Why is identity so central to literary and cultural studies? This question has always puzzled me. It is such a disputed, multi-faceted, and problematic concept, could those of us who study culture not do better without it? In my own work, I have tried to shift analysis toward questions of agency through exploring autonomy, transnational literacy, and communal negotiation, yet I have to recognize that in the current era, questions of identity appear for many people more urgent than ever. Globalization brings both homogenization in some spheres and an increased tolerance for diversity in others. Both changes can threaten stable notions of identity. North-American poet-critic Charles Bernstein suggests that “No issue has dogged poetry so much in the past two decades as identity—national, social, ethnic, racial, and local.” We could add gender and sexual orientation to this list. He continues: “Like the Americas, identity is always plural. And like the Americas, identity is necessarily, a priori, identity-obsessed parts, syncretic and braided, indeed, self-cannibalizing, as surely as the DNA that flows in our psyches and concatenates our mental projections” (Bernstein, “Our Americas” 67-68). Here Bernstein voices an emergent view of identity as plural, fluid, interactive, and always in transition, a view that shapes how many linguists and poets understand language today, but which remains somewhat at odds with the reality that identities may also be experienced by many as far less fluid in practice. In this paper, I am interested in how what Bernstein calls “mental projections” may be created through literature. Identity proved a rallying cry for two of the popular social movements of the last few years: the Occupy movement and Idle No More. Occupy emerged in response to a global trend toward increased economic inequalities, recognizing the power imbalances separating the 99 per cent from the 1 per cent, and then took root in many different localities, perhaps especially of the developed world, while Idle No More began in Canada in response to a specific issue and then aroused global interest in its call for social justice and its reminder that the Americas was land already occupied.
In similar interwoven fashion, I see recent trajectories of Canadian literary debates as simultaneously arising in response to our own time and place and interacting with global theoretical fashions, so as to reconfigure them in dialogue with local concerns and orientations. Instead of seeing Canadian literary traditions as derivative of models formed elsewhere, I see them as sometimes concurrently developing comparable models and at other times forming their own distinctive kinds of engagements with the compelling issues of the day.
Today’s talk emerges from my interactions with the Concurrences Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies in Vaxjo, Sweden, where I have spent the last four months engaging with their research group, which seeks to develop “methodological and theoretical foundations for empirical studies that map forms of simultaneous, concurring claims of reality, experience, and meaning.” Their chief research question asks “whether and how it is possible to listen to complementary or conflicting occurrences at the same time and in the same place,” or, put differently, how can the researcher “allow multiple voices to be heard, stories that voice concurrent claims on geographical, temporal, political, and moral spaces.” For me, this question resonates with settler/colonial particularities but it has a much wider reach. As Metis writer Emma LaRoque asks: what happens “when the other is me”? Their project is interdisciplinary and collaborative. Concerned by the ways in which many different disciplines and streams within them seem to be investigating similar questions from different angles, they wonder if it will be possible to bring those investigations together so as to create a greater cross-fertilization of ideas. While the focus of their work is postcolonial, my visit constitutes one of their first engagements with Canadian studies. So this talk, written for an audience in Israel, emerges from my readings of Canadian texts from a Swedish location, in which Walter Mignolo’s revision of Descartes’s formula,” I think, therefore I am” resonates deeply with me. From his own location in the Americas reading the history of colonial modernity, Mignolo proposes “I am where I think,” which for me seems to echo Northrop Frye’s framing of the Canadian identity question as one that asks, not “who am I?”, but: “where is here?”
The full paper may be read online at this link.
References
Bhabha, Homi K., ed. 1990. Nation and Narration. New York and London: Routledge.
Brand, Dionne. 2005. What We All Long For. Toronto: Vintage.
Cariou, Warren.”’How Come these Guns are so Tall’: Anti-corporate Resistance in Marvin Francis’s City Treaty.”
—. “Foreword.” Marvin Francis. Bush Camp.
Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class; and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life. New York: Basic Books: 2002.
Francis, Daniel. 2002. City Treaty: a long poem. Winnipeg: Turnstone.
—. “Description of Proposal.” Daniel Francis Fonds. Archives. University of Manitoba.
