Canadian Nation-state Research Articles

Isotopic Poetics: The Petrocultural Appropriations of Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons

Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons (2015) broadens the scope of what might be considered a politicized ecopoetics. Battler’s collection, which I suggest works through a poetics of appropriation, links experimental poetic form with Anthropocene criticism in the humanities and critical studies of settler colonialism, addressing the contiguities between ecological degradation and land expropriation, while also making the appropriation of language one of its central formal concerns. In the context of the Canadian nation-state and its extractive economies, I argue that Battler’s “isotopic poetics” appears as a politically motivated formal praxis for working through the tangled exigencies of ongoing settler-colonial dispossession and the accelerating environmental crisis.

Editors’ Note

Editors’ Note Silvia Patricia Solís, Wanda S. Pillow, Darius Bost, and Kimberly M. Jew This issue begins with an essay from our general submissions. Ranjoo Seodu Herr offers a philosophical analysis of the relationship between Indigenous women’s rights and self-determination within the settler Canadian nationstate. In her research, Herr notes that “some Indigenous women . . . strongly support the collective right to Indigenous self-determination even at the expense of women’s individual rights.” Herr invites readers to engage with the full essay and then sit with the analysis regarding the paths forward for Indigenous feminists and civil rights. The remainder of this volume is dedicated to the special issue “Deterritorializing Frontiers: Opening Space for Dis(mis)located Voices” with guest editors Lydia Huerta Moreno and Ana Gómez Parga. This special issue opens spaces for transfeminist dialogues from a range of perspectives and geographies in order to decenter Western structures of knowledge and to address the violence of academic imperialism. The issue represents different geopolitical perspectives, sensibilities, and mobilities—Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, El Salvador, Bolivia, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, and the US-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, and Cuidad Juarez, Chihuahua. The contributions are in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, making it the first multilingual issue of Frontiers in its history. To echo the guest editors, this issue required extensive editorial work by the guest editors and the Frontiers Editorial Collective. The work undertaken to produce this special issue was in itself a deterritorializing process and reiterated the stakes of this special issue. The submission process through our English-only online portal was not feasible for some authors located outside the US. The journal’s websites, instructions, and author documents additionally privileged English-only protocols. Initial communications were in English but that was not sustainable and did not make sense. So we soon [End Page ix] switched to the preferred language of the guest editors and authors. Multilanguage reviewers were identified and submissions repeatedly transcribed. A special search had to be made to find Spanish and Portuguese copyeditors prior to submitting the special issue to the press. The process made us reflect on and critique how we operate as a feminist journal. We want to thank the University of Nebraska Press for their support and responsiveness throughout this process. However, this support did not take away from multiple layers of recognition of the assumptions of academic publishing, including feminist publishing. Additionally, the time period of work on this special issue occurred during the implementation of some of the most anti-immigration policies in the US, during travel bans and during economic turmoil and hurricanes in the places authors were living, working, protesting, and writing. Then came a global pandemic, further highlighting systemic racism and social inequities amid protests, hate, and political upheaval. Journal and press timelines and to-do checklists did not work under these precarities. This process exposed the ways that the westernization of feminist publishing creates procedural obstacles for non-Western scholars and serves more privileged, English-speaking scholars in the US academy. As editorial assistant, Dr. Silvia Patricia Solis took on all primary communications with authors, guest editors, reviewers, and copyeditors. Without Silvia’s extraordinary direction and commitment this special issue would not have made it to print. This special issue, began as an investment on Global South feminisms, turned into a praxis of actually doing feminist collective work. Frontiers is sitting with this experience and making changes in how and what Frontiers can do as a feminist publication. The beauty in this issue and in the labor undertaken to bring it to print is captured in the poetics, the activism, and in a collective reference to the writings of the radical women of color who edited and participated in the 1981 feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back. In that same spirit, we turn to Toni Cade Bambara in This Bridge, to express the radical possibilities in feminist practices, “Now that we’ve begun to break the silence and begun to break through the diabolically erected barriers and can hear each other and see each other, we can sit down with trust and break bread together. Rise up and break our chains as well...

