Smaro Kamboureli Research Articles

The Emergent Writes Back: Emergent Ethnic Self-History Recasting Dominant Ethnohistory in Khaled Hosseini’s Fiction

“Anglophone,” “Postcolonial,” Diasporic,” “Transnational,” “Ethnic,” “Multicultural,” “Cosmopolitan,” and “Emergent” are all umbrella terms that are used to lump together writers who write from the fringes of the Western center. Such writers, however various and different their literary productions are, create worlds in their stories and populate them with characters that defy and counteract many Western essentialist misconceptions about their homelands. In this context, and resonating with Salman Rushdie’s seminal statement— “the empire writes back to the center”—and Smaro Kamboureli’s “the diaspora writes back home” (30), I argue that “the emergent” also writes back as a response to the dominant mainstream discourse. This paper seeks to read Khaled Hosseini’s fiction as an exemplar of an emergent narrative that deals with Afghanistan’s ethnic self-history and voices the gory details that can only be perceived and mirrored through the lenses of an insider. Being a diasporic ethnic writer, Hosseini’s fiction discredits the Western ethnohistory that mainly offers an essentialist depiction of the writer’s homeland, typifying, thereby, the colonial discourse as dominant.

The Geography of ‘Otherness’: Spaces of Conflict in Smaro Kamboureli’s in the Second Person

In today’s “liquid” society, boundaries and limits are shifting or disorienting: belonging to no place, not knowing where ‘home’ is, underlines the sense of uncertainty and in-betweenness experienced by people. This contribution suggests five spatial issues Greek-born Canadian author Smaro Kamboureli has to negotiate with in her ‘poetic diary’ in the second person, where she investigates the duality of the self, displaying the double “I” of the writer’s split subjectivity on a concrete (Greece) as well as abstract (language) place of living. Kamboureli’s account of a duel with and a paradoxical courting of what was and is now for her “the place of language” is related to the awareness of inhabiting a “third” zone of expectations: the difference of origin, of country, of point of view. In conclusion, the different levels of spatial negotiations Kamboureli has had to come to terms with have made her a completely different person. Her life on the border, epitomized in turn by airports, boats, Greece, and the Greek islands, is indeed an endless research of, as well as a conflict with, the ‘Other’, which opens up questions about the relativity of the space/place dichotomy.

“[They] would say she was betraying Poland already”: Major Themes in Contemporary Canadian Literature by Writers of Polish Origins

In June 2015 The Canadian Polish Research Institute organized a panel discussion chaired by professor Tamara Trojanowska called “Writing Change and Continuity: Culture, Languages, Generations.” The debate featured esteemed writers of Polish descent: Eva Stachniak, Andrew Borkowski, Ania Szado, Jowita Bydlowska and Aga Maksimowska. Although the writers in question do not belong to the same generation and do not share exactly the same emigration experience, nowadays they form a distinguished group of Canadian writers of Polish origins. The aim of this paper is to look at the selection of the latest texts written by authors of the Polish diaspora in Canada such as Eva Stachniak’s The Chosen Maiden (2017), Jowita Bydlowska’s Drunk Mom (2013) and Guy (2016), Ania Szado’s Studio Saint Ex (2013) and Aga Maksimowska’s Giant (2012) among others. This paper does not venture to repeat the conclusions drawn during the panel but rather to extend the exploration of the recent Polish diasporic, multivoiced writing as well as offer a modest supplement to the famous analysis of ethnic writing proposed by Smaro Kamboureli in her Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada (2009). Hence, the discussion comprises the authors’ choice of themes, (dis)appearance of immigrant motifs, references to Poland as a country of origin and Canada as the new homeland as well as an analysis of the genres the aforementioned authors use.

Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada edited by Dean Irvine and Smaro Kamboureli

<i>Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada</i> edited by Dean Irvine and Smaro Kamboureli

Dean Irvine and Smaro Kamboureli, eds. &lt;i&gt;Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada&lt;/i&gt;

Dean Irvine and Smaro Kamboureli, eds. &lt;i&gt;Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada&lt;/i&gt;

Living in Messy Times: An Interview with Kit Dobson

Abstract Kit Dobson is an Associate Professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary where he works on Canadian literature, film, and art. He is the author of Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization (2009), which tracks the development of globalization in Canadian literature. He is also the editor or co-editor of three more books: Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu (2013), Transnationalism, Activism, Art (with Áine McGlynn, 2013), and Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace (with Smaro Kamboureli, 2013). More recent work looks at the intersection of neoliberal governance and literary practice. In this interview, we discuss the political potentials of literature in a thickly material field, asking how it circulates amidst calls for social justice, how it helps code and decode spatial stability, and how it helps us map the effects and affects of global pressures on the individual subject.

Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada ed. by Dean Irvine and Smaro Kamboureli

Reviewed by: Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada ed. by Dean Irvine and Smaro Kamboureli Margaret Steffler Dean Irvine and Smaro Kamboureli, eds. Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada. Wilfrid Laurier up, 2016. 335 pp. $42.99. Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada originated in a joint workshop organized by the Trans-Canada Institute and Editing Modernism in Canada (emic) in October 2011. The workshop, as explained by Dean Irvine and Smaro Kamboureli in their introduction to the edited collection, was designed to address the dialogue between "the cultural and material particularities outside a text that shape its production, publication, and circulation with those inscribed in it," taking into account "recent developments in editorial methodology" and "the important changeover from a presumably homogeneous CanLit tradition to Canadian literatures" (14). Providing opportunities for participants to move easily between their roles as critics and/or literary authors and editors, the workshop encouraged the fluidity and collaboration that characterize the highly successful and prolific research carried out within and, in this case, between the Trans-Canada Institute and emic. Irvine and Kamboureli are correct in their assertion that there is a "dearth of critical material on the theory and practice of editing in Canada" (4). In helpfully placing this conference and edited collection in the context of, and to some extent in opposition to, earlier conferences and collections, the editors clearly showcase what is different, dynamic, and forward looking in current relationships between editing, criticism, and theory, demonstrating the rich, diverse, and complex ways in which twenty-first-century editors are participating, through cultural practice, in the making of Canadian literatures. The insistence on the importance of collaboration runs throughout the collection, which is not surprising given the central position of collaborative work in projects undertaken by the Trans-Canada Institute and emic. Four of the fifteen essays are co-written, while intergenerational partnerships and teams are intrinsic to many of the case studies included. Contributors are writers, critics, and editors who bring the labour of editing from the periphery to the centre through understanding and using the intersections between "literary critics and textual critics" and between "literary and editorial theory" (18) to quote from the first chapter, Christl Verduyn's "Literary and Editorial Theory and Editing Marian Engel." Referencing key scholars and movements in editorial theory and practice, Verduyn's work is invaluable in its comprehensive coverage of central concepts that recur throughout the collection, such as genetic and social-text criticism and editing, the role of archival materials, and the valuing of [End Page 224] process over product. Focusing on her awareness of the "'literary/textual theory' divide" (28) identified by Michael Groden, Verduyn turns to the social-text criticism and practice of Jerome McGann, whose work and name are the most prominent of the theorists referred to in the collection. For example, in his chapter on bpNichol as editor Frank Davey places Nichol's attention to "the process of creating a text" within the "'genetic' editing mode discussed in this collection by Christl Verduyn and Zailig Pollock" (207). Although these essays share many common elements, important differences exist as one would expect in the editing of a plurality of Canadian literatures. Kateri Akiwenzie-Damn, for example, in the context of colonial history and editorial oppression, advocates for "non-hierarchical relationships," "non-interference," "linguistic accuracy," "protection of the integrity of Indigenous knowledge," and "commitment to the collective well-being of Indigenous peoples" (36–8) in "the (Indigenous) editing of Indigenous writing" (36). Speaking as "an Anishinaabe writer, editor, and publisher," she describes Kegedonce Press "as a form of kinship, a 'family' or community operating on shared goals and values for the betterment of the whole" (35). Robert Bringhurst, in addressing the controversy of his translation of Haida texts, also speaks of a collective in his belief that "culture is necessarily common property," turning to the language of John Locke when expressing his view that to "edit a text is to mix our labour with a portion of the commons" (215). My only quibble with this excellent collection, and it is a minor one, is the lack of explanation of, or clear structure for, the order in which the chapters occur. I...

