This panel focuses on what might be metaphorically described as the externalities—extra-national side effects—of the production (ecological, cultural, political, technological, economic) of Canada as a settler colonial nation. More broadly, it aims to illuminate material relations that exceed the country’s territorial boundaries through atmospheric, oceanic, and other planetary systems, as well as the offshoring of ecological hazards and globalized, racialized markets in labour and resource appropriation, which often have devastating ecological effects elsewhere, especially in the Global South. Among the questions this panel takes up:
· How does Canadian environmentalism and/or ecocriticism engage or obscure extra-national issues of social/environmental justice?
· How do mythologies of nature/culture in Canada, along with adjacent concepts of liberalism, democracy, multiculturalism, sustainability and resilience, work to shore up white nationalism?
· How does art/literature/film, etc., focus on topics such as migrant labour, offshore extraction industries, and the global effects of local industrial and environmental practices to illuminate the environmental lines, relationships, articulations, and flows of racial capitalism and settler colonialism that fall outside national boundaries?
· How do narratives of diasporic mobility and belonging challenge settler colonial myths of Canadian nature?
· How do Indigenous art and literature problematize settler stereotypes of Indigenous stasis and illuminate extra-national cultural and ecological mobilities and alliances?
Participants:
Tania Aguila-Way (University of Toronto)
Susie O’Brien (McMaster University)
Zahra Tootonsab (McMaster University)