"A Different Economy": Postcolonial Clearings in David Chariandy's Brother

This article explores the myriad of ways in which racial identity and geographical location are deterministic factors in David Chariandy's Brother (2017). Borrowing from theories of critical race scholars, including Rinaldo Walcott, Idil Abdillahi, and Frantz Fanon, this article argues that Chariandy's book is an exemplar of how an economy based on intrinsic value privileges human bonds over money. In response to dominant Canadian discourses that position Black men as criminals, Chariandy's novel celebrates Black masculinities and reveals how law enforcement haunts the communities, homes, and small businesses of Black people. The characters in Brother find refuge in what I call postcolonial clearings, which take the form of barbershops, hidden valleys, and music. This article begins with the premise that Canada is a colonized territory that treats Black people as second-class citizens. The article underscores police brutality which in Brother—a text set in the Toronto of the mid-1990s—is directed at racialized people, especially Black men. Chariandy not only breathes life into Black men rendered nameless and faceless by powers-that-be, but he also questions the central ideals and pillars of the Canadian nation-state.

Rendering Whiteness Palatable: The Acceptable Muslim in an Era of White Rage

In this paper, I analyze the perspectives of the Acceptable Muslim (Kassam, 2018)in two Canadian case studies: (a) Irshad Manji, a Canadian Muslim journalist and activist who has been an active commentator on a variety of issues including those related to Muslims; and (b) the CBC sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie (2007-2012), which was the first Canadian mainstream television series featuring Muslim characters. I suggest that these case studies illuminate the figure of the Acceptable Muslim (Kassam, 2018)who is represented as a “moderate,” modern, and assimilable Muslim, and who espouses a privatized faith with few public expressions of religious/cultural belonging. Centrally implicated in Canadian debates about multiculturalism, gender equality, citizenship, and secularism, Acceptable Muslims (re)confirm the racial boundaries of the nation-state, becoming icons of multiculturalism, reanimating the whiteness at the heart of the Canadian nation-state. The Acceptable Muslim sustains the narrative of the Canadian nation-state as liberal, secular, modern, and inclusive even as it relentlessly excludes, punishes, and eliminates the Muslim Other, enabling such policies to be legitimated as “race-neutral.” Acceptable Muslims stand as sentries at the (symbolic) borders of the nation, reanimating racialized boundaries of acceptability and signalling that those beyond these boundaries can be legitimately policed by the nation-state. My analysis provides insights into how Canada has re-configured the power and persistence of its white fantasy and, through the strategic use of the Acceptable Muslim, cloaks its deeply racialized coding in more palatable grammars of multiculturalism, gender equality, and secularism.

Martyrdom, collective memory, and the contested penal authority of racial state institutions

Recent work in postcolonial and border criminologies has called for more extensive consideration of the complex temporal and geographic dimensions of penal authority. This article explicates new dimensions of the modern state’s penal authority by analyzing the execution and remembrance of Mewa Singh, a Sikh anticolonial activist convicted of killing Canadian immigration agent William C Hopkinson in Vancouver in 1914. Because Hopkinson was embedded in racial immigration enforcement against Indian populations as well as intelligence gathering about anticolonial activities, his death galvanized fields of penal authority that spanned the imperatives of the Canadian nation-state and the British Empire. Using archival and observational data, this article tracks how the significance of Mewa’s execution has been articulated through these penal fields as well as through recent practices of memorialization undertaken by local Sikh and Indian communities. Insofar as these mnemonic practices frame Mewa’s death as a sacrifice necessitated by state racism, my analysis illuminates the complex temporal parameters of penal fields of authority as well as the manner in which they are conditioned by racial borders and boundaries.

