artists in Canada, Chelva Kanaganayakam argues that the relation between diaspora and home now needs to be seen within the framework of circulation rather than imitation.

16

Negotiating Belonging in Global Times: The Hérouxville Debates

Diana Brydon

Through a postcolonial reading of the media event sparked by the Hérouxville code and its aftermath, Diana Brydon analyses the ways in which global and national imaginaries intersect to complicate how citizenship is inhabited, contested, regulated, and negotiated in Canada and Quebec today. This chapter doubles as a conclusion to the book.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. v-vi
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  1. Acknowledgements
  2. pp. vii-viii
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  1. 1. Introduction: Negotiating Meaning in Changing Times
  2. pp. 1-20
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  1. 2. “Whirlwinds Coiled at My Heart”: Voice and Vision in a Writer’s Practice
  2. pp. 21-36
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  1. Section One: Collaboration, Crosstalk, Improvisation
  1. 3. Voicing the Unforeseeable: Improvisation, Social Practice, Collaborative Research
  2. pp. 39-52
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  1. 4. Epistemological Crosstalk: Between Melancholia and Spiritual Cosmology in David Chariandy’s Soucouyant and Lee Maracle’s Daughters Are Forever
  2. pp. 53-72
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  1. 5. Native Performance Culture, Monique Mojica, and the Chocolate Woman Workshops
  2. pp. 73-94
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  1. 6. Collaboration and Convention in the Poetry of Pain Not Bread
  2. pp. 95-108
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  1. Section Two: Dialogism, Polyphony, Voice
  1. 7. Rejoinders in a Planetary Dialogue: J.M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Lloyd Jones, et al. in Dialogue with Absent Texts
  2. pp. 111-134
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  1. 8. Not Just Representation: The Sound and Concrete Poetries of The Four Horsemen
  2. pp. 135-150
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  1. 9. Portraits of the Artist in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For and Madeleine Thien’s Certainty
  2. pp. 151-168
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  1. 10. Unsettling Voices: Dionne Brand’s Cosmopolitan Cities
  2. pp. 169-184
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  1. 11. Questions of Voice, Race, and the Body in Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand
  2. pp. 185-196
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  1. Section Three: Space, Place, and Circulation
  1. 12. The Artialisation of Landscape in Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool
  2. pp. 199-214
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  1. 13. Ghostly Voices and Arctic Blanks: From Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to Jane Urquhart’s Changing Heaven
  2. pp. 215-224
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  1. 14. “You must see to understand …”: Orientalist Clichés and Transformation in Robert Lepage’s The Dragons’ Trilogy
  2. pp. 225-240
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  1. 15. Diasporic Appropriations: Exporting South Asian Culture from Canada
  2. pp. 241-252
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  1. 16. Negotiating Belonging in Global Times: The Hérouxville Debates
  2. pp. 253-272
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  1. Works Cited
  2. pp. 273-298
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  1. Contributors
  2. pp. 299-302
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 303-321
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