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This article was created based on a talk given by Canisia Lubrin with the Black Canadian Studies Association (BCSA) for their 2022 conference, "Black Solidarities, Thought and the Quest for Black Freedom." It engages with the theme of Black solidarities, thought, and the quest for Black freedom, in the interest of recognizing the complexities of its range. In this era of new forms of Black dispersement, the author offers this as a care work in the core character of Blackness. It is a wish for a kind of respite from the ontological over-determinism that bares down on us from all directions, from the restlessness that forms the tenor of our being in this world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1979 Writing in Our Time series became Vancouver's most attended reading series, bringing light to the viability and international status of the city's literary scene. While it has largely been remembered as a celebration of Vancouver's literary culture, more marginalized voices of Vancouver's literary communities have highlighted the series' implications for gay male and female writers in the city. This article considers whose time was actually represented by the Writing in Our Time series. I suggest that while it gave gay men the opportunity to be onstage and speak about their concerns, including the homophobic attacks against bill bissett in the House of Commons that prompted the series, Writing in Our Time provided women limited opportunities to publicly share their work while relying upon their invisible labour to succeed. Through the production of a new socio-cultural history of the series, including an analysis of printed publications, oral histories, and audiovisual documentation of the events, this article demonstrates that Writing in Our Time was catalyzed by attacks on a gay writer, relied on women's invisible labour, showcased the androcentric relations of Vancouver's literary scene, and sparked resistance from feminists to women's peripheral position in the series. I argue that, due to their proximity to or distance from heterosexual white males in power within the scene, the series simultaneously supported gay writers in Vancouver's literary scene and further marginalized women by reinforcing sexist social hierarchies. The effects of these androcentric relations led to greater dialogue about issues affecting gay men within the series and by women about sexism within and outside of the series at that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long dismissed as a "critical error" (Booth 2016) and still capable of inciting "embarrassment palpable" (Watson 2006) among scholars otherwise happy to emphasize the material contexts that inform the circulation of texts, literary tourism has recently become the focus of serious academic inquiry. Recent work has begun to disaggregate the various forms of literary tourist sites (Fawcett and Cormack 2001), but continues to have a methodological gap surrounding the specifically literary aspects of the practice itself, and—with the notable exception of Green Gables (Squire 1992; Devereux 2001)—has left Canada predictably unexamined. This essay begins with a brief introduction to literary tourism in Canada before moving into a comparative analysis of two National Historic Sites associated with Canadian literary authors: the Robert Service cabin in Dawson City, Yukon, and the John McCrae House in Guelph, Ontario. The sites offer a compelling comparison as the former homes of two of the best-known Canadian poets of the early twentieth century whose works have become popularly synonymous with two of Canada's most heavily mythologized eras. The enduring popularity of poems like "The Cremation of Sam McGee" reflect not only Service's central role in mythologizing Canada's north but also a strategic "cultural commoditization" of the area's gold rush heritage (Jarvenpa 1994; Grace 2001), while McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" retains its status not only as the "most popular poem" of the First World War in Canada and beyond (Fussell 2000), but also as a primary example of the ideological function of Great War literature within Canada (Holmes 2005; Gordon 2014). Although the two author houses may initially appear a study in contrasts, I draw on recent work in literary tourist studies to argue they are linked in their function as "materialized fictions" (Hendrix 2008), or concrete interpretative frames that aim to offer tangible evidence of the Canadian myths their former inhabitants helped to fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a framework for identifying and analyzing the Newfoundland master narrative, a narrative that is powerful and persistent in Newfoundland literature, its marketing, and its popular and critical reception. This master narrative problematically positions Newfoundlanders as timeless and authentic but also moving inexorably toward loss and disappearance. As a representative case, this narrative is shown to be fundamental to the novels, public persona, and reception of Michael Crummey, one of Newfoundland's most popular and acclaimed writers, focusing on his 2009 novel Galore. Through an analysis of Galore and Crummey's framing authorial comments, the figures, structures, and perspectives that are fundamental to the Newfoundland master narrative are identified. While Crummey's novel does contain diverse characters, and while he has publicly affirmed the diversity of the Newfoundland population, we show that his depiction of diversity ultimately affirms the exclusionary master narrative. And, in this, he is part of a wider tendency, even among those who explicitly critique the Newfoundland master narrative, to overlook its presence, underestimate its power, or use it despite themselves. This interpretive framework is thus intended to expose and to critically engage with the often hidden workings of the Newfoundland master narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an introduction to this issue of the journal that focuses on French-Canadian literatures.