Inter-referencing Asian Canadian Studies: imagining diasporic possibility outside the (Canadian) nation

ABSTRACTThis paper proposes to use inter-Asian methodologies to reread Asian Canadian Studies. As an intellectual and political project, Asian Canadian Studies has largely been constituted through its responses to the Canadian nation-state and anti-racism alliances but has failed to seriously engage with Asia as a critical problematic. Informed by theories and practices of inter-referencing developed through Inter-Asia critique, we reconsider the specific pressures, local debates, and historical moments that have produced the field's central arguments and reframe the field as a series of localized reference points in dialogue with each other as well as with Asia. We conclude by turning to Madeleine Thien's novel Dogs at the Perimeter in order to ask what it might mean to localize Asian Canadian Studies and reposition it as part of a transpacific rather than nation-based formation.

Race, Space, and Prostitution: The Making of Settler Colonial Canada

This article examines the fundamental role that prostitution has played in securing settler colonial domination over Indigenous peoples and lands in the historical and ongoing making of the Canadian nation-state. Using the theoretical and methodological framework developed by critical anti-racist feminist scholar Sherene Razack, this article offers a spatial analysis tracing how prostitution has been deployed, repeatedly and in distinctly racialized and gendered ways, to secure settler colonial domination in Canada. This analysis focuses on four key examples: (1) early settlement in British Columbia; (2) the Indian Act; (3) the Pass System; and, more recently, (4) Vancouver's Missing Women. It also focuses on how these settler colonial deployments of prostitution contributed (and, in some ways, continue to contribute) not only to violence against Indigenous women and girls but also to the justification, legitimation, and erasure of this violence and, thus, its normalization within settler colonial society.

Who gets in? The Price of Acceptance in Canada

The Canadian nation state is often applauded for its open and welcoming attitude towards Others. The Prime Minister of Canada has openly stated that “Diversity is our strength.” However, who gets in suggests who and what Canada values. Through the stories of Jazmine, Nico and Harold shared by Global News, I will illustrate how Canada continues to discriminate against people with disabilities. Using critical disability studies and critical race theory, I explore the assumptions the “excessive demand,” point system, and medical exam make in labelling and disregarding disabled applicants who are read as undesirable and unworthy. Finally, I reflect on the dangers of these media stories which focus on the accomplishment/contributions of the parents without considering the inherent values of the children.

Borderland Identities in Niagara: Craig Davidson’s Cataract City (2013)

ABSTRACTThis present article explores how border identities are narrated in Craig Davidson’s Cataract City (2013), a Canadian novel about friendship between two young men, set in Niagara Falls, Ontario and their involvement with a smuggler on the Tuscarora Reservation near Niagara Falls, New York. Drawing on research on the complex and contradictory nature of border identities in Canada and elsewhere, it examines how the novel’s Niagara protagonists negotiate identity and relationships in the region. My reading shows how the text’s protagonists engage in cross-border activities without forming ties on the other side of the border. The Native characters demonstrate a different rapport with the 49th parallel, positioning themselves outside of both the American and Canadian nation-state yet without forming pan-tribal alliances. In the end, Davidson’s fictional representation of the Canada–U.S. border region in Cataract City confirms and complements border studies research that finds increasing obstacles to cross-border cooperation and an absence of shared identity constructs along the Canada–U.S. border.

Racial extractivism and white settler colonialism: An examination of the Canadian Tar Sands mega-projects