Heti, Sheila.2012. How Should a Person Be? Toronto: Anansi
—. “A New Canadian Myth for New Canadian Times.” Response to the Globe and Mail. Post April 15, 2013
http://backtotheworld.net/2013/04/15a-new-canadian-myth-for-new-canadian-times-by-sheila-heti/
Australia and Canada are among the world’s most highly urbanized countries yet myths of the wilderness and the bush continue to dominate national imaginaries and perhaps especially, to deny indigenous peoples full rights to the city. This paper will engage postcolonial settler urban imaginaries as they are challenged and redefined through texts that reposition the national, the global, and the transcultural through a focus on walkers in two Canadian cities as imagined by Sheila Heti, Dionne Brand and Russell Smith (Toronto in How Should a Person Be?, What We All Long For and Muriella Pent), and Winnipeg (in Marvin Francis’s city treaty: a long poem). These texts each renegotiate what Jane Rule calls “contracts with the world” in the shadow of Canada as a “treaty nation” reimagining the gendered and racialized spaces of the city. These urban imaginaries will be contrasted with those linked to the streets of Sydney, Australia, through a brief comparison of the ways in which Gail Jones’s Five Bells may be seen to revise not only Kenneth Slessor’s canonical poem of the same title but also Christina Stead’s accounts of walkers in the city in Seven Poor Men of Sydney and For Love Alone. In relocating the Australian myth of the lost child from the bush to the city, revisiting Stead’s hymns to the harbour, and revising Slessor’s elegy for a drowned companion, Jones reimagines Sydney as a place where losses must be remembered, where danger still lurks, but also as a place where forgiveness and new beginnings might be possible in a city increasingly seen to be a crossroads for the world. Each text asks what it means to think in these cities, where as city treaty puts it, “we all walk edges uncertain / on border slippery … between bush and city” 28).
The full paper may be read at this link pdf
Image Ryan McGinley, still from Sigur Ros video “Varuo” illustrating Don’t Move to New York @artfcity by Paddy Johnson
http://artfcity.com/2013/04/24/art-f-city-at-the-l-magazine-dont-move-to-new-york/
Preliminary References
Ben-Messahel, Sahlia. “An Interview with Tim Winton.” Antipodes vol. 26. No. 1 (June 2012): 9-12.
Bhabha, Homi K., ed. 1990. Nation and Narration. New York and London: Routledge.
Bhabha, Homi. K. The Location of Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 1994.
Brand, Dionne. 2005. What We All Long For. Toronto: Vintage.
Callahan, David. “Failing to Meet in the Middle: East Timor and Gail Jones’s ‘Other Places’”. Antipodes. 137. December 2012. 137-142.
Cariou, Warren.”‘How Come these Guns are so Tall’: Anti-corporate Resistance in Marvin Francis’s City Treaty.”
—. “Foreword.” Marvin Francis. Bush Camp.
Castells, M. 1996. The rise of the network society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Clarke, Stella. “Her Time.” The Australian. January 29, 2011.
Dale, Leigh. (2013): “No More Boomerang? ‘Nigger’s Leap’ and ‘Five Bells’.” Journal of Australian Studies, 37:1, 48-61.
Dixon, Robert. (2013) “Invitation to the voyage: Reading Gail Jones’s Five Bells.” Journal of the Association for Austrralian Literary Studies. (JASAL) 12:3.
www.nta.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/viewFile/…/3320
Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class; and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life. New York: Basic Books: 2002.
Francis, Daniel. 2002. City Treaty: a long poem. Winnipeg: Turnstone.
—. “Description of Proposal.” Daniel Francis Fonds. Archives. University of Manitoba.
Heti, Sheila.2012. How Should a Person Be? Toronto: Anansi
—. “A New Canadian Myth for New Canadian Times.” Response to the Globe and Mail. Post April 15, 2013
http://backtotheworld.net/2013/04/15a-new-canadian-myth-for-new-canadian-times-by-sheila-heti/
Iyer, Pico. The Global Soul.
Jameson, Fredric.1986. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” Social Text 15: 65-88.
Jones, Gail. Five Bells. Sydney: Vintage, 2011; New York: Picador e-book 2012.
Pierce, Peter. The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Smith, Russell. 2005. Muriella Pent. Toronto: Anchor.
