TransCanada – serie

The study of Canadian literature - CanLit - has undergone dramatic changes since it became an area of specialization in the 1960s and '70s. As new global forces in the 1990s undermined its nation-based critical assumptions, its theoretical focus and research methods lost their immediacy. The contributors to Trans.Can.Lit address cultural policy, citizenship, white civility, and the celebrated status of diasporic writers, unabashedly recognizing the imperative to transfigure the disciplinary and institutional frameworks within which Canadian literature is produced, disseminated, studied, taught, and imagined.

Transnational Canadas marks the first sustained inquiry into the relationship between globalization and Canadian literature written in English. Tracking developments in the literature and its study from the centennial period to the present, it shows how current work in transnational studies can provide new insights for researchers and students. Arguing first that the dichotomy of Canadian nationalism and globalization is no longer valid in today's economic climate, Transnational Canadas explores the legacy of leftist nationalism in Canadian literature. It examines the interventions of multicultural writing in the 1980s and 1990s, investigating the cultural politics of the period and how they increasingly became part of Canada's state structure. Under globalization, the book concludes, we need to understand new forms of subjectivity and mobility as sites for cultural politics and look beyond received notions of belonging and being. An original contribution to the study of Canadian literature, Transnational Canadas seeks to invigorate discussion by challenging students and researchers to understand the national and the global simultaneously, to look at the politics of identity beyond the rubric of multiculturalism, and to rethink the slippery notion of the political for the contemporary era.

Scandalous Bodies is an impassioned scholarly study both of literature by diasporic writers and of the contexts within which it is produced. It explores topics ranging from the Canadian government's multiculturalism policy to media representations of so-called minority groups, from the relationship between realist fiction and history to postmodern constructions of ethnicity, from the multicultural theory of the philosopher Charles Taylor to the cultural responsibilities of diasporic critics such as Kamboureli herself. Smaro Kamboureli proposes no neat or comforting solutions to the problems she addresses. Rather than adhere to a single method of reading or make her argument follow a systematic approach, she lets the texts and the socio-cultural contexts she examines give shape to her reading. In fact, methodological issues, and the need to revisit them, become a leitmotif in the book. Theoretically rigorous and historically situated, this study also engages with close reading - not the kind that views a text as a sovereign world, but one that opens the text in order to reveal the method of its making. Her practice of what she calls negative pedagogy - a self-reflexive method of learning and unlearning, of decoding the means through which knowledge is produced - allows her to avoid the pitfalls of constructing a narrative of progress. Her critique of Canadian multiculturalism as a policy that advocates what she calls ""sedative politics"" and of the epistemologies of ethnicity that have shaped, for example, the first wave of ethnic anthologies in Canada are the backdrop against which she examines the various discourses that inform the diasporic experience in Canada. Scandalous Bodies was first published in 2000 and received the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Criticism.

Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Canada considers how the terms of critical debate in literary and cultural studies in Canada have shifted with respect to race, nation, and difference. In asking how Indigenous and diasporic interventions have remapped these debates, the contributors argue that a new ""cultural grammar"" is at work and attempt to sketch out some of the ways it operates. The essays reference pivotal moments in Canadian literary and cultural history and speak to ongoing debates about Canadian nationalism, postcolonalism, migrancy, and transnationalism. Topics covered include the Asian race riots in Vancouver in 1907, the cultural memory of internment and dispersal of Japanese Canadians in the 1940s, the politics of migrant labour and the ""domestic labour scheme"" in the 1960s, and the trial of Robert Pickton in Vancouver in 2007. The contributors are particularly interested in how diaspora and indigeneity continue to contribute to this critical reconfiguration and in how conversations about diaspora and indigeneity in the Canadian context have themselves been transformed. Cultural Grammars is an attempt to address both the interconnections and the schisms between these multiply fractured critical terms as well as the larger conceptual shifts that have occurred in response to national and postnational arguments.

Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace brings to light the relationship between writers in Canada and the marketplace within which their work circulates. Through a series of conversations with both established and younger writers from across the country, Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli investigate how writers perceive their relationship to the cultural economy - and what that economy means for their creative processes. The interviews in Producing Canadian Literature focus, in particular, on how writers interact with the cultural institutions and bodies that surround them. Conversations pursue the impacts of arts funding on writers; show how agents, editors, and publishers affect writers' works; examine the process of actually selling a book, both in Canada and abroad; and contemplate what literary awards mean to writers. Dialogues with Christian Bök, George Elliott Clarke, Daniel Heath Justice, Larissa Lai, Stephen Henighan, Roy Miki, Erín Moure, Ashok Mathur, Lee Maracle, Jane Urquhart, and Aritha van Herk testify to the broad range of experience that writers in Canada have when it comes to the conditions in which their work is produced. Original in its desire to directly explore the specific circumstances in which writers work - and how those conditions affect their writing itself - Producing Canadian Literature will be of interest to scholars, students, aspiring writers, and readers who have followed these authors and want to know more about how their books come into being.

Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies is a collection of interdisciplinary essays that examine the various contexts - political, social, and cultural - that have shaped the study of Canadian literature and the role it plays in our understanding of the Canadian nation-state. The essays are tied together as instances of critical practices that reveal the relations and exchanges that take place between the categories of the literary and the nation, as well as between the disciplinary sites of critical discourses and the porous boundaries of their methods. They are concerned with the material effects of the imperial and colonial logics that have fashioned Canada, as well as with the paradoxes, ironies, and contortions that abound in the general perception that Canada has progressed beyond its colonial construction. Smaro Kamboureli's introduction demonstrates that these essays engage with the larger realm of human and social practices - throne speeches, book clubs, policies of accommodation of cultural and religious differences, Indigenous thought about justice and ethics - to show that literary and critical work is inextricably related to the Canadian polity in light of transnational and global forces.

Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory is a collection of essays written in honour of Barbara Godard, one of the most original and wide-ranging literary critics, theorists, teachers, translators, and public intellectuals Canada has ever produced. The contributors, both established and emerging scholars, extend Godard's work through engagements with her published texts in the spirit of creative interchange and intergenerational relay of ideas. Their essays resonate with Godard's innovative scholarship situated at the intersection of such fields as literary studies, cultural studies, translation studies, feminist theory, arts criticism, social activism, institutional analysis, and public memory. In pursuit of unexpected linkages and connections, the essays venture beyond generic and disciplinary borders, zeroing in on Godard's transdisciplinary practice that has been extremely influential in the way that it framed questions and modeled interventions for the study of Canadian, Québécois, and Acadian literatures and cultures. The authors work with the archives ranging from Canadian government policies and documents, to publications concerning white supremacist organizations in Southern Ontario, online materials from a Toronto-based transgender arts festival, a photographic mural installation commemorating the Montreal Massacre, and the works of such writers and artists as Marie Clements, Nicole Brossard, France Daigle, Nancy Huston, Yvette Nolan, Gail Scott, Denise Desautels, Louise Warren, Rebecca Belmore, Vera Frenkel, Robert Lepage, and Janet Cardiff.

Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies is the third volume of essays produced as part of the TransCanada conferences project. The essays gathered in Critical Collaborations constitute a call for collaboration and kinship across disciplinary, political, institutional, and community borders. They are tied together through a simultaneous call for resistance - to Eurocentrism, corporatization, rationalism, and the fantasy of total systems of knowledge - and a call for critical collaborations. These collaborations seek to forge connections without perceived identity - linking concepts and communities without violating the differences that constitute them, seeking epistemic kinships while maintaining a willingness to not-know. In this way, they form a critical conversation between seemingly distinct areas and demonstrate fundamental allegiances between diasporic and indigenous scholarship, transnational and local knowledges, legal and eco-critical methodologies. Links are forged between Indigenous knowledge and ecological and social justice, creative critical reading, and ambidextrous epistemologies, unmaking the nation through translocalism and unsettling histories of colonial complicity through a poetics of relation. Together, these essays reveal how the critical methodologies brought to bear on literary studies can both challenge and exceed disciplinary structures, presenting new forms of strategic transdisciplinarity that expand the possibilities of Canadian literary studies while also emphasizing humility, complicity, and the limits of knowledge.

The 1980s and 1990s are a historically crucial period in the development of Asian Canadian literature. Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s contextualizes and reanimates the urgency of that period, illustrates its historical specificities, and shows how the concerns of that moment - from cultural appropriation to race essentialism to shifting models of the state - continue to resonate for contemporary discussions of race and literature in Canada. Larissa Lai takes up the term ""Asian Canadian"" as a term of emergence, in the sense that it is constantly produced differently, and always in relation to other terms - often ""whiteness"" but also Indigeneity, queerness, feminism, African Canadian, and Asian American. In the 1980s and 1990s, ""Asian Canadian"" erupted in conjunction with the post-structural recognition of the instability of the subject. But paradoxically it also came into being through activist work, and so depended on an imagined stability that never fully materialized. Slanting I, Imagining We interrogates this fraught tension and the relational nature of the term through a range of texts and events, including the Gold Mountain Blues scandal, the conference Writing Thru Race, and the self-writings of Evelyn Lau and Wayson Choy.

Public Poetics is a collection of essays and poems that address some of the most pressing issues of the discipline in the twenty-first century. The collection brings together fifteen original essays addressing ""publics,"" ""poetry,"" and ""poetics"" from the situated space of Canada while simultaneously troubling the notion of the nation as a stable term. It asks hard questions about who and what count as ""publics"" in Canada. Critical essays stand alongside poetry as visual and editorial reminders of the cross-pollination required in thinking through both poetry and poetics. Public Poetics is divided into three thematic sections. The first contains essays surveying poetics in the present moment through the lens of the public/private divide, systematic racism in Canada, the counterpublic, feminist poetics, and Canadian innovations on postmodern poetics. The second section contains author-specific studies of public poets. The final section contains essays that use innovative renderings of ""poetics"" as a means of articulating alternative communities and practices. Each section is paired with a collection of original poetry by ten contemporary Canadian poets. This collection attends to the changing landscape of critical discourse around poetry and poetics in Canada, and will be of use to teachers and students of poetry and poetics.

This collection of essays focuses on the varied and complex roles that editors have played in the production of literary and scholarly texts in Canada. With contributions from a wide range of participants who have played seminal roles as editors of Canadian literatures - from nineteenth-century works to the contemporary avant-garde, from canonized texts to anthologies of so-called minority writers and the oral literatures of the First Nations - this collection is the first of its kind. Contributors offer incisive analyses of the cultural and publishing politics of editorial practices that question inherited paradigms of literary and scholarly values. They examine specific cases of editorial production as well as theoretical considerations of editing that interrogate such key issues as authorial intentionality, textual authority, historical contingencies of textual production, circumstances of publication and reception, the pedagogical uses of edited anthologies, the instrumentality of editorial projects in relation to canon formation and minoritized literatures, and the role of editors as interpreters, enablers, facilitators, and creators.Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada situates editing in the context of the growing number of collaborative projects in which Canadian scholars are engaged, which brings into relief not only those aspects of editorial work that entail collaborating, as it were, with existing texts and documents but also collaboration as a scholarly practice that perforce involves co-editing.