Diasporic writing simultaneously asserts a sense of belonging and expresses a sense of being 'ethnic' in a society of immigration. The essays in this volume explore how contemporary diasporic writers in English use their works to mediate this dissonance and seek to work through the ethical, political, and personal affiliations of diasporic identities and subjectivities. The essays call for a remapping of post-colonial literatures and a reevaluation of the Anglophone literary canon by including post-colonial diasporic literary discourses. Demonstrating that an intercultural dialogue and constant cultural brokering are a must in our post-colonial world, this volume is a valuable contribution to the ongoing discourse on post-colonial diasporic literatures and identities.

Primary audience is Canadian literature scholars Contributes directly to current conversations in both contemporary Canadian media and academic circles around the relationship between bodies and land. For instance, Jordan Abel's piece addresses the possibilities and difficulties of reclaiming Nishga/Nisga'a identity in the aftermath of the residential school experience. Karina Vernon's essay addresses how Black subjects might respond in a moment when they learn that the home they've been longing for is already inhabited. Dina Al-Kassim's essay addresses kinships of dispossession. This book is an effort to steer Canadian literatures out of controversy for controversy's sake, and into a flow of productive, relation-building discussion. It does this by addressing the substance of Canadian and Turtle Island writing, particularly writing by Indigenous, Black and Asian writers. While it avoids empty controversy, it embraces rigorous argument. Addresses issues related to Indigenous and diaspora literatures, settler culture, Black studies, Asian Canadian studies, decolonization, critical race studies, multiculturalism, land issues Particularly for those interested in the concepts of intersectionality, solidarity, and relationality

This collection of essays focuses on the varied and complex roles that editors have played in the production of literary and scholarly texts in Canada. With contributions from a wide range of participants who have played seminal roles as editors of Canadian literatures - from nineteenth-century works to the contemporary avant-garde, from canonized texts to anthologies of so-called minority writers and the oral literatures of the First Nations - this collection is the first of its kind. Contributors offer incisive analyses of the cultural and publishing politics of editorial practices that question inherited paradigms of literary and scholarly values. They examine specific cases of editorial production as well as theoretical considerations of editing that interrogate such key issues as authorial intentionality, textual authority, historical contingencies of textual production, circumstances of publication and reception, the pedagogical uses of edited anthologies, the instrumentality of editorial projects in relation to canon formation and minoritized literatures, and the role of editors as interpreters, enablers, facilitators, and creators. Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada situates editing in the context of the growing number of collaborative projects in which Canadian scholars are engaged, which brings into relief not only those aspects of editorial work that entail collaborating, as it were, with existing texts and documents but also collaboration as a scholarly practice that perforce involves co-editing.

"Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies" is a collection of interdisciplinary essays that examine the various contexts--political, social, and cultural--that have shaped the study of Canadian literature and the role it plays in our understanding of the Canadian nation-state. The essays are tied together as instances of critical practices that reveal the relations and exchanges that take place between the categories of the literary and the nation, as well as between the disciplinary sites of critical discourses and the porous boundaries of their methods. They are concerned with the material effects of the imperial and colonial logics that have fashioned Canada, as well as with the paradoxes, ironies, and contortions that abound in the general perception that Canada has progressed beyond its colonial construction.

Smaro Kamboureli's introduction demonstrates that these essays engage with the larger realm of human and social practices--throne speeches, book clubs, policies of accommodation of cultural and religious differences, Indigenous thought about justice and ethics--to show that literary and critical work is inextricably related to the Canadian polity in light of transnational and global forces.

"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.

All the Feels / Tous les sens presents research into emotion and cognition in Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois writings in English or French. Affect is both internal and external, private and public; with its fluid boundaries, it represents a productive dimension for literary analysis. The emerging field of affect studies makes vital claims about ethical impulses, social justice, and critical resistance, and thus much is at stake when we adopt affective reading practices. The contributors ask what we can learn from reading contemporary literatures through this lens. Unique and timely, readable and teachable, this collection is a welcome resource for scholars of literature, feminism, philosophy, and transnational studies as well as anyone who yearns to imagine the world differently. Contributors: Nicole Brossard, Marie Carrière, Matthew Cormier, Kit Dobson, Nicoletta Dolce, Louise Dupre�, Margery Fee, Ana Mari�a Fraile-Marcos, Smaro Kamboureli, Aaron Kreuter, Daniel Laforest, Carmen Mata Barreiro, Ursula Mathis-Moser, Heather Milne, Eric Schmaltz, Maïte� Snauwaert, Jeanette den Toonder

"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.

Featuring seven English-language essays, five French-language essays, and a bilingual introduction, this collection examines the cultural work of space and memory in Canada and Canadian literature, and encourages readers to investigate Canada within its regional, national, and global contexts. It also invites us to recognize local intersections so easily overlooked, yet so important. The diverse critical approaches of this collection reveal and probe the unities and fractures in national understanding, telling stories of otherness and marginality, of dis-location and un-belonging. This collection will be welcomed by readers and critics of Canadian literature. Contributors: Albert Braz, Samantha Cook, Jennifer Delisle, Lise Gaboury-Diallo, Smaro Kamboureli, Janne Korkka, Andre Lamontagne, Margaret Mackey, Sherry Simon, Pamela Sing, Camille van der Marel, Erin Wunker

"Pacific Rim Letters "is a never before seen collection of letters Roy Kiyooka wrote between 1975 and 1985 It presents a fascinating and highly valuable picture of the artistic and literary communities Kiyooka was actively involved with as well as Kiyooka as a man with an extraordinary intellect and passion for life and the arts Kiyooka takes the epistolary form into new and radical directions At once tenderly estranged and confessional attentive as much to the minutiae of daily life as to the complexities of artistic and literary creation and embedded in the politics of culture making and those of racialized identities these letters are a literary achievement in their own right

"Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace" brings to light the relationship between writers in Canada and the marketplace within which their work circulates. Through a series of conversations with both established and younger writers from across the country, Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli investigate how writers perceive their relationship to the cultural economy--and what that economy means for their creative processes.

The interviews in "Producing Canadian Literature" focus, in particular, on how writers interact with the cultural institutions and bodies that surround them. Conversations pursue the impacts of arts funding on writers; show how agents, editors, and publishers affect writers' works; examine the process of actually selling a book, both in Canada and abroad; and contemplate what literary awards mean to writers. Dialogues with Christian Bok, George Elliott Clarke, Daniel Heath Justice, Larissa Lai, Stephen Henighan, Erin Moure, Ashok Mathur, Lee Maracle, Jane Urquhart, and Aritha van Herk testify to the broad range of experience that writers in Canada have when it comes to the conditions in which their work is produced.

Original in its desire to directly explore the specific circumstances in which writers work--and how those conditions affect their writing itself--"Producing Canadian Literature" will be of interest to scholars, students, aspiring writers, and readers who have followed these authors and want to know more about how their books come into being.