In this Book

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Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies is the third volume of essays produced as part of the TransCanada conferences project. The essays gathered in Critical Collaborations constitute a call for collaboration and kinship across disciplinary, political, institutional, and community borders. They are tied together through a simultaneous call for resistance—to Eurocentrism, corporatization, rationalism, and the fantasy of total systems of knowledge—and a call for critical collaborations. These collaborations seek to forge connections without perceived identity—linking concepts and communities without violating the differences that constitute them, seeking epistemic kinships while maintaining a willingness to not-know. In this way, they form a critical conversation between seemingly distinct areas and demonstrate fundamental allegiances between diasporic and indigenous scholarship, transnational and local knowledges, legal and eco-critical methodologies. Links are forged between Indigenous knowledge and ecological and social justice, creative critical reading, and ambidextrous epistemologies, unmaking the nation through translocalism and unsettling histories of colonial complicity through a poetics of relation. Together, these essays reveal how the critical methodologies brought to bear on literary studies can both challenge and exceed disciplinary structures, presenting new forms of strategic transdisciplinarity that expand the possibilities of Canadian literary studies while also emphasizing humility, complicity, and the limits of knowledge.1
Belief as/in Methodology as/in Form: Doing Justice to CanLit Studies
Roy Miki
Interrogates the effects and consequences of form in Canadian literary studies through a comparison of Northrop Frye and Roy K. Kiyooka. Calling for the creative critical reading practices modeled in Kiyooka’s work, Miki suggests new possibilities for a social justice-oriented approach to CanLit.
4
Ambidextrous Epistemologies: Indigenous Knowledge within the Indigenous Renaissance
Marie Battiste
Marie Battiste emphasizes the violence enacted on Indigenous subjects through the Eurocentrism of colonial education models, and calls for pedagogies based in Indigenous Knowledge, heritages, and identities.2
Trans-Systemic Constitutionalism in Indigenous Law and Knowledge
Sa'ke'j Henderson
Indigenous legal scholar Sa’ke’j Henderson discusses Aboriginal and treaty rights in the context of Canada’s constitutional framework, offering a model for a trans-systemic reconciliation of Aboriginal and Eurocentric knowledges.
3
The Accidental Witness: Indigenous Epistemologies and Spirituality as Resistance in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach
Julia Emberley
Emberley brings together postcolonial testimonial studies and Indigenous storytelling knowledges and practices, locating in Robinson’s work the possibility for Indigenous spiritual epistemologies to become sites of resistance to trauma’s enforced silences.5
Epistemologies of Respect: A Poetics of Asian/Indigenous Relation
Larissa Lai
Lai takes up Battiste’s call for ambidextrous epistemologies by arguing for the possibility of kinship between Asian and Indigenous epistemologies. Through readings of literary texts and performances, Lai suggests a framework for anti-colonial alliances based on relation without sameness.6
Acts of Nature: Literature, Excess, and Environmental Politics
Catriona Sandilands
Sandilands, stages an argument for the relation between ecocriticism and literature. The literary, she argues, contributes to an eco-literary public practice capable of resisting the totality of environmental discourse and challenging established modes of environmental investigation.7
Ecocriticism in the Unregulated Zone
Cheryl Lousley
Lousley uses Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl to argue for the destabilization of “nature̵” as a transcendental ground for politics. The Unregulated Zone brings with it the possibility of radical change, blurring the boundaries between natural and human, made and given, local and global, material and semiotic.8
Disturbance Loving Species—A Gathering and Pondering
Laurie Ricou
Ricou draws on a dozen years of developing and teaching “Habitat Studies” courses at the University of British Columbia in order to demonstrate how a methodological turn toward bioregional thinking disturbs familiar approaches to CanLit by questioning the disciplinary dominance of place and landscape.9
Translocal Representation: Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, Nello ‘Tex’ Vernon-Wood and CanLit
Julie Rak
Rak argues for a turn to the translocal rather than the transnational by demonstrating how figures who push the boundaries of literariness, nationality, race, and class reveal the historical and institutional production of both Canadianness and literariness.10
Jazz, Diaspora, and the History and Writing of Black Anglophone Montreal
Winfried Siemerling
Through a combination of cultural geography, Jazz Age history, and literary analysis, Siemerling argues for a renewed focus on Montreal’s black diasporas and their cultures as part of the city’s social and cultural architecture.11
Systems of Tradition and Pluralism in Contemporary Acadia
François Paré
Paré explores the tension between rising Acadian nationalism and the invisibility of the Acadian nation as one of many linguistic and cultural groups that do not appear on national maps, putting pressure on the concepts of pluralism, multiculturalism, tradition, and nostalgia.12
Critical Allegiances
Christl Verduyn
Co-editor Christl Verudyn’s conclusion locates this volume as an integral component of the TransCanada project’s focus on methodological and disciplinary concerns, while gesturing toward the insights Canadian literary studies might draw from Canadian Studies’ interdisciplinary experience.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Title Page, Series Page, Copyright Page
  2. pp. i-iv
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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. Introduction
  2. Smaro Kamboureli
  3. pp. 1-28
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  1. Belief as/in Methodology as/in Form: Doing Justice to CanLit Studies
  2. Roy Miki
  3. pp. 29-48
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  1. Trans-Systemic Constitutionalism in Indigenous Law and Knowledge
  2. Sa’ke’j Henderson
  3. pp. 49-68
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  1. The Accidental Witness: Indigenous Epistemologies and Spirituality as Resistance in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach
  2. Julia Emberley
  3. pp. 69-82
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  1. Ambidextrous Epistemologies: Indigenous Knowledge within the Indigenous Renaissance
  2. Marie Battiste
  3. pp. 83-98
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  1. Epistemologies of Respect: A Poetics of Asian/Indigenous Relation
  2. Larissa Lai
  3. pp. 99-126
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  1. Acts of Nature: Literature, Excess, and Environmental Politics
  2. Catriona Sandilands
  3. pp. 127-142
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  1. Ecocriticism in the Unregulated Zone
  2. Cheryl Lousley
  3. pp. 143-160
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  1. Disturbance-Loving Species: Habitat Studies, Ecocritical Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature
  2. Laurie Ricou
  3. pp. 161-174
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  1. Translocal Representation: Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, Nello “Tex” Vernon-Wood, and CanLit
  2. Julie Rak
  3. pp. 175-198
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  1. Jazz, Diaspora, and the History and Writing of Black Anglophone Montreal
  2. Winfried Siemerling
  3. pp. 199-214
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  1. Tradition and Pluralism in Contemporary Acadia
  2. François Paré
  3. pp. 215-226
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  1. Critical Allegiances
  2. Christl Verduyn
  3. pp. 227-240
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  1. Notes
  2. pp. 241-252
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  1. Works Cited
  2. pp. 253-268
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  1. Contributors
  2. pp. 269-274
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 275-287
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  1. Series Page
  2. p. 288
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