Critical Collaborations: Indegeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies ed. by Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn

Critical Collaborations: Indegeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies ed. by Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn

Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies, edited by Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn

<i>Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies</i>, edited by Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn

Why Study the Humanities?

There has been a rise of what Daniel Coleman and Smaro Kamboureli call research capitalism in Canadian universities — by which they mean the need to leverage external funding through grant applications, technology transfer, and industry partnerships. This has put increasing pressure on the core disciplines to articulate their use value. This is true of the sciences as well as the arts. The latter, however, is the specific focus of Coleman and Kamboureli’s Retooling the Humanities, in which they gather together a cast of Canadian literary scholars that includes academic administrators (Findlay, Pennee), Canada Research Chairs (Brydon, Coleman, Kamboureli, Mathur), senior (Brown, Stone) and junior faculty members (Dobson), as well as a writer (Wong) and graduate students (Danyluk, Stephens), to identify the value of humanities scholarship, and its way forward in Canadian Universities.

Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies ed. by Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn

Reviewed by: Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies ed. by Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn Lisa Szabo-Jones Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn, eds. Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier up, 2014. 286pp. $42.99. Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies is the third edited collection from the TransCanada Institute's conference series that began in 2005. The three collections accumulatively attempt to think across the field of Canadian literature as it is complicit in or challenges the formation of nation and the field as institution, methodology, and, ultimately, collaborative and transformative politics. Consistent with all of these collections is their authoritative weight. The contributors are long-established experts in their respective fields, the majority in literary criticism. Critical Collaborations, comprised of twelve essays, plus an introduction by co-editor Smaro Kamboureli, shifts slightly from the two earlier collections. Although the first two collections include indigenous scholarship, environmental scholarship is absent. In its inclusion of ecological thinking, Critical Collaborations can be seen as either a corrective or as a deliberate windup to the conference series. Either way, it is edifying to see a new collection merging Canadian studies with ecological epistemologies, and in inspiring multidisciplinary ways. Although the essays do not necessarily speak to one another directly, there is a connective thread through repeated concepts, "trans-", of course, being the underlying one. Yet more subtle and provocative is the persistent emphasis on generative thinking, which occurs when the scholars cross over into the possibility of other complementary or intersecting methods of enquiry and seek interconnection. While some use the term "generative" explicitly, such as Roy Miki in his call for an arts-based or creative-critical reading approach, a field that has been gaining popularity in the humanities and social sciences over the past few years, others, such as Laurie Ricou in his "Habitat" studies, establish the concept as inherent to their methodological practice. The articles in Critical Collaboration offer intellectual rigour and insight, and, although a couple are a bit theoretically opaque at times, the majority make for invigorating reading. That said, there are many stand-outs in this collection. Space allows me to touch upon only a few highlights. After Kamboureli's introduction and Miki's essay, the collection seems ordered into three parts: indigenous scholarship, environmental criticism, and diasporic studies. The first part of the collection focuses on indigenous scholarship and offers methods for de-colonization of Western epistemologies. [End Page 207] The essays, respectively by Sa'ke'j Henderson (law), Julia Emberley (literary criticism), Marie Battiste (education), and Larissa Lai (literary criticism) move from more general theoretical engagement to literary analysis. All are outstanding. In "Ambidextrous Epistemologies: Indigenous Knowledge within the Indigenous Renaissance," through an investigation of the conflicts between Eurocentric pedagogy and indigenous knowledge (ik, Marie Battiste illustrates the ties between ecological thinking, language, decolonization, and educational reform. She demonstrates that an educational model inclusive of ik promotes "a participatory consciousness" (91), which cultivates empowerment, agency, and ultimately fulfills the terms set out in the 2008 un Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the subsequent unesco conventions. Larissa Lai presents a practice model for building creative alliances between non-indigenous and indigenous peoples, which further enriches Battiste's and Sa'ke'j Henderson's call for institutional and political reform. In "Epistemologies of Respect," she calls for a practice of ethics that allows room for ongoing learning and transformation—an "ethics-under-construction" (99). The practice, Lai contends, both acknowledges complicity in the production of colonial-settler power structures and participates, through creative practices, in "remaking of contemporary culture and an imagining of the nation" (99) to construct a different future. As successful collaborative and cross-cultural illustrations, Lai provides persuasive readings of Lee Maracle's "Yin Chin," The Movement Project's How We Forgot Here, and Marie Clement's Burning Vision, three works that explore engagement between indigenous peoples and non-white settler cultures in Canada. The second part of the collection shifts to environmental criticism, and decolonization becomes associated with the challenges in transforming human relationships to the biophysical environment. The three articles, in their respective...

