Project MUSE®: TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/736
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USNo. 37 (2017) - vol. 50 (2025)Latest Articles: TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural StudiesTWOProject MUSE®TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies1916-01941206-0143Latest articles in TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®“I don’t feel like an activist”: Monstrous Subjectivities and the Racial Elsewheres of Queer and Trans “Activism” in Toronto
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964502
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Toronto1 is an activist city with an activist reputation. It is known nationally, if not globally, for its social justice movements, grassroots organizing and overarching culture of political dissent (see Atluri 2018; Bain 2016; Catungal 2014; Chambers et al. 2017; Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018). It is also, to quote Haritaworn et al. (2018a, 4), “one of the world’s queer of colour capitals—a place that people move to in order to be queer of colour and in queer of colour community” (emphasis in original). This can be understood both literally, in that there are a lot of queer people of colour living here, as well as figuratively, in that there exists a vibrant queer of colour counterpublic (Catungal 2014, 76). The
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/736/image/coversmall“I don’t feel like an activist”: Monstrous Subjectivities and the Racial Elsewheres of Queer and Trans “Activism” in Toronto2025-06-27text/htmlen-US“I don’t feel like an activist”: Monstrous Subjectivities and the Racial Elsewheres of Queer and Trans “Activism” in Toronto2025-06-272025TWOProject MUSE®791332026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-27Forget-Me-Not, Though the Nation Will: Black Queer Mourning, Homonationalism, and the Politics of Memory
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964503
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Defend the dead. To enter the archive is not just an act of retrieval but of reckoning, of sitting in the afterlives of violence and making sense of what has been deliberately fragmented, withheld or obscured (Philip 2008). Black feminist and queer writers often enter the archive knowing that much of what we seek will not be there. We become acquainted with the stories embedded in silences, footnotes, crumpled pieces of parchment and paper stains (McKittrick 2021; Mohamed 2018). To archive black queer life is to enter the wake (Sharpe 2016). An act of bearing witness. A commitment to sounding an ordinary note of care (Sharpe 2023). It is, as Ajamu, McFarlane and Cummings (2020) suggest, an act of promiscuity—of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/736/image/coversmallForget-Me-Not, Though the Nation Will: Black Queer Mourning, Homonationalism, and the Politics of Memory2025-06-27text/htmlen-USForget-Me-Not, Though the Nation Will: Black Queer Mourning, Homonationalism, and the Politics of Memory2025-06-272025TWOProject MUSE®742012026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-27Roundtable: Revisiting Disrupting Queer Inclusion: Homonationalisms and the Politics of Belonging—Ten Years Later
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964504
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Sonny Dhoot (SD): We are seeing an unprecedent number of queer people of colour led social and political projects. However, these are not all invested in the same political genealogy, as many of these projects seek incorporation into systems of violence, often at the expense of others, namely Indigenous and Black people more targeted by economic systems of exclusion or exploitation. Thus, questions of homonationalism and settler colonialism require a critical inquiry into how many political queer projects may be rhetorically oppositional or alternatives to violent systems but are materially aligned with these exclusionary (necropolitical) projects.Alexa DeGagne (ADG): We (Kathryn Trevenen and I) wrote this chapter
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/736/image/coversmallRoundtable: Revisiting Disrupting Queer Inclusion: Homonationalisms and the Politics of Belonging—Ten Years Later2025-06-27text/htmlen-USRoundtable: Revisiting Disrupting Queer Inclusion: Homonationalisms and the Politics of Belonging—Ten Years Later2025-06-272025TWOProject MUSE®708722026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-27Who Invented Multiculturalism in Canada?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964505
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In 1971, Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau famously declared, “[T]he fabric of Canadian society is as resilient as it is colourful. It is a multi-cultural society: it offers to every Canadian the opportunity to fulfil his own cultural instincts and to share those from other sources” (Meister 2021, 5). This assertion underscores multiculturalism’s central role in the Canadian imaginary. In The Racial Mosaic: A Pre-History of Canadian Multiculturalism (2021), Daniel R. Meister delves into multiculturalism’s evolution in Canada from the late 1920s to the end of World War II. He critically considers the role of race, specifically the impact of problematic race science on the early 20th century public intellectuals
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/736/image/coversmallWho Invented Multiculturalism in Canada?2025-06-27text/htmlen-USWho Invented Multiculturalism in Canada?2025-06-272025TWOProject MUSE®133502026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-27Hope for a Generation: Speculative Fiction as a Tool for Racial Justice and Systems Change
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964506
