“Connected Understanding, Understanding Connections”

CACLALS

Concordia University, Montreal May 28-30, 2010

Conference Program

Registration for the annual CACLALS conference is done through Congress 2010: http://www.congress2010.ca/

Friday, May 28

9-10:15am (MB S2-115) Diasporic Memory

Chair: Susan Gingell (Saskatchewan)

Stephanie Oliver (Western Ontario) “Diffuse Connections: Re-thinking Smell and Memory in Canadian Diasporic Women’s Writing” Abstract

Veronica Austen (Wilfrid Laurier) “Surfacings in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!: The Story that Cannot Be Told and Must” Abstract

Katie Mullins (Toronto) “‘My Body is History’: Embodying the Past, Present, and Future in Dionne Brand’s Sans Souci and Other Stories” Abstract

10:30-11:45am (MB S2-115) Multicultural Canada

Chair: Dorothy Lane (Luther)

Carrie Dawson (Dalhousie) “‘Papers, Please’: On Reading, Writing and Refugees”

Abstract

Gabrielle Etcheverry (Carleton) “An ‘Accented’ Literature: Multilingualism in Latino-Canadian Writing” Abstract

Malissa Phung (McMaster) “Imagined Solidarities Haunted by Betrayal in Lee Maracle’s ‘Yin Chin’ and SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café” Abstract

10:30-11:45am (MB S2-401) South Africa

Chair: Shannon Hengen (Laurentian)

Fraser Hawkins (Queen’s) “(Dis)connecting National Fictions with Cultural and Material Geographies in Coetzee’s Disgrace” Abstract

Jessie Forsyth (McMaster) “Shameless Recognition: Voice and Citizenship (Dis-) Connect in a Contemporary South African Novel” Abstract

Kaelyn Morrison (Toronto) “‘Friend and Lover’: The Erotics of Female Friendship in Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed and Futhi Ntshingila’s Shameless” Abstract

12-1pm (MB S2-115) Book Launch (Lunch provided)

Maria Casas Multimodality in Canadian Black Feminist Writing: Orality and the Body in the Work of Harris, Philip, Allen, and Brand  (Rodopi)

Deanna Reder and Linda M. Morra, ed. Troubling Tricksters: Revisioning Critical Conversations (Wilfrid Laurier University Press).  

Paul DePasquale, Renate Eigenbrod, and Emma LaRocque, ed. Across Cultures Across Borders: Canadian Aboriginal and Native American Literatures, (Broadview Press).

1-2:30pm (MB2-270) Keynote Address

Carole Boyce Davies (Cornell) “TRANSNATIONAL BLACK POETICS: CONNECTIONS AND DISCONNECTIONS”

Carole Boyce-Davies is the author of Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (Routledge, 1994) and Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones  (Duke University Press, 2008).  Boyce-Davies has also published Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature (Africa World Press, 1986); Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (Africa World Press, 1990); and a two-volume collection of critical and creative writing entitled Moving Beyond Boundaries (New York University Press, 1995): International Dimensions of Black Women's Writing (volume 1), and Black Women's Diasporas (volume 2). She is co-editor with Ali Mazrui and Isidore Okpewho of The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities (Indiana University Press, 1999) and Decolonizing the Academy:  African Diaspora Studies (Africa World Press,  2003).  She is general editor of the three-volume Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora (Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2007).  Currently, Dr. Boyce Davies is writing a series of personal reflections called Caribbean Spaces: Between the Twilight Zone and the Underground Railroad, dealing with the issue of transnational Caribbean/American black identity, and is preparing an edition of the writings of Claudia Jones entitled Beyond Containment: Claudia Jones, Activism, Clarity and Vision.

2:45-4pm (MB S2-115) Lands of Arrival

Chair Kofi Campbell (Wilfrid Laurier)

Aine McGlynn (Toronto) “A Hundred Thousand Welcomes: Race, Immigration and ‘New’ Irish Culture” Abstract

Alison Toron (New Brunswick) “‘Rather Shop than Pray’: Reading Irony in Ian McEwan’s Saturday" Abstract

Jennifer Bowering Delisle (Alberta) “Pilgrimages ‘Home’ in Post-Immigrant Family Memoirs” Abstract

2:45-4pm (MB S2-401) India

Chair: Terry Goldie (York)

Dana Mount (McMaster) “Rukmani versus Kenny: Negotiation Tactics in Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve” Abstract

Chandrima Chakravorty (McMaster) “(Il)legitimate Mothers: Remembering to Forget in Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age” Abstract

Khurram Khurshid (New Brunswick) “‘Our Life is Like a Candle Flame’: Urdu Tropes and Muslim Consciousness in Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi” Abstract

4:15-5:30pm (MB S2-401) Reading by Anita Rau Badami

Anita Rau Badami is the author of the novels Tamarind Mem, Hero’s Walk, and Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?

Saturday, May 29

9-10:15am (CL 233) Africa

Chair: Philip Mingay (King’s)

Alessandra Capperdoni (Simon Fraser) “Culture and the Ecocritical Imagination” Abstract

Esther de Bruijn (Toronto) “What is the Afro-Gothic? Considerations from ‘High’ Literature to Popular Fiction” Abstract

Paul Ugor (Alberta) “Postmodernity, African Cities, and New Youth Cultures: Glimpses from Nollywood” Abstract

9-10:15am (CL 235) Aboriginal

Chair: Michelle Coupal (Western)

Renate Eigenbrod (Manitoba) “‘Let Me Find My Talk’: Dis/connections in Residential School Literature." Abstract

Helen Hoy (Guelph) “‘Some Traditions Were Never Meant To Be’: Porcupines and China Dolls as a Fetal-Alcohol Narrative” Abstract

Deena Rymhs (British Columbia) “Directing Traffic: Roads and Violence in Indigenous Writing” Abstract

10:30-11:45am (CL 235) Violence: Memory and Narrative

Chair: Diana Brydon (Manitoba)

Maureen Moynagh (St Francis Xavier) “Consuming the Human Rights Subject: Child Soldier Narratives and the Problem of Form” Abstract

Susan Spearey (Brock) “Fostering Interconnectivity between Witnesses: Textual Mediations of Contemporary Histories of Mass Violence” Abstract

Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi (Montréal) “Anachronisms, Anatopisms, and Black Memory” Abstract

10:30-11:45am (CL 233) Orality and Literacy

Chair: Hugh Hodges (Trent)

Susan Gingell (Saskatchewan) “Connecting Dub to the Struggle against Childhood Sexual Abuse: anitafrika’s Staging of Incest and Healing” Abstract

Marci Prescott-Brown (Toronto) “Locating the I/ai/eye and finding me/mi: Codeswitching in the Poems of Benjamin Zephaniah” Abstract

Margery Fee (British Columbia-Vancouver) “Harry Robinson's Views on Literacy” Abstract

12-1pm (CL 235) CACLALS Executive meeting

1 -3 (EV 2 -204/238/260) Eleventh Annual CACLALS Aboriginal Roundtable

10 Years of the Aboriginal Roundtable: where do we go from here?

Conveners: Renate Eigenbrod (Manitoba) and Jonathan Dewar (Aboriginal Healing Foundation)

Participants:

Warren Cariou (Manitoba)

Jo-Ann Episkenew (First Nations University)

Kristina Fagan (Saskatchewan)

Tasha Hubbard (Calgary)

Sam McKegney (Queen’s)

Dolores van der Wey (Simon Fraser)

3:15–4:30pm (CL 233) Witnessing Violence and Dispossession

Chair: Laura Moss (BC-Vancouver)

Atef Laouyene (California State) "The Ethics of Witnessing: Life Writing and the Spectacle of Arab Violence" Abstract

Terri Tomsky (Alberta) “Jewish Anarchists and Muslim Terrorists: Connecting Histories in Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project” Abstract

Nouri Gana (UCLA) “The Commitment to Late Style: Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish” Abstract

3:15– 4:30pm (CL 235) Aboriginal and Global

Chair: JoAnn Episkenew (First Nations U)

Brendan Smyth (Alberta) “Overlapping Stories: Negotiating the Global and Local in Jeannette Armstrong’s Whispering in Shadows” Abstract

Peter Forestell (New Brunswick): “Reasserting Difference: Chrystos and the ‘american’ Queer” Abstract

Taryn Beukema (Queen’s) “(De)Constructing Cartographies: Understanding Indigenous Connections to Land in Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen” Abstract

5-7pm President’s Reception

7:30pm CACLALS dinner

Prêt à Manger, 1809 Saint Catherine W.

Sunday, May 30

9-10:15am (CL 233) The Fate of Culture

Chair: Ken Derry (Toronto)

Jennifer Andrews (New Brunswick) “Fashion Television, National Identity, and Citizenship” Abstract

Kailin Wright (Toronto) “Performing (Dis)Connections: Canadian Theatre History in ‘The Theatre of Neptune’ and ‘Sinking Neptune’” Abstract

Alexander Eastwood (Toronto) “Outsourcing the Author-Function: Atwood and the Long Pen” Abstract

9-10:15am (CL 235) Canada

Chair: Hajer Trabelsi (Montreal)

Nora Foster Stovel (Alberta) “Margaret Laurence: The Woman and the Masks” Abstract

Joshua Prescott (New Brunswick) “An Intervention of Sorts: A History of Violence in Catherine Bush's The Rules of Engagement” Abstract

Sharlee Reimer (McMaster) “‘It is life you must write about’: Fixity and Refraction in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging” Abstract

10:30-12noon (MB 2-270) keynote address

Diana Brydon (Manitoba) “Globalization and Higher Education: Implications for Postcolonial Research” Abstract

Diana Brydon FRSC is Canada Research Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies at the University of Manitoba where she directs the Centre for Globalization and Cultural Studies. A former President of CACLALS, she has published books on Australian author Christina Stead and Canadian writer Timothy Findley, edited the 5-volume Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (Routledge 2000) and co-edited Shakespeare in Canada (UTP 2002). In 2008, she published Renegotiating Community: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Global Contexts (UBC Press), co-edited with W.D. Coleman. She currently serves as a member of the international convening group for a project on “Building Global Democracy” (www.buildingglobaldemocracy.org) and is conducting individual research on global and national imaginaries. This project explores representations of home, diaspora, planetarity, and change.

