"En Route" : narratives of travel and displacement in contemporary Canadian writing

Abstract

From a fictional as well as a theoretical point of view, the present interest in travel is a consequence of the increasing relevance of postcolonial discourses and the ongoing processes of cultural transference and globalisation. These phenomena have resulted in a re-conceptualisation of notions of identity, location, place and site, which foster, in turn, the rethinking of terms like home, margin and periphery. Most of these have been targeted by post-structuralist and postcolonial theories in their attempt at disrupting unified and imperialist conceptions of subjectivity and place. In Canadian fiction, the abiding relativism affecting notions of culture and nation elaborated on binary pairs is laid bare by physical and metaphorical displacement. This paper examines the arena of de/re-territorialisation provided by travel and displacement in a number of Canadian fictions. Many contemporary Canadian narratives are cohesively joined by the recurrent motifs of travel and displacement, paralleling the geographical movement to a re-organisation of identity paradigms at personal, cultural and national levels. Hence, the sample of Canadian writing presented here exhibits a concern with journeying as destabilization of unified subjectivity, mirroring, in this way, much of the debate of contemporary theory