Twenty literary critics engage a variety of genres - essay, life writing, testament, polemic, poetry - to explore the ways Canadian cultural production has been shaped by social and historical relations and can be given new and various forms to decolonize the institutions associated with the creation of this country's vision of Canadian literature.
Primary audience is Canadian literature scholarsContributes 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 issuesParticularly for those interested in the concepts of intersectionality, solidarity, and relationality