The Globe and Mail—the newspaper I saw my father reading every day when I was growing up—published a profile of me this past weekend. In it, a familiar Canadian story was told: Canadian artist, neglected in Canada, finds acclaim in the States, and only then at home. While there is certainly some truth to this, and a lot of what I said in the piece seemed to corroborate it, I made a point of telling the journalist that my story feels different to me, as does the story of my latest book’s publication, and that I think it’s time for a new story.
Crosstalks is a quarterly academic talk show, broadcast live in English, brought to you by KTH and Stockholm University. It is a forum for some of their greatest scientists to talk to each other, to international colleagues, to people in other fields and to students about some of the great issues of our day. Not only do great minds meet at…
The teaching term at my school ended last Thursday afternoon, and since then I've been reflecting a great deal on the power of failure.
End of term is the time when students rush headlong into final essay writing and exam preparation, so their anxiety about grades yet to come is at an all-term high; meanwhile, they are eating too little and drinking too much, needing far more care than we can (or even should) offer.
As I have mentioned in the form of Facebook bitching and Twitter complaint, D and I are required to submit IELTS scores as part of our applications for permanent residence in Canada. It is not enough that we claim to be native speakers and have been hired by Canadian institutions to teach sophisticated uses of the English language to college and university students; we must also have some standardized test company certify our basic proficiency in the national tongue (one of them).
Lecture Title: “Autonomy, Transnational Literacies, and Planetarity: Emergent Cultural Imaginaries of Research Engagement”
This paper will introduce my participation within cultural studies projects that have crossed borders and can be understood as interdisciplinary and collaborative activities devoted to understanding the various ways in which people make meanings within different cultural contexts under changing historical and economic pressures. I offer these three terms for cultural studies engagement because they have emerged in response to challenges posed by globalization and the growing need for global research and action. They offer alternative ways of framing some of cultural studies’ most persistent concerns. I will explain why these concepts matter and the work they can help us do as cultural studies continues to reinvent itself in interaction with our changing global climate of knowledge construction. I am responding to current debates within the North American/European nexus of cultural studies, and to make my case, will discuss some dimensions of the argument offered in Lawrence Grossberg’s Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (2010) and various texts by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who has inspired further thinking about transnational literacy and planetarity across the disciplines.
The full text of the lecture may be read in this pdf online.
Works Cited
Alhassen, Amin. (2007). “The Canonic Economy of Communication and Culture: The Centrality of the Postcolonial Margins” Canadian Journal of Communication. 32. 103-118.
Appadurai, Arjun.
Bhambra, Gurminder K. (2007). “Sociology and Postcoloni8alism: Another ‘Missing’ Revolution?” Sociology. 41.5: 871-884.
Birns, Nicholas (2010). Theory After Theory: An Intellectual History of Literary Theory from 1950 to the Early Twenty-First Century. Peterborough: Broadvidew.
Boatca, Manuela, Sergio Costa and Encarnacion Gutierrez Rodriguez. “Introduction: Decolonizing European Sociology: Different Paths towards a Pending Project.” In Rodriguez, E.G., M. Boatca, and S. Costa, eds. Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches. Farnham, Ashgate, 2010.
Brydon, Diana. “Competing Autonomy Claims and the Changing Grammar of Global Politics.” Globalizations. vol.6. no.3 (Sept 2009): 339-352.
—. “Critical Literacies for Globalizing Times.” Critical Literacy, Special Issue: Theories and Practices. 4:2, June 2010. 16-28. www.criticalliteracyjournal.org
“Earth, World, Planet: Where does the Postcolonial Literary Critic Stand?” In Cultural Transformations: Perspectives on Translocation in a Global Age, ed. Chris Prentice, Henry Johnson, and Vijay Devadas. Rodopi, 2010. 3-29.
Brydon, Diana and W. D. Coleman, ed. (2008) Renegotiating Community: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Global Contexts. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Cetina, Karin Knorr. (2007) “Culture in Global Knowledge Societies: Knowledge Cultures and Epistemic Cultures.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. 32.4: 361-75.
Clifford, “Indigenous Articulations” In Wilson, R and C.L Connery, eds. The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2007. 13-38.
Code, Lorraine. (2000) “The Perversion of Autonomy and the Subjection of Women: discourses of social advocacy at century’s end,” in C. Mackenzie and N. Stoljar, eds. Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 181-209.
Dimock, Wai Chee.(2006) Through Other Continents. Princeton: Princeton UP.
