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This article is based on Our Canada: Jewish-Canadian Women Writers, a federally funded research project exploring the literary output of more than one hundred women authors in this country, together with the body of commentary on their work. Elucidating themes of immigration, tradition, identity, family, hope, and strengthening connections, the prose and poetry of these authors prods us to think about what Canada means and what these authors have contributed to our shared cultural imaginary. This literature serves to deepen our understanding of broadly diverse nations--both Jewish and Canadian. It is timely in terms of current reflection, examination and questioning of the multicultural paradigm that has shaped Canadian identity for over thirty years. Nothing is more challenging than grasping, or attempting to grasp, the mindset of others with radically different understandings and beliefs. Part of this challenge are the social and political implications of how particular individuals within particular communities have understood themselves and their place in the Canadian mosaic--often over generations. The contributions of Jewish women writers to Canadian literature respond to this challenge, beginning in the late nineteenth century in Montréal, developing in key centres across the country, and continuing in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the Mikinaakominis/TransCanadas conference held at the University of Toronto in May 2017, Rinaldo Walcott described Canadian literature as being as white then as it was when Insomniac Press published his Black like Who? twenty years prior. This essay responds to Walcott’s critique with a personal ethnography that describes Canadian literature as a field of study, that pays particular attention to the internal fractures that belie the field’s whiteness, and that considers students’s self-governance within neo-liberal universities. Beyond Canadian post-secondary education’s anti-Black structural barriers, graduate-level studies in the humanities depend on students’ access to financial and social credit. In turn, credit limits who can afford to study Canadian literature. Academic labour’s growing precarity further redlines non-professional fields of study, intensifying racial divisions within Canadian post-secondary education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay intervenes in debates on visibility in Asian Canadian literary criticism by engaging with Kim Fu’s novel, For Today I Am a Boy, through Rey Chow’s theorization of capture in Entanglements. In Asian Canadian literary criticism, the idea of visibility is both a demand and a site of critique. Fu’s novel responds to the doubled experience of being invisible and yet all too visible as a minority subject. This essay is interested not only in how visibility functions as a trap, but also in how the experience of being trapped can be one that captivates. For Today brings into relief the relentlessness of the entanglement of race, of its seemingly inescapable visibility, and calls it out for the trap that it is. In so doing, Fu’s novel demands an engagement with what it means to be held by something and to be caught in beholding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article historicizes cultural appropriation in Canadian literature today by examining key texts from the critiques of cultural appropriation in Canadian culture in the 1990s. Appropriation is contextualized in relation to a modernist temporality that constructs an Other outside of modernity and to the temporality in Frantz Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism, a temporality in which the colonized is liberated but the colonizer is still “choked” and not yet rehabilitated. Reading appropriation through its cultural historical context in relation to modernist art and conceptual art, the practice of appropriation emerges as an extension of colonial practices and as an extractivist economy. Countering this, I point to the Indigenous concept of “cultural belongings” as a form of critique and alterity that counters the logic of cultural appropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the literary scholarship of reading asian canadian literature including limits of official multiculturalism, theatrical representation of violence against indigenous women and complicated intersections between race, sexuality and gender identity. Topics include indigenous peoples responding to colonization, africans of canada and women of colour.

This article looks at trauma beyond the fixation on the limits of narrative as expressed in the mainstream theory of trauma in the 1990s, in the work of Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, among others. Its purpose is to achieve an appreciation of narrative as a navigable textual itinerary whose very flows and discontinuities are energized by a reconciliation (or lack thereof) with life's shocking and incomprehensible moments. I build upon Amir Khadem's rejection of the polarity between narrative and the incurable psychic wound in order to provide textual analyses of a corpus of three contemporary novels set in the context of a historically traumatized regional identity, that of Newfoundland in Canada: The Town That Forgot How to Breathe (2003), by Kenneth J. Harvey, February (2009), by Lisa Moore, and Sweetland (2014), by Michael Crummey. A revision of the role of genres traditionally used to describe historical and personal crises will help us observe how their conventions function within a context of outrage at the global and regional mismanagement of natural resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens once the rogue rides off into the sunset? This cross-genre essay considers the figure of the rogue's decline and gradual dismemberment in the face of the pressures of the world. Beginning with the "rogue" digits and other body parts lost by the men who surrounded him in his youth—especially his grandfather—Dobson considers the costs of labour and poverty in rural environments. For him, the rogue is one who falls somehow outside of cultural, social, and political norms—the one who has decided to step outside of the establishment, outside of the corrupt élites and their highfalutin ways. To do so comes at a cost. Turning to the life of writer George Ryga and to the poetry and fiction of Patrick Lane, this essay examines the real, physical, material, and social costs of transgression across multiple works linked to rural environments in Alberta and British Columbia. The essay shows the ways in which very real forms of violence discipline the rogue, pushing the rogue back into submission or out of mind, back into the shadowy past from whence the rogue first came. Resisting nostalgia while evincing sympathy, this essay delves into what is at stake for one who would become a rogue. [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]