12-1:30 (EV1.615) keynote address

Saskia Sassen "Neither Global nor National: Novel Assemblages of

Territory, Authority, Rights"

1:30 -2:45pm (CL 233) Literary History

Chair: Adele Wilson (Toronto)

Zara Rix (Connecticut) “Reimagining Contemporary India: the Children's Literature of Manula Padmanabhan” Abstract

Nathan Suhr-Sytsma (Yale) “Editing the Commonwealth: Poetry and the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival” Abstract

Stephen Ney (British Columbia-Vancouver) “What Hath Athens to do with Ibadan? Literary Reconfigurations of Ancient Greece in Modern Yorubaland” Abstract

1:30-2:45pm (CL 235) Author Meets Critics Panel Session

Discussing Jo-Ann Episkenew’s Taking Back Our Spirits

Conveners: Deanna Reder (Simon Fraser) and Susan Gingell (Saskatchewan)

Discussants:

Kristina Fagan (Saskatchewan)

Daniel Heath Justice (Toronto)

Allison Hargreaves (British Columbia-Okanagan)

3-4:15pm (CL 233) South Africa

Chair: Susan Spearey (Brock)

Jaime Denike (Queen’s) “Destabilizing Autonomy: Writing Narrators in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee” Abstract

Shannon Hengen (Laurentian) “Private and Public Lives: the South African Voice of Antjie Krog” Abstract

Jesse Arseneault (McMaster) “Transhistorical Horizons: Reading Queer Identity in John Greyson and Jack Lewis’s Proteus” Abstract

3-4:15pm (CL 235) Diaspora

Chair: Katja Thieme (BC-Vancouver)

Robert Zacharias (Guelph) “On a Newly Arisen Tone in Diaspora Studies” Abstract

Michelle Peek (McMaster) “A Subject of Sea and Salty Sediment: Diasporic Labour and Queer Be(longing) in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt” Abstract

Pamela McCallum (Calgary) “Art and Literature: Representing Migrancy in Marina Lewycka”s Strawberry Fields and Peng Kailin’s ‘Background’” Abstract

4 :30pm (CL 233) CACLALS AGM (pizza will be served)

Abstracts

Friday, May 28

9-10:15am (MB S2-115) Diasporic Memory

Chair: Susan Gingell (Saskatchewan)

A1. Stephanie Oliver (Western Ontario) “Diffuse Connections: Re-thinking Smell and Memory in Canadian Diasporic Women’s Writing”

In Swann’s Way (1913), Proust not only developed a literary framework for representing how aromas trigger flashbacks; his nostalgic tone significantly shaped our understanding of the relationship between smell and memory. But how does olfaction operate for those who might have more complicated relationships to the past and to place? In literature that explores diasporic experience, authors often use smell to represent memories in ways that exceed Proustian frameworks of nostalgia. Although smell is one of the least studied senses, it is a productive site for exploring the complexity of diasporic relationships between past and present, homeland and hostland. Using the literature of Larissa Lai and Hiromi Goto, the first part of my paper develops a theoretical framework for understanding more ambivalent relationships between smell and memory in literature about diasporic experience. Building on Lily Cho’s argument that diasporic subjectivity “requires both a lateral engagement across multiple diasporic communities and identities, and vertically through long histories of dislocation” (21), the second part of my paper proposes the olfactory model of “diffusion” as a multivalent concept for understanding diasporic subjectivity. While “diaspora” refers to scattering, “diffusion” denotes a temporal and spatial process of both scattering and intermingling. Diffusion emphasizes the connections (and confrontations) not only between diasporas, but also between past and present, homeland and hostland. This liminal olfactory concept also reinforces the key role smell plays in diasporic experience. I will use the work of Lai and Goto to develop this theory. Back to Conference schedule

A2. Veronica Austen (Wilfrid Laurier) “Surfacings in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!: The Story that Cannot Be Told and Must”

In the artist’s statement that concludes Zong! (2008), M. NourbeSe Philip wonders how one can bring the bodies back from the waters of the Atlantic slave trade. Noting that there are no words to denote the recovery of bodies from water – there’s no “exaqua” (201) – Philip wonders, “Does this mean that unlike being interred, once you’re underwater there is no retrieval [. . .]?” (201). Despite the assumed impossibility of the endeavour, an attempt to bring to the surface the drowned slaves of the 1781 Zong Massacre is precisely what consumes Philip’s Zong! The Zong, a ship sailing from the West Coast of Africa to Jamaica, with 470 slaves, became the site for a particularly tragic example of the dehumanizing treatment of African slaves. During a tumultuous and overly long voyage where many died from want of provisions and subsequent illnesses, the Zong’s captain and crew threw upwards of 150 living slaves overboard, believing that they could receive compensation via an insurance claim regarding their lost “cargo.” It is a document from the ensuing court battle between the ship’s owners and the insurance company that Philip uses (and abuses) to explore the lost voices of those slaves put to death.

With Ian Baucom’s 2005 Spectres of the Atlantic prominently delving into the history of the Zong Massacre and with a 2006 City University (UK) conference and the resulting 2007 issue of the Journal of Legal History devoted to the Zong Massacre, Philip’s text takes part in a recent upsurge in interest regarding the Zong case. Although there have been other artistic explorations of the Zong Massacre – for example, David Dabydeen’s long poem “Turner” (1994) and Fred D’Aguiar’s novel Feeding the Ghosts (1997) – Philip’s collection is distinct in its particular focus on the recovery voices, and the related struggle with language as a medium for the expression of trauma.

Exploring Philip’s stated struggle to tell the story that “cannot be told yet must be told, but only through its un-telling” (207), my paper for the 2010 CACLALS Conference will look at how matters of poetic and textual form inform Philip’s engagement with a traumatic past. I see this text as a continuation of Philip’s earlier interests in the voicing of silence (Looking for Livingstone) and her distrust of the lyric form (perhaps best shown in the chorus form of “Discourse on the Logic of Language”). Stating an intent to “murder the text” (193), Philip puts to use the page in even more varied (and harried) ways than her earlier work. Words are fragmented and appear scattered around the page, forming, as she acknowledges, spontaneous relationships with one another beyond our usual desire to read in a conventionally linear manner. To hear out-loud many of the poems from this collection, the words are fragmented to the point of staccato, seeming closely tied to the gutteral, non-linguistic sounds of Sound Poetry. Nevertheless, despite the ways in which Philip’s text disrupts the unity of a lyric voice and even, to her admission (and desire), frustrates the communication of meaning, her text, through its concluding artist’s statement, shows a turn to an expression of an autobiographical self. Looking at Philip’s concluding artist’s statement alongside the poems of Zong!, my paper will explore the implications of this autobiographical turn, considering especially its portrayal of the resonance of a traumatic historical moment.

Works Cited:

Philip, M. NourbeSe. Zong! Toronto: Mercury Press, 2008. Back to Conference schedule

A3. Katie Mullins (Toronto) “‘My Body is History’: Embodying the Past, Present, and Future in Dionne Brand’s Sans Souci and Other Stories”

In A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Dionne Brand suggests that to live in a black body is to embody a history of both oppression and liberation. It is not, therefore, surprising that Brand’s characters in Sans Souci and Other Stories often “experience” the past through the body, while the future is often evoked as a transformation of the body in either imaginative or spiritual terms. Rather than separate mind and body, Brand’s stories suggest that they are inextricably linked and that the body plays a fundamental and productive role in the psychological processes through which her characters confront history and the dynamic between past and present experiences. I will look at Brand’s representation of the Black female body in several of the Sans Souci stories through the lenses of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Michael Lambek’s exploration of spirit possession. I will also draw upon current developments in trauma theory concerning the body. Using this theoretical focus on the body as a departure point, I propose that characters’ bodies in Sans Souci play a major role in the “working through” of memories. By exploring ways in which history, present, and future collapse not only in temporal space, but specifically on and around the site of the body, I hope to show that, in many of the Sans Souci stories, Black female characters both revile and revere their bodies as symbols of history to become empowered in the face of oppression. Back to Conference schedule

10:30-11:45am (MB S2-115) Multicultural Canada

Chair: Dorothy Lane (Luther)

B1. Carrie Dawson (Dalhousie) “‘Papers, Please’: On Reading, Writing and Refugees”

Bugs feature prominently in Souvankham Thammavongsa’s 2003 poetry collection, Small Arguments. Rendered in tiny type surrounded by a great deal of white space, Thammavonga’s poems foreground the intense vulnerability of their subjects and meditate on the violent potential of the large, lumbering forms that tend to overlook or denigrate them. Though Thammavongsa’s bugs are dignified and, indeed, celebrated in all their “buginess,” these beings—typically imagined as invasive, dirty, unwanted, threatening—are also posited as metaphors for refugees, illegal immigrants, and, perhaps, all racialized migrants who might be said to “hol[d] out their limbs/to a world that will not/ hold them.” This is made clear by the poet, who has said: “Small Arguments collects small lives and argues for their belonging. While doing so, it also serves as an argument for my own belonging. I was born in a refugee camp. I was not given a birth certificate. It is not enough that I am living. A piece of paper needs to prove this (“Author’s Comments”).

Despite the growing use of biotechnologies, citizenship continues to be largely contingent on what Michel Foucault called “a network of writing” designed to “capture and fix” the identity of its subject. This is perhaps particularly true for refugee claimants, whose applications to the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada include a two-page personal narrative that chronologically sets out “all the significant events and reasons” for the claim. Beginning with a brief analysis of the challenges presented by such a form, this paper asks how refugees are read in Canada today. Drawing on the work of Nandita Sharma, Sherene Razack, and others working in the field of citizenship studies, it then explores the innovative and promising ways in which contemporary Canadian writers—including Thammavongsa—are responding to inconsistencies and injustices in the state regulation of citizenship. Back to Conference schedule

B2. Gabrielle Etcheverry (Carleton) “An ‘Accented’ Literature: Multilingualism in Latino-Canadian Writing”

Translation in multicultural and multilingual societies such as Canada plays an important role in the expansion of the national literary field by connecting elements from different linguistic, cultural, and, literary worlds. “Latino-Canadian” writers and publishers have used translation and created multilingual texts since they first began publishing in the late 1970s, making multilingualism a major characteristic of Latino-Canadian literature (Hazelton 2007; Micó 2007). Multilingualism in these texts has the ability to engage readers and audiences differentially depending on their knowledge of both languages, while simultaneously creating a space for intercultural communication.

In this paper, I examine the ways in which Latino-Canadian writers and publishers use translation and other multilingual strategies to connect their texts to wider, non-Spanish speaking audiences and, thus, establish links with other diasporic groups, as well as with English-and French-Canadian audiences. Although multilingualism is often seen as a characteristic stemming from sociological conditions, my analysis collapses the distinction between the sociological and the aesthetic. Following Hamid Naficy's definition of Iranian exile cinema in the United States as an "accented" cinema, in which he argues that the traces of its “interstitial” mode of production are visible in the content and aesthetic of the films themselves, I will argue that Latino-Canadian literature is similarly an "accented" literature, whose multilingual character creates a particular kind of text and particular kind of reading borne from multi-lingual identities and affinities. Back to Conference schedule

B3. Malissa Phung (McMaster) “Imagined Solidarities Haunted by Betrayal in Lee Maracle’s ‘Yin Chin’ and SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café”

Dedicating her short story to SKY Lee, Lee Maracle opens “Yin Chin” with a poem about an unnamed woman who is tough, verbose, and not sweet, a woman who has lived a thousand lives and yet remained uncuckolded by men. Reading the poem without having read SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe may lead one to attribute the unnamed woman to SKY Lee herself. But if we read the poem alongside Lee’s novel, we can recognize the poem as a tribute to the mercenary matriarchs in Disappearing Moon Cafe.

