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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]

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]