Drug treatment courts (DTCs) have been proposed as an alternative to custody that will better deal with drug-dependent offenders through application of therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ). While DTC proponents emphasize the positive aspects of the judicial involvement and intense treatment that most courts provide, critics observe that there are many punitive aspects to DTCs. Frequent court appearances, curfews, urinalysis, multiple bail conditions, and delayed sentencing can be viewed as extensions of coercive social control rather than as benevolent measures intended to help offenders. Further, critics of Canadian DTCs have challenged the efficacy of treatment. This paper seeks to add to a limited Canadian research literature by examining a DTC in the Prairie city of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Two samples are used: sample 1 examines sentencing outcomes and reoffence data for 199 DTC admissions from 2006 to 2014; sample 2 is employed for a quasi-experimental comparative recidivism study using a propensity score matching determined sample of 63 DTC cases with 167 adult probationers from 2010–12. Graduates showed lower rates of reoffence compared to unsuccessful cases. Sentencing outcomes showed that unsuccessful participants were most often incarcerated when re-sentenced on original charges. Probation cases reoffended at higher rates than the matched DTC group. Administrative violations were still higher than in the probation group, and may actually result in an inflated reoffence rate for Canadian DTCs. Policy implications and directions for further research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archibald MacMechan's regular column in the Montreal Standard entitled "The Dean's Window" (1906–1933) is an important index to educated antimodernist literary values. MacMechan brought his reading of world literature into his appraisals of the Canadian scene, through his groundbreaking work, Headwaters of Canadian Literature(1924). In a 1912 "Dean's Window" column, MacMechan, a published poet, opened with a poem of his own, "The Ballade of Canadian Literature," which anticipated F.R. Scott's "The Canadian Authors Meet"—itself a seminal work of early Canadian modernism. By no means binaries, the degree to which modernism and antimodernism could resemble each other is manifest in MacMechan's and Scott's poems, even though Scott's poem eviscerates the Canadian Authors Association, an organization of which MacMechan was a founding member. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frederick Philip Grove's Settlers of the Marsh (1925) is a settler-colonial farm novel. Grove's novel is an exemplary Canadian instance of a mode of fiction which attended the 'settler revolution' – the agricultural colonisation of temperate range lands in North and South America, Eurasia, Australasia and Southern Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth. The defining feature of this iconic form of settler colonialism was the presence of what the Canadian historian Peter A. Russell terms a 'large scale open land frontier'. The settler farm – whether it was in the South African High Veld, the Western Australian wheatbelt, the prairies of Manitoba or the Canterbury Plains of New Zealand – was the main instrument in a mode of colonisation in which seized indigenous land was made available to mainly European immigrants for agricultural enterprise. In the literary sphere, the particular aura and ideological valency of the pioneer farm find expression in the appearance of novels that dramatise the taking up of land by settlers in these frontier communities. This essay uses Grove's Settlers of the Marsh to trace how the particular forms of desire mobilised by settler colonialism are modulated in the settler-colonial farm novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on a roundtable discussion featuring Scholar-Poet Amatoritsero Ede and Novelist Helen Walsh, discussing the Diaspora Dialogues (DD) and its impact on Canadian literature. Topics covered include the inception and development of DD, its transformative effect on the Canadian literary landscape, and insights from Walsh's novel, "Pull Focus," reflecting her cultural activism and experiences in the Toronto culture industry.

The article offers information related to the number of controversies with sexual misconduct and appropriation of voice that have left the people who produce and support Canadian literature divided along generational, racialized, and gendered lines. It mentions that fault lines between writers and academics have also become more entrenched; and epidemic of sexual violence that apparently plagues the institutions that created Canadian literature.

