Literature and the Glocal City

Reshaping the English Canadian Imaginary

Ana María Fraile-Marcos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780367869762
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317682158
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The modern city is a space that can simultaneously represent the principles of its homeland alongside its own unique blend of the cultures that intermingle within its city limits.

This book makes an intervention in Canadian literary criticism by foregrounding both 'globalism,' which is increasingly perceived as the state-of-the-art literary paradigm, and the city. These are two significant axes of contemporary culture and identity that were previously disregarded by a critical tradition built around the importance of space and place in Canadian writing. Yet, as relevant as the turn to the city and to globalism may be, this collection's most notable contribution lies in linking the notion of 'glocality', that is, the intermeshing of local and global forces to representations of subjectivity in the material and figurative space of the Canadian city. Dealing with oppositional discourses as multiculturalism, postcolonialism, feminism, diaspora, and environmentalism this book is an essential reference for any scholar with an interest in these areas.

1 Mobility and Its Disenchantments in Marie Clements’ The Unnatural and Accidental Women and Burning Vision

Deena Rymhs

In the fall of 2009, a flurry of petitions emerged in protest against alleged changes to the March for Murdered and Missing Women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.¹ A memorial for the distressing number of women, many of them Indigenous, who have been murdered or gone missing in Canada, the historic march coincided with Day Three of Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics. Committed to ensuring the flow of Olympic traffic in the downtown core, the City of Vancouver, VANOC, and the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit reportedly discussed cancelling or relocating the march. As visual reminders of the destitution, poverty, and violence that Indigenous people continue to experience in Canada, the memorial march and its venue of the Downtown Eastside² presented a damning image of the country as it played host to the Olympics. The contest of values that emerged in public discussions of the march prompts deeper reflection of mobility, territory, and the racialization of space writ large in Indigenous- settler history. An assertion of visibility for its participants as well as for those it memorializes, the march is also a defiant exercise of mobility—a movement through important arteries of the city that interrupts traffic and, in so doing, reclaims physical and symbolic city space. The threat of its cancellation represented a trumping of one group’s mobility for another’s, the prioritization of Olympic traffic over the circulation of the city’s everyday users and its most disenfranchised inhabitants.

From the history of the Road Allowance People to the recently memorialized “Highway of Tears,”³ roads figure prominently in Indigenous people’s collective experiences of dispossession. Some of these traumatic histories are remembered in spatial metaphors like “The Trail of Tears” and “The Long Walk.”⁴ Evoking images of routes and uprooting, this language describes the forced movements of Indigenous communities while adumbrating the containment, sometimes imprisonment, that followed. Mobility, when read in light of these histories, is burdened with unsettling reminders of state-sanctioned violence, expropriated territory, and the exercise of power over bodies. Recent writing by some Indigenous authors explores this tension between mobility and confinement,⁵ joining emergent theoretical discussions of space, biopolitics, and states of exception. Contributing to this literary archive, Marie Clements’ The Unnatural and Accidental Women (1999) and Burning Vision (2003) examine mobility through different representational and politicohistorical frames. Clements’ two works further key critical insights on gendered, racial, and cultural experiences of mobility—experiences beset by exile, displacement, and ecological and human violence in both plays. The analytics I employ in this chapter thus converge with those that have animated recent discussions in political geography, border studies, and spatial theory. My aim here is not to debate the possibilities and limitations of mobility in the context of globalization. Rather, I wish to trace how, in both plays, violence is constitutive of mobility. The Unnatural and Accidental Women and Burning Vision posit mobility and exitability⁶ as effects of modern power—a power over the movement of people and things that leaves in its trail irremediably altered lives and landscapes.

