"Scandalous Bodies" is an impassioned scholarly study both of
literature by diasporic writers and of the contexts within which it
is produced. It explores topics ranging from the Canadian
government's multiculturalism policy to media representations of
so-called minority groups, from the relationship between realist
fiction and history to postmodern constructions of ethnicity, from
the multicultural theory of the philosopher Charles Taylor to the
cultural responsibilities of diasporic critics such as Kamboureli
herself.
Smaro Kamboureli proposes no neat or comforting solutions to the
problems she addresses. Rather than adhere to a single method of
reading or make her argument follow a systematic approach, she lets
the texts and the socio-cultural contexts she examines give shape
to her reading. In fact, methodological issues, and the need to
revisit them, become a leitmotif in the book. Theoretically
rigorous and historically situated, this study also engages with
close reading--not the kind that views a text as a sovereign world,
but one that opens the text in order to reveal the method of its
making. Her practice of what she calls negative pedagogy--a
self-reflexive method of learning and unlearning, of decoding the
means through which knowledge is produced--allows her to avoid the
pitfalls of constructing a narrative of progress. Her critique of
Canadian multiculturalism as a policy that advocates what she calls
"sedative politics" and of the epistemologies of ethnicity that
have shaped, for example, the first wave of ethnic anthologies in
Canada are the backdrop against which she examines the various
discourses that inform the diasporic experience in Canada.
"Scandalous Bodies" was first published in 2000 and received the
Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Criticism.
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