A literary criticism of the book "Injun" by Jordan Abel is presented. It outlines the decolonization of print, digital, and oral spaces. It examines the discordant layering of fragmented poetry intensified, and the sound of digital malfunction; and responsibility for working towards decolonization. It also mentions that analysis of Canada’s participation in global industry has been promoting the issuing of official apologies advocating forgiveness and reconciliation.

The article announces the periodical in the business for 60 years.

This paper aims to analyze the complex articulations of the Island-trope in Canadian fantastic fiction. A prevalent trope in Anglophone literature, the Island is rarely perused within the framework of twentieth-century fantastic Canadian literature. Yet in novels such as Erskine Douglas' A bit of Atlantis (1900), Jack Hodgins' The Invention of the World (1977) and Graham Petrie's Seahorse (1980), the (often contrasting) symbolism associated with the island-possibility, marginality, liminality-is not merely an aesthetic or thematic obsession; the Island functions as a fluctuating metafictional landscape, a self- referential artefact, culturally and historically embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scope and content of section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, which constitutional- ized the recognition of Aboriginal and Treaty rights, was intended to be negotiated at the political level. The failure of that process meant that the job of determining the meaning of the provision fell largely to the judiciary. As a result, the constitutional relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state has most frequently been theorized in terms of Aboriginal rights and the judicial doctrines interpreting section 35. Theis paper explicitly considers the relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canadian governments from the perspective of federalism. It does so by emphasizing the interstitial character of federalism. Theis articulation serves two func- tions. First, it recognizes the myriad ways that Indigenous peoples exercise jurisdiction as being constitutive of federalism in Canada. Theat is, it offers a way of re-describing existing practices of governance in Canada in order to shed light on their federal character. Second, this approach offers a view of how constitutional change can occur moving forward, providing a critique of conceptions of federalism that cement a constitutional order that has histori- cally marginalized Indigenous practices of governance. Lastly, it suggests avenues for the development of a federalism that can support Indigenous self-determination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon ethnographic research in Winnipeg, Manitoba, we complicate simplistic epidemiological and sexual health discourses that position African newcomer teen girls and young women as "at-risk" for HIV/AIDS and other consequences of being sexually active. By tracing the trajectories of sexual health messages and utilizing the concept of assemblage, we seek to account for the ways in which risk is actively made and negotiated in practice by African newcomer youth. By highlighting the perspectives and experiences of participants in relationship to Canadian literature on the subject of sexual risk, culture, and education, we work to counter essentializing, racializing, and pathologizing discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the book "The Back of the Turtle," by Thomas King, giving particular focus on the role of water as a multivalent trope. Topics include the use of water to criticize extractive economies, the use of water to articulate and propose an ethics of care where Indigenous and feminist paradigms can interact and move forward in collaboration, and the potential of transcultural interdisciplinary readings of Canadian literature.

The article presents an introduction to the articles published within the issue, including the state of Canadian literature outside national boundaries, the influence of Canadian poet Robert Kroetsch in American literature, and the book "The Back of the Turtle," by Thomas King.

From late fifteenth- to late sixteenth-century Europe, travellers and intellectuals from Iberia, Italy, France, and England (at least) were dazzled by the so-called areitos of the Caribbean and mainland Americas. Most held them to be a public-performed poetry/song that kept peoples’ history, spirituality, and shared culture alive in ways lost to contemporary European elites but known to the ancients and folk life. Many yearned to transfer such usage from the Americas to Europe, even to integrate them into a European poetics and historiography. This was all the more so because the areitos seemed linked to pictorial and pictographic practice, seeming to recall notably those Egyptian hieroglyphs that had fascinated the same European scholars since the mid-fifteenth century. This moment of possible Americo-European transculturation stayed alive throughout the sixteenth century, but it did not survive it in any meaningful way [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages selected moments in Austin Clarke's literary journey to argue that in spite of his involvement in the development of Canadian literature (CanLit) during the 1960s and 1970s, the Canadian literary establishment continues to pay little critical attention to his contributions. This lack of recognition is specifically evident in recent writings about Canadian literature and the literary figures who spearheaded its development after Canada's Multiculturalism policy of 1971. Canada's becoming officially multicultural required a new narrative of Canada and new literary depictions of Canadians in their national literature, as ethnically diversified but of a single citizenship. I argue that Clarke's legacy as a Black writer should be given more prominence in Canadian institutions because today this legacy is under threat of erasure as the number of Canadian Black voices telling mainstream stories about Black people's experiences is evidently in decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the significance of place in the works of Canadian writer Alice Munro. Topics covered include Munro's first book "Dance of the Happy Shades," which is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 2018, her manuscript "Places at Home," which consisted of descriptive sketches intended to accompany photographs of Ontario, and her imagined place of Alice Munro Country.