Burning Vision plots its events along the “road to the atom” (Clements 14), a route extending from the Northwest Territories to Ontario, New York, New Mexico, and other centres of the Manhattan Project before its terminus of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While the play’s events end around the 1940s, the network of political and industrial alliances, resource extraction, and transport that produced the atomic bombs augurs an era of transnational capitalism that would follow soon after. Burning Vision not only explores the role that technologies of mobility have played in human and ecological destruction, but it also reflects on the new geographies created by technologies of mobility. Contrasting with the geographically expansive dramaturgy of Burning Vision, The Unnatural and Accidental Women’s primary setting is Vancouver. This play intimately re-creates lives of women rent by gendered, sexual, and racial violence. At first blush, the two plays are vastly different: Burning Vision’s focus is global, while The Unnatural and Accidental Women’s setting is local;⁷ Burning Vision reflects on shared complicities and shared traumas stemming from the uranium’s extraction; The Unnatural and Accidental Women examines the deaths of women, most of them Indigenous, by a Vancouver serial killer; Burning Vision follows the movement of things—pitchblende, uranium, bombs—through physical, conceptual, and heterotopic space; The Unnatural and Accidental Women focuses on the movement of people—dispossessed Indigenous women, primarily—in urban space. Both plays, however, explore the relationship between violence and mobility while also depicting communities and environments rendered vulnerable by the logic of capitalism. Linking its female characters’ uprooting to the logging industry’s violent alteration of landscapes, The Unnatural and Accidental Women connects these experiences of colonial violence to the broader spatial history of Vancouver. Reading these two works together encourages deeper recognition of what might be called relational space—a reminder of how the local is unassailably affected by global processes. Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which figures as the affective centre of The Unnatural and Accidental Women, does not exist in a vacuum: its frontier history and its current material-social status are the outcome of neoliberal policies, capital accumulation, and global economics beyond its borders.

The Unnatural and Accidental Women revisits the murder of ten women by Gilbert Paul Jordan between 1965 and 1988. Eight of the ten of Jordan’s victims were Indigenous women who lived or worked in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside where Jordan operated a barbershop. Luring his victims with alcohol, Jordan reportedly coaxed the women to drink excessive amounts. Several women died in Jordan’s company with suspiciously high blood alcohol levels, but coroners’ reports ruled their deaths as “unnatural and accidental” because of prevailing perceptions of the women as alcoholics and prostitutes. At least seven women died before Jordan was convicted of manslaughter in the 1987 death of Vanessa Lee Buckner, a white woman. Jordan served six years of his nine-year sentence; he was never convicted of murder.

The Unnatural and Accidental Women unfolds around its central character Rebecca, a thirty-year-old Métis woman searching for her mother who was one of Jordan’s victims. Ten characters in the play are ghosts of women loosely based on the real-life murder victims. The play takes the form of a revenge drama with surrealist influences,⁸ but it is also a memorial to the real women whose deaths were treated indifferently because of the spaces they inhabited. Michelle LaFlamme places The Unnatural and Accidental Women alongside the work of artists Yvette Nolan, Rebecca Belmore, and Archer Pechawis who “document, historicize, and elegize the deaths of Aboriginal women in Canada.” While Clements’ play does not claim to be a non-fictional account of the murders, it commemorates the victims and affirms the value of their social existence. The play’s premiere performance at Vancouver’s Firehall Arts Centre, mere blocks from where the women were murdered, further anchors this work in the real— localizing and repatriating this artistic production to the community it seeks to represent.

When Clements wrote and produced The Unnatural and Accidental Women in the late 1990s, over sixty women in the Downtown Eastside had been reported missing. Another serial killer, Robert William Pickton, would soon dominate news headlines as horrifying details of his involvement in many of the women’s deaths came to light.⁹ While the police and media had been slow to respond to the disappearances of women (disappearances that had been reported over the previous two decades), the Pickton case brought national attention to the racial and sexual violence that was part of daily life for many women living in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The developments that occurred during and after the writing of The Unnatural and Accidental Women form an extra-textual register to the play, linking the displacements and vulnerabilities examined in Clements’ work to more recent and immediate instances of such violence. The Pickton murders were a reminder of what Achille Mbembe calls a “necropolitical” social order, where certain bodies, which have already died a “social death” (21), are seen as disposable.¹⁰ While the public’s latent reaction to the women’s deaths was characterized by shock and outrage, the murders were but a paroxysm of what was in fact a normalized and widely-known violence.