ABSTRACT Building on an analysis of the historical context of oil and gas extraction in the Athabasca region of Canada, and the white settler colonial policies, management, discourses and logics that enable it, this work examines the Canadian nation-state’s neoliberalisation, and the white settler state’s contemporary interrelationship to the transnational oil and gas industry in the region. This first point is addressed through a summary description of the emergence of neoliberalism in both the US and Canada – as these two contexts are deeply interrelated. The second half of the paper examines the contemporary context of the extractive oil and gas industry in the Athabasca region and its ties to contemporary white settler colonialism. Under the conditions of neoliberalism, I argue that these reconfigured relationships, while continuing trajectories of previous forms of white settler colonialism, represent a unique character transformation in the ways and means that both settler colonialism and white supremacy are executed and reproduced. This character change can best be described as a normalization process, whereby free market ideology deeply anchors settler claims to Indigenous lands in the rhetoric of individualism, private property and capital power that is state-supported. The racialised dynamics of accessing the cheap labour needed to expand the extractive industries in the region, and the immigration and labour policies needed to facilitate this will be briefly examined here alongside contemporary popular national discourses of the Alberta tar sands. These naturalizing discourses simultaneously attempt to present the Canadian nation as white, while erasing the existence of Indigenous peoples and discursively (and sometimes physically) ejecting non-white citizens from the settler nation-state’s claimed territories – territories that have been naturalized as falling under Canadian jurisdiction. Furthermore, addressing how concepts of race and realities of racism structure the Canadian nation-state and the extractive industries profiting from ongoing settler colonialism, I argue that racial extractivism, a concept introduced herein, works within and as part of racial capitalism in this neoliberal context. Indeed, race, racism and racialisation need to be analysed in relation to neoliberalism’s operation in settler colonial contexts as these continue to naturalize, order, enable and rationalize settler colonial violence and its extractive manifestations.

“Mother of Her Nation”: Dr. Éléonore Sioui (1920–2006)

Abstract Éléonore Sioui was born in 1920—the same year that the Canadian deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott, proclaimed infamously, “Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question and no Indian Department.” The major piece of legislation guiding Canadian federal relations with First Nations, the Indian Act, reinforced Scott’s declaration, promoting an imperial patriarchal system that disregarded Wendat matrifocal traditions. This policy swept across the Canadian nation-state, transcending provincial borders and informing mainstream society’s attitudes toward Indigenous peoples. Although the 1920s seemed to suggest a new wave of racist and sexist objectives, the national policies remained consistent with the historical process of colonization and imperial rule in North America. This article uses Sioui’s life story as a window into this long history, providing insight into twentieth-century Indigenous social movements such as the political activism of the 1970s, the quest for higher education in the 1980s, and the efforts to harmonize Indigenous international rights in the 1990s. Taken as a whole, Éleonore’s Sioui’s participation in these movements outlines a successful strategy to counter colonialism. Throughout her existence, Sioui witnessed the ongoing marginalization of Indigenous peoples at home and abroad, motivating her toward a lifetime dedicated to combating these policies and empowering Indigenous women like herself.

Liminality and (Trans)Nationalism in the Rethinking of the African Canadian Subjectivity: Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

Drawing on the concepts of liminality proposed by Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner and Althusser's three ideological tools that nationalism prescribe to be undertaken by individuals who try to become an integral part of a national community, this paper reads Esi Edugyan’s debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2004), as an exploration of the role of literature within the debate about the different positions of black Canadian subjectivity and national adherence. George Elliott Clarke and Rinaldo Walcott polarized the African Canadian criticism by proposing two different theories in an attempt to shape up and (re)define the subjectivity of black Canadians. Clarke advocates to include African Canadian subjectivity in the national desire to belong to a uniform Canadian culture and aims to establish the African Canadian identity in Canada’s national soil. Conversely, Walcott stands up for the defense of transnationality as the best way to explore and grapple with African Canadian subjectivi- ty aiming to contest racism while fostering self-definition. Declining Clarke’s theory, Walcott warns African Canadians to “think contrapuntally within and against the nation” (22) as a means to counteract a Canadian nationality that has historically exclud- ed its black citizens. It is my argument that The Second Life of Samuel Tyne fully participates in this debate and aligns partially with Walcott’s liminal status for black Canadians. The diasporic nature that defines Samuel Tyne together with his impossibility for succeeding and recognizing himself as truly Canadian place Edugyan’s novel within the scope of Walcott’s critical theory and helps to reconsider and to overtly challenge the image of Canada as a compassionate and egalitarian nation-state as well as to reconsider the negotiation of space. The concept of liminality stands as a valuable critical lens to highlight the retrieval of a transcultural African Canadian subjectivity that shows the complex and multiple faces of black Canadians. However, by setting forth a liminal subjectivity that aims to problematize black Canadian subjectivity, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne expands, to a certain extent, Walcott’s understanding of the diasporic approach by rejecting nostalgia as a melancholic hindrance. In this way, it bridges memory and present to cultivate a new reading of the diasporic approach that confirms an acute and more precise reading of the black Canadian experience. In so doing, the novel discusses the waning of the sovereignty of the Canadian nation-state and opts for uprootedness, transnational politics and deterritorialization as the way to extol a self-(re)definition of the coeval African Canadian subjectivity.

