Trent University | French and Francophone Studies
| Research Areas: Lettres Françaises with a specialization in Canadian and Indigenous Studies; Interdisciplinary Studies; Queer Theory; De/Postcolonial and Settler Colonial Studies |
Zishad Lak is a postdoctoral fellow (Lakehead University Orillia) and an adjunct professor at the French Department and Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa. Zishad completed her PhD in Lettres françaises with a specialization in Canadian and Indigenous Studies at the University of Ottawa in October 2020. Her research is interdisciplinary and primarily engages with queer theory and de/postcolonial and settler colonial studies. Lak’s doctoral thesis offers an intercontextual and comparative reading of contemporary novels written in French and English by Indigenous, Black, Euro-settler and diasporic writers in the territory currently known as Canada. Lak is the Emerging Scholar Representative at the Association of Canadian and Québécois Literature (ACQL). Zishad also oversees the English and CanLit component activities for the group “Culture and Colonialism in Canada and Québec” (Principal Investigator: Dr. Pierre-Luc Landry).
Selected Publications
Lak, Zishad and Pierre-Luc Landry. “On the Road in ‘French America’ Métissage and Discursive Self-Indigenization in Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues.” Indigenous Studies Review, Volume 53, Issue 1, 2023–2024, pp. 57–67.
This article examines discursive and narrative strategies of métissage and self-indigenization in Volkswagen Blues, a transculturalist novel published in 1984 by Quebecois writer Jacques Poulin. Claims to indigeneity and métissage in the novels do not appear directly, but through the myth of French America; settler colonialism is concealed, Indigenous peoples are relegated to a prehistoric past, and French settler past is implicitly foregrounded as the origin of North America.