Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and Canadian Literature by Amelia DeFalco (review)

Amelia DeFalco's Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and Canadian Literature is an excellent critical work that depicts how care is conceptualized in contemporary Canadian literature. The author argues that care necessitates ethical dilemmas and that it is also entangled within complicated and nuanced power relationships. Examining the writing of Margaret Atwood, David Chariandy, Michael Ignatieff, and Alice Munro, she analyses the 'often ambivalent relations of dependence and need' between caregivers and those for whom they care. In so doing, she challenges the myth that Canada is unified and marked by its benevolence – the notion that it is a superior nation because of its motivation for, and quality of, care.

DeFalco begins by examining care and life writing. She shows how the relations between caregivers and their subjects are enmeshed in relational identities. She then analyses Margaret Atwood's Moral Disorder, a collection of short stories with 'complicated ethics of obligation,' in which the needs of those cared for are never quite met. A strength of this chapter is its contextualization of the collection within Atwood's corpus of work – all of her work addresses ethics – and its contrast to other texts the author examines. She emphasizes Atwood's protagonists' will to escape obligations of care, and yet she also complicates that desire and explores how care and harm can be interrelated.

DeFalco's considerations of both Michael Ignatieff's Scar Tissue and David Chariandy's Soucouyant are extensive in their consideration of how trauma and witnessing figure into caregiving scenarios. Her discussion of Soucouyant is particularly strong; she situates it in the context of Canadian multiculturalism, drawing from critics such as Smaro Kamboureli and Himani Bannerji, and she includes relevant theories on identity, corporeality, memory, and diaspora. She ends this chapter with Chariandy's desire to engage in 'a new, productive perspective of memory loss.'

Perhaps the strongest parts of the book are the two chapters that address the ethics of care in Alice Munro's writing. As DeFalco puts it, Munro's narratives situate 'disability and disease outside any comprehensive epistemological framework.' In her first chapter on Munro, she considers theories by Emmanual Levinas, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler to consider inversions in caregiving roles between mothers and daughters, for instance, and to interrogate notions of power and control, vulnerability and anxiety. DeFalco demonstrates how Munro moves 'far beyond the manicured terrain of affection and respect' to the realms of 'resentment and anger where the absolute otherness of loved ones becomes distressingly apparent.'

The second chapter on Munro considers affective economies, gender, and care. Here, DeFalco discusses care as part of an exchange economy and convincingly employs Jacques Derrida's theories on the gift. She considers stories such as 'Runaway' and'some Women,' among others, and addresses the complexities of paid caregiving scenarios and the roles of nurses and aides in Munro's work. The strength of this chapter lies in its insightful readings and its intelligent deployment of theoretical frameworks. By approaching the literature in this way, DeFalco addresses problems regarding the ethics of care in the context of Munro's writing.

Imagining Care is a well-written and well-researched book that considers ethical dilemmas in Canadian literature and argues for a reconsideration of the notion that Canada is unquestionably benevolent. DeFalco shows that care is multifaceted in the Canadian context: it is complicated by notions of obligation, vulnerability, and the desire for power or control. Moreover, through her discussion of Chariandy's writing, she implies that Canada's multicultural context demands an acknowledgement and confrontation of racism and trauma. The book is an excellent addition to the corpusof critical work on Canadian literature. It points to the ways in which writing in Canada addresses urgent questions on the complexities of ethics and care.