Hostiles in the Global Village

For several years it seemed as if Marshall McLuhan had come and gone leaving little trace of his influence on Canadian thinking. Now three new books,* two by ex-students of his at the University of Toronto (Powe and Smyth), engage with his ideas to address the same problem — a postliterate world and its implications for writing, reading and thinking. Fawcett and Smyth carry the inquiry one step further, to consider our potential for the destruction of our environment and ourselves, and our potential for creative social change. Powe writes as an uncritical disciple of McLuhan, Fawcett and Smyth as critics, but each writer poses these questions, as put by Powe: \u27What happens to thinking, resistance, and dissent when the ground becomes wordless, electric and musical?\u27 (15). In other words, what are the implications of McLuhan\u27s Global Village for the role of the intellectual in contemporary Canada? Each poses this question according to his or her personal concerns. Smyth and Fawcett both ask why people put up with the way things are, suggest that they do because they cannot imagine alternatives, and therefore make it their job to imagine alternatives. Powe, in contrast, appears to be asking how the traditional intellectual (himself) can maintain his authority when the new organisation of his society no longer needs him to legitimate it. His response to this differently formulated dilemma is to re-assert his authority through plugging into a self-defined tradition of maverick authority. Each of these positions comments on the options available to the Canadian writer in response to the intensified marginalisation of a colonised position

Experimental Writing and Reading across Borders in Decolonizing Contexts

Reading across epistemic borders in a globalizing world requires a revised understanding of how experimentation functions in decolonizing contexts, intervening to trouble the prevailing paradigms through which readers understand how meanings are made. Experimental fictions free the imagination to envision cognitive and social justice, which take different forms within different settings. Through examining several texts written out of contexts of incomplete decolonization and ongoing imperialism in Canada, Australia, and the Caribbean, the paper shows how their various innovations navigate the problems of scale, generating new forms through which to represent cognitive justice in its many different potential manifestations, revealing the vitality of nonscalable worlds, and the links between the scalable and the nonscalable. Wilson Harris’s music of living landscapes is set in dialogue with Alexis Wright’s fictions; Patrick White’s artist as vivisector with Christian Bök’s “Xenotext Experiment”; Dionne Brand’s quest for a cognitive schema beyond captivity with Wright’s and Tomson Highway’s turns to the nonscalable space/time imaginaries of their people; and Shani Mootoo’s small island world with Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place

Riesgo, mortalidad y memoria: los imaginarios globales de Cherie Dimaline en The Marrow Thieves, M.G. Vassanji en Nostalgia y André Alexis en Fifteen Dogs

Este artículo examina tres novelas canadienses contemporáneas basadas en la sociedad del riesgo global usando un modo ficticio especulativo que inquiere: «¿Qué pasaría si?» The Marrow Thieves (2017), de Cherie Dimaline, y Nostalgia (2016), de M.G. Vassanji, imaginan sociedades distópicas devastadas por el cambio climático para analizar los ideales humanistas del Progreso. Fifteen Dogs (2015), de André Alexis, usa la fábula animal para abordar qué significa ser un animal mortal. Cada una profundiza en las implicaciones de una conciencia de riesgo para la agentividad y la ética: para los pueblos indígenas en The Marrow Thieves; para los habitantes de Toronto en el contexto de un apartheid global intensificado en Nostalgia; y para los perros que luchan con una inteligencia humana otorgada por Dios en el Toronto contemporáneo de Fifteen Dogs. Al negociar el riesgo, cada ficción recurre al papel de la memoria, la creatividad y las formas alternativas de subjetividad y comunidad para garantizar la supervivencia. Las tres narrativas dan pasos sutiles, aunque necesarios, hacia futuros alternativos con la habilidad de imaginar de una forma distinta.This paper examines three contemporary Canadian novels that depict global risk society through a speculative fictional form that asks the question “What if?” Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017) and M.G Vassanji’s Nostalgia (2016) imagine dystopian worlds ravaged by climate change to critique humanist ideals of Progress. André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs (2015) uses the animal fable to address what it means to be a mortal animal. Each asks what an awareness of risk means for agency and ethics: for Indigenous people in The Marrow Thieves; for Torontonians in the context of a heightened global apartheid in Nostalgia; and for dogs wrestling with a god-granted human intelligence in the contemporary Toronto of Fifteen Dogs. In negotiating risk, each fiction turns to the roles of memory, creativity, and alternative forms of subjectivity and community in ensuring survival. Each novel finds fragile yet necessary steps toward alternative futures in the ability to imagine otherwise

