In this Book

summary

Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies is a collection of interdisciplinary essays that examine the various contexts—political, social, and cultural—that have shaped the study of Canadian literature and the role it plays in our understanding of the Canadian nation-state. The essays are tied together as instances of critical practices that reveal the relations and exchanges that take place between the categories of the literary and the nation, as well as between the disciplinary sites of critical discourses and the porous boundaries of their methods. They are concerned with the material effects of the imperial and colonial logics that have fashioned Canada, as well as with the paradoxes, ironies, and contortions that abound in the general perception that Canada has progressed beyond its colonial construction.

Smaro Kamboureli’s introduction demonstrates that these essays engage with the larger realm of human and social practices—throne speeches, book clubs, policies of accommodation of cultural and religious differences, Indigenous thought about justice and ethics—to show that literary and critical work is inextricably related to the Canadian polity in light of transnational and global forces.

1

National Literatures in the Shadow of Neoliberalism

Jeff Derksen

Jeff Derksen’s essay, “National Literatures in the Shadow of Neoliberalism,” cautions scholars of Canadian literature to be attuned to the critical concepts and methodologies they employ, so that they are able to attend to the national as a category without inadvertently replicating its limits. Derksen’s argument posits scale theory as the conceptual framework that would allow for the “embed[ding of] the nation-state into sociospatial relations ranging from the body to the globe” (56).


2

“Beyond CanLit(e)”: Reading. Interdisciplinarity. Trans-Atlantically.

Danielle Fuller

Danielle Fuller’s “‘Beyond CanLit(e)’: Reading. Interdisciplinarity. Transatlantically.” draws on the transnational and interdisciplinary scope of Beyond the Book, her collaborative project that offers a comparative analysis of book clubs in Canada, the UK, and the US. Fuller’s consideration of both the unsettling function of “collaborative interdisciplinarity” (90) and the practical complications born out of intrapersonal, disciplinary, and institutional differences serves as a warning about the challenges that emerge in navigating the shifting ground of Canadian literary studies.


3

White Settlers and the Biopolitics of State-Building in Canada

Janine Brodie

Janine Brodie’s “White Settlers and the Biopolitics of State Building in Canada” constructs a critical genealogy of white settler society and the concept of indigenization in order to “destabilize contemporary national narratives” that celebrate the project of integrating cultural diversity into unitary nation (122). Brodie undertakes a close reading of Speeches from the Throne from Confederation to 1946, the year of Canada’s first citizenship act, to critique the construction of Canadian citizenship as the evolution of a rights-based collective or the steady progression of ethnocultural accommodation.


4

“Some Great Crisis”: Vimy as Originary Violence

Robert Zacharias

Robert Zacharias’ essay, “‘Some Great Crisis’: Vimy as Originary Violence,” identifies two related myths that remain operative in Canadian literary criticism—that Canada lacks a violent moment at its origin, and that the nation systematically effaces the violence of its construction. He juxtaposes these two paradigms’ shared concern with “crisis” against the prominent role Vimy Ridge plays as an “originary violence” in Canadian nationalism. Zacharias argues that while Vimy is often overlooked by Canadian literary critics, it functions as an act of “preserving violence” (135) whenever the nation is invoked as an ordering principle.


5

Amplifying Threat: Reasonable Accommodations and Quebec’s Bouchard–Taylor Commission Hearings (2007)

Monika Kin Gagnon and Yasmin Jiwani

Monika Kin Gagnon and Yasmin Jiwani’s “Amplifying Threat: Reasonable Accommodations and Quebec’s Bouchard-Taylor Commission Hearings (2007)” examines the complex “race/culture equation” in Quebec though a critique of the political and media furor surrounding L’Affaire Hérouxville. Demonstrating how the event “pierced the delicate veneer of tolerance that characterizes everyday life and social practices in Quebec” (147), Gagnon and Jiwani show how the response of the Quebec government and popular media amplified its negative impact on Quebec’s Muslim community.


6

The Time Has Come: Self and Community Articulations in Colour. An Issue and Awakening Thunder

Larissa Lai

Larissa Lai’s essay, “The Time Has Come: Self and Community Articulations in Colour. An Issue and Awakening Thunder,” examines the genre of special issues as a forum for the voices of minoritized subjects in the anti-racist activism of the early 1990s. Wrestling with the doubled status of special issues as simultaneously privileged sites of collective articulation that are always also supplementary to a reaffirmed norm, Lai reads two special journal issues on Asian Canadian literature to argue that such publications have played a key role in the development of Canadian literature as an institution, and to insist that their politics must be understood within the particular moments of their publication. 


