Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory: Essays in Honour of Barbara Godard ed. by Eva C. Karpinski etal (review)

This collection of essays is a thoughtful and generative presentation of the work of Professor Barbara Godard, notably her innovative scholarship in feminist semiotics and translation studies. The chapters engage in the history and practice of Godard’s scholarship (Fuller and Forsyth), as well as extend the scholarly interests of her career, paying tribute to “Godard as a prolific producer and broker of feminist culture and women’s writing in Canada” (xi). The text is divided into four parts. Part one highlights Godard’s critical feminist interventions into the canon of Canadian Literature, specifically her translations of Québécois women writers such as Nicole Brossard and her critical writings that brought the diversity of women’s writing in Canada into view for a whole generation of Canadian scholars. Pamela McCallum’s essay extends Godard’s interest in women’s writing and translation to the question of cultural memory in her reading of Nancy Huston’s The Mark of the Angel, while Karl E. Jirgens takes up Godard’s work on the textual and the visual, examining and furthering Godard’s theoretical insights into Brossard’s Picture Theory. Claudine Potvin also discusses the dialogic mediations of the visual in textual productions of Quebec women writers, Denise Desautels and Louise Warren. Godard’s work on language, women’s writing, and cultural practices is both discussed and demonstrated by these scholars, who also bring their own exciting insights to the scholarly conversations with Canadian women writers. Part two demonstrates the impact of Godard’s work in the 1990s, in particular her studies of cultural institutions, theories of value, and memorializing archival practices. Bringing into view the complexities of cultural location, Moyes and Leclerc’s chapter traces the uneven and unequal transactions across Quebec, Arcadia, and English literary publication, Phanuel Antwi politicizes the epistemic frameworks that read the construction of racial difference in literature across regional and provincial cultural maps, Len Findlay attends to the politics of translation in an official bilingual federal government document written for new or prospective Canadian citizens. He pays particular attention to the cultural politics at work in this text and what the linguistic play between and among French/English and Aboriginal, Inuit, Métis languages signifies in terms of sovereignty and state power. Part three delves into Godard’s rich work on translation theory. Interwoven throughout these theoretically rich chapters are discussions of Godard’s translation practices (Capperdoni), her use of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of de/territorialization (Demers), and her writing on the ethics of translation and subjectivity (Lane-Mercier).

Part four emphasizes the themes of public memory, cultural practices, and diversity. Sophie McCall reads the interwoven complexities of diasporic and indigenous histories in Marie Clements’s Burning Vision across multiple boundaries of difference in language, history, and geography. There are essays on French scholarship and the Holocaust (Dor-land), creativity and the work of mourning (Sue Lloyd), and Barbara’s own account on violence, indigenous performance, and the murdered and missing indigenous women. The collection ends with a wonderful piece on Barbara Godard’s archive by Lisa Sloniowski. If you visited Barbara’s house and experienced her hospitality, perhaps in one of her graduate glasses in the late 1980s as I did, you would have seen her loose-leaf archive of paper scraps lying hither and thither, or, during a conference presentation, you would have seen her pull out a scrap of paper from her pile of notes, reading the paper and turning it around as her own text crawled up the edge of the page and over to the other side. I watched Barbara’s hands as she pieced her presentations together. It was as if she were designing a quilt of multiplayed textures and colours—just like her work, just like her way of thinking, she brought inspiration to a generation of scholars

Barbara’s work stood at the crossroads of a revolutionary turn...