Key Issues in Global Studies

Review of: Bales, Kevin, and Becky Cornell. Slavery Today. Toronto: Groundwood/Anansi, 1998. Caplan, Gerald. The Betrayal of Africa. Toronto: Groundwood/Anansi, 2008. Laxer, James. Democracy. Toronto: Groundwood/ Anansi. 2009. Laxer, James. Empire. Toronto: Groundwood/Anansi, 2006. Lorinc, John. Cities. Toronto: Groundwood/Anansi, 2008. Siddiqui, Haroun. Being Muslim. Toronto: Groundwood/Anansi, 2006.   DOI: 10.1353/jeu.0.000

Themes and preoccupations in the novels of Australian expatriates

The purpose of this thesis is to fill a gap in Australian literary criticism by examining certain recurrent themes and preoccupations in the novels of representative Australian expatriate writers from Mrs Campbell Praed, who published her first novel in 1880, to George Johnston, whose last unfinished novel was published in 1971. Whereas the achievement of those writers who stayed at home and expressed recognizably Australian social values in their work has received a great deal of critical attention, the work of the expatriates has more often been ignored or rejected as "un-Australian". It is the contention of this thesis that only when the expatriate heritage has been explored as fully as the nativist tradition can a balanced overview of Australian literature, and indeed of Australian cultural history, be attained. The theme of expatriation --both the reality and the dream of escape from a provincial society to one of the metropolitan centres of the world --and its thematic offshoots --the experiences of exile and of alienation, the voyage as escape and quest, and the difficulties of communicating in an increasingly fragmented world -- are examined in a few of the novels of Mrs Campbell Praed; Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead, Martin Boyd, Patrick White, Helen Simpson, and George Johnston. Discussion also centres around their recurring preoccupations with the relationship between the Old World and the New, with the conflict between a need for roots and a need for motion, and an interest in the landscape and in the emotions of nostalgia and of depaysement which it arouses. Particular attention is paid in the first section of the thesis to the use and development of the international novel and, within it, of the Australian heroine. An Australian Heroine Policy and Passion, Maurice Guest, For Love Alone and Lucinda Brayford are each seen to centre about the journey (or the desired journey)of a young provincial person to a centre of metropolitan culture, and to concentrate on his or her quests for love and freedom. Because the journey is a basic element in the expatriate experience, the second section concentrates on the theme of the quest for knowledge and for freedom in novels of a symbolic orientation. The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney The Aunt's Story and Voss describe three quests - of an emigrant, of a traveller and of an explorer - each of which ends in the alienation of madness. The third section examines the memoirs of three character-narrators, who attempt to comprehend and conquer their sense of the essentially solitary fate of the individual within a world he cannot understand and in which he is torn by dualities he can neither reconcile nor accept, by exploring and ordering their experiences in an imaginative work of art. Boomerang, the four Langton novels of Martin Boyd and George Johnston's Meredith trilogy are discussed in this final section. Whereas the protagonists discussed in Section One embark on literal voyages, which never lose their close connection to reality however many further dimensions they assume, the protagonists of Section Two undertake symbolic quests, in which the distinctions between dream and reality tend to blur. The character-narrators examined in Section Three are introspective voyagers, who bring dream and reality together in their art. The investigation concludes with the observation that most of Australia's expatriate novelists are more deeply concerned with the symbolic than with the literal implications of expatriation. They use the concepts of exile to question the validity of the norms of behaviour and belief which man has fashioned himself in order to cope with his own divided nature and the demands of his world. Their novels illustrate the fact that the expatriate perspective may involve an increased awareness of the value of a felt relationship with the land of birth, in addition to the kind of critical distance which a knowledge of alienation may bring. Australian literature appears more diversified, more sophisticated and more critical of the Australian ethos when the novels of expatriate writers are included in the literary tradition