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I begin with story. I am drawn to speculative fictions as method for learning and world building. I agree with Brown’s assertion that speculative fiction is a way of practicing the future (Brown 2017). As we lean into the uncertainty of a future in a moment of collapse, I am turning to the future to find a way forward. This story begins in 2072.* * * * * * * *Daily Log 449: December 12th, 2072We used to write about the future, but like Michelle Wright suggested in The Physics of Blackness (Wright 2015), you can’t stop time, and so the future is now the present, and time keeps marching on. Even as I write this sentence, the ending seems so far off and in the future, but just like that, it’s in the past. When did we
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/736/image/coversmallHope for a Generation: Speculative Fiction as a Tool for Racial Justice and Systems Change2025-06-27text/htmlen-USHope for a Generation: Speculative Fiction as a Tool for Racial Justice and Systems Change2025-06-272025TWOProject MUSE®808842026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-27Introduction—Beyond Homonationalisms: Queer(er) Possibilities of Elsewhere and Imagining Otherwise
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964507
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Our 2015 book, Disrupting Queer Inclusion: Canadian Homonationalisms and the Politics of Belonging (UBC Press),1 foregrounded the entangled relationships between queer inclusion and exclusion, complicity and community, dispossession and belonging in the land(s) currently known as Canada. Ranging from the tangible spaces of prisons, Pride marches, Olympic Pride House, fetish fairs and feminist porn awards to the material effects of marriage law, hate crime laws, citizenship guides, blood donation and refugee claims, the chapters of the book grappled with various processes by which a normatively raced, gendered, sexed and classed (homo)sexual subjectivity was (and continues to be) interpellated into upholding the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/736/image/coversmallIntroduction—Beyond Homonationalisms: Queer(er) Possibilities of Elsewhere and Imagining Otherwise2025-06-27text/htmlen-USIntroduction—Beyond Homonationalisms: Queer(er) Possibilities of Elsewhere and Imagining Otherwise2025-06-272025TWOProject MUSE®261522026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-27Reflections from a Black Queer Feminist: A Conversation on Caribbean Cultural Performance Practices, Collaboration, Resistance, and the Formation of Queer of Colour Spaces
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964508
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R. Cassandra Lord: I have known you for a little over two decades now and have witnessed how you have transferred your ideas and passion into creating tangible queer spaces for Black queer and queer people of colour (BPOC). Could you reflect on the earliest memories that activated your interest in organizing?Jamea Zuberi: Organizing in community spaces has always for me been informed by practices of resistance. My background in community organizing goes back many years starting at the age of 16. I grew up in in Jane and Finch, a thriving immigrant community located North of downtown Toronto, made up of predominantly immigrants of lower socio-economic status. I founded with my sister Janvere the group called
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/736/image/coversmallReflections from a Black Queer Feminist: A Conversation on Caribbean Cultural Performance Practices, Collaboration, Resistance, and the Formation of Queer of Colour Spaces2025-06-27text/htmlen-USReflections from a Black Queer Feminist: A Conversation on Caribbean Cultural Performance Practices, Collaboration, Resistance, and the Formation of Queer of Colour Spaces2025-06-272025TWOProject MUSE®479172026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-27Straddling Boundaries, Rebuilding Relations: Queer Indigenous Governance in Blackfoot Territory
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964509
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In recent years, efforts to address systemic racism and violence rooted in gender and sexuality have gained momentum, particularly in relation to Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQI+ people in Canada. Initiatives like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) Calls to Action and the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls have catalyzed the formation of new communities, movements and social imaginaries aimed at advancing Indigenous gender and sexual justice. These developments have contributed to a broader shift towards more inclusive forms of Indigenous representation and relationality, with 2SLGBTQI+ Indigenous people playing a critical role in challenging normative
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/736/image/coversmallStraddling Boundaries, Rebuilding Relations: Queer Indigenous Governance in Blackfoot Territory2025-06-27text/htmlen-USStraddling Boundaries, Rebuilding Relations: Queer Indigenous Governance in Blackfoot Territory2025-06-272025TWOProject MUSE®1028412026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-27Queer Palestinian Solidarity Work: Coalition, Encampments, and Affective Activisms
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/964510
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Deborah Cowen’s work explores how the spaces of everyday life are assembled, reproduced, contested and transformed, focusing on questions of circulation and infrastructure, which attend to the co-production of race and space, sexuality and social ordering, and the intimate life of war in ostensibly civilian spaces. Cowen is a professor at the University of Toronto (ON), a founding member of the Jewish Faculty Network, and a member of Faculty 4 Palestine. Email: deb.cowen@utoronto.caNatalie Kouri-Towe is currently an associate professor of feminism and sexuality at Concordia University’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute, where she researches and teaches on topics related to sexuality, solidarity, pedagogy, kinship and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/736/image/coversmallQueer Palestinian Solidarity Work: Coalition, Encampments, and Affective Activisms2025-06-27text/htmlen-USQueer Palestinian Solidarity Work: Coalition, Encampments, and Affective Activisms2025-06-272025TWOProject MUSE®574592026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-06-27