Confluences 1: Essays on the New Canadian Literature ed. by Nurjehan Aziz (review)

In the preface to this collection, the reason for the book's existence is identified as a felt imperative for literary criticism to address the increasing diversity of Canadian literature. The subsequent articles demonstrate abundantly that many literary critics have already been doing this work. Indeed, one of the most striking characteristics of Confluences 1 is that seven of its eleven articles have been previously published. The earliest one, Arun Prabha Mukherjee's 1985 survey of Canadian poets of the South Asian diaspora, is curiously positioned last in the book, where an introductory note calls it "the first serious consideration of the then emerging diversity of Canadian poetry." The article seeks to articulate the distinctiveness of South Asian Canadian writing, observing its tendency to "to identify with the entire Third World" in foregrounding the "misery of poverty" while noting that it often uses irony to emphasize the disjunctions between North American political ideals and the persistence of racialized injustice on this continent.

Mukherjee also rebukes Canadian literary criticism of the time for its "structuralist-formalist" bent and failure to consider "the ideological and sociological aspects of literature." As the rest of the articles in Confluences 1 indicate, the decades since Mukherjee's article have seen the wide-scale embrace of critical attentiveness to those aspects. For instance, the article positioned first in the collection, Aparna Halpe's 2010 analysis of critical responses to the depiction of Sri Lanka in Michael Ondaatje's work, shows Halpe to be concerned overtly with the political as she echoes Mukherjee's complaint by censuring critics of the 1980s for fixating on Ondaatje's postmodernism while insufficiently engaging with the referential elements of his writing. Halpe goes on to point out that it was critics of the South Asian diaspora such as Mukherjee who finally gave due consideration to the "socio-political and historical frame' for Ondaatje's work. Halpe singles out for praise Chelva Kanaganayakam, whose criticism she sees as a model in its assessment not only of Ondaatje's "literary inheritances' but also of "the relation between race, class, and migration' in his writing.

The next article in Confluences 1, a 1993 study by H. Nigel Thomas of M. NourbeSe Philip's poetry collection She Tries Her Tongue: Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989), similarly keeps both literariness and politics in sight as Thomas elucidates the ways in which Philip historicizes and deconstructs the English language, exposing the deep bonds between discourse and oppression. Thomas admirably marries formalist close reading to a consideration of Philip's postcolonial poetics, making his article both a valuable companion to Philip's book and an example of how scholars in the early 1990s were transforming Canadian criticism.

Together, Mukherjee's, Halpe's, and Thomas's articles suggest a volume that Confluences 1 could have become: a casebook tracking the development of postcolonial and diaspora studies in Canadian literary criticism. The majority of the articles in this collection, however, do not follow through on the possibility. Instead, they are primarily recent studies of one or two books each, with few obvious interconnections beyond their interest in the anti-racist politics of books by diasporic authors. For example, James W. Johnson considers caste and the semiotics of the human body in Rohinton Mistry's novel A Fine Balance (1995), while Christine Kim investigates how Hiromi Goto's novel The Kappa Child (2001) negotiates the situation of Japanese Canadians who have been displaced and dispossessed by racist policies while, at the same time, occupying land taken from and populated by Indigenous peoples. Meanwhile, the book includes articles by Frank Birbalsingh and Chelva Kanaganayakam that are introductions to the corpuses of Cyril Dabydeen and the poet Cheran, respectively.

The preface to Confluences i identifies the book as the first in a planned series devoted to literary criticism "reflecting Canada's diversity.' While this first entry would have benefited from a stronger articulation of the rationale for the choices made in assembling its particular...