If What We Do Matters: Motives of Research in Canadian Literature Scholarship

MY TITLE BEGINS WITH IF, as if to cast doubt on whether Canadian literature scholarship matters. I write as a sometime insider to the discipline of literary studies and the field of Canadian literature, referring to myself as one of an addressed by articles published in the field, and I have long felt strongly that it does matter. But the study I present here was motivated in part by questions posed from outside the discipline about whether or not and how literature scholarship matters. These questions come from a variety of locations, including from casually curious or skeptical outsiders--I hear them from friends wanting to know what research looks like, in English--but also from students hoping to join the field, as they wonder what they are supposed to do in their essays for their English classes. Behind their uncertainty, I hear the question, why: Why would we bother? Why does this text or that analysis matter? (1) Meanwhile, as Daniel Coleman and Smaro Kamboureli, Kit Dobson, and others have pointed out, similar questions are implied by funding bodies that seek a type of tidily instrumental project literature scholarship does not often seem to provide (Coleman and Kamboureli xv-xvii, xx, Dobson 16). Compelling versions of these questions come, too, from an adjacent scholarly field that I also inhabit: Writing In the Disciplines (WID) research (see, for instance, the work of John Swales, David R. Russell, Ken Hyland, Janet Giltrow, Natasha Artemeva, and Heather Graves or the contributors to Berkenkotter, Bhatia, and Gotti's edited collection). Scholars in this field, who are interested in describing the aims, habits of mind, and rhetorical practices characterizing research in various academic disciplines, have conducted some sustained analyses of literature scholarship (see Charles Bazerman, Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor, Susan Peck MacDonald, Laura Wilder, Katja Thieme, Joanna Wolfe). They have largely pursued this project by analyzing professional texts written by literature scholars, especially the published scholarly articles that embody our research. As Margery Fee observes in a recent editorial, their inquiries into our methods of analysis and argument help make explicit what is otherwise tacit and unexplained disciplinary rhetoric (Spies in the House np)--unexplained in our professional texts and, importantly, in our classrooms (see also Wilder Rhetorical, Wolfe, Thieme, Banting Uncomfortable). The questions raised by their accounts of our work connect to the questions asked by more general audiences (friends, incoming students, funding bodies), because they too can be conceived as questions about how literature scholarship should be understood and valued: How is it supposed to matter for anyone who is not already a professional in the field? (2) I want to pursue two specific versions of that question here, each version prompted by the findings of WID research about our discipline. One is, Can literature scholarship legitimately claim to be doing knowledge-making research--and thus claim to matter in a so-called knowledge economy the same way some other disciplines can? Analysts point out, for example, how our interpretive work remains so fascinated with the individual particularities and complexities of texts and phenomena that we do not generalize in ways that would enable us to coordinate our findings with others'--hence we do not generate a body of agreed-upon scholarly knowledge (MacDonald). The critical terms that we do generate in our efforts to encapsulate precisely what we see going on in our material are observed to be upward diverging: as they get more abstract, they diverge from terms other literature scholars might use for similar phenomena rather than converging with them in agreement about what is to be studied and how it is to be defined. This divergence apparently happens because our terms are crafted to be precisely appropriate to the specificities of the material we are reading closely rather than being necessarily generalizable (MacDonald 42). …

