Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue ed. by Diane Brydon and Marta Dvořák (review)

Abstract

Diane Brydon and Marta Dvorak, editors. Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginarles in Dialogue. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier up, 2012. 321 pp. $85.00. Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginarles in Dialogue originated in conference at Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris called and Vision: Situating Canadian Culture Globally in 2008. Editors Diane Brydon and Marta Dvorak have ably assembled papers from conference address abiding concerns of conference and especially notion of that gives book its title. Brydon and Dvorak declare that they are interested in how readers negotiate meaning in contexts where norms of understandings diverge, that is, how different subjects might interpret similar materials across different settings. For editors, these settings are ones that are shaped in particular by notion of globalization, by movements across and through different nation-states and subject positionings. The rubric for understanding these interactions is what they term crosstalk, which they see metaphor for ways in which audial and visual imaginaries interact create complex forms of interference. The editors focus on Canada, including Quebec, as means of focusing on forms of that can, in some way, be situated partly in relation Canada but that also extend beyond such borderings. They see crosstalk, in particular, continuous, ongoing, and co-constructing activity that relentlessly performs unbordering, resulting in a field where Canadian may not disappear but may well become destabilized and rearticulated. While such notion of provides overall framework for engagements found in volume, subsidiary concerns also structure book, particularly those of crosstalk, improvisation; dialogism, polyphony, voice; and space, place, and circulation. Brydon and Dvorak set an ambitious agenda for understanding functioning of transnational flows in literary context in Canada, one that remains clearly in editors' focus. The contributors volume respond this structure in variety of ways. Writer Olive Senior opens volume with consideration of the importance of voice and in her practice. Voice and vision enable Senior consider how colonial and postcolonial movements between her youth in Jamaica and her being situated in Canada influence her writing. This meditation builds on address that Senior gave during initial conference and provides an opening book that is situated within creative practice, thereby complementing theoretical concerns of editors in their introduction. Section one of book, focusing on concerns of collaboration, crosstalk, and improvisation, documents literary practices that might fall aslant of more frequently studied aspects of Canadian cultural work. Ajay Heble and Winfried Siemerling collaboratively produce chapter on their ongoing Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice project, project that focuses particularly on how improvisation--often within context of jazz--impacts cultural practice. For them, reading through writers like Michael Ondaatje and Wayde Compton, jazz and mixing might provide metaphors for discourse that can demonstrate political potential in crossing of borders. Similarly, Daniel Coleman argues, in following chapter on David Chariandy's novel Soucouyant and Lee Maracle's novel Daughters Are Forever, that these two texts' use of notion of melancholia to describe residual effects of colonial trauma might allow for productive conversation between Caribbean diasporic and Salish Indigenous contexts. Coleman's goal of generating an epistemological crosstalk demonstrates Brydon and Dvorak's proposed methodology being put work politically significant ends. Ric Knowles's subsequent contribution focuses on work of Monique Mojica and work-shopping of her performance pieces in order read for ways in which theatre might help suture wounds inflicted by colonization. …