Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Canada ed. by Christine Kim, Sophie McCall, and Melina Baum Singer (review)

Cultural Grammars forges a language that can enable long-delayed conversations to finally take place. In the words of its editors, the contributors to this volume “examine tensions within and between concepts of Indigeneity and diaspora, and … analyze the ways those tensions transform concepts of nation.” Because both diasporans and Indigenous peoples have been displaced from native homelands and traditions, one might assume that they would readily find common cause. But Indigeneity’s and diaspora’s different relations to what the editors call these two entities’ constitutive third term – the nation – have tended to block solidarity between them. While many ethnic-minority diasporans seek belonging within the nation-state and its economies, Indigenous peoples have resisted the settler state’s efforts to assimilate them. For this reason, the critical languages, let alone the political movements, of Indigeneity and diaspora have taken different paths.

To try to bridge this gap and generate mutually enlivening dialogue between Indigenous and diaspora studies, editors Christine Kim, Sophie McCall, and Melina Baum Singer have collected twelve essays by scholars based at Canadian universities, all of which address some aspect of diasporic and/or Indigenous criticism and theory, usually grounded in a reading of literary or cultural texts. Part I of the book takes up present debates, with McCall formulating a “diasporic-Indigenous-sovereigntist” critical approach to the works of Gregory Scofield; Kristina Fagan, Daniel Heath Justice, Keavy Martin, Sam McKegney, Deanna Reder, and Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair engaging in a panel discussion on the problems and possibilities of the tribal-specific focus of Native American literary nationalism; Julia Emberley decoding the systems of representation that associate Indigenous women with violence in testimonies to the women who died on Robert Picton’s farm; and Belén Martín-Lucas showing how “ethnic” Canadian literature has been fashioned into an exotic commodity by the government-subsidized book business, especially in Europe.

Part II takes up the challenges of history, with Singer tracing how race figures in diasporic identification by reading how 1960s and 1970s critics downplayed A.M. Klein’s Jewish themes in an effort to present him as a cosmopolitan modernist; with Christopher Lee discussing the commemoration of events such as the 1907 anti-Asian riots in Vancouver as having the potential to alert us to the way our lives in the present are enabled by the gifts given by oppressed people, usually without their consent; with Renate Eigenbrod reading Richard Wagamese as writing from within an Anishinaabe diasporic consciousness with the desire to imagine a reconnection to land and place for all, Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike; and with Jody Mason critiquing post-colonial–diaspora theory’s too easy celebration of cultural mobility from the perspective of Austin Clarke’s and Cecil Foster’s novels’ depiction of the extreme limits placed on the mobility of Caribbean migrant workers. Part III focuses on cross-pollinations between various Indigeneities and diasporas in Kim’s exploration of Marianne Hirsch’s concept of Holocaust “postmemory” in the transference of trauma between Jewish-Roma and Japanese diasporas in Kyo Maclear’s novel The Letter Opener; in Lily Cho’s explorations of a politics of inter-diasporic relation between the Black Atlantic and the Pacific as demonstrated in Richard Fung’s video Islands; in Alessandra Capperdoni’s reading of Trish Salah’s Wanting in Arabic to show how the “trans” in Judith Butler’s theory of parodic gender performance cannot account for the racialized queer person’s culturally located material body and experience of oppression; and in Deena Rhymes’s remarkable reading of writings by Native prisoners that present narratives of personal and collective empowerment, reassertion of community responsibilities, and international political influence in the very belly of the colonial state.

Cultural Grammars indicates the generative ferment of current literary-cultural studies in Canada that do not take the nation as given, that have developed sophisticated theoretical and...