- Inhabiting Memory in Canadian Literature/Habiter La Mémoire Dans La Littérature Canadienne ed. by Benjamin Authers, Maïté Snauwaert, and Daniel Laforest
This book investigates time, space and memory in Canada and Canadian literature, and it also identifies and explores critical gaps in Canadian literary studies. It invites readers to revisit national imaginaries and racialised geographies within the nation by disseminating novels, poetry, drama, and life writing, in printed and digital forms. Divided in four sections – Mapping the City, Diasporic Memories, Intercultural Spaces, and Towards a New Memory – the contributors are Albert Braz, Samantha Cook, Jennifer Bowering Delisle, Lise Gaboury-Diallo, Smaro Kamboureli, Janne Korkka, André Lamontagne, Margaret Mackey, Sherry Simon, Pamela V. Sing, L. Camille van der Marel, and Eric Wunker.
The work has a bilingual introduction, seven chapters in English, and five chapters in French. The editors emphasise the need to think about space and the idea of 'here' in Canada by considering the importance of, albeit overlooked, local intersections, so the work explores the cultural intersections across Canada. As they suggest, a '(settler-colonial- anglophone) account of Canadian criticism' of space indicates a partial account, so the study departs from the understanding that 'the spatial has crucial intellectual intersections with concerns about representation, identity, nation, difference, and belonging' (p. xi). Thus, Simon explores the linguistic and literary intersections of Yiddish in Montreal, 'oú les mémoires ne cessent de se confronter' in translation (p. 11). Wunker refers to Walter Benjamin's work on the streets of urban Paris to note that Benjamin's flâneur is 'a resolutely – and problematically – male figure' as 'women experience the city differently' (p. 18). Wunker reads the poetics of Sachiko Murakami and Meredith Quatermain in the space between gender consciousness and difference. Mackey investigates aspects of print, media, and digital literacies with Play Spaces, an app created for the iPad by Logan Gilmour, to open a play space that is also a literacy space.
The work explores the problematics of reading urban spaces where settler-colonial and anglophone accounts of Canadian criticism result in multiple and ambiguous readings. Kamboureli investigates the politics of belonging and diasporic memory in Rawi Hage's Cockroach. Narrated by a Lebanese Arab in Montreal whose proper name is never known to the reader, the protagonist embodies 'the alienation of immigrants and the difficulties they encounter in trying to integrate or assimilate into an environment that constantly reminds them they are foreign to it' (p. 65). Delisle reconceptualises the cultural heritage of Canadian family memoirs to suggest a 'genealogical nostalgia can never be resolved' (p. 91). Braz discusses Lorena Gale's Angélique to argue that it 'not only reinserts people of African descent into Canadian history but also suggests why they have been so often erased from it, since figures like Angélique call into question some of the country's most popular master narratives' (p. 219). This work is a must read for scholars of Canadian literature. [End Page 173]