That Maracle’s intertextual poem precedes “Yin Chin,” a short story about an Indigenous woman haunted by her and her community’s racist attitudes towards old ‘Chinamen,’ begs a closer comparative analysis of the two works than has been offered to date. In this paper, I will look at Lee’s critical appropriation of Indigenous characters and will explore the ways in which these texts speak to each other and how they imagine Indigenous and Asian Canadian affiliations. Since much work in settler colonial studies has focused mainly on the white settler-invader figure, I will be exploring the problematic settler status of Asian immigrants as settler-invaders even as they are simultaneously discriminated against and treated as subalterns in Canada. I will reflect on what this complex colonial relationship might mean for building solidarities between Indigenous peoples and Asian Canadians, especially in British Columbia, an unceded territory which situates these narratives and has come to be increasingly populated by Asian ‘settlers’ and their descendents. Back to Conference schedule

10:30-11:45am (MB S2-401) South Africa

Chair: Shannon Hengen (Laurentian)

C1. Fraser Hawkins (Queen’s) “(Dis)connecting National Fictions with Cultural and Material Geographies in Coetzee’s Disgrace”

One of the qualities of any act of legislation aimed at addressing generations of socioeconomic inequality is a certain erasure of complexity. It is not surprising then, that the post-apartheid narrative of the “New South Africa” propagated by the African National Congress (ANC), as well as various fictions articulated by the National Land Committee (NLC) and the Department of Land Affairs (DLA), have sought to project a somewhat sterilized version of the reconfiguring of contemporary South African rural and urbanscapes by emphasizing the process of spatial redistribution in terms of racial healing, social justice, and equality. As a result, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace was widely received in 1999 as a fundamentally pessimistic text, one that refused to parallel the essentially positive and progressive version of events that the ANC had been articulating since sweeping into office five years earlier. My paper illustrates the connections between these competing narratives of national identity in new ways by examining how particular “official” government and legislative narratives of post-apartheid South Africa have been variously rejected, reshaped and reinterpreted by Disgrace. More specifically, I re-interrogate the novel’s treatment of gender and landownership via its connections to actual land redistribution policies contemporary to the novel’s production, such as the market based “willing buyer/willing seller” dynamic enacted by the ANC which was narrativized as a resolution to the racial inequality of land possession but in actuality helped retrench patriarchal and colonial conceptions of property that necessitated violence and dispossession, particularly concerning women. Therefore, my work on the connections between fictive forms of national imagining also focuses on the disconnections between legislative principal and practical reality, which suggests a disparity between the acts of drafting and of enforcement. Employing this approach has enabled me to solidly connect the novel’s complex treatment of land redistribution to the efficacy of gender rights when operating within traditional patriarchal social hierarchies in rural South Africa.

Back to Conference schedule

C2. Jessie Forsyth (McMaster) “Shameless Recognition: Voice and Citizenship (Dis-) Connect in a Contemporary South African Novel”

Futhi Ntshingila’s 2008 novel, Shameless, marks a critical intersection between South African women’s literature and citizenship studies by complicating celebratory mythologies of post-apartheid freedom. This paper explores Ntshingila’s interrogation of agency and (dis)empowerment as performed in perniciously unequal sites of recognition. It signals the troubling limitations of a strategically significant legal framework for South African subjectivity, asking what citizenship has meant for racialized women post-1994 and in what ways women’s subjectivities have been (mis)recognized. Drawing on Francis B. Nyamnjoh’s adaptation of Charles Taylor’s “politics of recognition,” this paper considers the parameters of “voice” within a neoliberal context that facilitates the commodification of bodies, while underlining modes of operative, if circumscribed, resistance. As such, the paper sets exclusionary citizenship-based recognition into dialogue with Kelly Oliver’s configuration of “response-able” witnessing – focused on addressing rather than assimilating difference – in order to re-imagine self and other beyond Hegel’s continually reiterated master/slave dialectic.

In effect, Shameless extends contemporary critique of masculinist, heternormative discourses in South Africa’s nation building by delineating a concurrently violent erasure of racialized women. The novel stages a response by disrupting expectations for a single authoritative discourse or unified subject and posing a voice-based challenge (through narrative strategies and discursive slippages) to legal discourses of subjectivity, seen most clearly in the protagonist’s alignment of sex work with formal employment as simply variations on a theme. By unsettling voice, interrogating citizenship, and evoking Oliver’s address/response-based recognition, this paper seeks to enliven possibilities for engaging with rather than subsuming difference in a “new” South Africa. Back to Conference schedule

C3. Kaelyn Morrison (Toronto) “‘Friend and Lover’: The Erotics of Female Friendship in Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed and Futhi Ntshingila’s Shameless”

The significance of friendship and other connections between women has traditionally been underrepresented or misinterpreted in both literature and criticism. Critics such as Lillian Faderman and Adrienne Rich have argued for an expansion of the definition of “lesbian” to include female friendships for anti-patriarchal reasons; however, their focus has been primarily on white European/American women. In a South African context, where the implementation of one of the most progressive Constitutions in the world exists in tension with a larger continental attitude that homosexuality is somehow “un-African,” it is particularly important to examine the representation of female relationships in literature. Two recent South African novels written by women, Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed (2006) and Futhi Ntshingila’s Shameless (2008), take as their primary subjects the weighty topics of slavery and prostitution respectively, but at the heart of both texts is an intimate female friendship. The depth of these intimacies is signaled by the fact that these relationships take precedence in the women’s lives over their relationships with men (which are often less than fulfilling); there is physical contact and appreciation of beauty between female friends; the relationships are frequently equated to romantic or sexual partnerships, but the language of kinship is also used to express the depth of the bond. These friendships have an erotic quality that blurs their distinction from same-sex romantic relationships. The representation of such intimate connections between women speaks to a resistance to both masculine domination and a phallocentric approach to human relationships. Back to Conference schedule

2:45-4pm (MB S2-115) Lands of Arrival

Chair Kofi Campbell (Wilfrid Laurier)

D1. Aine McGlynn (Toronto) “A Hundred Thousand Welcomes: Race, Immigration and ‘New’ Irish Culture”

In the last two decades, Ireland has, for the first time, seen an influx of immigrants. It has also experienced rapid economic growth and more recently, crippling recession. The country is now at a new crossroads of global culture, where economics, nationalism, immigration and culture converge. Unfortunately, this convergence has often been met with openly articulated racism and right wing nationalism. But it cannot hold. What the Irish don’t need is a crash course in political correctness or in the usable terms of subtle racism that pervade more established “diverse” nations. Rather a new kind of multiculture must emerge. My paper will examine representations of race, globalization and nationalism in the innovative cultural products of the “traditionally” Irish and the “new” Irish alike. Both kinds of work suggest that something radical is taking place – in an effort to think postracially, representations of “new Dublin” and “new Ireland” are being articulated alongside the “traditional” in an effort to suggest how coincidence is possible. My project will bring to light “new Irish” literature, drama, poetry and film and suggest how the “new Irish”, through the inroads that they make into traditional definitions of Irishness, and based on the historic malleability of ancient Irish culture, might transform the outward signs of multiculturalism into a genuinely new national culture. Back to Conference schedule

D2. Alison Toron (New Brunswick) “‘Rather Shop than Pray’: Reading Irony in Ian McEwan’s Saturday"

Ian McEwan’s 2005 novel Saturday has been criticized for the way in which it refuses to engage fully with the postcolonial realities of contemporary London, and in a broader sense, with a globalized world. Yet Saturday provides particularly fertile grounds for exploring ideas of wealth, privilege, and social responsibility in the context of Britain as a former imperial power. While early incarnations of postcolonial theory are most often associated with “writing back” to the empire, the voices of former colonizers form an compelling supplement to postcolonial discourse, both defensively and with an acknowledgement of past and current injustices. A postcolonial reading of Saturday could easily slip into exposing the simple binary divisions of East/West, privilege/disadvantage, wealth/poverty, public/private, and self/other in order to demonstrate the novel’s perpetuation of Western neocolonial attitudes. This potentially negative reading of Saturday is made possible partly because of its style: the novel is intensely insular, with the narrative perspective being entirely filtered through the mind of its neurosurgeon protagonist, Henry Perowne. Perowne frequently makes statements relating to ethical dilemmas in the information age, and indeed the entire novel is concerned with moral choices in the context of a liberal democracy. Yet few commentators have noted the ways in which McEwan employs several types of irony in an attempt to complicate a seemingly straightforward narrative perspective. Most of the verbal irony Perowne employs serves to reinforce his moral outlook, but McEwan utilizes structural irony in order to subtly undermine Perowne’s point of view. Using theories of irony put forward by Linda Hutcheon and others, this paper will argue that despite its seeming unwillingness to acknowledge its own complicity in the perpetuation of neocolonial structures, Saturday opens up a space to consider power and privilege and make connections in an increasingly globalized world. Back to Conference schedule

D3. Jennifer Bowering Delisle (Alberta) “Pilgrimages ‘Home’ in Post-Immigrant Family Memoirs”

As a genre that seems rooted in nostalgia for a lost place of origin, the diasporic family memoir has created much critical and creative anxiety. In particular, second and third-generation memoirs that trace ancestry to distant homelands raise serious ethical concerns about cultural appropriation, “authenticity,” and ethnic absolutism. Yet despite these anxieties, the genealogical drive remains strong, particularly in Canada where post-immigrant generations struggle to construct their identities against colonial legacies and within a framework of official multiculturalism.

In this paper I examine memoirs in which this genealogical drive leads the author to make physical returns or pilgrimages to an imagined place of origin. Janice Kulyk Keefer in Honey and Ashes, Denise Chong in The Concubine’s Children, and Caterina Edwards in Finding Rosa recount journeys to the homelands of their parents’ and grandparents’ stories, amidst self-reflection about their writing and research processes. Do such journeys blindly privilege an unproblematic origin and an idealized homeland? What happens when imagined homelands are confronted with real places?

Visiting the physical place allows authors to transfer family narratives into lived experience. Yet at these sites, which often lie at the cusp of shifting national borders, the inevitability of change and loss also becomes more palpable. I show how these authors variously stage the rupture between the romanticized home and the reality of place, in order to highlight the particularity of post-immigrant experience as a generation making connections between multiple sites of belonging. Back to Conference schedule

2:45-4pm (MB S2-401) India

Chair: Terry Goldie (York)

E1. Dana Mount (McMaster) “Rukmani versus Kenny: Negotiation Tactics in Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve”

Critics of Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve generally accept the idea that the protagonist, Rukmani, represents the idealized, traditional Indian woman. Recently, Uma Parameswaran has shown that Rukmani is less docile than she may at first appear. My own work goes further to argue that Rukmani is actually a thoughtful, engaged character who is actively negotiating modernity. In this paper I analyze the tactics, understood through Michel de Certeau, employed by Rukmani to negotiate her way through the immense changes of urbanization and industrialization. de Certeau is interested in the way in which people actually succeed in actively navigating the immense and nearly flattening systems of authoritative power that govern the world in which they operate. According to de Certeau, these systems of power, or strategies, do not render subjects powerless. Instead, he writes that people “make do” in these spaces by employing what he calls tactics: the manoeuvres of the weak. To this end, I interrogate the under-examined relationship between Rukmani and Kenny, the worldly white doctor. Rukmani constructs a complex bond with the doctor; she utilizes him as an avenue of power in an increasingly hostile environment, but also views him as a kindred friend. Their intellectual affair displays another side of Rukmani, who stands up to his derisive perception of Indian peasants as “meek, suffering fools” (43). Her interactions with Kenny reveal her ability to “make do.”

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E2. Chandrima Chakravorty (McMaster) “(Il)legitimate Mothers: Remembering to Forget in Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age”

Tahmima Anam’s "A Golden Age" is the first novel on the 1971 Bangladeshi War of Liberation to be published in the West. Backed by the 2008 Best First Book Commonwealth Prize, it is bound to make its way into postcolonial and women’s studies courses in the West. Yet, the novel’s investment in heroic motherhood—the celebration of Rehana for producing and nurturing male patriots (Sohail and his friends) and the narrative silence around raped women (such as Sharmeen)—when read in the context of the Bangladeshi state’s concerted efforts to control and define norms of legitimate motherhood soon after the War, demonstrates how the novel obscures as it makes visible a War that resulted in the rape of 200,000 Bengali women.

