Renée Hulan – författare

An in-depth examination of the ethnographic content and impact of literary representations of "Canada as North."

By investigating mutually dependent categories of identity in literature that depicts northern peoples and places, Hulan provides a descriptive account of representative genres in which the north figures as a central theme - including autobiography, adventure narrative, ethnography, fiction, poetry, and travel writing. She considers each of these diverse genres in terms of the way it explains the cultural identity of a nation formed from the settlement of immigrant peoples on the lands of dispossessed, indigenous peoples. Reading against the background of contemporary ethnographic, literary, and cultural theory, Hulan maintains that the collective Canadian identity idealized in many works representing the north does not occur naturally but is artificially constructed in terms of characteristics inflected by historically contingent ideas of gender and race, such as self-sufficiency, independence, and endurance, and that these characteristics are evoked to justify the nationhood of the Canadian state.

Oral traditions are a distinct way of knowing and the means by which knowledge is reproduced, preserved and transferred from generation to generation. The conference from which these essays were selected created an opportunity for people to come together and exchange information and experiences over three days. The scholarship may be grouped into three broad areas: oral traditions and knowledge of the environment, economy, education and/or health of communities; oral traditions and continuance of language and culture; and the effects of intellectual property rights, electronic media and public discourse on oral traditions.

Climate Change and Writing the Canadian Arctic explores the impact of climate change on Canadian literary culture.  Analysis of the changing rhetoric surrounding the discovery of the lost ships of the Franklin expedition serves to highlight the political and economic interests that have historically motivated Canada’s approach to the Arctic and shaped literary representations.  A recent shift in Canadian writing away from national sovereignty to circumpolar stewardship is revealed in detailed close readings of Kathleen Winter’s Boundless and Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s The Right to Be Cold.