A few decades later, the “Murdered and Missing Women” cases in Canada have attracted widespread media and scholarly attention. While the media’s borderline-pornographic fascination with these crimes has been duly criticized, and while the ethics of scholarly as well as artistic engagements with this violence have also been questioned, one of the more valuable recognitions that has emerged from this broader public discussion is the critical role of space in determining the social value of the victims’ lives. In her analysis of Stan Douglas’ panoramic photograph, Every Building on 100 West Hastings, Denise Blake Oleksijczuk draws a parallel between dominant perceptions of the women and the abandonment, objectification, and repudiation captured in Douglas’ image of this row of buildings in the Downtown Eastside. The women, that is, were conflated with the spaces they inhabited. Oleksijczuk’s critical analysis is among a growing body of work exploring the interplay of race, space, and gender in the violence that the “Missing and Murdered Women” have come to evoke.¹¹ These other critical engagements inform my discussion here, but my analysis is primarily interested in mobility’s relation to this violence. It is worth mentioning that many of the missing women in Vancouver were described as transient in ways that relieved authorities of responsibility to investigate their disappearances. Inner-city residents, Nicholas Blomley similarly observes, are often characterized as unfixed in ways that exclude them from the rights and entitlements of citizen-subjects. The vulnerabilities of forced or even elected mobility, in such examples, exist outside the logic of property ownership, settlement, and late capitalism’s ontologies of belonging, Blomley argues. The Unnatural and Accidental Women and Burning Vision register mobility’s injurious effects in the counterhistories they tell—stories of characters who are compelled to “keep on walking” in limited geographies of shrunken space and attenuated possibilities, or communities who watch the land beneath them turn to toxic or deforested environments in what Rob Nixon calls the “slow violence” (2) of fast capitalism.

The Unnatural and Accidental Women explores mobility’s racial and gendered limits by following the movements of Indigenous female characters who cannot wear their bodies lightly in urban space. For Rebecca’s mother and the other women whom Jordan murdered, Vancouver’s charged potential for violence reveals the colonial frontiers still operating within this settler city. Its inner-city streets offer impunity for racial and sexual violence, a place of exception where, as Sherene Razack puts it, “violent acts can be committed without meaningful consequence” (142). In this morally charged geography, the Downtown Eastside is construed as a “zone of degeneracy” sealed off from the rest of the city (Jiwani and Young 899). This perceived localization of crime, poverty, and delinquency to the Downtown Eastside corresponds with David Theo Goldberg’s discussion of urban segregation, specifically the spatialization of racial and class categories. The physical visibility of the Downtown Eastside serves what Goldberg calls “panoptical discipline” (198), a joint operation of spectacle and segregation that “magnifies the image of racialized criminality” and “extend[s] discipline over inhabitants and visitors by monitoring them without having to bother about the intraspatial disciplinary relations between them” (197). The form of discipline that Goldberg describes here is inherently spatial, limiting the movements of those who live in monitored spaces like the Downtown Eastside. It is not only the effects of these “degenerate” spaces—effects that include drugs, crime, poverty—that are vigilantly prevented from spilling over into the rest of the social fabric, but the people themselves—their mobility and access to the rest of the city.

Yet city spaces are obviously more fluid than such geographies of segregation might imagine. In The Unnatural and Accidental Women, Rebecca’s apartment in Kitsilano, an upper middle-class neighbourhood in Vancouver where she later lives as an adult, is described as “reflecting] the symptoms of urban isolation even without being on Hastings Street [in the Downtown Eastside]” (Clements 7). This image of Rebecca’s apartment suggests affective connections between seemingly disparate spaces—a view of the city defined less by its “metropolarities” (Soja, Postmetropolis 265) and more by its shared complicities in the violence seemingly contained to the Downtown Eastside. Clements reminds us that the degradations and trauma of Downtown Eastside cannot be sealed off from the rest of the city’s consciousness. This description of Rebecca’s apartment might further suggest that, for racialized women like Rebecca, the Downtown Eastside is never far away: Rebecca carries this part of the city with her as a result of her shared history there, but processes of racialization ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Permissions
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Urban Glocality and the English Canadian Imaginary
• 1 Mobility and Its Disenchantments in Marie Clements' The Unnatural and Accidental Women and Burning Vision
• 2 Embodying the Glocal: Immigrant and Indigenous Ideas of Home in Tessa McWatt's Montreal
• 3 From Rowanwood to Downtown: The Torontonians and Girls Fall Down
• 4 Dystopic Urbanites: Civilian Cyborgs in TransCanadian Speculative Fictions
• 5 The Intrinsic Potential of Glassness: Narcissistic, Opaque, Organic Modes of Signifying the Urban in Vancouver
• 6 The Refugee as Signifier in the Semiotics of the Glocal City: Michael Helm's Cities of Refuge
• 7 Responding to Late Capitalism: The Mall
• 8 Hipster Urbanism and Glocal Toronto
• 9 Glocalization and Neoliberalism in Michael Winter's The Architects Are Here
• 10 Ian Fleming's Canadian Cities
• List of Contributors
• Index