Representing "Other" Diasporas in Recent Global Canadian Fiction

A number of novels produced in the last decade by Canadian writers have rendered more complex the notion of "diasporic" people and their relationship to homelands, real or imaginary. I use the examples of Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, Gibb's Sweetness in the Belly, and Brand's What We All Long For to speculate about the emergence of what I would call "global Canadian novels," where dislocated and/or diasporic writers inscribe alternative worlds that create nostalgia or evoke memories of a homeland or past to which they do not belong. The protagonists of the novels are cosmopolitans, not just in the sense of free flowing "citizens of the world," the literal meaning of "kosmo-polities," but also in the sense of what Benita Parry has termed "postcolonial cosmopolitanism," those cosmopolitans who have been produced by "the 'global flows' of transnational cultural traffic." The works of these recent Canadian writers deterritorialize and reimagine diasporic identities, at the same time as they reterritorialize aspects of our cultural memory, a number of public spaces and cities.