Through an analysis of select 1971 policy documents that address issues of women and motherhood, this paper will establish and interrogate the complex connections between state discourses on motherhood and Anam’s fictional representation of Rehana as the heroic mother par excellence. My exploration of the articulation of legitimate motherhood in Anam’s novel will reveal the fraught relation between texts and their contexts, the production and dissemination of knowledge, and the politics of remembering and forgetting the past. Back to Conference schedule

E3. Khurram Khurshid (New Brunswick) “‘Our Life is Like a Candle Flame’: Urdu Tropes and Muslim Consciousness in Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi”

Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940), the first English novel by an Indian Muslim, uses Urdu linguistic and stylistic elements to unsettle and resist the hegemony of official English in colonial Delhi. This paper will deploy the theories of Antonio Gramsci, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Stephen Duncombe to identity tropes of cultural resistance in Ahmed Ali’s text. It will also show that Twilight in Delhi presents a revisionist account of key events in contemporary Indian history, challenging the assumptions entrenched in colonial historiographies of India. The Urdu lexical features and a Muslim perspective on Indian history mark the difference of Ali’s text from British and Hindu accounts of India, and offer insights into Indian Muslim identity and consciousness of the period.  Back to Conference schedule

Saturday, May 29

9-10:15am (CL 233) Africa

Chair: Philip Mingay (King’s)

F1. Alessandra Capperdoni (Simon Fraser) “Culture and the Ecocritical Imagination”

An ‘ecological turn’ seems to mark contemporary cultural production from different African regions. Building on critical work from previous decades, texts of poetry, fiction, and theatre increasingly engage with questions of ecology and environmental sovereignty. Their critique of the politics of ‘progress’ and ‘development,’ aggressively pursued by neoliberal policy makers and corporate interests, seems to point to a specifically African ecocritical cultural activism. Indeed, this emerging cultural front works not only at the level of exposure (and denunciation) of the ongoing environmental devastation and material exploitation of the continent, but also rearticulates the function of culture toward the creation of an ecocritical imagination for civic engagement and a renewed understanding of the political.

This paper discusses texts from West and South Africa from the 1970s to the present to address the interrelationship between different generations of writer-activists and the different ways in which their work interrogates the role of the nation within global conditions, thus raising questions about the role of the cultural in relation to the urgency of contemporary politics. The discussion will focus on the effects of oil exploitation and the struggles of the Ogoni people in the Niger Delta region at the centre of the poetry by Nigerian Tanure Ojaide (Delta Blues, 1976), the late political activist Ken Saro-Wiwa (Songs in a Time of War, 1985), and the younger Ogaga Ifowodo (The Oil Lamp, 2005), as well as the land dispossession in the wake of capitalist encroachment on public land in post-Apartheid South Africa depicted in Zakes Mda’s novel The Heart of Redness (2000). Back to Conference schedule

F2. Esther de Bruijn (Toronto) “What is the Afro-Gothic? Considerations from ‘High’ Literature to Popular Fiction”

The last two decades has seen a revival in Gothic literary studies. One particular area of growth has been that of the African-American and Postcolonial Gothic. As enthusiasm for this line of inquiry has spread to the study of African literatures, the term ‘Afro-Gothic’ has begun to be bandied about in scholarly conversations, though not yet in written criticism. My paper considers this term for its problems and possibilities. On the one hand, the term draws meaningful connections between the literatures of the African Caribbean, African-America, and Africa .‘Afro-Gothic’ as a literary category opens up a space for interrogating the narrative function of supernatural phenomena in Africana texts. It provides a means of considering shared mythopoeic topographies and common representations of the unheimlich nature of legacies of racial oppression. On the other hand, the term invokes Eurocentric racist writing. It raises the spectre of the ‘dark continent’ of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and its ‘horror.’ As such, the term ‘Afro-Gothic’ invites a degree of scholarly scepticism, and even aversion. The second part of my paper will concentrate on another problematic: the frequent blanket application of the term ‘Gothic’—a literary term with particular political and historical inflections—to all texts that foreground supernatural content. I will question the effectiveness of the term ‘Afro-Gothic’ for categorizing popular literary forms, as distinct from ‘high’ literature. To this end, I will discuss the case of popular Ghanaian market fiction for young readers, and particularly its sub-genre of sika duro (‘blood-money’) narratives.

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F3. Paul Ugor (Alberta) “Postmodernity, African Cities, and New Youth Cultures: Glimpses from Nollywood”

In the last two decades or so, an entire industry of critique has emerged around the concept of postmodernity, a term that has come to signal the rapidity of global social change arising from what Anthony Giddens (1998) describes as a world “open to transformation by human intervention [i.e. through science and technology]” (Giddens and Pierson 94). At the heart of the ongoing debates about Postmodernity is how globalization, especially beginning in the 1990s, has been marked by fluidity, uncertainties, and risks (Baumann 2000; Beck 1992; Giddens 1994; Harvey 1990). But this same moment of global uncertainty and risks, others argue, has also energized vast and disparate forms of cultural processes amongst local cultures all over the world, especially amongst young people. Consequently, youth culture scholars have begun to mobilize emerging sociological concepts about postmodernity in making sense of contemporary youth cultures all over the world (France 2007; McRobbie 1994; Fornas and Bolin 1995; Furlong and Cartmel 1997; Cieslik and Pollock 2002; Mallan and Pearce 2003). These studies focus on not only the crucial implications of the great contradictions of our postmodern civilization on young people’s lives, but also on the ways in which youth are now responding pro-actively to such phenomenal global social changes and its accompanying risks and uncertainties. In my presentation I propose to deploy some of the recent ideas about Postmodernity in reading a three part Nigerian video film entitled Face of Africa, arguing that the film demonstrates a classic postcolonial example of the new phase of global connections in cultures in which new social spaces have emerged “in the local-global nexus, and in particular, upon the different subject positions young people create in response to global change” (Nayak 4). Specifically, I seek to illustrate a particular national example of how popular culture in Africa now plays a significant cultural role of conveying the struggles, anxieties, mentalities, and triumphs of young people in the face of an uncertain and risky global postmodernity. Back to Conference schedule

9-10:15am (CL 235) Aboriginal

Chair: Michelle Coupal (Western)

G1. Renate Eigenbrod (Manitoba) “‘Let Me Find My Talk’: Dis/connections in Residential School Literature."

More than one hundred years of residential schools in Canada attempted an erasure of Indigenous cultures, languages and worldviews in the name of assimilation, often enforced by physical and sexual abuse. Presently, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is in the process of collecting stories from all involved at the schools in order to document fully a history of a human rights violation that had genocidal consequences for Aboriginal peoples of Canada. But there has already been some other documentation. Starting in the early 70ies, survivors from these schools have written about their experiences in poems, short stories, memoirs and (autobiographical) novels. Surprisingly, in spite of the schools’ “cataclysmic impact” (Farrell-Racette) on Aboriginal communities, these works do speak to a cultural continuity in the sense of Daniel Heath Justice’s “kinship criticism,” asserting an Aboriginal voice in the face of erasure, a connectedness with the respective culture in spite of all the disconnections from it. Although the authors describe and evoke many forms of colonial violations and ruptures in their stories, the presence of an Indigenous perspective is written into the text, reclaimed, for example, through allusions to oral traditions, phrases in the respective Aboriginal language, choice of title, like My Name is Masak, and other framing devices. Ironically, residential school literature tells about a way of life that was supposed to be forgotten by means of the education in these very schools; Aboriginal authors did “find their talk” as Rita Joe announced in her poem evoking loss (“I lost my talk”). However, the re-membering connections resisting the official dis-membering discourse are not always presented explicitly or connected cohesively as the silencing of Aboriginal cultures and the censorship of the schools’ pedagogy left a legacy. It takes a knowledgeable and perceptive reader to fill in the gaps (created through a child’s voice, for example), to understand intertextual references, and to piece together the fragments of a story, but such reading is well worth the effort as these texts may transform both survivors and perpetrators. Back to Conference schedule

G2. Helen Hoy (Guelph) “‘Some Traditions Were Never Meant To Be’: Porcupines and China Dolls as a Fetal-Alcohol Narrative”

This interdisciplinary paper makes the connection between Teetl’it Gwich’in author Robert Alexie’s Porcupines and China Dolls and social-political issues around Fetal-Alcohol disorders for Canada’s First Nations. Alexie’s explicit focus is on the direct line between generations of residential-school damage and contemporary pain and dysfunction. This paper identifies, captured unnamed in the novel, a possible intervening mechanism, a conduit to transmit and distil the colonial destruction: the presence of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. In proposing evidence for such a reading of the novel, the paper goes on to problematize this argument, using it as a paradigm for the difficulties of discussing possible FASDs in First Nations communities. One of the more obvious objections to an FASD reading of Porcupines and China Dolls is the real risk of reinforcing the misperception of FASDs (and alcohol abuse more generally) as primarily found in marginalized communities, specifically impoverished and First Nations populations, a stereotype produced by differential rates of surveillance and diagnosis. Carolyn Tait, in addition, challenges the creation of a “unidirectional link between the experience of residential school students and the ‘problem’ of FAS,” because of the risks of locating colonialism solely or primarily in the past and framing the impact of current socio-economic inequalities in terms of individual psychological weakness and treatment (“Disruptions” 207). Porcupines and China Dolls works as a cautionary lesson in interdependent causalities, complex explanations, and community-centred solutions. Back to Conference schedule

G3. Deena Rymhs (British Columbia) “Directing Traffic: Roads and Violence in Indigenous Writing”

In September of 2009, a flurry of petitions emerged in protest against proposed changes to the February 14 March for Murdered and Missing Women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The historic march, now in its nineteenth year, happens to coincide with Day 3 of Vancouver’s Winter Olympics. Committed to “ensuring the flow of Olympic traffic” in the downtown core, the City of Vancouver, VANOC, and the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit discussed cancelling or relocating the memorial march. This moment in the already tense relations between Olympic organizers and activist groups in Vancouver illuminates Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside’s (DTES) in/visible place in the city’s imagination. As visual reminders of the destitution, poverty, and colonial violence that indigenous people continue to experience in Canada, DTES and the memorial march present a damning image of the country as it plays world host to the Olympics. The contest of values that played out over public discussions of the February 14 memorial march prompts deeper reflection of issues of mobility, exchange, territory, and the racialization of space writ large in colonial-settler history.

From the history of the Road Allowance People to the recently memorialized “Highway of Tears,” roads are a part of indigenous people’s traumatic histories of dispossession. Indeed, some of most iconic moments in the oppression of indigenous people are evoked in spatial metaphors like “The Trail of Tears” and “The Long Walk.” While many authors are recasting the notion of mobility in positive terms that depart from these vulnerable histories of forced relocation,^[1] roads witness the flow of bodies between symbolic, racialized, and often dangerous spaces. In some recent writing by indigenous authors, roads reflect a tension between mobility and confinement, between the mythology of individual freedom and the threat of violence.

The disappearance of over thirty women—almost all of them indigenous—along British Columbia’s Highway 16 continues a legacy that Sarah Carter and Sherene Razack link to the mapping of space in early settler-indigenous history. Exploring colonial land patterns that eventually segregated town from reserve, Carter looks at the many measures, including the pass system, that made indigenous women’s mobility both illicit and dangerous. Razack situates the recent histories of missing and murdered women in a historical context similar to Carter’s in her discussion of Pamela George, a Saulteaux woman who was picked up on “The Stroll” in Regina by two white male university students who later murdered her on a road on the outskirts of the city. As fluid entry points into multiple racialized spaces, roads are often sites of violence.