Crossing the Cobequid: Meeting Places/Lieux de rencontre

Canadian studies has long served as meeting for disciplinary approaches. As this theme issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies demonstrates, Canadian studies continues to offer tremendous potential for interdisciplinary connection and co-operation. The essays assembled here were originally presented as papers at conference jointly organized by the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University and the Gorsebrook Research Institute at Saint Mary's University in September 2013. Places: An International Canadian Studies Conference/Lieux de rencontre: Colloque international en etudes canadiennes brought together academics, artists, and authors interested in placebased cultures and in creative and scholarly collaboration and production; they came from across Canada and around the world. As special feature of the conference, participants travelled from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Sackville, New Brunswick, crossing the Cobequid Pass and tracing the movements of Indigenous peoples through the millennia. In recognition, we broke the journey at the Glooscap Heritage Centre (now known as the Millbrook Cultural and Heritage Centre) in Millbrook, Nova Scotia, the authors of The Language of This Land, Trudy Sable and Bernie Francis, introduced Mi'kma'ki as a fluid and living landscape filled with networks of reciprocal relationships and moral obligations (2012, 25). Crossing the Cobequid little later that day became the occasion for reflecting on how the land is deeply embedded in Indigenous knowledge and society. As participants travelled from one place to another, from Halifax to Sackville, across the Cobequid Pass and the provincial border between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, sharing their knowledge and learning from each other, ideas took shape and the interdisciplinary essays published here are the result.In addition to academic sessions and to keynotes by Andrea Bear Nicholas, Cole Harris, Tania Martin, and Graeme Wynn, the Meeting Places Exhibition featured work and performances by artists Alison Creba, Ray Fenwick, Eryn Foster, Frank Shebageget, Tom Sherman, Aaron Weldon, and Mitchell Wiebe, curated by Gemey Kelley at the Owens Art Gallery. The creative writers who gave public readings at the conference are similarly engaged in reimagining place. Poems and films by Hermenegilde Chiasson and stories by Alexander MacLeod are embedded in real and imagined places. Aritha van Herk's Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta (2002) and Michael Crummey's pictorial elegy Newfoundland: Journey into Lost Nation (2004), written in collaboration with Greg Locke, meditate on the authors' relationship to the places they live. Each of their readings, like the artworks on display, enacted the generative role of in Canadian arts and culture.This theme issue shares some of the highlights of the gathering with readers everywhere. Since the emergence of Canadian Studies in the 1960s, has served as both marker of identity and an object of study. Understanding Canada as and understanding place(s) within Canada have been integral to the development of Canadian Studies, from Northrop Frye's inquiry where is here? in the Literary History of Canada (1965, 826), to the situatedness Smaro Kamboureli considers formative in Canadian literary culture (2014, 7), and to the critical readings of displacement, movement, and belonging produced from various inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives. Studies of region and regionalism in literature, from Laurie Ricou's influential Vertical Man, Horizontal World (1973) and Frank Davey's cultural critique in From There to Here (1974) to Patrick O'Flaherty's The Rock Observed (1979), proliferated in the 1970s.Although early studies of region may seem dated in an era when, under the pressure of globalization, national identities seem to dissolve with their borders, these readings of local and regional cultures in Canada shaped the emerging field of Canadian Studies, often creating their own object of study as well as new cultural expressions and products. …

Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies ed. by Smaro Kamboureli, Christl Verduyn

Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies ed. by Smaro Kamboureli, Christl Verduyn

