Speaking Up, Speaking Out, Or Speaking Back: The Signposts Are In The Right Direction (original) (raw)
Related papers
Canadian Revisionist Drama: Performing Race, Sexuality, and the Cultural Imaginary
2012
My dissertation examines how Canadian revisionist plays adapt popular narratives—national histories, Greek myths, Shakespearean plays, and colonial legends—by changing the identities of marginalized characters and cultural groups. While Linda Hutcheon defines adaptation as repetition with difference, I define revisionist drama as repetition with politicized difference. It is this politicized difference that transforms the identifications of the original marginalized characters, and, as a result, changes their roles in the cultural imaginary. Canadian revisionist plays critique cultural figures such as Philomela, Othello, and Pocahontas as reductive emblems of necessarily complex, layered racial, sexual, and gendered identities. Though this dissertation concentrates on Canadian literature, it also considers European sources (Ovid, Homer, Shakespeare) as well as theories of historiography (Filewod, Salter), speech acts (Austin, Butler), audience reception (Bennett), and publics (Haber...
2018
This thesis explores the ways that stories by Indigenous women matter to decolonization and reframe debates about transitional justice in Canada. My corpus is comprised of Indigenous women’s life writing in Canada (in French and English) and in Guatemala (in Spanish) in the 1970s and 1980s, and epistolary exchanges published in Quebec between 2008 and 2016. Each chapter addresses the relationships between author and audience—literary projects—and between reader and text—ways of reading—to examine tensions and affinities in Indigenous and settler engagements for justice. My readings respond to two intertwined objectives: prioritizing Indigenous women writers’ visions of justice, while problematizing the position of settler critics’ and settlers’ feeling of what is right and just. My methodological approach juxtaposes feminist, antiracist and decolonial theories with Indigenous women’s writing, in order to think with the texts, and treat the stories themselves as theory. In chapter one, I contend that Rigoberta Menchú’s testimony (1983) offers the reader a text-based relationship rooted in her understanding of the incommensurability of the reader’s and the author’s epistemological positions. In chapter two, I look at Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers’ relationship to territory in Aimititau! Parlons-nous! (2008) and explore how Nahka Bertrand, Joan Pawnee-Parent and Rita Mestokosho’s unapologetic but generous voices relate to non-Indigenous people’s discomfort with their positions as settlers. Chapter three discusses Joséphine Bacon (2010), Rita Mestokosho (2011) and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine’s (2016) gesture of friendship in their correspondence with Quebecois writers as a critical and unsettling mode of relationships. In the final chapter, I propose a reciprocal reading that requires a displacement of my academic voice and that takes seriously An Antane Kapesh’s (1976) and Mini Aodla Freeman’s (1978) embodied writing about their experiences of colonialism. Throughout my analyses of the texts, I propose a settler feminist approach that accounts for positionality, grounds itself in embodied (self-) criticism and considers the materiality of literary relationships
Cambridge History of Canadian Literature, 2009
The diversification of both professional and community work over the last three decades has produced an Aboriginal theater that is vibrant, polyvocal, syncretic and frequently resistant to categorization. Like other Indigenous art forms in Canada, this work has necessarily served at least two different constituencies: its own distinct communities and the broader postcolonizing society from which many audience members are drawn. As this brief survey suggests, Aboriginal theater has wrestled with the legacies of colonialism in original and provocative ways; it has also looked forward to imagine different futures for Indigenous peoples and to forge new cultural and artistic allegiances, facilitating a pronounced if uneven shift in the nation’s performing arts culture.
“The Marginalization of the Discourse in Recent Western Canadian Fiction.”
Minority Discourses in a Cross/ Trans-Cultural Perspective. Eds. E. Sojka, T. Sikora. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Slask, 2004
Multicultural societies essentially experience countless encounters, clashes, mutual enrichment and transformation of the cultures involved in their ever-changing facet. The present paper aims at calling attention to the distinct North-American literary scenario and the dynamics of inter-racial character metamorphosis. It focuses on biracial counter-passage rites, and the contextual and textual markers of the clash of cultures, the so-called zebra aesthetics in particular. Catchwords that signify this kind of literature are: gone colored stories, trauma or passing narratives and satires on race. One of the most significant features is the post- colonial challenge to the physical, spiritual, attitudinal and behavioral consequences of colonization. Further significant shared features in the literary texts are the subversion of identity aesthetically marked by fictional boundary breaking that is based on the dynamic concept of identity, i.e. orbiting (referring to the title of a short story by Bharati Mukherjee), and the formulation of a cross-cultural identity. Related broader questions are: how does the construction of identity change in the context of literature on biracial relations by U.S. and Canadian authors of different ages? To what extent is the gender (family/ marital) setup specific, i.e. to what extent does the aesthetic discourse differ in the macro versus the micro social environment? Last but not least: what is the gift we can obtain studying the patter of counter passage (going colored) stories?
Giving ; the Twenty-First Century a Try: Canadian and Québécois Women Writers as Essayists
This article looks at the use of the essay genre by Canadian and Québécois women writers since 2000, in particular essay writing by authors known primarily for their works of fiction and poetry. For many, the essay form has served as an ideal venue for combining new, innovative, experimental and “alternative” forms of writing with concerns of personal and political struggle for social, cultural, economic, and even psychological recognition and justice. The article begins with a brief overview of aspects of essay writing by Canadian and Québécois women writers at the end of the 20th century before turning to some comparative observations that suggest convergences and differences, as well as continuity and departures in essay writing by Canadian and Québécois women writers since the beginning of the 21st century. Convergences are seen in the combination of personal commentary on topics of social, political, national and global relevance with experimental use of the essay genre. They are seen as well in the continuum of these explorations and practices from the last two decades of the 20th century into the first decade of the 21st century, even as the latter brings about new forms of essay writing in the use of the internet and the blog-essay. Differences between Canadian and Québécois women writers’ practice of the essay may be seen as well, notably in what one literary and critical community reads and knows of the other. This stems in large part from language barriers and limited resources for translation, though these have been overcome in some cases such as the collection of essays by Nicole Brossard in English translation, Fluid Arguments (2005). Whether writing in French or in English, Canadian and Québécois women writers as essayists have produced and continue to produce important work that calls for ongoing critical attention.
The Deconstruction of Oppressive Structures: Three Non-Conforming Female Figures in Canadian Drama
USURJ: University of Saskatchewan Undergraduate Research Journal, 2021
Sometimes, resistance to oppressive structures takes on forms initially unexpected. Through close readings of George Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, Judith Thompson's The Lion in the Street, and David French's Salt-Water Moon, this paper considers four female figures in Canadian drama who oppose their circumstances leveraging the—sometimes minimal—power available to them.