The article presents an interview with Rachel Lebowitz and Zachariah Wells, two married poets who live in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They discuss Maritime fiction and what it means to be Maritime writers, their commitment to socialism and social critique, and their views about the centre of literary culture in Canada.

Scholarship in Canadian public administration programs takes many forms. One of these is the contribution made by practitioners. Yet very little is known about this group and, with the exception of Kenneth Kernaghan's articles, there is little Canadian literature on practitioner‐scholars. Taking Kernaghan's work as a starting point, we explore the contribution of practitioner‐scholars and shed light on their background and contribution to public administration scholarship. Our study finds that practitioner‐scholars are well‐qualified and engaged public administration professionals whose contribution is much broader than that first described by Kernaghan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the novel "Love Enough," by Dionne Brand, and the short story collection "The Outer Harbor," by Wayde Compton, is presented. Topics include the notion of Afroperipheral Canada and black diasporic culture; the idea of transposition in the book "Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics," by Rosi Braidotti; and the portrayals of the cities of Vancouver, British Columbia and Toronto, Ontario in the books discussed.

This article considers the many productive forms of theatrical, historical, and musical haunting in Harry Somers's 1967 opera Louis Riel. Although the opera has been criticized for its datedness, an examination of the several layers of haunting and manipulations of embodiment and sound/silence in the score and libretto suggest that the opera has the potential to resonate beyond its original historical context to create meaning for contemporary Canadians. A consideration of how the 2017 Canadian Opera Company's production, directed by Peter Hinton, amplified these hauntings reveals that the opera presents opportunities for both the past and present to haunt one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In exploring Still Stands the House by Gwen Pharis Ringwood, Scott considers how a particularly gendered experience of the Canadian landscape finds expression in a murderous act by a woman. The act of murder can be a powerful theatrical device for reflecting, on stage, a Canadian reaction to the experience of being embedded in a hostile environment. The play provides a fascinating case study for the convergence of gender roles, violence, geography, and climate, and springs from the perspectives and concerns of Alberta settler-colonial farm families in the early twentieth century. The theories of Northrop Frye and Margaret Atwood have been challenged by subsequent critics and by the changing realities of Canadian society and literature, and many of their assumptions thoroughly problematized by colonial and Indigenous studies. But, keeping these crucial criticisms in mind, Scott argues that some of Frye's and Atwood's key concepts can still prove applicable to the imaginative world of Ringwood's play, and are therefore useful for understanding its impact and continuing status in the Canadian dramatic canon. By realistically evoking the hardship of the time and the isolation of the settler farmer lifestyle, Ringwood makes the harsh environment an active character in the drama and, by linking the violence of the environment with the violent act of her character, Hester, Ringwood suggests something intrinsically brutal behind the rhetoric of the pioneer spirit and the settler experience in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A celebration of Geoffrey Davis's work in Canadian literature and his great organizational skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses about the articles in the issue including essay studies on Robert Kroetsch works like "Gone Indian and New World Myth", "What the Crow Said" and "Alibi and The Puppeteer."