Obituaries as Markers of Memory

Many Aboriginal peoples belong to stateless nations within the White Canadian nation-state. Their claims to sovereignty are predicated on a timeless, immemorial existence that predates White settlement. Yet, the very reproduction of the nation is a gendered and raced project, centering some bodies while marginalizing others. In tracing the ways in which Aboriginal women have been projected on the canvass of the nation’s memorials—in obituaries—this article interrogates the visibility/invisibility of Aboriginal women and sheds light on the changing racial logic that underpins the articulation of race and gender in the twenty-first century.

Since Skyscrapers: New Histories of Native-Newcomer Relations in Honour of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of J.R. Miller's Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens

It has been a quarter century since the publication of Jim Miller's Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1989). Coming as it did in the wake of the modern Native rights movement and the Indigenous cultural renaissance of the 1970s and '80s--and informed by a series of landmark court cases that alerted Canadians to the centrality of historical questions to pressing national political issues--Miller's work marked the coming of age of a new type of Indigenous historical scholarship in Canada that brought to the fore the experiences and stories of Indigenous peoples even as it firmly situated them within the colonial history of the Canadian nation-state. J.R. Miller caught a wave, as it were, for as he noted in his preface to the first edition, his study was greatly stimulated by the work of (p. xiii). In the decades prior to Skyscrapers, many historians had already started to question the tendency of earlier scholars to relegate First Nations history to the introductory chapters of general Canadian survey texts or to consider that history as important only within certain subfields (most prominently in fur trade history). But it was really Skyscrapers, with its nation-wide coverage and its characterizing of Canada as a colonial settler state that led non-Indigenous Canadians to consider the history of Indigenous people as integral to the country's narrative, rather than a mere backdrop. Miller highlighted how First Nations peoples and cultures had resisted and were renewing--indeed, that they were charting a course into the future despite Canadian policies that sought to displace and assimilate them. Skyscrapers was a history of what the Canadian state had done to First Nations, as well as a story of how Aboriginal people responded. But more than that, it was a work of scholarship that boldly challenged non-Indigenous Canadians to learn about their past so that together with First Nations peoples they could create a better future for everyone. As such, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Skyscrapers, coinciding as it does with the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action, remains a poignant and inspiring work of scholarship. The articles in this special issue represent new perspectives on Native-newcomer relations in Canada. In one way or another, all of them are either inspired by the work of Jim Miller or enabled by the work that he and others of his generation (such as Sylvia VanKirk, Jacqueline Peterson, Olive Dickason and Arthur Ray) have done to better understand the shared history of Canada's Indigenous and settler societies. The first essay in this collection, by George Colpitts, reorients our understandings of both the forms and motivations for international/tribal cooperation during the fur trade era. He reveals how memories, spirituality, and understandings of a neutral landscape enabled the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot nations), Cree, Nakoda, and Saulteaux peoples to put their differences aside and cooperate during a series of particularly mild winters in the 1830s that disrupted the migratory actions of bison in Alberta's Neutral Hills. …

