Latest posts
Suburb Nation: Canadian Literature and Suburban Space | University of Guelph | November 8, 2024
Presentations discussing suburban space, environment, and settler colonialism in recent Canadian Fiction.
Extra-Canadian Ecologies | ALECC Conference | Wilfrid Laurier University | June 2024
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. Read More
What the World Might Look Like by Susie O’Brien
Susie O’Brien’s What the World Might Look Like: Decolonial Stories of Resilience and Refusal (McGill-Queen’s University Press, May 2024) exposes the complexities and limits of resilience and questions the concept of resilience, highlighting how Black and Indigenous novelists can offer different decolonial ways of thinking about and with resilience to imagine things “otherwise.”
Book Launch: Restoring Relations through Stories by Renae Watchman
When: May 7, 2024 – 10:30 a.m.-12 p.m.
Where: McMaster University, ISS Ceremonial Room – LRW 1811
Restoring Relations Through Stories: From Dinétah to Denèndeh (University of Regina Press, May 2024) introduces, synthesizes, and analyzes traditional stories by Diné and Dene storytellers in orature and film. The book conceptualizes narrative autonomy as hane’tonomy and visual storytelling from a Diné perspective, offering a map for re-storying that resists inauthentic and misappropriated stories. Watchman centres Indigenous narratives and examines how these narratives are tied to land and relations.
Suburb Nation | ACCUTE Conference | McGill University | June 2024
If Canada is a suburban nation, what are its suburban stories? What dreams and diasporas land immigrant communities in suburbs? How has the mid-twentieth century popular imaginary of the suburb as a white middle-class, automobiled enclave been written otherwise across varied experiences of racialization, diaspora, and generation — and in the era of fossil-fuelled climate change? What histories are disrupted, and which are forged in suburban lives and spaces? What other places and social lives are relationally entangled in the suburbs — in social connections, in memory, in colonial displacements, and in material economies of labour, production, consumption, waste, and emissions? How are suburban arrivals and departures — and pasts and futures — narrated? What poetic practices engage suburban form and its social relations?
This three-day panel at the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) is on methods of reading literary texts that illuminate the racialized dimensions of the environment and climate change. Read More.