Cosmopolitan critical discourses tend to celebrate mobility. Sara Ahmed, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, speaks about activism as the experience of being moved. How can we create a space within this critical discourse to address the experiences of forced mobility—not only historical experiences of exile and relocation, but also the more recent conditions that force some indigenous women into sex work in the city? Mobility, my paper will argue, is both gendered and racialized. Drawing on the critical work of Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, and David Theo Goldberg, together with Marilyn Dumont’s “Broadway,” Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen, Marie Clement’s The Unnatural and Accidental Women, and Rebecca Belmore’s Vigil, I will look at these artists’ examinations of roads, mobility, in/visibility, and violence in urban spaces. Back to Conference schedule

10:30-11:45am (CL 235) Violence: Memory and Narrative

Chair: Diana Brydon (Manitoba)

H1. Maureen Moynagh (St Francis Xavier) “Consuming the Human Rights Subject: Child Soldier Narratives and the Problem of Form”

In Human Rights and Narrated Lives, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith point out that the recent boom in memoir publication coincides with the era of human rights discourse. In this paper, I examine a particular variant of this coincidence by focusing on the proliferation of narratives of former child soldiers. These narratives, which have been consumed avidly in the West, slip readily into the systems of production that produce what Joseph Slaughter has described as a “human-rights-concerned consumer, whose demand for politicized human beings from the non-West creates … an international human rights market.” That Emmanuel Jal’s memoir War Child is available in a “combo-pack” with the DVD of the documentary, also called War Child, and his identically-titled CD at the very least says something about the commodification of the human rights subject. The popularity of figures like Jal and Ishmael Beah on the radio and television talk-show circuit is additional evidence of a Western appetite for narratives that affirm a certain form of development and a certain kind of human rights discourse. Slaughter has focused on the centrality of the form of Bildung to human rights discourse, and to be sure some of the memoirs follow this plot of social (re-)integration; I aim to focus on the formal discrepancies between the memoirs and the fictional representations of child soldiers in novels by Emmanuel Dongala, Amadou Kourouma, and Uzodinma Iweala. The literary texts offer a complex set of representational strategies for conveying the myriad contradictions of international human rights discourse on intervention, on the rights of the child, and the putative agency of the child figure. Back to Conference schedule

H2. Susan Spearey (Brock) “Fostering Interconnectivity between Witnesses: Textual Mediations of Contemporary Histories of Mass Violence”

When engaging with literary, cinematic and other artistic texts that bear witness to contemporary histories of mass violence, it is crucial to keep clearly in view the differences between bearing witness—an undertaking that is performative and inter-subjective, and that requires of us what Kelly Oliver has termed “infinite response-ability” (87)—and adopting a stance of objective distance in relation to the events and processes that such texts address. Any artistic mediation of histories of brutality and disenfranchisement runs a number of risks for artists as well as their audiences. The problems of objectification on which most of these risks hinge may be further exacerbated if and when we treat such artistic texts and the histories on which they focus principally as objects of analysis, or when we approach their contents as information to be consumed. As the title of Oliver’s Witnessing: Beyond Recognition reminds us, the ethical imperative to bear witness demands much more of us than simply recognizing that injustice has been done and that profound suffering has ensued, or recognizing as legitimate certain claims of belonging or agency that have heretofore been disavowed. It requires our meticulous attention to the complex inter-subjective relations inherent in any scenario of witnessing. And it requires that we continually ask, in the words of the former president of Médicins Sans Frontières, Dr. James Orbinski, “How am I to be, how are we to be in relation to the suffering of others?” (4). Working in dialogue with Oliver’s conception of witnessing as the “founding possibility of subjectivity and its most fundamental obligation” (91), and citing Dave Eggers’ What is the What as a case study, my specific aim in this paper is to explore how best to cultivate conditions in which responsibility and “infinite response-ability” might be fostered pedagogically, so that histories of atrocity are not simply rendered as events that readers come to “know” by assimilating the contents of the materials they encounter, but serve rather to engender the enactment of witnessing, an increasingly nuanced awareness and practice of ethical relationship, a heightened experience of interconnectivity, and perhaps provisional reconstitutions of community, identity and agency. Back to Conference schedule

H3. Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi (Montréal) “Anachronisms, Anatopisms, and Black Memory”

My presentation addresses the emergence of a practice of life writing in which writers formulate a post-national drive for alternative modes of solidarity beyond the framework of nation-state. In the context of the memorializations of slavery, the slave trade and abolition, the conjunction of post-nationalism and autonomy means that writers are interrogating the ways in which slavery has been mediated by both colonial and post-colonial state making projects. As an example of the new post-national narratives of slavery in the circum-Atlantic world, I will examine how Wole Soyinka demonstratively reroutes his narrative of political exile through Jamaica in his memoir You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2006).  While he ostensibly situates the visit within the context of a search for a home, I want to suggest that the juxtaposition of unfolding ‘gang violence’ in Kingston and the political violence in Nigeria offers an avenue to read the ways in which the legacies of slavery and the slave trade are realized through a reflexive cross-referencing of the multiple alienated moral, political, and juridical dispensations in which the memories of slavery are located.  Through this analysis of Soyinka’s memoir, I will suggest that anachronistic dialogisms create metonymic spaces for linked modes of oppositional thought. Back to Conference schedule

10:30-11:45am (CL 233) Orality and Literacy

Chair: Hugh Hodges (Trent)

I1. Susan Gingell (Saskatchewan) “Connecting Dub to the Struggle against Childhood Sexual Abuse: anitafrika’s Staging of Incest and Healing”

In addressing childhood sexual abuse, d’bi.young.anitafrika connects dub poetry and theatre to a new form of political struggle. She first breaks the silence around incest in a scene from the play yagayah in which imogene, speaking directly to the audience, recounts her rape by her uncle john. anitafrika then performs imogene’s monologue, now titled “children of a lesser god,” at a Def Poetry Jam before publishing a version dedicated “to likkle debbie” in which uncle john has become uncle sam. The one-woman play, bloodclaat, shifts the emphasis from abuse to healing. We will read anitafrika’s “versionings” of childhood incestuous rape as part of a self-directed healing journey ultimately connected to broader political action.

To illuminate the scripto-therapeutic aspects of her project we will draw on Jo-Ann Episkenew’s Taking Back Our Spirits, a book that explores how the writing and reading of Indigenous literature about (neo-)colonially inflicted trauma can serve healing functions and Jerry Wasserman’s “Daddy’s Girl,” an article about plays that deal with recovering and integrating memories of incest, as well as Elaine Scary’s The Body in Pain and Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, both of which view healing as a progression from alienation and silence (or the pre-verbal) to a rediscovery of voice and human connection. By authoring and acting the role of incest survivor, anitafrika minimizes the risks of re-victimization that Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray in “Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation?” explain can occur when the silence around incest is broken in such confessional contexts as therapy sessions or TV talk shows. anitafrika revealed in an interview with us that her strategies to avoid such re-victimization include staging incest without a fourth wall to implicate the audience in knowledge of the childhood sexual abuse being acted out.

We will consider the implications of anitafrika’s sometimes making incest the sole focus of a work about what an adult does to a child in domestic space, and at other times showing this violence as lodged in the social and public structures of society. In the latter scenario her characters are clearly caught in a larger web of poverty and of forces and discourses that include (neo)colonialism, patriarchy, and American imperialism. The name change from uncle john to uncle sam will be discussed in this light. Her plays also suggest recovery is a social as well as individual process when the abused characters seek to break their isolation and heal by reconnecting with Yoruba goddesses and the ancestral figure of Maroon Nanny. Back to Conference schedule

I2. Marci Prescott-Brown (Toronto) “Locating the I/ai/eye and finding me/mi: Codeswitching in the Poems of Benjamin Zephaniah”

As an artist who famously rejected the Order of the British Empire offered by the Queen, Benjamin Zephaniah’s status as a prolific poet and musician is generally uncontested. Despite his acclaim, many rich socio-historical contexts in Zephaniah’s writings have been elided. This paper harnesses linguistics to perform a historical and theoretical reading of Zephaniah’s “Translate” from Too Black Too Strong and “De Queen an I” from Propa Propaganda. The dearth of linguistic analysis may be attributed to scholars such as Darren J. N. Middleton, who argues that Rastafarian poets “hardly ever” adhere to “grammar or established laws of poetry” because this would be considered “too stylized, restrictive, and oppressively Western” and claims that their work privileges “social conscience.” Middleton’s problematical generalizations deny the possibility that Rastafarian writers have the agency or inclination to use linguistic devices; however, careful analysis of Zephaniah’s poetry reveals that he intentionally uses code-switching.

British-born and Jamaican-raised, Zephaniah’s awareness of the differences between the Standard British English “I,” Standard Jamaican English “I” or “me”, the Iyaric /ai/ (oral) or “I” (written) and “I –n- I” (oral and written), and the Jamaican Creole and British Black English /mi/ is apparent. These terms, in various situations, might mean: I (individual and/or communal self), my, mine, me, and he deftly utilizes them while code-switching. I argue that in “Translate,” Zephaniah references his linguistic approach through these terms, and expresses frustration at being misunderstood (by the English and general readers). Similarly, in “De Queen an I,” he uses the Iyaric association of “I” with “eye” to reveal the discomfort caused by the “English” surveillance of the “other,” a tension promoted by the British Nationality Act of 1981, which redefined who could be classified a “British Citizen.” My analysis shows the importance of distancing one’s self from popular culture’s approach to these artists, and mobilizing linguistic analyses where warranted. Back to Conference schedule

I3. Margery Fee (British Columbia-Vancouver) “Harry Robinson's Views on Literacy”

The importance of literacy has not been lost on indigenous peoples subjected to colonization, as, for example, the work of Gordon Brotherston (Book of the Fourth World, 1992), Walter Mignolo (Writing without Words, 1994), and Penny Van Toorn (Writing Never Arrives Naked, 2006), has made clear. In Canada, the Supreme Court decision in Delgamuukw vs. the Queen (1997) has brought Aboriginal oral traditions into connection with Western notions of history and truth to make it the site of intensive debate. Harry Robinson, an Okanagan rancher (1900-90), told hundreds of stories in English to Wendy Wickwire with the goal of reaching a wide audience (see Write It on Your Heart, 1990; Nature Power, 1992, and Living by Stories, 2005). Several of his important stories revolve around the difference between white and Indian symbolized by “paper” or “book.” As Wickwire points out, literacy, paper, and books are associated not with civilization for Robinson, but with fraud. He clearly regarded literacy as a powerful tool, or, as Wickwire puts it “an assigned form of power and knowledge which had been literally alienated from its original inhabitants” (Living 30). Nonetheless, he did not see a shift towards literate practices as requiring an abandonment of his own cultural perspective, despite the arguments found in the work of the Toronto School of Marshall McLuhan (e.g. Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962) and his student Walter Ong (e.g. Orality and Literacy, 1982), among others. Their position crudely put, was that to adopt print literacy was to become irrevocably modern, and thus, Western. Back to Conference schedule

12-1pm (CL 235) CACLALS Executive meeting

3:15–4:30pm (CL 233) Witnessing Violence and Dispossession

Chair: Laura Moss (BC-Vancouver)

J1. Atef Laouyene (California State) "The Ethics of Witnessing: Life Writing and the Spectacle of Arab Violence"

This paper argues that the narrativization of violence in Arab life writing, particuarly after 9/11, oftentimes forecloses the proper “witnessability” of that violence. (I understand Arab violence here both as an act of aggression and as a site/sight of suffering: suicide bombing, honnor killing, wife beating, stoning, FGM, etc.). Bringing under critical scrutiny Jordanian-American Norma Khouri’s 2003 fake memoir Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan, I show how post-9/11 Arab women autobiography sails too close to an auto-ethnographic discourse that is driven less by the author’s commitment to mimetic realism than by what Rey Chow aptly calls “coercive mimeticism.” Masquerading under the guise of “authentic” native anthropology, Khouri’s fabricated memoir caters to her (Western) readers’ horizons of expectations by portraying patriarchal Arab violence as an inherent, elemental predisposition, while paying scant attention to the complex realities and institutional structures that create the conditions for that violence. It is precisely the absence of a nuanced historical framework within which Arab women’s victimhood can be narrated, I argue, that not only betrays the self-orientalizing, careerist impulse of post-9/11 Arab life narratives, like Norma Khouri’s, but also dilutes their ethical imperative as testimonial literature. Under the economic logic of today’s culture industry, the otherwise empathic wintessing of Arab violence is suspended not because the substance of that violenc is overwhelmingly incomprehensible, but because it is often sublimated into a commercially palatable spectacle the thrill of which is to be experienced from a relatively comfortable distance. Back to Conference schedule

J2. Terri Tomsky (Alberta) “Jewish Anarchists and Muslim Terrorists: Connecting Histories in Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project”

The United States’ hyper-vigilance about terrorism has intersected in uncomfortable ways with its already troubled relationship to immigration. More specifically, when the terrorist threat was located in the racialized body of the Islamic other, there was a surge of uncoordinated violence against minorities who were thought to be Muslim. Responding to this vilification, Ali Behdad has called for a “critical historicism” that focuses attention to past as well as persisting exclusionary practices towards immigrants. Critical historicism aims to expose the historical amnesia of a nation-state, which disavows its long-standing use of disciplinary violence against foreigners.

