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Concerned with the Canadian context, this study proposes a critique as a strategy to access a time relatively ignored in historical-literary manuals. Particularly focused on the discussion of ethnic-racial issues in literary education, elements are provided for the understanding of post-colonial literature in its interface with pedagogical relations, in the face of marginalization in curricula, and the absence in the canon of the literary production of minority groups in Canada. Thus, there is herein a commitment to opening borders through a critical and theoretical movement capable of overcoming the rigidity of traditional limits in the interpretation of the world, resulting in more flexible, plural, and heterogeneous readings of Canadian literature, as opposed to totalizing understandings remaining from colonialist discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the various connotations of the name of the protagonist in Jane Urquhart's Irish-Canadian novel Away, first published in 1993. The heroine Mary changes her name to Moira at the start of the book, which leads the reader to ponder on the significance of these names. By exploring the classical, topographical, naval, linguistic and religious undertones of Mary/Moira, this study seeks to demonstrate how the Canadian author conveys notions of postcolonialism throughout her novel with the choice of a character's name. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article, informed by the recent work of scholars who have examined and theorized the feminization of nation-states in the context of contemporary post-colonial literary production, performs an analysis of Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game (2006) that focuses on the novel's conflations of woman and nation. The paper argues that, while Bassam, the text's narrator and protagonist, undertakes a journey toward manhood that is troubled by his country's (Lebanon's) civil unrest and violent political upheaval, he, like the text's other male characters, is and remains throughout an active subject-citizen endowed with agency. Because the same cannot be said about the female characters in De Niro's Game, the narrative ultimately illustrates that, however "in flux" Lebanon society may be, patriarchal power structures persist, rendering real women the passive objects and symbolic projections of a nation whose destiny is determined by her "sons" and "lovers." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of postcolonial trauma investigate Cathy Caruth's contention that traumatic psychopathology, by virtue of its universality, can bridge cultural difference. David Bergen's The Time in Between tests this theory in relation to the Vietnam War. Bergen's novel recognizes trauma as an effective, though limited, vehicle of cultural reconciliation that ultimately needs to be supplemented by further discursive resistance. Although the novel's treatment of trauma resists Orientalist representations of Vietnam, forms of parallelism point to tacit cultural fissures, which are countered through narrative self-reflexivity and the frustration of what Edward Said terms the "exteriority of representation." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The T.E. Lawrence Poems (1982), the Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen writes in the voice of the man also widely known as Lawrence of Arabia to consider the extent of her identification with him and to raise questions about their relative cultural standing. Identifying with Lawrence both as a fan and as a celebrity of lesser degree, she implies in the end that both of them owe their celebrity to appropriation of Middle Eastern culture. She accomplishes her critique through artistic passing. She could not pass as Lawrence in the flesh, but by imitating his voice so accurately, and by using many uncredited phrases from the historical Lawrence in her book, MacEwen begins to pass for him. When she modifies his descriptions, the extent of her identification with him becomes more apparent than it was. Ultimately, she asserts her difference from him in a postcolonial feminist critique related to her identity as a Canadian poet in the 1970s, when some Canadian poets had recently emerged as celebrities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the idea of Canadians as postcolonial subjects through ideas found in his references to the country's history as a British colony. To explore this idea, the author examines the essays of the Canadian novelist, poet, and theorist Robert Kroetsch. The author also discusses Kroetsch's writings on British colonialism from the perspectives used by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin in their 1989 survey of postcolonial literature, "The Empire Writes Back."

The article explores the problems that confront contemporary Canadian theories of postcoloniality in relation to concerns such as cultural representations of Canada and minority positioning. There has been an increasing awareness of a crisis in the cultural representation of Canada and needs for reconsideration of "Canadianness" through postcolonial perspectives. Minority writers who are excluded from the centre of cultural production draw on the cultural resources available to them yet they are basically bounded by national parameters. Because of the lack of sustained theoretical disturbance in Canadian literary criticism concerning the institutionalization of racialized texts, it is perhaps time for critics to inquire why, in recent years, such Asian Canadian texts are institutionalized.

Focuses on the writings of Rudy Wiebe. Role of Wiebe on the tendency for Canadian literature to become postcolonial; Criticism on the religious content and the representation of indigenous; Contradictions in the writings of Wiebe.

Examines the location of Canada in the contemporary postcolonial discourse. Concept of national identity based on Canadian definition; Discussion on central problems of postcolonial theory; Factors contributing to postcolonial complexities of Canada in literature.

This article points out that Canadian literature, culture and environment are interrelated as evidenced in the listserv operated by the Association for Literature, Environment and Cultural in Canada. It is observed that colonialism in Canada must be addressed even in postcolonial studies because environmental issues are part of postcolonial Canada. It is noted that environmentalists, historians, biologists, geographers and others have actually similar interests and need to cooperate.