Critical Collaborations

Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies

Smaro Kamboureli, Christl Verduyn, Smaro Kamboureli, Christl Verduyn

• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781554589128
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Belief as/in Methodology as/in Form: Doing Justice to CanLit Studies
• Trans-Systemic Constitutionalism in Indigenous Law and Knowledge
• The Accidental Witness: Indigenous Epistemologies and Spirituality as Resistance in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach
• Ambidextrous Epistemologies: Indigenous Knowledge within the Indigenous Renaissance
• Epistemologies of Respect: A Poetics of Asian/Indigenous Relation
• Acts of Nature: Literature, Excess, and Environmental Politics
• Ecocriticism in the Unregulated Zone
• Disturbance-Loving Species: Habitat Studies, Ecocritical Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature
• Translocal Representation: Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, Nello “Tex” Vernon-Wood, and CanLit
• Jazz, Diaspora, and the History and Writing of Black Anglophone Montreal
• Tradition and Pluralism in Contemporary Acadia
• Critical Allegiances
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Contributors
• Index