Critical Collaborations

Indigenity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies

Smaro Kamboureli, editor, and Christl Verduyn, editor

TransCanada

Book Description

Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies is the third volume of essays produced as part of the TransCanada conferences project. The essays gathered in Critical Collaborations constitute a call for collaboration and kinship across disciplinary, political, institutional, and community borders. They are tied together through a simultaneous call for resistance—to Eurocentrism, corporatization, rationalism, and the fantasy of total systems of knowledge—and a call for critical collaborations. These collaborations seek to forge connections without perceived identity—linking concepts and communities without violating the differences that constitute them, seeking epistemic kinships while maintaining a willingness to not-know. In this way, they form a critical conversation between seemingly distinct areas and demonstrate fundamental allegiances between diasporic and indigenous scholarship, transnational and local knowledges, legal and eco-critical methodologies. Links are forged between Indigenous knowledge and ecological and social justice, creative critical reading, and ambidextrous epistemologies, unmaking the nation through translocalism and unsettling histories of colonial complicity through a poetics of relation. Together, these essays reveal how the critical methodologies brought to bear on literary studies can both challenge and exceed disciplinary structures, presenting new forms of strategic transdisciplinarity that expand the possibilities of Canadian literary studies while also emphasizing humility, complicity, and the limits of knowledge.

About Smaro Kamboureli, and Christl Verduyn

Smaro Kamboureli is a Canada Research Chair in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature at the University of Guelph. Her most recent publications with WLU Press are Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies, co-edited with Robert Zacharias (2012), and Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace, co-edited with Kit Dobson (forthcoming 2013).

Christl Verduyn is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University, where she holds the Davidson Chair in Canadian Studies and is the director of the Centre for Canadian Studies. Publications include Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography, co-edited with Eleanor Ty (WLU Press, 2008), Archival Narratives for Canada: Re-Telling Stories in a Changing Landscape, co-edited with Kathleen Garay (2011), and Canadian Studies: Past, Present, Praxis, co-edited with Jane Koustas (2012).

Table of Contents

Related interest

Canadian literature

Cultural studies

Literary theory

By the same editor

Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace, Kit Dobson, and Smaro Kamboureli

Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature, Smaro Kamboureli, editor, and Roy Miki, editor

Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada, Smaro Kamboureli

Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies, Smaro Kamboureli, editor, and Robert Zacharias, editor

Marian Engel’s Notebooks: “Ah, mon cahier, écoute...”, Christl Verduyn, editor

Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries, Christl Verduyn, editor, and Edna Staebler

Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography, Eleanor Ty, editor, and Christl Verduyn, editor