Search

This article heeds the recent shift in cultural criticism and creative writing toward imagining "a functional ecology of knowledges in Canada" (Coleman, "Toward" 8) that takes its conceptual lead from Indigenous epistemologies. Through close reading Thomas King's novel The Back of the Turtle (2014), Wayde Compton's short story collection The Outer Harbour (2014), and Daniel Coleman's nonfiction book Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place (2017), the article connects Indigenous notions of kinship to the turn to trans-systemic epistemologies in contemporary Canadian literature and criticism. My analysis draws on Indigenous theories of kinship underlying Indigenous resurgence and decolonization and sets them in conversation with King's reflections on storytelling and world-building, Compton's theoretical charting of African Canadian space as Afroperipheral within diaspora criticism, and Coleman's self-retraining to redefine settler belonging and knowledge. This analysis concludes that, by promoting an awareness of the interdependence between the natural environment, humans, and other-than-human beings that is central to Indigenous epistemologies, these works contribute to the shift toward the construction of an ecology of knowledges and hold the potential for renewed decolonizing efforts, social justice, and environmental sustainability.

Yann Martel’s experimental novel Self (1996) recounts the story of a young man’s gender transformation as he also negotiates his national and linguistic identity through cosmopolitan and multilingual affiliations. To convey the tropes of mobility and flexibility, the novel juxtaposes English and several other languages in parallel columns, inviting comparisons across discrete linguistic and literary traditions. Conceptualized from the start as a multilingual novel, Self challenges monolingual ways of classifying national literature, raising interesting questions about multilingual texts’ canonical location, implied readership, and translation into another language. Drawing on recent debates on transnationalism, I argue that the novel’s formal strategies require a mode of reading predicated on comparison and translation. Readers are encouraged at once to conceive of distinct languages relationally and to uncover the hegemonic relationship between global and local languages in Canada as well as globally. Through its formal aesthetics, which underscores both the opportunities and the limits of multilingualism, Martel’s novel contributes valuable insights to current debates on transnational literature.

This article draws on personal narrative, literary criticism, and multicultural Canadian literature to interrogate George Elliott Clarke’s conceptualizations of a Black Canadian literature and a racialized African-Canadian literary canon in his 2002 essay collection Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literatures. Clarke’s work is juxtaposed with my own experience as a bi-racial, multi-ethnic, Black, Negro, mulatto, half-caste, African-Canadian woman, and with those of non-Black scholars, to expose the shifting contours of ethnicity and the blurred and blurring boundaries of Canadian blackness in multi-, mixed-, and indeterminately racial Canada. Through these critical comparisons, I suggest that a racialized African-Canadian literary canon excludes the multiple Canadian cultures in which our literatures are formed, and supports racial constructs that no longer fit the shapes of our multi-ethnic, diasporic, postcolonial skins. I conclude that upon the fertile ground tended by Clake's Black literary activism, a deracialized African-Canadian literature may grow.

Cynthia Sugars. Canadian Gothic: Literature, History and the Spectre of Self-Invention. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2014. Pp. x, 291. US$150.00. Cynthia Sugars' Canadian Gothic explores the ghosts of settlers past and how recent diasporic and Indigenous writers are unsettling their inherited traditions. Sugars argues that the use of the Gothic is a long-standing strategy for connecting the Old World and New World through shared literary mythologies and for infusing the untamable Canadian landscape with a narrativized past. This Gothic tradition, however, is founded on an exclusionary nationalism that renders non-white Anglo-Canadians as other. Building on her earlier work on the postcolonial Gothic and the unhomely, Sugars makes another significant contribution to the field of Canadian Gothic scholarship by examining the longstanding mutually constitutive relationship between Canadian nationalism, the land, and ghosts in a variety of literary genres. Canadian Gothic spans from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries to trace the Gothic literary tradition in what is now called Canada; the book is divided into seven chapters that not only offer a historical survey and an analysis of multiple genres but also explore the distinctions between Anglo- and French-Canadian Gothic narratives. Canadian Gothic ultimately establishes the persistent presence of ghosts and the Gothic in Canadian literature. Canadian Gothic begins by analyzing the often overlooked ghosts in two famous Canadian poems, Robert Services "The Cremation of Sam McGee" (1907) and John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" (1919). The Introduction then turns to a myriad of writers, such as Susanna Moodie, Duncan Campbell Scott, Robertson Davies, James Reaney, and Margaret Sweatman, among others, in order to argue that "from very early on the Gothic has held a precarious, even contradictory, position in Canadian literature" because Canada "had long been perceived as either a location of monstrous extremes or an empty terrain that was unhaunted by a historical tradition" (8). Ironically, as Sugars asserts, the absence of a Canadian past or mythology is conveyed through Gothic sensations of horrific newness. Chapter One delves deeper into Gothic absence and the paradoxical phenomenon of being haunted by a lack of ghosts. Using white European explorers' encounters with the New World as case studies, the first chapter demonstrates how early explorers projected their psychic fears onto Indigenous peoples. The second chapter surveys the larger national investment in the Gothic tradition as a strategy for defining a Canadian identity. Sugars asserts that "settler Canadian literature has from its beginnings been haunted by its efforts to 'story' itself" (50); in short, "The absence of the Gothic is aligned with a failure of poetry and a failure of imagination--more specifically with a failure to write Canada into history" (67). Sugars suggests that the Gothic not only captures the speciality of a lacking Canadian national identity but also, as a form of artistic creation, offers a solution to this absence. While Chapter Two equates Canadas lack of a national mythology with a lack of ghosts, Chapter Three develops an analysis of psychic projection by arguing that Anglo-Canadian writers started replacing the Indigenous other with a Francophone spectral threat. …