Taking up Behdad’s challenge, I perform a critical historicization of structural amnesia. Using The Lazarus Project (2008), a novel by Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon, I examine the fear of anarchists in early twentieth-century America in relation to today’s War on Terror. Hemon’s novel recreates the history of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant murdered on the unfounded suspicion that he was an anarchist. It is significant not only for linking together similarly racist histories, but also for reminding us of how the State codifies (imagined) threats. In particular, Hemon’s reproduction of the actual police photographs of Averbuch calls attention to the way visual technology normalizes violence and circulates truth claims. Hemon himself has called his book an “Abu Ghraib” novel to highlight the (bio)political instrumentality of photographs, which assert control over history, other cultures, and subjugated bodies. In a globalised, image-saturated culture, Hemon’s critique is imperative in making perceptible those objectification practices that legitimate racial and political violence against others.

Works Cited

Behdad, Ali. “Critical Historicism.” American Literary History. 20.12 (2008): 286-99.

Hemon, Aleksandar. The Lazarus Project. New York: Riverhead, 2008. Back to Conference schedule

J3. Nouri Gana (UCLA) “The Commitment to Late Style: Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish”

This paper seeks to unpack the aesthetic and political purchases of the concept of “late style” in the works of Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish—two Palestinian intellectuals whose respective critical and creative contributions have mutually mirrored each other in a thought-provoking manner. Drawing on Adorno’s theorizations of such concepts as “commitment,” “form,” and “late style,” I will show how the late works of Said and Darwish deliberately keep alive the productive tension between aesthetic commitment, which by itself can verge on tendentious propaganda, and aesthetic autonomy, which by itself can boil down to nothing more than the cultivation of art for art’s sake. I will argue that the commitment to late style in Said and Darwish is indeed a form of political commitment. I will ask in the meanwhile whether political commitment should ever be understood separately from the aesthetics of unresolved dialectics that inform late style. Back to Conference schedule

3:15– 4:30pm (CL 235) Aboriginal and Global

Chair: JoAnn Episkenew (First Nations U)

K1. Brendan Smyth (Alberta) “Overlapping Stories: Negotiating the Global and Local in Jeannette Armstrong’s Whispering in Shadows”

The project of building and sustaining communities, ranging from her Okanagan Nation to global networks of social justice, is an underlying thread throughout Jeannette Armstrong’s novels, poetry and non-fiction. Published in 2000, six years after NAFTA went into effect on January 1, 1994, the same day the Zapatistas declared war on the Mexican state, and seven years before the signing of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Armstrong’s novel Whispering in Shadows is set within and explores the context of ongoing Indigenous liberation struggles in the Americas, as well as Indigenous activism at the international level. This paper examines the ways that Armstrong’s novel represents the figure of the Indigenous artist, Penny, and her commitment to the intellectual, spiritual, and political sovereignty of her people. The novel problematizes Penny’s role as artist/activist, revealing her as already embedded in relations of power which extend within and beyond her local community to the international. As Penny struggles with her own mobility within a system of globalized cultural production, she negotiates a place for herself upon a field where her works are produced, displayed, and consumed within the same system she critiques. By examining different moments in Penny’s activist and artistic development, this paper addresses the ways in which Armstrong’s novel imagines global and pan-Indigenous modes of being-together and being-in-common that are rooted in Penny’s Okanagan worldview. Back to Conference schedule

K2. Peter Forestell (New Brunswick): “Reasserting Difference: Chrystos and the ‘american’ Queer”

In recent years Queer and Native North American literary scholars have made significant efforts in order to bridge the gap between the two fields of study. This paper will argue that Chrystos’ early poetry delineates the potential intractability of such a “two-spirited” effort, and that her later work offers up an uneasy solution to this conundrum. In Not Vanishing and Dream On, Chrystos identifies the impasses inherent in the exchange of language across the borderlines of gender, sexuality, race, and nation, and so to safeguard her autonomous voice, she requires safe-spaces in which to speak, and more importantly, in which to hear others speak, entirely free from the language of a nationalistic, white America. These safe-spaces are created necessarily through acts of exclusion, despite the protests of the white women and men, gay or straight, excluded. For Chrystos, “america,” as the prime signifier, has the most power to sever the common bonds between Queer and Two-Spirited allies of any race. Chrystos’ more recent collection In Her I Am demonstrates that the celebration of the Native lesbian erotic, on the other hand, has an opposite potential to unify. Indeed, as fraught as the borderlands of the discourses on race, gender, nation, and sexuality may be, in the space uniting the female tongue, lip, and finger with the clitoris, words lose their political charge and can thus be spoken free from the context of oppression. Back to Conference schedule

K3. Taryn Beukema (Queen’s) “(De)Constructing Cartographies: Understanding Indigenous Connections to Land in Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen”

Through its portrayal of the removal of two Cree brothers from their homeland in northern Manitoba to residential school, Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen dissects discourses of (dis)placement that have been implicated in the attempted spiritual and cultural genocide of Indigenous nations in Canada. By attributing to Highway’s text theories of cultural geography and cartographic discourse, I argue in this paper that Kiss of the Fur Queen promotes an agenda of cultural reterritorialisation that renders legible – while providing an imaginative blueprint for – Cree (re)connections to land. I argue that Highway employs his text as an authored map and the Two-Spirited Cree body of Gabriel Okimasis as a resistant landscape in order to assume Indigenous authority over land while establishing a more productive relationship between map-making and meaning-making. I investigate not only Highway’s employment of the text itself as a new system of cartography where mapping becomes both descriptive and prescriptive, but also Highway’s writing of Gabriel’s body as a fluid and adaptable landscape. Gabriel’s movement in the novel ruptures the notion of maps as fixed, enclosed spaces that must be controlled and protected. This paper argues that Highway creates a new territory for Indigenous fiction. He interrogates the constrictive and coercive operations of Eurocentric maps, critiques the rhetorical strategies implemented in the “discovery” of Indigenous lands, and deconstructs the Western signifying system of cartographic space. By employing Kiss of the Fur Queen as map and Gabriel’s body as landscape, I argue that Highway is able to reinforce Indigenous systems of knowledge in regards to land, institute a politics of decolonization, and construct a geography of belonging. Back to Conference schedule

Sunday, May 30

9-10:15am (CL 233) The Fate of Culture

Chair: Ken Derry (Toronto)

L1. Jennifer Andrews (New Brunswick) “Fashion Television, National Identity, and Citizenship”

Created and first aired in 1985 by City-TV, a “renegade television station” known for its unorthodox production values, Fashion Television marked the beginning of Canada’s turn on the world’s runways, and revisioned Canada’s status as a colonial outpost for fashion innovation (Fulsang 319). With its “lively soundtrack, sexy characters, and provocative dialogue,” the show, hosted by Toronto-native Jeanne Beker, blends together fashion and music video concepts to create a fast-paced and fun snapshot of fashion, arts, and culture around the globe (319-20). Combining what Beker has described as “eye candy” shots of provocatively clad female and male models with short news stories, Fashion Television remains groundbreaking in its presentation of fashion as entertainment to this day (320). Notably, FT cannot claim to be the first television fashion show, an honour that goes to CNN’s Style with Elsa Klensch (1980-2001), a program shaped by the Atlanta- based Ted Turner-owned twenty-four hour news network and its Australian-born host’s reserved demeanour. However, FT marks a radical departure from CNN and Klensch precisely because Beker has fashioned herself as accessible, and eager to pose the “personal questions,” participate in the “gossip” and look at fashion from a “behind the scenes” perspective (320).

At the same time, Beker has carefully and repeatedly positioned herself as a Canadian, who typically wears Canadian designer garments, champions Canadian brands, and has created a platform for delivering knowledge of the Canadian fashion industry through a globally popular television show; in other words, Canadian designers, labels, and shows, ranging from Milan-based DSquared (created by Canadian-born twins Dan and Dean Caten) to the seasonal Montreal and Toronto fashion weeks all get coverage along with the Paris, Milan, London, and New York-based designers and shows. This distinctly nationalist effort has also spawned a variety of programs south of the forty-ninth parallel that borrow from and in turn have influenced Canadian fashion television programming—most obviously Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model, with Jeanne Beker serving as a judge in the Canadian version of this popular contest for a lucrative national modeling contract.

While post 9/11 fears of terrorism have provoked the increased regulation of what David Staines has called “the world’s longest undefended border” (3), television constantly crosses this line, raising important questions about citizenship and identity particularly in the constantly changing world of fashion. How does FT’s international success and its influence on how North Americans understand fashion as entertainment intersect with the show’s distinctly nationalistic efforts to identify as different from America or Europe? Drawing on John Hartley’s work on television’s creation of the “D-I-Y” citizen and Julia Emberley’s interdisciplinary study of fashion and identity in The Cultural Politics of Fur, this paper reads the story of FT and its Canadian-host Jeanne Beker as refashioning (literally and figuratively) how viewers on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel and the Atlantic Ocean perceive of Canada and its status as a source of fashion knowledge and creative energy, a project that has implications for Canada’s ambivalent status as a colonial/post-colonial nation.

Works Cited

Fulsang, Deborah. “The Fashion of Writing, 1985-2000: Fashion-Themed Television’s Impact on the Canadian Fashion Press.” Fashion: A Canadian Perspective. Ed. Alexandra Palmer. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004. 315-338.

Hartley, John. Television Truths. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

Staines, David. “Introduction.” The Forty-Ninth and Other Parallels. Ed. Staines. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1986. 3-8. Back to Conference schedule

L2. Kailin Wright (Toronto) “Performing (Dis)Connections: Canadian Theatre History in ‘The Theatre of Neptune’ and ‘Sinking Neptune’”

Performed on the water of Port Royal in 1606, Marc Lescarbot’s Le Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France has been celebrated as the earliest documented performance in Canada. The Theatre of Neptune is an oceanic masque that celebrates the return of the French colony’s leader. Lescarbot’s play casts the colonial project as a “praiseworthy enterprise,” and features four “sauvages” who tell the Frenchmen that “All we desire / Is to live forever in your favour.” Despite this contentious representation of the Mi’kmaq tribe, Stratford’s centennial report describes Lescarbot’s play as “the first theatrical happening in Canada,” Laurent Lavoie cites the play as the beginning of Acadian theatre, and Frederick Lewis Gay claims it to be the “first American play.” In addition to editing a 2006 anniversary edition of The Theatre of Neptune, Jerry Wasserman describes the play as “a landmark in our cultural history.” This paper questions the implications of the celebrations of The Theatre of Neptune as “the first Canadian play.”

