New Ecologies of the Real: Nonsimultaneity and Canadian Literature(s)

This essay draws attention to variations in the use of formal textual strategies that sometimes have been overlooked in the productive but potentially homogenizing shift from Canadian literature to Canadian literatures. A mere insistence on pluralization can run the risk of masking differences that include specific forms of “nonsimultaneity” or ungleichzeitigkeit (Ernst Bloch). Such differing relations to time—or heterochronicities— imply related, varying views of space, point to different functionalities of formal modes and genres, and influence how texts relate to audiences and intervene in the public sphere. I argue that the deployment of formal elements is often contingent on social dimensions and cultural specificity, and thus on contextual factors whose consideration was seen as detrimental to the discussion of Canadian literature in Frank Davey’s “Surviving the Paraphrase.” Focusing on examples drawn from black Canadian cultural expression, I examine contextually motivated temporalities in works by George Elliott Clarke, Marie-Célie Agnant, Sylvia Hamilton, Camille Turner, and Wayde Compton. By using distinct strategies of re-temporalization and re-spatialization, these writers and artists work towards the “not-yet” of a differently conceived future and exert civic agency with the help of formal choices in their art

Austin Clarke: remembrando el hogar y el Atlántico Negro

En sus memorias ‘Membering (2015), Clarke emplea prácticas asociativas de corte memorístico como estrategias textuales recuperativas para construirse un hogar y sentirse como en casa, tanto en Toronto como en una geografía e historia del Atlántico negro y del Mediterráneo marcadas por las consecuencias de la esclavitud. Remembrando historias fragmentadas y fusionando experiencia personal con dispersiones diaspóricas, la memoria intervencionista de Clarke reivindica imaginativamente la riqueza obtenida de las desposesiones diaspóricas, transformando así la victimización en legítima propiedad y sentido de la pertenencia.In his memoir ‘Membering (2015), Clarke employs associative memorial practices as recuperative textual strategies to make himself a(t) home in Toronto and a black Atlantic-cum- Mediterranean geography and history marked by the afterlife of slavery. “ ‘Membering ” fragmented histories and fusing personal experience with diasporic dispersals, Clarke’s interventionist critical memory imaginatively lays claim to the wealth reaped from diasporic dispossessions, transforming victimization into rightful ownership and a sense of belonging

Introduction: Risking Feeling: Alice Munro’s Fiction of “Exquisite Shame”

This introduction places the volume in the context of previous scholarship on Munro and anchors the collection in the wealth of affect and ethical theory that has informed recent cultural studies. We argue that these new essays, taken together, offer us an Alice Munro who is not the kindly Canadian icon reinforcing small-town verities who was celebrated and perpetuated in acts of national teaching with her Nobel Prize win; they ponder, instead, an edgier, messier Munro whose fictions of affective and ethical perplexities disturb rather than comfort

Border Insecurity: Reading Transnational Environments in Jim Lynch’s Border Songs

This article applies an eco-critical approach to contemporary American fiction about the Canada-US border, examining Jim Lynch’s portrayal of the British Columbia-Washington borderlands in his 2009 novel Border Songs. It argues that studying transnational environmental actors in border texts—in this case, marijuana, human migrants, and migratory birds—helps illuminate the contingency of political boundaries, problems of scale, and discourses of risk and security in cross-border regions after 9/11. Further, it suggests that widening the analysis of trans-border activity to include environmental phenomena productively troubles concepts of nature and regional belonging in an era of climate change and economic globalization. Cet article propose une lecture écocritique de la fiction étatsunienne contemporaine portant sur la frontière entre le Canada et les États-Unis, en étudiant le portrait donné par Jim Lynch de la région frontalière entre la Colombie-Britannique et Washington dans son roman Border Songs, paru en 2009. L’article soutient que l’étude, dans les textes sur la frontière, des acteurs environnementaux transnationaux – dans ce cas-ci, la marijuana, les migrants humains et les oiseaux migratoires – jette un jour nouveau sur la contingence des limites territoriales politiques, des problèmes d’échelle et des discours sur le risque et la sécurité des régions transfrontalières après les évènements du 11 septembre 2001. Il suggère également qu’en élargissant l’analyse de l’activité transfrontalière pour y inclure les phénomènes environnementaux, on brouille de façon productive les concepts de nature et d’appartenance régionale d’une époque marquée par les changements climatiques et la mondialisation de l’économie

Oral History and the Writing of the Other in Ondaatje\u27s In the Skin of a Lion

Winfried Siemerling argues in his paper Oral History and the Writing of the Other in Ondaatje\u27s In the Skin of a Lion that the simulation of oral narratives in the novel imagines the conveyance of oral histories of immigrant experiences obscured by historiography. The narrative device of simulated orality -- the written text casts itself as the outcome of serial story-telling -- serves here to introduce erstwhile anonymous societal actors as makers of history, and emphasizes the collective production of story and history. Oral narratives emerge dreamlike like light out of darkness in this text; yet light, like writing, creates a problematic visibility whose multiple sources must be acknowledged. A critique of previous writing of history, In the Skin of a Lion betrays in both senses of the word history, silence, and darkness -- by imagining necessary possibilities and necessarily omitting others. The interdependence of orality and writing and of darkness and visibility evokes in the novel the romantic valorization of darkness that inverts the classical metaphor of light as purveyor of truth. Yet, this interdependence also critiques orality: articulations of history and the survival of events have to cope with the lacunae created by writing and with the hazardous transmissions and temporalities of orality. The title of In the Skin of a Lion evokes the Epic of Gilgamesh intertextually, whose eponymous hero fails to achieve immortality because of his inability of staying awake several nights. Similarly, the oral narratives Patrick Lewis collects and conveys throughout the novel almost remain in darkness when he falls asleep at a critical moment. The immortality of these narratives and their silenced subjects is assured only by a listener who later keeps the speaker awake in the night, and the stories alive in a conversation that sees the light of day in a written text and its simulation of oral history

VIII. Canada and Its Americas: Transnational and Transcultural Navigations of the Literary

I “All the buses to Aracataca were brightly colored”, Michael Ondaatje recalls in a 1978 essay on Gabriel García Márquez that he addresses to fellow Canadian writer Sheila Watson. Ondaatje writes that the vehicles en route to Márquez’s home town “would take a side road down into the river and soak in it like animals” and notes that he has “terrific slides of the pigs and of the men delivering ice at Aracataca”. Yet he finds himself wondering, “What am I doing in this South American town [...]..

VIII. Canada and Its Americas: Transnational and Transcultural Navigations of the Literary

I “All the buses to Aracataca were brightly colored”, Michael Ondaatje recalls in a 1978 essay on Gabriel García Márquez that he addresses to fellow Canadian writer Sheila Watson. Ondaatje writes that the vehicles en route to Márquez’s home town “would take a side road down into the river and soak in it like animals” and notes that he has “terrific slides of the pigs and of the men delivering ice at Aracataca”. Yet he finds himself wondering, “What am I doing in this South American town [...]..