During, Simon. (2005) Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.
Featherstone, Simon. (2005) Postcolonial Cultures. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press and University Press of Mississippi.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. (2010) “Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies.” MODERNISM / modernity. 17.3: 471-99.
Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar (2002) “Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction.” Public Culture. 14.1: 1-19.
Ghai, Yash. (2000) “Ethnicity and Autonomy: a framework for analysis” In Yash Gai, ed. Autonomy and Ethnicity: Negotiating Competing Claims in Multi-ethnic States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 415-440.
Gilroy, Paul. (2005) “A New Cosmopolitanism” Interventions 7.3: 287-292.
Grossberg, Lawrence. (2010) Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Gunkel, Ann Hetzel. (2011) “On Cultural Studies in the Future Tense: Pedagogy and Political Work in Cultural Studies.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. 8.3. 323-329.
Heise, Ursula K. (2008). Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jefferess, David. (2008) Postcolonial Resistance: Culture, Liberation, and Transformation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Lee, Ezra Yoo-Hyeok. (2011) “Globalization, Pedagogical Imagination, and Transnational Literacy,” CLC Web: Comparative Literature and Culture. 13.1. 1-12. http://doc.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol13/iss1/1
Levander, Caroline and Walter Mignolo. (2011) “Introduction: The Global South and World Dis/Order” The Global South. 5.1.1-11.
Morris, Rosalind C, ed. (2010) Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on an Idea. New York: Columbia University Press.
Moure, Erin and Forrest Gander. (2011) “Preface.” Andrés Ajens. Poetry after the Invention of América: Don’t Light the Flower. Trans. Michelle Gil-Montero. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ostler, Nicholas. (2010) The Last Lingua Franca: English until the Return of Babel. New York: Walker & Co.
Pavan Kumar, Malreddy. (2011) “Postcolonialism: interdisciplinary or interdiscursive?” Third World Quarterly. 32.4. 653-672.
Reiss, Timothy J. Against Autonomy: (2002) Global Dialectics of Cultural Exchange. Stanford University Press.
Rethmann, Petra, Imre Szeman, and William D. Coleman (2010) Cultural Autonomy: Frictions and Connections. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. (2003). Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press.
—. (1990) The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym. New York: Routledge.
—. (2006) “World Systems and the Creole.” Narrative. 14.6: 102-12.
—. (2010) Nationalism and the Imagination. London: Seagull Books.
—. (2011). “Response.” Parallax. 17.3: 98-104.
Staten, Henry (2005) “Tracking the ‘Native Informant’: Cultural Translation as the Horizon of Literary Translation” In Bermann, Sandra and Michael Wood, eds. Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation. P;rinceton: Princeton University Press. 111-126.
Young, Robert J.C. (2011). “The Right to Resist.” In Oboe, Annalisa and Shaul Bassi, eds. Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures. Abingdon: Routledge. 43-58.
Seminar title: “Taking Responsibility for the Human Sciences”
“Everybody talks about the crisis in the humanities but nobody takes responsibility for it” (Bernstein 78)
In making this claim, American poet Charles Bernstein issues a challenge to imagine ethical forms of teaching and research appropriate to the demands of our globalizing world. Bernstein proposes poetics “as the foundation for a realm of value that is neither scientistic nor moralistic.” Instead, “Poetics is the ethical engagement with the shifting conditions of everyday life” (78). Bernstein’s poetics offers one possible alternative with the flexibility to negotiate the combined fluidities and frictions of life in global times and the continuing need to decolonize the imagination, reinventing social imaginaries on more egalitarian and inclusive principles. What, then, might it mean to take responsibility for the human sciences today? I will discuss my preliminary answers to this question by drawing on three collaborative, interdisciplinary research activities: “Brazil/Canada Knowledge Exchange: Building Transnational Literacies,” “Globalization and Autonomy,” and “Building Global Democracy.”
Work Cited Bernstein, Charles. “The Practice of Poetics.” In Attack of the Difficult Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 73-80.
Copies of Brydon’s paper for the seminar can be obtained from Stephen.wolfe@uit.no and will be available at the seminar.
Taking Bernstein’s challenge as its starting point, this paper considers the potential of Gayatri Spivak’s notions of planetarity and transnational literacies for reimagining humanities futures.
