Canada’s humanitarian reach and Maggie Helwig’s Where She Was Standing

Abstract

Canada’s official rhetoric situates the nation as one capable of perceiving and arbitrating upon humanitarian need on a global scale. Unofficial discourses confirm this perception of Canada’s humanitarian credentials. One unofficial discourse that tends to question official rhetoric, however, is that of fiction. This article examines the representation of humanitarian concerns in Canadian Maggie Helwig’s novel Where She Was Standing. The novel’s portrayal of the nature of evidence, and of its own status as a type of evidence, are discussed, leading to the proposal of Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” as a potentially appropriate conceptual tool with which to deal with the difficulties in the position of Western observers of humanitarian issues in distant cultures.