Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies

by Smaro Kamboureli (Editor), Christl Verduyn (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781554589111
Publisher:	Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publication date:	05/13/2014
Series:	TransCanada
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Smaro Kamboureli is a professor and the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature in the English Department at the University of Toronto. She is the founder of the TransCanada series of books, published by WLU Press, originating from interdisciplinary conferences that initiated collaborative research on the methodologies and institutional structures and contexts that inform and shape the production, dissemination, teaching, and study of Canadian literature. Her most recent publications include Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies (WLU Press 2012), co-edited with Robert Zacharias and Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace (WLU Press, 2013), co-edited with Kit Dobson.

Christl Verduyn is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University, where she holds the Davidson Chair in Canadian Studies and is the director of the Centre for Canadian Studies. Most recent publications include Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography, co-edited with Eleanor Ty (WLU Press, 2008), Archival Narratives for Canada: Re-Telling Stories in a Changing Landscape, co-edited with Kathleen Garay (2011), and Canadian Studies: Past, Present, Praxis, co-edited with Jane Koustas (2012).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction Smaro Kamboureli 1

Belief as/in Methodology as/in Form: Doing Justice to CanLit Studies Roy Miki 29

Trans-Systemic Constitutionalism in Indigenous Law and Knowledge Sa'ke'j Henderson 49

The Accidental Witness: Indigenous Epistemologies and Spirituality as Resistance in Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach Julia Emberley 69

Ambidextrous Epistemologies: Indigenous Knowledge within the Indigenous Renaissance Marie Battiste 83

Epistemologies of Respect: A Poetics of Asian/Indigenous Relation Larissa Lai 99

Acts of Nature: Literature, Excess, and Environmental Politics Catriona Sandilands 127

Ecocriticism in the Unregulated Zone Cheryl Lousley 143

Disturbance-Loving Species: Habitat Studies, Ecocritical Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature Laurie Ricou 161

Translocal Representation: Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, Nello "Tex" Vernon-Wood, and CanLit Julie Rak 175

Jazz, Diaspora, and the History and Writing of Black Anglophone Montreal Winfried Siemerling 199

Tradition and Pluralism in Contemporary Acadia François Paré 215

Critical Allegiances Christl Verduyn 227

Notes 241

Works Cited 253

Contributors 269

Index 275