In response to the celebratory historicization of The Theatre of Neptune, Montreal’s Optative Theatrical Laboratories created a revisionist adaptation Sinking Neptune (2006). Sinking Neptune provides a model for potential strategies of revising dominant narratives. Yet, aside from brief newspaper articles, there is no scholarship on Sinking Neptune. This paper will conduct a close-reading of the two plays’ representations of “les sauvages.” The Theatre of Neptune not only survives as a historical document of French colonialism, but also reinforces colonialist propaganda, posits written culture above oral cultures, and features a redface performance of subordinate “sauvages.” Sinking Neptune, by contrast, features multiple intertexts from contemporary Native artists who write back to Lescarbot. In spite of the announced connections between the two plays, this paper explores the violent disconnect between representation of “sauvages” and the actual Mi’kmaq audience.

In approaching Sinking Neptune as a response to The Theatre of Neptune, this paper ultimately seeks to outline a dramatic methodology for revisionist plays. With collaborative creation, intertextuality, and audience involvement, Sinking Neptune works to re-define accepted notions of “theatre in our nation” and the possessive pronoun “our.” Back to Conference schedule

L3. Alexander Eastwood (Toronto) “Outsourcing the Author-Function: Atwood and the LongPen”

Margaret Atwood’s LongPen invention serves as a fascinating object of inquiry for a study of the theoretical implications of technology’s mediation of author-fan contact. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of the author-function, I argue that the LongPen foregrounds the distinction between writer and author by imposing technological mediation between readers and the writer. Technology such as the LongPen enforces a dynamic wherein the author is ever-present and yet the writer is, particularly in a corporeal sense, absent. Curiously, however, the LongPen fosters a sense of connection; many readers state that the videoconferencing aspect feels more “personal” to them than a physical meeting. Atwood’s device raises interesting questions about the nature of the “real,” authorial presence, and the function of the signature. Taking Atwood herself as a case-study, I conclude that technology plays a vital role in allowing writers to distance themselves from the public realm while simultaneously constructing a public author-figure for marketing purposes in order to satiate the public’s demand for increased access to the author. In an age obsessed with celebrity culture, this ability to maintain interest and assert privacy simultaneously proves vital. Atwood claims that the LongPen is a “democratizing tool” that allows authors to market themselves to a wide variety of readers. Situating the LongPen within contemporary literary marketing practices, I speculate that the LongPen will ultimately devalue the authorial signature. Rather than prompting the total demise of the book tour, however, the LongPen will enhance the cultural value of the writer’s physical presence. Back to Conference schedule

9-10:15am (CL 235) Canada

Chair: Hajer Trabelsi (Montreal)

M1. Nora Foster Stovel (Alberta) “Margaret Laurence: The Woman and the Masks”

Margaret Laurence’s favourite biblical passage was “thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt,” from Exodus 23:9, a passage she quoted three times in her writing career: first in her travel journal, The Prophet’s Camel Bell (1963), following her 1950-51 sojourn in the British Protectorate of Somaliland; second, in her Ghanaian collection of short stories, The Tomorrow-Tamer and Other Stories (1963); and third, in her collection of travel essays, Heart of a Stranger (1976). Travel afforded Laurence perspective on “strangers,” or racial “others,” and also on her own self and country.

Laurence frequently expresses her sympathy with racial “others” subjugated by colonial rule. Her empathy with African peoples—especially Somali and Ghanaian peoples, both planning independence while Laurence lived among them during her “seven-years’ love affair with a continent,” 1950-57—and Canada’s Aboriginal peoples—especially the Métis of her native Manitoba—is manifested in Heart of a Stranger: “The Poem and the Spear” celebrates Somali leader Mahammed ‘Abdille Hasan, known to the Somalis as the “Sayyid,” or Lord, and to the British as “The Mad Mullah”; and “Man of Our People” celebrates Gabriel Dumont.

Laurence writes compellingly about African peoples in her five African texts and Canada’s Métis in her five Manawaka texts, where she publicizes crimes committed against these peoples under colonialism. Indeed, her African experience influenced her perspective on Canada as a post-colonial nation and also on women as colonized under patriarchy. She condemns female genital mutilation, enslavement, and child prostitution in her Somali journal, The Prophet’s Camel Bell (1963); her Ghananian novel, This Side Jordan (1961); and her stories in The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963). In her Canadian fiction, she critiques Aboriginal stereotypes, specifically in Vanessa MacLeod’s prejudiced perception of Piquette Tonnerre in “The Loons” from A Bird in the House (1970), the “Indian” whose tragic fate is revisited in The Diviners (1974).
In Heart of a Stranger Laurence claims to have “The Very Best Intentions” toward Africans, “wearing my militant liberalism like a heart on my sleeve.” Her use of the suffering of racial “Others” to catalyze the epiphanies of her white protagonists is problematic, however, in both her African and Canadian texts. In This Side Jordan, the hateful hero, Johnnie Kestoe, rapes “Emerald,” a virgin enslaved by prostitution. Having suffered cliteridectomy, she hemorrhages, triggering his recognition of her humanity by recalling the blood clots on his mother’s deathbed, following her self-administered abortion in Britain during his childhood. Similarly, although Laurence ironizes Vanessa MacLeod’s romanticized stereotyping of Piquette Tonnerre, the death of Piquette with her infants in a fire in the Tonnerre shack, when Piquette was drunk on “home brew,” not only perpetuates the stereotype of the drunken Indian, but also employs her tragic death to trigger Vanessa’s recognition of Piquette’s individuality as a Métis woman in relation to her own self-awareness—just as Emerald’s suffering triggers Johnnie Kestoe’s realization of her individuality.
There can be no doubt that Laurence had “the very best intentions,” and yet how can we reconcile them with this use of “others” in her African and Canadian fiction? This is the paradox I intend to explore in “Margaret Laurence’s Heart of a Stranger.” Back to Conference schedule

M2. Joshua Prescott (New Brunswick) “An Intervention of Sorts: A History of Violence in Catherine Bush's The Rules of Engagement”

Catherine Bush’s The Rules of Engagement tackles head-on the implications of the intersection between past history and present experience. Shuttling back and forth between London and Toronto, the narrative details the story of Arcadia Hearne as she struggles to reconcile questions concerning the inevitability of violence and the inability to escape one’s past. A novel about the connection of the public with the private, of personal responsibility and a larger global accountability, Bush explores the potential binary between risk and safety as a window into Arcadia’s musings on the concept of intervention. Bush’s submission that the tenuous nature of interventions grows ever more significant as the world becomes increasingly more connected seems to reject what Noam Chomsky calls “enlightenment humanitarianism” – and what Michael Ignatieff names “a permanent rationale for involvement in zones of danger” (63) – in favour of a more objective doctrine of intervention, born from the question “Is there life after loss?” and predicated on the notion that the “world continually realigns itself” (Bush 300).

This paper will examine the novel’s seeming desire to question the logic behind intervention, both in terms of personal narratives and with regard to the larger global political sphere. Using de Certeau’s thoughts on the relationship between city-space and everyday activity, this paper will argue that Bush’s Rules suggests that interventions are always complicated, subjective, and situational. It is through Bush’s exploration of war and violence, the space of the city, and the very idea of intervention that the novel suggests, both with regard to personal struggles and issues of global conflict, that progress requires that one confront the past in order to acquire control over one’s ‘story.’ Back to Conference schedule

M3. Sharlee Reimer (McMaster) “‘It is life you must write about’: Fixity and Refraction in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging”

How do we read a book like Map to the Door of No Return? And what does its unconventional structure and content mean politically? To date, the criticism of Map has located the book’s political work almost exclusively in its content, but I argue that an interrogation of its form is crucial to understanding this book. In this paper, then, I will begin to answer these questions by examining Map’s generic complexities—particularly as it does and does not adhere to auto/biographical conventions—and its departure from literary conventions more broadly in relation to Enlightenment epistemologies.

I will suggest that Map to the Door of No Return troubles genre expectation in order to draw the reader’s attention to the ways in which the refraction that results from displacement is simultaneously irreducible and exceeds—and, indeed, refuses—these conventions. That is, this book’s discussion of history and experience cannot be contained in a narrative; it embodies, both in its form and its content, the trauma of the history of colonialism, slavery, displacement, and racism, the legacy of which causes a rupture in the narrator’s way of knowing, but one that insists upon a reframing of anti-racist and anti-colonialist struggles. As Brand says, “too much has been made of origins” (69), and while saying so risks undermining the communities that can be and are built on notions of coherent origins, she insists on a coalitional approach to the political work that is imperative to address the legacy of these violences. Back to Conference schedule

10:30-12noon (MB 2-270) keynote address

Diana Brydon (Manitoba) “Globalization and Higher Education: Implications for Postcolonial Research”

Globalization brings new pressures to bear on the contexts in which academics and civil society conduct their research. This paper examines those pressures in the context of the ongoing European Union Bologna process, raising questions for scholars across the disciplines. As circuits of academic exchange and evaluation make new connections among previously disconnected geopolitical and research cultures, they also close off others. How can we make interdisciplinarity work toward achieving cognitive justice in such contexts? What does it mean to read across cultures in the

twenty-first century? Can ethical practices be developed to address the shifting power relations through which circuits of exchange flow and are shorted? How do modes of postcolonial critique interrupt those proposed by global higher education?

Back to Conference schedule

1:30 -2:45pm (CL 233) Literary History

Chair: Adele Wilson (Toronto)

N1. Zara Rix (Connecticut) “Reimagining Contemporary India: the Children's Literature of Manula Padmanabhan”

Within postcolonial studies, Manjula Padmanabhan is known primarily for Harvest, a play published in 1999 that harshly critiques the economic and cultural relationship between India and the United States.  Since then, she has largely published within the realm of children’s literature, where she contributes to the small but growing body of Indian children’s fiction written and produced in India for an audience of Indian children.  Within this paper, I consider Unprincess! (2005), an English-language work produced through Puffin Books New Delhi and containing three short stories about “feisty” Indian girls.

Although Unprincess! does not engage in as specific an analysis of globalized relationships as Harvest, the girls’ position as members of a globalized world is evident in their adventures, from arguing with a Windows 98-using giant to taking part in a war against an unnamed country to the northwest of India. As Unprincess! also pays attention to its protagonists’ daily lives, Padmanabhan’s book allows me to examine her image of contemporary, globalized India. Given the didacticism inherent in children’s literature, this raises a number of questions. What challenges does Padmanabhan consider the children (and their society) likely to encounter?  What qualities – new and traditional – and what ways of interacting with the world are Indian children encouraged to emulate?  Through analyzing Padmanabhan, I argue that because of the hopefulness and imagination employed by children’s literature (and encouraged by the world-wide proliferation of children’s fantasy publishing, thanks to JK Rowling), children’s literature offers a unique insight into a postcolonial culture’s self-representation and approach to the future.  Back to Conference schedule

N2. Nathan Suhr-Sytsma (Yale) “Editing the Commonwealth: Poetry and the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival”

The 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival drew together poets from around the English-speaking world, giving rise to several anthologies and special issues of periodicals that featured “Commonwealth poetry.” This Commonwealth poetry phenomenon, I suggest, constituted the first sustained challenge to the London literary world’s habitual geography of contemporary poetry as British or American.