A Retrospective Futurity: Daniel MacIvor’s Marion Bridge

A Retrospective Futurity: Daniel MacIvor’s Marion Bridge Linda Revie (bio) Recent theorizing about diaspora focuses on the etymology of the word (to scatter; to sow; to inseminate) and on the biological, reproductive Oedipal logic that inevitably shapes the core of its conventional formation. For example, Julia Emberley’s analysis of archetypal blood-and-belonging literary diasporas as patrilineal accounts of father/son inheritances provides a standard of how maleness and heterosexuality function in many texts.1 Kinship and belonging are also central themes in Daniel MacIvor’s Marion Bridge, but his drama about three complex women has nothing to do with their relationships with men. Instead, MacIvor’s play challenges the heterosexuality of the family tree that typically structures diasporic narratives, and it proposes alternatives based not only on the mother/daughter line but also on sexual diversities and diverse identities. A two-act play produced in 1998, then published and nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 1999, Marion Bridge2 consists of a series [End Page 51] of short, chronologically ordered scenes, each containing a monologue delivered by one of the three main characters. The MacKeigan sisters, all in their thirties, have gathered in the family home to be with their gravely ill mother. Agnes, the eldest hard-living sibling, has left a faltering acting career in Toronto to come back to Sydney, Nova Scotia; Theresa, a cloistered nun, has taken a leave of absence from a religious community in New Brunswick; and Louise, the unemployed perennial “outsider,” has never ventured beyond Cape Breton. They fall into familiar patterns of behaviour: Agnes and Theresa argue and bicker while Louise watches television. As they all act out, their dying mother (unseen throughout the play) is upstairs, still exerting her will. Eventually, she commands her daughters to visit their neglectful father. This stirs up more resentment, for he represents the dangers of the past. While they are making that call to him, their mother dies. Each sister grieves the mother’s passing in her own fashion, then, in a plot twist worthy of Louise’s favourite soaps, find ways to reconnect with Joanie, the daughter Agnes placed for adoption fifteen years before. By the end of the play, the sisters have decided to bring Joanie “home.” En route, they also find a way to honour the memory of their deceased mother by detouring to a place she had loved: Marion Bridge.3 Because their mother had loved it so well, Marion Bridge holds a mythic place in the imaginations of the three main protagonists. Their stories about how they remember a family trip to this small community about twenty kilometres from Sydney invoke what Stuart Hall calls “a narrative of displacement” that recreates “the endless desire to return to lost origins” (402). Further, for Igor Maver, Marion Bridge would stand in for the MacKeigan’s nostalgically invested and contested “home,” and, [End Page 52] paradoxically, it would be “a place of no return” (“Introduction” x). In the play, glimpses into how the three sisters reimagine Marion Bridge map an intense longing for events that have been lost, perhaps not even experienced. What this “homeplace” comes to represent is a profound state of turning backward in time, of being temporarily en route to a displaced self and destination. All of this resonates with the diasporic condition as it is theorized by Smaro Kamboureli. Like Hall and Maver, Kamboureli analyzes the diasporic state as a journey toward an origin that one is “never destined to return to …” (132). Kamboureli also notes that a shift or change often occurs during a subject’s “becoming” diasporic, specifically at the moment of realizing that the “otherness” of identity is defined by something “foreign” or outside the self. Kamboureli calls this a “self-identification by negation” and postulates that this process sets up a binary of the “I” and “not-I” selves. Within that paradigm, the subject realizes identity cannot be found through a relation to some remote place that s/he is attached to, but it must be discovered in the context of self-negation in present place and time (139). This essay examines each sister’s individual and collective journey back...

The Good and the Read: Literary Value and Readership in Canadian Literature

Review article on Colin Hill, Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012), and Smaro Kamboureli and Robert Zacharias, eds., Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012).

‘LULLABIES FOR BROKEN CHILDREN’: DIASPORIC CITIZENSHIP AND THE DISSENTING VOICES OF YOUNG SIKHS IN CANADA

Within transnational networks of diasporic youth identities and formations, how are narratives of migration, memory, and violence rendered intelligible by youth? How are diasporic experiences articulated by Sikh youth in Canada, and what creative means do youth utilize to do so? In this paper we examine personal narratives and the artistic practices of diasporic Sikh youth living in the Greater Toronto Area in order to examine the nexus between youth formations and diasporic citizenship (Cho, Lily. 2007. Diasporic Citizenship: Contradistinctions and Possibilities for Canadian Literature. In Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature, edited by Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki, 93–109. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press). By doing so, we aim to elaborate upon how Sikh youth situate themselves within larger frameworks of citizenship and migration. The narratives and practices of Sikh youth that we examine in this paper do not fit neatly into these larger frameworks, which often position the Sikh body as a radical, potentially dangerous, racialized, gendered and subversive sign in a post-9/11 world and in the context of Canadian liberal multiculturalism. By examining memorial events, youth-created media content, artistic performances and by conducting interviews with second and third generation Sikhs, we contend that diasporic Sikh youth in urban Canada are actively involved in debates over identity under the rubric of Canadian citizenship and multiculturalism. These dissenting voices hinge upon critical analyses and experiences of present and past violence which shape their everyday worlds.