This article explores the relationships between fashion, glamour, celebrity, and Canadian literature, focusing specifically on Toronto, Canada. I argue for the value of "reading glamour" into Toronto's literature by examining how glamour provides a socio-cultural insight into character and plot development and, moreover, elevates the character of the city itself. No doubt certain authors conjure up a glamorous cachet with their coterie of bohemian intellectual and literary salons but the writing itself rarely approaches the same level of glamorous celebration. However, reading glamour--that is, following Brown, tracing the language and grammar of glamour as a literary form linked to modern mass culture--extends the potential for literary and cultural expression of the text. As Gundle and Castelli argue, glamour is typically associated with the urban and cosmopolitan, and this paper explores how Toronto has historically engaged with its own sense of burgeoning celebrity, fashion, and glamour. By focusing on the work of Phyllis Brett Young' s The Torontonians (1960), I examine how glamour as a corollary to fashion challenges preconceptions of "Toronto the Good," not only within the local urban imaginary but also on national and global levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Novels from the Dear Canada series of historic fiction, published by Scholastic Canada, currently populate the shelves of school classrooms and libraries across Canada. This study explores two Dear Canada novels that chronicle significant moments in Atlantic Canadian history: Janet McNaughton’s novel (Flame and ashes: The great fire diary of Triffie Winsor. St. Johns, Newfoundland, 1892, Scholastic Canada, Toronto, 2014) which explores the Great Fire of Newfoundland in 1892, and Julie Lawson’s novel, No Safe Harbour (No safe harbour: the Halifax explosion diary of Charlotte Blackburn, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1917, Scholastic Canada, Toronto, 2006), which explores the Halifax Explosion of 1917. Kenneth Kidd (Child Lit 33: 120-149, 2005) notes that “subjects previously thought too upsetting for children are now deemed appropriate and even necessary” in children’s literature (p. 12); indeed, the themes of both Flame and Ashes and No Safe Harbour resonate with recent attempts to represent broader and more diverse ranges of experiences in children’s fiction. Like many other texts in the series, these texts explore economic hardship and psychological distress. Furthermore, they explore events through the eyes of subjects who have, historically, had very little agency: female children. Drawing on narrative theory and feminist standpoint theory (Fuller in Writing the everyday: women’s textual communities in Atlantic Canada, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 2004), this study examines the narrative techniques McNaughton and Lawson rely on to counterbalance difficult historical events with the appeal of young protagonists who offer subjective responses to the historical moment. This study considers both the ideological challenges and the possible advantages of circulating historical knowledge that is linked to girlhood and profoundly rooted in place. Ultimately, I argue that these young female narrators provide important inroads for interrogating what counts as history in historical narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the interconnections between young adult fiction and young adult readers’ constructions of place within two contemporary texts. It employs a qualitative, multiple case study design, and utilizes discussion groups, semi-structured interviews, and the creation of place-journals to interpret some of the ways in which several young adult readers, from two contrasting Canadian communities (rural/urban), respond to how place and place-identity are construed within two young adult fiction texts: Tim Wynne-Jones’ Blink and Caution and Clare Vanderpool’s Moon Over Manifest. Drawing on geography theory and ecocriticism, it argues that the participants’ interpretations of place align with the theories of place put forth by cultural geographer Doreen Massey and ecocritic Lawrence Buell. In doing so, it illustrates how the participants reflected on place, inside and outside of the chosen texts, as geographers and ecocritics would have done. The methodological approach moves beyond strictly textual analysis to privilege the voices of adolescent Canadian readers, positioning them as critical interpreters of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the Canadian Women's Peace Write Campaign for world peace and nuclear disarmament by sending literature to the government. It focuses on considering connections between Canadian literature and antinuclear mobilization; and discusses about the most pressing practical, moral, and spiritual issue of times.

The article discusses the issue of the journal of 1985 which devoted to Italian-Canadian connections and what contributions several Italian-Canadian writers did to Canadian letters in promotion of ethnic minority writing for Canadian literature. Topics discussed include multiculturalism of government of several ethnic communities across Canada, Canadian authors writers such as Mary di Michele, Caterina Edwards and Mary Melfi, and book "The Godfather" by Mario Puzo.

The article discusses the introduction of the book "The Prose & Poetical Works of Peter Edward Susand" and mentions that Black man publishing in Canada in era is not common. Topics discussed include discussions of nineteenth-century Black Canadian literature, work undertaken by author Linda Brown- Kubisch, and problems in a Canadian context in literature.

This article aims to deal with the « banlieue » narratives, such as testimonial or fictional narratives, according to the epistemic framework of Decoloniality Thought developped in South America and the migrant litterature poetics from Canada. We propose to analyse the memory work-in-progress that these narratives build, whereas cultural representations and collective memories of the « banlieue » populations can hardly reach a social visibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The connection between national and personal traumas is a key concern in two Dominican-American short-story cycles, Julia Alvarez's How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and Junot Díaz's This Is How You Lose Her (2012). Both texts link the inability to establish long-lasting romantic relationships to the violent collective past of the Dominican Republic, but they do so very differently. With its regressive chronological structure, Alvarez's narrative casts its characters as inescapable victims of a history destined to repeat itself. By contrast, Díaz eschews Alvarez's etiological quest, highlighting the question of personal responsibility. Only marginally successful in rejecting traditional models of national identity, the protagonist-narrator of Lose Her continues the reconceptualization of Dominicanness begun in Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]