Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue ed. by Diane Brydon and Marta Dvořák (review)

Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue originated in a conference at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris called “Voice and Vision: Situating Canadian Culture Globally” in 2008. Editors Diane Brydon and Marta Dvořák have ably assembled papers from the conference to address the abiding concerns of the conference and especially the notion of “crosstalk” that gives the book its title. Brydon and Dvořák declare that they are interested in how “readers negotiate meaning in contexts where norms of understandings diverge,” that is, how different subjects might interpret similar materials across different settings. For the editors, these settings are ones that are shaped in particular by a notion of globalization, by movements across and through different nation-states and subject positionings. The rubric for understanding these interactions is what they term crosstalk, which they see “as a metaphor for the ways in which audial and visual imaginaries interact to create complex forms of interference.” The editors focus on Canada, “including Québec,” as a means of focusing on forms of crosstalk that can, in some way, be situated partly in relation to Canada but that also extend beyond such borderings. They see crosstalk, in particular, “as continuous, ongoing, and co-constructing activity” that relentlessly performs unbordering, resulting in “a field where the Canadian may not disappear but may well become destabilized and rearticulated.” While such a notion of crosstalk provides the overall framework for the engagements found in the volume, subsidiary concerns also structure the book, particularly those of “collaboration, crosstalk, improvisation; dialogism, polyphony, voice; and space, place, and circulation.” Brydon and Dvořák set an ambitious agenda for understanding the functioning of transnational flows in a literary context in Canada, one that remains clearly in the editors’ focus.

The contributors to the volume respond to this structure in a variety of ways. Writer Olive Senior opens the volume with a consideration of “the importance of voice and vision” in her practice. Voice and vision enable Senior to consider how colonial and postcolonial movements between her youth in Jamaica and her being situated in Canada influence her writing. This meditation builds on the address that Senior gave during the initial conference and provides an opening to the book that is situated within a creative practice, thereby complementing the theoretical concerns of the editors in their introduction.

Section one of the book, focusing on the concerns of collaboration, crosstalk, and improvisation, documents literary practices that might fall aslant of more frequently studied aspects of Canadian cultural work. Ajay Heble and Winfried Siemerling collaboratively produce a chapter on their ongoing Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice project, a project that focuses particularly on how improvisation—often within the context of jazz—impacts cultural practice. For them, reading through writers like Michael Ondaatje and Wayde Compton, jazz and mixing might provide metaphors for discourse that can demonstrate the political potential in the crossing of borders. Similarly, Daniel Coleman argues, in the following chapter on David Chariandy’s novel Soucouyant and Lee Maracle’s novel Daughters Are Forever, that these two texts’ use of a notion of melancholia “to describe the residual effects of colonial trauma” might allow for a productive conversation between Caribbean diasporic and Salish Indigenous contexts. Coleman’s goal of “generating an epistemological crosstalk” demonstrates Brydon and Dvořák’s proposed methodology being put to work to politically significant ends. Ric Knowles’s subsequent contribution focuses on the work of Monique Mojica and the workshopping of her performance pieces in order to read for ways in which theatre might “help to suture the wounds inflicted by colonization.” Knowles sees in Mojica’s workshops “a kind of transindigenous crosstalk” that might resituate indigenous discourses at sites of strength rather than at the sites of oppression that persist in Canada. Alison Calder’s closing piece to the section focuses on collaborative poetic practices, in particular those of the collective Pain Not Bread, in which she...