This article examines how contemporary Québécois literature is worlding itself. The term "worlding" being problematic, its use in this article departs from that of David Damrosch and other scholars who consider literature to be "worlded" when it has been integrated into a canon of literary works from around the world that ought to be, and sometimes are, read. In this study, I focus on the works of literature themselves in order to analyze how they inscribe the "world" through a problematization of history, identity, languages, and, in Wajdi Mouawad's theatre in particular, of time and space. The four plays that make up Mouawad's Sang des promesses cycle are connected through overarching themes such as war and conflict, ruptured family lines, death, and blurred identities, but, more importantly, they are preoccupied with historical and political events suggesting that, regardless of how distant they may be (in time and in space), they nonetheless shape the world now. Thus, the plays show that events such as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 or the Lebanese Civil War of the 1970s and 1980s have an impact now, even on readers or spectators in Quebec. Mouawad's tetralogy highlights how Quebec is inextricably connected to global concerns and urges that we share the ethical responsibility in creating a world that is less violent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the present article is to analyze the representation of Quebec literature in four literary blogs: Littérature du Québec, Passion chronique, le fil rouge and Page par Page. In light of the claims made by the authors of the manifesto "Pour une 'littérature-monde' en français" (Le Bris et al. 2007), we will examine the extent to which the writers of these blogs perceive Quebec literature as a component of the world literary landscape, characterized by esthetic and stylistic diversity beyond the political and ethnocultural compartmentalization of writers. We will also attempt to examine the role of literary blogs, one of the contemporary forms of literary criticism, in promoting and legitimizing literary works in the Quebec literary field, one of the most advanced in the use of new technologies in the service of literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this research is to empirically analyze the constitution of the subsystem of French-Canadian literatures, its inscription in Canadian literature and its relations with the literatures of the world, particularly those geographically and linguistically related to it. Theoretically, it is based on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of a field (1992), on polysystems theory developed by Itamar Even-Zohar (1990) and on scientometrics (de Solla Price 1963). From the methodological viewpoint, we have retrieved from the most important literary database, the Modern Language Association International Bibliography, references that correspond to the different literatures analyzed. The compilation and the analysis of the metadata of these references allowed us, firstly, to map French-Canadian literatures and to describe the diffusion of the critical bibliography. Secondly, we elaborated several indicators in order to study the relations of French-Canadian literatures to, on the one hand, literatures of the Americas, and, on the other hand, francophone literatures. We observed that French-Canadian literatures are characterized by their vitality, their youth, and their relative independence from other systems. We consider that this paper constitutes an illustration of the potentiality of the new observable resources of the digital age, as they may increase our understanding of the configuration and the evolution of the literary systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Canadian literature was virtually unknown in the USSR during the Cold War era (1945-1991), although few works by Canadian authors were published in Russian translation in the Soviet Union, and there were no critical reviews of these books before the Perestroika period of the 1980s, the Soviet press at times referred to Canadian authors in order to serve its own objectives or rather the objectives of the ruling Communist Party. This article explores how Canadian literature was received in the USSR during the Cold War, what purposes this reception served, and which projected images of Canada can be found in the reviews of Canadian books and articles on Canadian literature published in the Russian language in magazines and newspapers of the time. The monographs on Canadian literature published in the USSR in Russian are also discussed here, to see, among other reasons, if Soviet critics made a distinction between English-Canadian literature and French-Canadian (or Québécois) literature. Finally, this article sets out to examine not only the representations of Canadian literature and Canadian society as conveyed by the Soviet press but also those put forward by Russian researchers of the period in their scholarly monographs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay recuperates Brian Moore's mostly forgotten classic of Canadian immigrant fiction, The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960), in a reading of its protagonist as a study in the necessary self-renovation of a new Canadian. Employing the scholarly work that has been done on the Irish in Canada over the past few decades, this essay contextualizes its reading of Moore's mid-century novel in a mildly corrective history of Irish immigration to that point. Ginger Coffey will also be seen to prefigure--on the eve of Canada's officially becoming the much-admired multicultural nation it is today--the central question facing Canadians respecting immigration. The unaccommodating setting of Ginger Coffey, its historical contexts, and its compromising immigrant's (Ginger Coffey's) hard-won promise of eventual integration into Canadian society challenge readers to entertain questions about the extent of Canada's tolerance of immigrants' tenaciously mistaken dreams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paul Quarrington's novel King Leary utilizes a late-life perspective in a way that questions prevailing ideals of masculinity in the culture of Canadian hockey. Leary's reminiscences of his past athletic prowess betray an abiding appreciation for forms of bodily movement associated with the feminized spheres of figure skating and dance, complicating his attempts to narrate a stable identity that conforms to the ideal of the tough, aggressive hockey player. Leary's ongoing affinity with these forms of movement suggests the possibility of sustaining his identity as an athlete into old age in a way that departs from his customary drive to dominate others. Foregrounding the body as an important site of identity in late life, the text challenges persistent cultural narratives of aging--particularly when accompanied by dementia--as a loss of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores aspects of passion in three Acadian poems, Herménégilde Chiasson's "Rouge" ("Red") which first appeared in Mourir à Scoudouc in 1974, Henri-Dominique Paratte's "Rouge Sang" ("Blood Red") which first appeared in Éloizes: Revue de l'Association des écrivains acadiens in 1984, and " La petite sorcière rouge..." (The little red witch), an excerpt from Dyane Léger's L'incendiaire, published in 2008 in collaboration with Paul Savoie. Although there is a period of 34 years between the publication of the first and last work, and they range in form from the prose poem to lineated free verse, ail three share the leitmotif of the passionate colour red with its many, often opposing, symbolic, historical, and literary associations; the list as a poetic device that incorporates past and present, real and surreal, poetic and political; and finally the love story, which aspires towards a happy ending, however elusive. The red of fire and blood that marked Le Grand Dérangement of 1755 is a testament to the passion o f a people determined to endure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay demonstrates that, in developing the plot outline and male protagonist of his last novel, Maria Chapdelaine (1914), Louis Hémon repeatedly evoked Pierre Loti's then-popular narrative about Breton fishermen and their community, Pêcheur d'Islande (1886). A Breton himself, Hémon seems to have evoked Loti's male protagonist, Yann Gaos, repeatedly in presenting his own, François Paradis, because such intertextualization allowed him to deal in a new way with the question of a perceived decline of masculinity, an issue that he had treated in several of his previous narratives and that was occupying Western European thought at the time. Such intertextualization also allowed him to address an issue that had been of personal significance to him since his adolescence: the importance of finding a way to be free of the constraints that he believed modern society was trying to impose on men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]