How did the editors of Commonwealth poetry and the poets gathered under that label imagine their connectedness to each other? Were they part of a “common culture,” or were they primarily representatives of individual nations? My paper examines how poets including Earle Birney from Canada and Christopher Okigbo from Nigeria who were commissioned to write for the Commonwealth Arts Festival and anthologized in Verse and Voice responded to the editors’ suggestion to “reflect”—pseudo-ethnographically?—“the landscape or the way of life of a particular country.” I then compare the image of the Commonwealth offered by Verse and Voice with that developed in the pages of the London Magazine and the Trinidad Guardian by Derek Walcott, who boycotted the Festival. While those who shaped “Commonwealth poetry” in Britain left little room for composite cultural identities or transnational affinities that did not pass through Britain, poets themselves remained alert to the disjunctions between their own experiences of culture, identity, or nationality and the political labels of the day. Back to Conference schedule

N3. Stephen Ney (British Columbia-Vancouver) “What Hath Athens to do with Ibadan? Literary Reconfigurations of Ancient Greece in Modern Yorubaland”

This paper considers three English literary texts from Yoruba writers that borrow thematically from ancient Greek myth and literature: Ola Rotimi’s 1971 play The Gods are Not to Blame (which transplants Oedipus Rex to Yorubaland), Wole Soyinka’s 1973 play The Bacchae of Euripides, and Helen Oyeyemi’s 2005 novel Icarus Girl. Identifying the references that these three Yoruba writers establish to ancient stories is easy; what is more interesting is to highlight the ways that the Greek antecedents are modified. This paper highlights how the Yoruba texts vehemently reject readings that blame the gods, that preclude politics by making human beings subject to the whims of deities. More moral than mythological, these three literary texts evoke a cosmos in which gods and human beings are interdependent and are held accountable to moral standards. This emphasis corresponds precisely to what Soyinka in his 1976 Myth, Literature and the African World calls a fundamental difference in “moral bias” of the Yoruba and the Ancient Greek world-view (14).

In the light of these literary texts, the second half of this paper considers the cultural and political implications of a postcolonial writer’s decision to establish a connection with an Ancient Greek tradition. Given that nineteenth century British missionaries and educationists in Africa frequently emphasized the teaching of Greek language and literature in order to confirm that “full humanity” was accessible to Africans as well as to Europeans, is this connection a way of succumbing to the colonial demand that the colonized either turn white or disappear? For some leading African cultural figures, including Senghor, connecting to the Greeks has indeed perpetuated a subtly Eurocentric mindset. But this is not necessarily the case. With reference to literary criticism by Soyinka as well as H. L. Gates I argue that, when carefully drawn, these connections can actually function to suggest the vitality and relevance of an enduring (Yoruba) culture, rather than to demonstrate a debt owed to a superior (Greek, European) civilization. Back to Conference schedule

3-4:15pm (CL 233) South Africa

Chair: Susan Spearey (Brock)

O1. Jaime Denike (Queen’s) “Destabilizing Autonomy: Writing Narrators in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee”

In a number of J. M. Coetzee's novels, narrators function as fictional authors of the text, a tactic that self-consciously foregrounds the authorial act. This presentation considers writing narrators as they emerge across Coetzee's fiction, with particular attention to Diary of a Bad Year. I argue that this technique of employing fictional authors demonstrates epistemological doubt about the first-person point-of-view and its characteristically univocal nature while also foregrounding the interconnectedness of the authorial role and dominant reading practices. Through an emphasis on relationality and intersubjective dialogue, Diary of a Bad Year challenges authoritative voice and the autonomy of individuated perception.

In Diary of a Bad Year, the typically univocal diary and essay genres are populated with the voice and intention of others. While J C's bold and individual voice shifts to one that, following Kierkegaard, is “'learn[ing] to speak without authority',” the novel also privileges the editorial input of Anya, a marginalized, female, non-academic reader. I ask, in what ways is imagining and incorporating Anya's point-of-view critically tied to J C's turn to subjective modes of discourse? What are the stakes around destabilizing the autonomy of an author's critical voice by making the distinction between J C's opinions and Anya's editorial input impossible to discern? Finally, to the extent that this novel models a discourse based on the exchange and development of critical stances, what kinds of criticism does it call for and how do we respond to this call? Back to Conference schedule

O2. Shannon Hengen (Laurentian) “Private and Public Lives: the South African Voice of Antjie Krog”

Outside of South Africa, Antjie Krog is known—if known at all—for her account of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission entitled, Country of My Skull. An Afrikaner, and so linked with the perpetrators of the injustices which the Commission was created to redress, Krog as a reporter on the Commission for the South African Broadcasting Corporation was painfully aware of her conflicted position, a position that I hope to clarify for its value to a Canadian audience.

I propose for this conference paper to interpret how Krog expresses her personal life in her poetry—little known in this country--to connect with or show a disjuncture with the highly complex political events she relates in her non-fiction prose. The genres meet in her search for a voice both honest and compassionate amid her own aging and also the troubling state of her “lost” and “forlorn continent” (Body Bereft 59).

My interpretation of the link between private and public will be informed by my reading of the role of testimonial writing that Shane Graham calls “making . . . asymmetry visible” (56), Mark Sanders labels “responsibility in complicity” (12 and throughout), and Dori Laub describes as prevention against “the collapse of witnessing” (80 and elsewhere). I will interview her in Cape Town in April, 2010. Back to Conference schedule

O3. Jesse Arseneault (McMaster) “Transhistorical Horizons: Reading Queer Identity in John Greyson and Jack Lewis’s Proteus”

Situated amidst recent Southern African legal, academic and cultural discussions of homosexuality, this paper examines queer identity in John Greyson and Jack Lewis’s film Proteus, which offers a historiographical reading of a queer, interracial relationship in South Africa’s colonial past. Released in 2003 amidst pivotal years for queer rights in South Africa, the film covers an 18^th century interracial sodomy trial and incorporates settings and artifacts reminiscent of both the nation’s colonial past and apartheid. This paper reads the way that the film’s transhistorical horizons – a term meant to both describe the film’s physical landscapes from South Africa’s colonial history to the present and to examine the way it imagines the trajectory of queer identity on South Africa’s future “horizons” – and how they expand contemporary conceptions of queer identity within the nation. Drawing from Judith Halberstam’s articulation of “queer time,” I suggest that the film’s construction of the past amidst contemporary landscapes represents a queering of South African history, carving out a space for queer identity alongside the oppressive histories of apartheid and colonialism where it had previously been denied. I also argue that the film’s engagement with legal discourse around the sodomy trial resists relegating queer identity into heteronormative conceptions of love and intimacy which, with gay marriage on the horizon’s at the time of the film’s release, legalized discourses of queer sexuality risk doing. Back to Conference schedule

3-4:15pm (CL 235) Diaspora

Chair: Katja Thieme (BC-Vancouver)

P1. Robert Zacharias (Guelph) “On a Newly Arisen Tone in Diaspora Studies”

In “On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy,” Immanuel Kant confronts philosophers he suspects are making their work intentionally abstract in an attempt to hide a lack of critical rigor. Calling them “mystagoges,” Kant warns, somewhat hyperbolically, that an adoption of their methods will lead to “the death of all philosophy” (71). Adopting Kant’s focus on tone while critiquing his apocalyptic rhetoric, this paper argues that the sarcasm adopted by Robin Cohen, William Safran, and others to critique the (admittedly exponential) growth of diaspora studies plays a regulatory role that belies a surprising critical territorialism. Such rhetoric implicitly dismisses entire areas of study—including postmodernism, cultural studies, and what Safran calls “even literature”—as outposts of upstart mystagoges whose critical imprecision will be the death of diaspora studies. The growth of diaspora studies, I suggest, and much of the resulting critical ambiguity, are better understood as the consequences of diaspora being one of the few critical concepts to be taken up in a widely interdisciplinary forum. Foucault’s work on the disciplinary function of academic fields reminds us that to those invested in their own critical domains, scholars from other disciplines appear as “monsters on the prowl” (“Orders” 15). Contemporary diaspora studies, then, offers an opportunity to reconsider the role of tone in academic writing, which, rarely the focus of critique, functions most effectively in its presumed absence. Back to Conference schedule

P2. Michelle Peek (McMaster) “A Subject of Sea and Salty Sediment: Diasporic Labour and Queer Be(longing) in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt”

To certain Parisian households in the interwar period in want of a stay-in chef, Binh, Vietnamese cook, migrant worker, and narrator of Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, is “nothing but a series of destinations with no meaningful expanses in between” (18). And yet, the “expanses in between,” most notably in reference to waterways—the Mekong River, the South China Sea, and the Indian Ocean—allude to a central trope of Vietnamese culture. The term nuoc in Vietnamese means both water, and country or homeland. In The Book of Salt, oceanic crossings are necessitated for Binh by both labour and love (as a queer subject and migrant worker who is able to experience pleasures, both culinary and sexual in Paris that he is denied in his father’s home in Vietnam); the material body traces of such oceanic and queer movements, then, are crystallized, quite literally, in the flowering of water to salt, described at one point as the "gradual revelation of [the] true self" (Truong 98). I argue that Binh’s sensitivity to salt extends beyond the class confines of distinguished culinary tastes and places him within a collective gustatory community (see Lily Cho) based on shared desires and memories – a diasporic community enabled by oceanic crossings and necessitated by queer desire. Thus, as a diasporic subject whose labour and love are fundamentally comprised of sea and salty sediment, I locate queerness, belonging, and becoming between inherited and chosen forms of affiliation, positioning The Book of Salt within and against “official” historicist temporalities. Back to Conference schedule

P3. Pamela McCallum (Calgary) “Art and Literature: Representing Migrancy in Marina Lewycka”s Strawberry Fields and Peng Kailin’s ‘Background’”

Globalization is a widely discussed issue in postcolonial studies and other disciplines, and yet questions about its representation of remain underexplored. How are the intricate interconnections of a globalized world to be represented? How does a writer or visual artist begin, as Fredric Jameson writes in his book on film The Geopolitical Aesthetic, “to think a system so vast that it cannot be encompassed by the natural and historically developed categories of perception with which human beings normally orient themselves”? (2). The Indian writer and activist, Arundhati Roy, raises similar issues when she comments, “What is happening to the world lies, at the moment, just outside the realm of common human understanding” (Power Politics 32). She goes on to challenge artists and writers to “translate cash-flow charts and scintillating boardroom speeches into real stories about real people with real lives” (32), in other words, to articulate in concrete forms the massive global flows of capital and bio-power. In terms of constructing “connected understanding”, I would suggest that dialogues between visual artists and writers be explored. While not claiming that art elicits a universal response, it is nonetheless important to recognize that visual art can be an especially useful site of cultural translation because responses to it do not depend on the knowledge of language and therefore have the power to communicate across linguistic barriers. This potential for cross-cultural communication is especially significant in the case of representing migrancy and migrants who are often not proficient in the language of the place in which they work. In exploring theoretical questions about potential dialogues between art and writing this paper will focus on “Background,” a conceptual artwork about migrant construction workers in Beijing by Peng Kailin and the novel Strawberry Fields by British writer Marina Lewycka. My purpose is to articulate the potential for connected understandings between contemporary art and writing, a dialogue which would be illuminating as postcolonial theory grapples with question of representing globalization. Back to Conference schedule

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[1] Consider, for instance, Joy Harjo’s driving poems, Vine Deloria’s essay, “I Want to Ride in Geronimo’s Cadillac,” or Chrystos’ affirmative last lines, “see / How I am still walking,” that end her poem, “I Walk in the History of My People.” The Tobique women’s 1979 “100 Mile Walk,” publicizing the gender discrimination of the Indian Act, is a grassroots, activist example of this reclaiming of mobility.