Canadian Literature

Indigenous Literary Expressions of Matriarchal Worlding as Kinship

Jennifer Brant — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

This article documents my journey into the world of Indigenous women’s literatures, to offer visions of matriarchal worlding as kinship. Selected writings offer Indigenous feminist analyses within the context of the white heteronormative violence that shapes our contemporary world. Indigenous women’s literatures are resonant and offer a felt sense of home and community. As a segue into matriarchal worlding as kinship, I prompt readers to consider the implications of applying feminist analysis to Canadian literature before offering a textual analysis of Lee Maracle’s Ravensong. Specifically, I urge readers to consider the critical lessons that Ravensong offers us about the state of our world today and imagine the altered possibilities of matriarchal worlding. The texts inspire readers to humbly journey with time, interrogate the past that has so powerfully shaped our current realities, and recall the story medicines offered by Maracle as a way to envision just and empowered futures.

Without Togetherness

Jessi MacEachern — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

In order to open up the possibility for a radical genealogy of feminist poetics in and beyond contemporary Canadian writing, I introduce the successes and failures of: radical citation, the proliferation of intersectionality, and the reproductive capabilities of cyborgs. The transformative potential of innovative and conceptual poetry practices and the ways in which they illuminate the productive flailing of feminist critique is demonstrated through attention to the collaborative and appropriative poetics of contemporary Canadian poet Syd Zolf. In order to approach a situation—a praxis of feminist critique and theory—in which “the errors of face-to-face ethical recognition” (Janey’s Arcadia 116) can be rendered readable, I position Zolf’s innovative strategies alongside the interventions in genre of Lisa Robertson and M. NourbeSe Philip. The paper seeks to address how feminist critics can productively address the ethical discomfort of our entanglements in issues of racialized and gendered violence, Indigenous sovereignty, and experimental cultural production.

Undernarrated Emotional Landscapes in Toronto’s Scarborough:

Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Téa Mutonji’s short story collection, Shut Up You’re Pretty (2019), follows the coming-of-age process of Loli, a Black Canadian woman from a Congolese immigrant family living in contemporary Scarborough, a low-income, multicultural district of Toronto. Relying on the frameworks of Black feminist geography and narratology, I discuss how Loli’s racialized and gendered body interacts with the urban landscape. After tracing the significance of places and spaces of various scales—from the intimate to the global—in the stories, I demonstrate the interrelatedness of the collection’s ubiquitous narratives gaps with emotional and material landscapes in Shut Up You’re Pretty to argue that the sparseness of narration—what I term undernarration—and the volume’s conspicuous focus on places function as symptoms of the protagonist’s disrupted emotional landscape and comment on Black women’s presence in Canada.

Mistaken Identity

Rusaba Alam — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Using the case study of Lee Maracle’s short story “Yin Chin” (1990) and its uptake in literary criticism on the topic of Asian/Indigenous relation, I argue that a predominant methodological approach in the field—reading characters and plot events as stand-ins for racial positions and histories—is one of the effects of neoliberal deprivation in today’s university, which demands representations of difference while denying us time and space for sustained attention to language. Against the backdrop of these institutional constraints, I look to the anti-essentialist genealogies of feminist literature, theory, and activism to piece together a deconstructive reading of intertextual traces and absences across Maracle’s story and the political scene that produced it. I use these examples to argue for a renewed critical commitment to speculative practices of reading that demand creativity, contingency, and risk, and that counter the institutional appropriation of difference with the irreducibility of literary critique.

Home “[H]eart-sweet” Homeland

Erin Akerman — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Building on Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s argument that Anishinaabe women’s personal experience can constitute a critical methodology (2017), this article contends that nineteenth-century Ojibwe poet and storyteller Jane Johnston Schoolcraft applies domestic experiences related to her Ojibwe culture as a decolonial methodology in her writing. This methodology corresponds with the criticism of contemporary Indigenous feminist scholars who write about the impact of colonialism on Indigenous women, their homes, and their families (see Anderson 2010; Goeman 2009, 2013; Huhndorf and Suzack 2010; and Lajimodiere 2013). By interweaving the home, Ojibwe knowledges, and Euro-Western literatures in writings that speak to her role as a host for European tourists, settler travellers, and government officials, Johnston Schoolcraft engages what Ann Laura Stoler terms colonial hierarchies of credibility (2009) in an Indigenous feminist framework to reconceptualize Indigenous and settler relationships in the Great Lakes region.

