About the Book
The dismantling of “Understanding Canada”—an international program eliminated by Canada’s Conservative government in 2012—posed a tremendous potential setback for Canadianists. Yet Canadian writers continue to be celebrated globally by popular and academic audiences alike. Twenty scholars speak to the government’s diplomatic and economic about-face and its implications for representations of Canadian writing within and outside Canada’s borders. The contributors to this volume remind us of the obstacles facing transnational intellectual exchange, but also salute scholars’ persistence despite these obstacles. Beyond “Understanding Canada” is a timely, trenchant volume for students and scholars of Canadian literature and anyone seeking to understand how Canadian literature circulates in a transnational world.
Contributors: Michael A. Bucknor, Daniel Coleman, Anne Collett, Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, Ana María Fraile-Marcos, Jeremy Haynes, Cristina Ivanovici, Milena Kaličanin, Smaro Kamboureli, Katalin Kürtösi, Vesna Lopičić, Belén Martín-Lucas, Claire Omhovère, Lucia Otrísalová, Don Sparling, Melissa Tanti, Christl Verduyn, Elizabeth Yeoman, Lorraine York
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction xi
Jeremy Haynes, Melissa Tanti, Daniel Coleman, Lorraine York
i Contexts, Provocations, and Knowledge Territories
1 Beyond Understanding Canada
Belatedness and Canadian Literary Studies // Smaro Kamboureli
2 The Understanding Canada Program and
International Canadian Literary Studies // Christl Verduyn
3 Indigenous Writing in Indigenous Languages
Reconfiguring Canadian Literary Studies and Beyond // Elizabeth Yeoman
ii Roots and Routes
4 Canada in Black Transnational Studies
Austin Clarke, Affective Affiliations, and the Cross-Border Poetics of Caribbean Canadian Writing // Michael A. Bucknor
5 “Why Don’t You Write about Canada?”
Olive Senior’s Poetry, Everybody’s History, and the “Condition of Resonance” // Anne Collett
6 Canada and the Black Atlantic
Epistemologies, Frameworks, Texts // Pilar Cuder-Domínguez
iii Mapping Bodies, Place, and Time
7 “Off the Highway”
Margins, Centres, Modernisms // Katalin Kürtösi
8 Canadian Photography and the Exhaustion of Landscape // Claire Omhovère
9 Posthuman Affect in the Global Empire
Queer Speculative Fictions of Canada // Belén Martín-Lucas
iv Border Zones
10 Unexpected Dialogical Space in David Albahari’s Immigrant Writing // Vesna Lopi_ci´c and Milena Kali _canin
11 The Politics of Art and Affect in Michael Helm’s
Cities of Refuge // Ana María Fraile-Marcos
v Reading Publics
12 Canada through the Lens of the Communist Censor
The Translation of CanLit under an Authoritarian Regime // Lucia Otrísalová
13 Economies of Export
Translating Laurence, Atwood, and Munro in Eastern Europe (1960–1989) // Cristina Ivanovici
14 Canadian Literature and Canadian Studies in the Czech Republic // Don Sparling
Works Cited
Contributors
Index
About the Author :
Melissa Tanti is a PhD candidate in English at McMaster University. Her area of specialization is contemporary women’s literature and feminist critical theory. Jeremy Haynes is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University where he studies Canadian, Indigenous, and diasporic literatures with an interest in Indigenous methodologies. Daniel Coleman is Professor Emeritus of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. He was born and raised in Ethiopia and came to Canada to go to college. After BEd and MA degrees from the University of Regina, and a PhD from the University of Alberta, he went on to teach at McMaster University. He has written scholarly books about literature, masculinity, migration, and whiteness in Canada, and he has written literary non-fiction books about his upbringing among missionaries in Ethiopia, about the spiritual and cultural politics of reading, and about eco-human relations in Hamilton, Ontario, the post-industrial city where he lives. Daniel Coleman has edited books on early Canadian literary cultures, postcolonial masculinities, race, Caribbean-Canadian literature, the state of the humanities in Canadian universities, the creativity and resilience of refugee-d and Indigenous peoples, and international scholarship on Canadian literatures. Some of these books have won awards. He is grateful to live in the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe in Hamilton, Ontario. Lorraine York, Senator William McMaster Chair in Canadian Literature and Culture in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, specializes in Canadian literary culture and celebrity studies.
Review :
"Beyond 'Understanding Canada' takes its name and impetus from the Canadian government’s 2012 cancellation of the “Understanding Canada” program, which ended nearly forty years of financial support for interdisciplinary studies of Canada around the world. As the title suggests, the collection quickly moves beyond the Understanding Canada program to examine a broader range of questions regarding the transnational circulation of Canadian literature.... [The collection] succeeds admirably, overcoming the 'material challenges' of international scholarship not only to argue for but also to demonstrate convincingly the transnational nature of Canadian literary studies." Canadian Literature 235, Winter 2017 [Full article at http://canlit.ca/article/transnational-nationalism]
"The editors draw a number of important conclusions from the collection: that the popularity of Canadian women writers abroad must be linked to their power politics; that Canada has a set of ‘less laudable links’ (Collett) that need to be examined too; that indigenous writing needs to be more visibly worked into transnational contexts, that ‘transing [as in ‘transnational’] provides an opportunity to unsettle the profitability of any singular notion of national identity’."
