Land/Relations: Possibilities of Justice in Canadian Literatures

by Smaro Kamboureli, Larissa Lai

Overview

Essential reading for those interested in questions of justice and cultural representation, Land/Relations speaks to and moves beyond the critical junctures in the study of Canadian literatures today.

In the aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and following Canada’s sesquicentennial, Land/Relations presents a collaborative effort at what Smaro Kamboureli and Larissa Lai call “counter-memory,” a collective effort to recognise “relationships that have always been”—between peoples, between humanity and other living forms, between us and the land—in an effort to avoid erasure, loss, and trauma. Twenty influential literary critics engage a variety of genres—essay, life writing, testament, polemic, poetry—to explore the ways Canadian cultural production has been shaped by social and historical relations and can be given new and various forms to decolonize the institutions associated with the creation of this country’s vision of Canadian literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771125109
Publisher:	Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publication date:	04/18/2023
Series:	TransCanada , #12
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (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.

Larissa Lai is the author of two novels, When Fox Is a Thousand and Salt Fish Girl. A recipient of the Astraea Foundation Emerging Writers’ Award, she has been shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Tiptree Award, and the Dorothy Livesay Prize. She is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Storying Land / Relations: An Introduction in Two Voices – Smaro Kamboureli and Larissa Lai
Agency, Urgency, Insurgency [poem] – Lillian Allen
Positioning Intergenerational Trauma: Nisga’a Nationalism and the Materiality of Marius Barbeau’s Totem Poles – Jordan Abel
Neoliberal Gothic, Settler Social Imaginaries, and the Case for Decolonization on Two Fronts – Jennifer Henderson
Listing Waters: The Poetics of Solidarity in Darwish and Wong –Dina Al-Kassim
CLI and CLII [prose poems] – Sonnet L’Abbé
Back to the Future: Black Canada’s Past and Present; or the Changing Same – Rinaldo Walcott
Deliberate Vulgarity: Performing the Demotic, Transforming Cultural Space? The Six Books [poems] – Pamela Mordecai
“Making Things Right”: Black Settlement and the Politics of Territory – Karina Vernon
From Islamophobia to Islamophilia: Dancing Orientalisms, Islamizing Muslims, and the Unspeakability of the Muslim Woman Subject – Sedef Arat-Koç
Literature, Language, Culture: At Mikinaakominis / TransCanadas 2017 – Eileen Antone
Listening at Mikinaakominis / TransCanadas 2017 – Erín Moure
Between Empire and Nation: Synchronicity and Revolution in Chinese Canadian Writing – Chris Lee
Diplomacy before Reconciliation – Margery Fee
Federal State, Feral Culture: (Not)Withstanding Canada around its 150th Year – Len Findlay
What Next? Asserting Peace Against the Odds – Rita Wong
Living on Unceded Indigenous Territories: Vancouver as a Site of Conflict in Building Alliance and Autonomy in Decolonial Struggles – Sophie McCall
Re-storying and Restoring the Buffalo to the Indigenous Plains – Tasha Hubbard
Landsensing: Body, Territory, Relation – Warren Cariou