Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies

Critical Allegiances

227 CRITICAL ALLEGIANCES Christl Verduyn What is “new,” then, is disciplinary consciousness. (32) A field’s political unconscious can re-script its primal scene only via epistemic and methodological shifts. (36) —Smaro Kamboureli, “Shifting the Ground of a Discipline: Emergence and Canadian Literary Studies in English” “Something has happened to English Canadian literary studies.” With this declaration, Smaro Kamboureli opens her introductory essay, “Shifting the Ground of a Discipline: Emergence and Canadian Literary Studies in English” (1), in the second of the three volumes that have emerged from the TransCanada conferences project.1 This essay is at the heart of the transformative exercise that the TransCanada project has been. As Kamboureli explains, the field of English Canadian literary studies has shifted “toward a foregrounding of the situational and material conditions” (1) that influence literary production in the country and that “broaden our understanding of what the literary entails and invite a reassessment of the disciplinary contexts within which we customarily read literature” (2). Something has indeed happened to English Canadian literary studies, and in this essay I argue that the TransCanada project is a vital part of what has happened. The TransCanada project refers primarily to three linked conferences that began in Vancouver in 2005, that continued in Guelph in 2007, and that concluded at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, in 2009. In addition to the conferences, the project included workshops, research seminars , and academic events sponsored by the TransCanada Institute under the 228 Christl Verduyn directorship of Smaro Kamboureli at the University of Guelph (2005–2013). Drawing widely and creatively on new disciplinary discourses and approaches, the TransCanada conferences gathered together a remarkable array of participants in a national discussion about the possible new directions that Canadian literary studies might take. These conferences have generated three extensive essay collections—including this volume—that trace the disciplinary transformation —or transdisciplinary discussion—that has unfolded in Canadian literary studies over the past decade. In this concluding essay, I offer some reflections on the paths charted during this journey—from the first collection, Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (2007), through the second, Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies (2012), to this third and final collection, Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, Ecology, and Canadian Literary Studies (2014). As I have suggested, Kamboureli’s expansive essay is at the heart of this triptych. Nominally, it serves as an introduction to the second volume; substantively and strategically, however, it speaks to the TransCanada project as a whole. As such, it offers a useful, productive, and consequential lens or focus for some closing comments, reflections, and suggestions about the collective and collaborative venture of the conferences, about the publications they have produced, and about future directions for transdisciplinary literary studies. The present essay has four sections. The first two focus directly on Kamboureli ’s strategic concerns about methodology and epistemology, in particular the two key concepts of “emergent events” and transdisciplinarity. The third and fourth direct my focus concretely to the broad areas of Canadian Studies and Canadian literature and, finally, to Indigenous Studies as a necessary foreshadowing of the future shape and character of transdisciplinary literary studies. Emergent Events Methodological concerns are for Kamboureli a “guiding principle.” As she explains: “I attempt to examine how the field of Canadian literary studies has been reconfigured as a discipline through what I call ‘emergent’ events or discourses” (3). The concept of emergent events expresses Kamboureli’s view of the changes in Canadian literary studies in recent years. These changes have not been based on sudden, radical paradigm shifts. Rather, they are part of an ongoing or incremental process, stemming from events or circumstances that “emerge” only episodically. In this emergence, they “disturb” their surroundings (8)—in this case, the field of Canadian literary studies—by introducing new ways of seeing and doing. These new perspectives and practices then lead to further developments. Kamboureli cites as examples of this process the 1983 Critical Allegiances 229 Women and Words conference in Vancouver; the 1988 Third International Women’s Book Fair in Montreal; and the 1994 Writing Thru Race conference in Vancouver. To this list of emergent events, I would add the TransCanada project itself. Through its conferences and publications, the TransCanada project has promoted and performed different ways of knowing and as well as the “nodal function” that Kamboureli ascribes to emergent events. By this she means that these events “operate...