Settler colonialism in Canada and the Métis

Although the literature on settler colonialism intends to identify what is specific about the settler colonial experience, it can also homogenize diverse settler colonial narratives and contexts. In particular, in Canada, discussion of the ‘logic of elimination’ must contend with the discrete experiences of multiple Indigenous groups, including the Métis. This article examines relationships between Métis people and settler colonialism in Canada to distinguish how Métis histories contribute to a broader narrative of settler colonial genocide in Canada. Cast as ‘halfbreeds’ and considered rebels by the newly forming Canadian nation-state, Métis peoples were discouraged from ‘illegitimate breeding’. Moreover, their unique experiences of the residential school system and forced sterilization have heretofore been underexplored in historiographies of genocide and settler colonial elimination in Canada. These social, political and racial divisions in Canada are magnified through genocidal structures and they reach a critical juncture between colonialism and mixed ethnicities. At that juncture, groups like the Métis in Canada are within a metaphorical gap or, more accurately, a jurisdictional gap. Colonial treatment of the Métis demonstrates, in part, the broad reach of colonial control and how uneven it is, often to the detriment of the Métis and Indigenous groups in Canada.

Localized Critical Theory as an Expression of Community Archaeology Practice: with an Example from Inuvialuit Elders of the Canadian Western Arctic

AbstractCritical theory has been little used in archaeology, despite its exceptional ability to understand social relations and circumstances, both past and present. In this paper, I develop the concept of a localized critical theory that connects broadscale global processes, such as colonialism and capitalism, to cultural processes that occur at the local level. This expression of archaeological practice has the power to hear, cultivate, and share the voices of individuals and communities as they speak about their respective histories, while recognizing and acknowledging their broader social context. I explore how lnuvialuit Elders' memories are portrayed and interpreted within the lnuvialuit Living History project, focusing particularly on their memories of traditional beluga-whaling in the Mackenzie Delta of Canada’s Western Arctic that were evoked through the identification and handling of ancestral whaling artifacts. I use localized critical theory to explore how Elders’ distinctive perspectives and experiences of beluga-whaling through the course of the mid-twentieth century articulate with and comment on wider historical processes and the agendas of the Canadian nation-state.

The Book of Others ( Book IV ): Canadian Multiculturalism, the State, and Its Political Legacies

THE MULTICULTURAL MOVE TO LANGUAGE It is always worth reminding Canadians that when Pierre Elliott Trudeau introduced Multiculturalism Policy to Parliament in October 1971, it was not an attempt to change fundamental character of modern Canadian nation-state. Rather, policy's intent was to manage non-French and non-English peoples of nation, as Eve Haque clearly explains in her discussion of Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism's (B and B Commission) production of other ethnic groups of Canadian body politic (186-237). The B and B Commission's work simultaneously cemented idea that French and English/British ethnicities constituted founding races of Canada (5-8, 14, 53-56, 87-93, 140-52). Furthermore, move to language rather than ethnicity for white French and English/British was a cover to preclude racial designation as foundational to nation, all while making it fundamentally so (6, 18, 62-71, 75-78, 160-62). Indeed, late Robert Stanfield, Progressive Conservative Opposition Leader, stood to endorse policy by saying that, wish to state immediately, Mr. Speaker, that emphasis we have given to multiculturalism in no way constitutes an attack on basic duality of our country (234). The duality that was already assumed and came to be enshrined in bilingual and multicultural articulation of nation-state as fundamental to its founding was soon after enshrined in legislation and law. MULTICULTURALISM AS RACIOLOGICAL THINKING Eve Haque's Multiculturalism Within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race and Belonging in Canada returns us to origin scene of Canadian nation-state's formation and management of its non-French and non-English/British others, to provide an account of how language, race, and culture have produced modern context of contemporary multicultural Canada. Haque's engagement with Canadian multiculturalism focuses squarely on the Preliminary Report and Books I (The Official Languages) and IV (The Cultural Contributions of Other Ethnic Groups) (7); her focus cannot be downplayed, for effects of Book IV continue to mark Canadian multicultural policy, politics, and their associated imaginaries. Haque begins her study with Jacque Parizeau's 1995 outburst that money and ethnic vote were reasons that No Campaign was narrowly successful in last referendum in Quebec (3-4, 238, 264). By beginning there, Haque pinpoints how deep structures of language, culture, and continue to shape contemporary Canadian politics, public sphere, and national imaginary. This shaping of contemporary Canadian national imaginary is fashioned through a recourse that places two languages outside boundaries of and ethnicity, only to be remarked by their accent as cultures - founding cultures of Canada. Indeed, Haque's work seeks to unmake such remarking as troubling work of and raciological thinking. Furthermore, it is Haque's argument that multiculturalism as policy usefully operated and operates in a space where public policy as biologically based racial exclusions became increasingly politically and socially disreputable (6). The disturbing impact in aftermath is how language and culture has come to stand in for and raciological thinking and in new and sustained ways more than forty years later. It is precisely manner in which language and culture appear to foreclose discussions of race and racism in Canada that makes Haque's contribution and reading of historical documents so important to contemporary debates on multiculturalism and racism. Indeed, Haque's analysis in part points to reasons why term barbaric cultural practices is currently used by Government of Canada to describe exclusively non-white cultural in Canadian citizenship guide (Zine 2012, 18). …