7

Archivable Concepts: Talonbooks and Literary Translation

Kathy Mezei

Kathy Mezei’s essay, “Archivable Concepts: Talonbooks and Literary Translation,” considers the role of translation in the formation of Canadian literature as an institution. Showing how small presses have facilitated the interactions of different bodies of literature through translation, Mezei suggests scholars should develop and interpret the archives of Canadian translation activities in order to unpack the “institutional dynamics, socio-political circumstances, and personal histories” that have fashioned the practice of cross-cultural translation in Canada (198).


8

Is CanLit Lost in Japanese Translation?

Yoko Fujimoto

Yoko Fujimoto’s “Is CanLit Lost in Japanese Translation?” investigates the translation and publication of Canadian literature in Japan, revealing how the national character of Canadian literature can become almost irrelevant to its circulation abroad. Drawing on her interviews with editors of prominent Japanese publishing houses, and offering close readings of the genre of postscripts that accompany Japanese translations, Fujimoto traces what she calls the “slighting, or the loss of significance, of the national category that occurs in the process of reproducing and distributing Canadian literature in translation” (215).


9

The Cunning of Reconciliation: Reinventing White Civility in the “Age of Apology”

Pauline Wakeham

Pauline Wakeham’s “The Cunning of Reconciliation: Reinventing White Civility in the ‘Age of Apology’” considers the rhetoric and function of state apologies in Canada. Extending, and ultimately moving beyond, Daniel Coleman’s concept of “white civility,” Wakeham draws on the work of Sákéj Henderson and the field of indigenous legal studies to argue for a more radical form of social change.


10

The Long March to “Recognition”: Sákéj Henderson, First Nations Jurisprudence, and Sui Generis Solidarity

Len Findlay

Len Findlay’s essay, “The Long March to ‘Recognition’: Sákéj Henderson, First Nations Jurisprudence, and Sui Generis Solidarity,” argues that the contemporary “knowledge economy” relies on an Enlightenment tradition that has long since met its ethical limit. Insisting that there is no neutral political ground for literary and cultural scholars concerned with colonial traditions and institutions, Findlay draws on Henderson’s call for “sui generis solidarity” to offer a self-consciously utopian call for the decolonization of both the nation-state and the academy.


11

bush/writing: embodied deconstruction, traces of community and writing against the state in indigenous acts of inscription

peter kulchyski

peter kulchyski’s essay, “bush/writing: embodied deconstruction, traces of community, and writing against the state in indigenous acts of inscription,” provocatively contests the state’s claims to monopoly over the form and function of communal narratives. Challenging scholarly norms at both the affective and linguistic levels, kulchyski offers an unflinching critique of how state-sponsored neoliberal capitalism in Canada has impacted indigenous communities, interspersed with performances what he calls “bush/writings,” that is, “resistant, embodied, creative texts out of the bush” (287).


Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
  2. pp. 1-7
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. vii-viii
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  1. Acknowledgements
  2. pp. ix-x
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  1. Preface
  2. pp. xi-xviii
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  1. Introduction: Shifting the Ground of a Discipline: Emergence and Canadian Literary Studies in English
  2. pp. 1-36
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  1. National Literatures in the Shadow of Neoliberalism
  2. pp. 37-63
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  1. “Beyond CanLit(e)”: Reading. Interdisciplinarity. Transatlantically.
  2. pp. 65-85
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  1. White Settlers and the Biopolitics of State Building in Canada
  2. pp. 87-108
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  1. “Some Great Crisis”: Vimy as Originary Violence
  2. pp. 109-128
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  1. Amplifying Threat: Reasonable Accommodations and Quebec’s Bouchard-Taylor Commission Hearings (2007)
  2. pp. 129-149
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  1. The Time Has Come: Self and Community Articulations in Colour. An Issue and Awakening Thunder
  2. pp. 151-172
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  1. Archivable Concepts: Talonbooks and Literary Translation
  2. pp. 173-186
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  1. Is CanLit Lost in Japanese Translation?
  2. pp. 187-208
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  1. The Cunning of Reconciliation: Reinventing White Civility in the “Age of Apology”
  2. pp. 209-233
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  1. The Long March to “Recognition”: Sákéj Henderson, First Nations Jurisprudence, and Sui Generis Solidarity
  2. pp. 235-247
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  1. bush/writing: embodied deconstruction, traces of community, and writing against the state in indigenous acts of inscription
  2. pp. 249-267
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  1. Notes
  2. pp. 269-301
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  1. Works Cited
  2. pp. 303-329
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  1. Contributors
  2. pp. 331-353
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 335-348
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