Theory in Practice, or, CanLit Is So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You

L. Camille van der Marel — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Teoria, the PhD candidate-narrator of Dionne Brand’s Theory (2018), is a distinctly paranoid reader. Their interdisciplinary thesis works to expose the false consciousness that mires others in anti-liberatory stasis. Like Teoria, many Canadian literature scholars are skillful practitioners of hermeneutic suspicion, an approach whereby critique provokes meaningful change by revealing subjects’ complicity with the same ideologies that do them harm. Paranoid reading offers the field a reproducible method for uncovering inequitable systems’ contradictions and slippages. But what if paranoid reading reiterates rather than repairs CanLit’s damage? For all their analytical strength, the hermeneutics of suspicion anchor scholarly analysis to disembodied claims of empirical distance, mastery, and individual refinement, each one a vector for settler-colonial (il)logics. This article challenges paranoid reading’s efficacy as a theory of change: in Canadian literary studies, hermeneutic suspicion both buttresses (settler) scholars’ sense of objective, masterful knowledge and demobilizes Black, queer, and feminist ways of knowing.

Feminist Critique Here and Now

Aubrey Hanson, Heather Milne — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

A forum on Feminist Critique Here and Now. Read the full contributions on our Canadian Literature website:

Aubrey Hanson and Heather Milne's "Introduction" (pp. 155-156)

Asha Jeffers' "Daughter Lessons" (pp. 156-159)

Lily Cho's "Feminist Practice Everywhere and Almost Nowhere" (pp. 159-161)

Linda M. Morra's "Gender and the Conveyor Belt of Citizenship" (pp. 162-165)

Hannah McGregor's "For Shame" (pp. 165-168)

Sophie Moulaison's "(Re)membering the City: On Daphne Marlatt's Liquidities" (pp. 168-171)

Tanis MacDonald's "Sticky Wills and Other Feminist Footprints" (pp. 171-174)

Erin Wunker's "Reading Feminisms: Notes on Some of the Texts That Shape Me" (pp. 174-177)

Fulmination

Amy LeBlanc — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Read the full poem on Canadian Literature's website at https://canlit.ca/article/fulmination/.

Hineni

Susan Glickman — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Read the full poem at Canadian Literature's website at https://canlit.ca/article/hineni/.

Errand Drive

Roy Wang — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Read the full poem on Canadian Literature's website at https://canlit.ca/article/errand-drive/.

An Album of Sorrows

Hanne Pearce — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Read the full poem on Canadian Literature's website at https://canlit.ca/article/an-album-of-sorrows/.

I am the woman

Bibiana Tomasic — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Read the full poem on Canadian Literature's website at https://canlit.ca/article/i-am-the-woman/.

Grandmother Grove

Kyeren Regehr — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Read the full poem on Canadian Literature's website at https://canlit.ca/article/grandmother-grove/.

Go Down Singing

Katharine Bubel — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=254.

The Art of Weaving

Kelly Shepherd — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=254.

Encountering Stowe and More

Jennifer Harris — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=254.

Our Permanent Revolution

Karl Jirgens — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=254.

Cris de Coeur

Neil Querengesser — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=254.

A Most Disturbing Book

Corinne Bigot — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=254.

Skirting Gender and Race in Early Drama

Kailin Wright — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=254.

Feminist Critique Here and Now

Aubrey Hanson, Heather Milne — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Read Aubrey Hanson and Heather Milne's full editorial, "Feminist Critique Here and Now," on our Canadian Literature website at https://canlit.ca/article/feminist-critique-here-and-now/.