Becoming Queer Here: Integration and Adaptation Experiences of Sexual Minority Refugees in Toronto

Since the early 1990s Canada has become a primary destination for individuals who make refugee claims on the basis of sexual orientation persecution. However, until recently, there was little research focusing on this growing component of Canadian urban queer communities and their experiences of the refugee claim process, and their integration and adaptation to Canadian society. This paper, based on interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) refugee claimants and participation in LGBT newcomer support groups in Toronto, explores the formal and informal processes, spaces and practices through which LGBT refugee claimants learn about the Canadian nation-state, citizenship and queer identities and communities, and in so doing enter a space/moment of becoming a ‘becoming’ refugee as they learn the social, cultural, and bureaucratic processes and norms of the Canadian refugee apparatus.

On Strangers and Ambivalence: Reconsidering the Ethical Boundaries of Asylum in Michael Helm's Cities of Refuge

Michael Helm’s recent novel Cities of Refuge (2010) offers a gallery of physically displaced people and of spiritual exiles who, albeit presenting different characteristics, are all subsumed within the category of the stranger. By foregrounding the ethical responsibility toward the stranger in our midst, the novel engages with questions of current concern, such as the impact of global-scale displacements and conflicts on the Canadian nation-state. Consequently, while delving on the ambivalence of the stranger, this essay tangentially addresses the following questions: how does the state manage its physical and imaginary borders? How does the presence of undocumented subjects impinge on Canada’s national self-image in the age of official multiculturalism and extolled pluralism? How is the average Canadian urbanite affected in his/her everyday life by the presence of these underground, non-status subjectivities? In which ways are the violences of history and of the state brought to bear upon the bodies and destinies of failed refugees in Canada, as well as upon Canadian citizens themselves? Given the philosophical extent of these concerns, my reading of the novel has been inspired by the discussions of Jacques Derrida and of Zigmunt Bauman around the ambiguities attached to the figure of the stranger. Frank Kermode’s Sense of an Ending has proved equally illuminating in my attempt to grasp the novel’s focus on the production of narratives as tools for providing order and meaning out of the ambivalent and apocalyptic experience characteristic of our globalized world.

Continental Divide: The Canadian Banking and Currency Laws of 1871 in the Mirror of the United States

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, international observers praised the stability of Canada's banks. When financial institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom collapsed, Canada did not experience any bank failures. The World Economic Forum'sGlobal Competitiveness Reportrated Canada's banking system as the most sound in the world. Historically, bank failures have been quite rare in Canada. Some authors argue that the stabilizing features of Canada's financial system were established in the first five years after the creation of the Canadian nation-state in 1867. This paper will examine the making of the Canadian banking law in 1871, an event widely regarded as a crucial turning point in Canadian financial history.