The Perils of “Research Capitalism”

A review of Coleman, Daniel and Smaro Kamboureli, eds. 2011. Retooling the Humanities: The Culture of Research in Canadian Universities. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press.

The Question of Authenticity in Migrant Self-Translation

Through the reading of Smaro Kamboureli’s and Ariel Dorfman’s translingual memoirs, this essay examines how the trope of authenticity figures in migrant narratives of self-formation in-between languages. With attention to the strategies of self-translation through which each text navigates the disjunction between mother tongue and foreign language, speech and writing, narrated and narrating selves, the essay argues that while both texts do away with mimetic notions of self-representation, each rearticulates the ethos of authenticity as constitutive of the process of writing the self in translation.

The Death of the Graduate Student (and the Birth of the HQP )

The Death of the Graduate Student (and the Birth of the HQP) Robert Zacharias (bio) In the middle of a sleek little brochure entitled Framing Our Direction 2010-12 (2010), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) announced its plans to gather together its graduate student and postdoctoral funding programs under a new umbrella program called "Talent." According to the SSHRC website, the primary context for the establishment of the Talent program is the granting council's efforts at "promot[ing] the acquisition of research skills, and assist[ing] in the training of highly qualified personnel in the social sciences and humanities" ("Talent Program"). The Talent program is not the first time that SSHRC has adopted the term "Highly Qualified Personnel" (HQP) as a euphemism for "graduate students," and SSHRC is far from the only granting council in Canada deploying this rhetoric. But for a recent PhD graduate and current postdoctoral scholar such as myself, SSHRC's decision to link the major granting programs for all graduate students and postdoctoral scholars and collectively frame them as a training program for highly qualified personnel offers an occasion to pause and consider what is beginning to look like the death of the graduate student in Canada's increasingly corporatized postsecondary institutions. The time has come [End Page 4] for an impassioned defence of graduate education as education, a process that could begin with a pedagogy of critical professionalization. In Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education (2011), James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar lament what they call the "drift towards vocationalism" (14) currently underway in Canadian universities. Although Côté and Allahar focus on undergraduate education, the distinction they draw between the training that characterizes preparation for postuniversity vocations and the education that fosters critical thought is useful for understanding the process underway at the graduate level as well. While "training is more given to specialization and the acquisition of a narrow range of skills and information associated with a discrete or specific task," they suggest, the concept of "education is more general and envisages as an end product a more cultured, open-mined, and civic-minded citizenry" (14). SSHRC's newly minted Talent program is only one example, of course, but its stated aims of "promot[ing] the acquisition of research skills, and assist[ing] in the training of highly qualified personnel" (emphasis added) is indicative of a larger shift in the humanities away from graduate student education and toward graduate student training.1 My own introduction to the changing climate of the humanities came as a result of my fortuitous involvement with Daniel Coleman and Smaro Kamboureli's "Culture of Research" colloquium, which I attended in the first semester of my PhD in 2006. Let me confess here that I was utterly and unredeemably lost throughout the weekend, although I'm sure this was abundantly clear to all who were around that table. My sense is that the vast majority of those currently entering graduate studies in Canada would be as bewildered as I was at such an event and, as such, are woefully unprepared to respond to the various ways in which their position in the university is shifting. As Jessica Schagerl points out, for students lacking a systematic introduction to the relevant networks of organizations and contexts of humanities scholarship in Canada, any debate surrounding their form or function quickly dissolves into "the equivalent of 'blah blah blah blah, funding, blah blah blah blah, research' " (98). Schagerl turns to a re-investment in mentorship as a means to offer graduate students such [End Page 5] an introduction, and, as someone who was extremely fortunate to have strong mentors throughout my graduate studies, I can certainly attest to the value—both intellectual and economic—of strong and invested mentorship. As a recent member of the wider graduate student community, however, I can also attest to the vast inconsistencies and inequalities that show mentorship to be a fatally ad hoc pedagogical model. A more systematic introduction to the shifting contexts of the humanities in Canada is necessary not simply for the precious few students who will ultimately join...