Canada and Beyond -- Vol. 07 (2018)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10272/14957

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Now showing 1 - 7 of 7

The Unsettling Portrayal of Migrant Existence in Rawi Hage’s Urban Fiction
(Universidad de Huelva, 2018) Staels, Hilde
This essay considers the function of the grotesque mode in Rawi Hage’s novels Cockroach (2008) and Carnival (2012). The grotesque is a provocative tool with which Hage draws attention to the predicament of the class of poor and disadvantaged new immigrants in contemporary Montreal. He offers a male immigrant’s unsettling perspective on the Canadian multicultural ideal that proclaims the acceptance of ethnic and racial difference. Formal aspects that generate a grotesque effect include the first-person narrator’s self-image, his disruptive discourse of resistance, his disorienting view of urban reality, and spatial metaphors in the context of the protagonist’s social alienation and marginalisation. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection throws light on the sense of fear and repulsion felt towards the urban poor, and on the protagonist’s deliberate identification with vermin in the context of his discourse of resistance. Even though the underprivileged migrant is able to answer back, Hage’s novels are devoid of true regenerative and liberating power. The literary texts give prominence to the migrant’s isolation and socio-economic outsider position. Nonetheless, the grotesque mode also functions as a powerful tool with which the author depicts the recent immigrant as someone with a resilient and mobile identity
The Life of Others: Narratives of Vulnerability
(Universidad de Huelva, 2018) Darias-Beautell, Eva
This special issue of Canada and Beyond looks into contemporary Canadian cultural production in English through the Butlerian notions of vunerability and precarity. It aims to provide a critical view of the field with an emphasis on the discursive modes that address, critique or produce vulnerability on local and global scales
“The best tradition of womanhood”: Negotiating and Reading Identities in Emma Donoghue’s Landing
(Universidad de Huelva, 2018) Mikalson, Kaarina
This article reads Emma Donoghue's 2007 novel Landing as an intersectional romance. The novel's conflict emerges not only from the distance between the two lovers, the Irish flight attendant Síle and the Canadian curator Jude, but from several intersecting differences: gender identity, class, race, age, sexual orientation, and nationality. Specifically, this article lays out how Síle’s nationality and sexuality are compromised through invisibility, and unpacks how her race and gender contribute to this invisibility. While Jude is recognizably queer and Canadian, as a femme of colour Síle’s identity requires more explanation and affirmation. Through Landing, Emma Donoghue examines how Síle can find happiness without compromising her identity as an Irish racialized femme
Now I am Become Death”: Japanese and Canadian Industrial Contamination in Michiko Ishimure’s Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease and Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle
(Universidad de Huelva, 2018) Ganz, Shoshannah
Canada and Japan share a history of industrial contamination that has resulted in mercury poisoning; the inhabitants of both Minamata, Japan and the Indigenous community of Grassy Narrows, Ontario have suffered from what would come to be known as Minamata disease. Environmental activists, proponents of industrial progress, individuals in the affected communities, and novelists Michiko Ishimure and Thomas King discuss and weigh the possibilities of economic and material progress against the problems of environmental degradation and industrial contamination leading to disease and death for humans and ecosystems. This paper will show how Ishimure and King discuss the possibility of hope and renewal through the tourist industry, but will also question the efficacy of “dark tourism.” Is it possible to balance an ethics of care and respect for those whose lives have been destroyed by industrial contamination with the need of those who remain to make a living through tourism? This paper will explore the fictional possibility offered by King alongside the actual recovery and tourist industry generated in the aftermath of the Minamata poisoning and subsequent clean up efforts. Is it possible to reimagine and reclaim industrial wreckage as sites of pleasure and recreation? Do these regenerated sites of industrial destruction promote the common good or further victimize the individuals and communities destroyed in the name of progress?
Controlled Bodies, Mental Wounds: Vulnerability in Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim
(Universidad de Huelva, 2018) Díaz Cano, Coral Anaid
This paper provides a study of vulnerability in Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim (2008), a graphic novel about Kimberly Keiko Cameron (known as Skim), a Japanese Canadian teenage girl interested in Wicca and struggling through high school. By analysing selected panels and scenes, I explore the multiple ways in which control is exerted over the othered individuals in this graphic novel, that ultimately leads to the production of vulnerability. My research draws on a selection of theoretical concepts by authors like Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, such as linguistic injury or surveillance and disciplinary institutions, all of which are proven useful to the articulation of the strategies of representation favoured by Tamaki and Tamaki. I begin with an analysis of racial remarks in Skim in order to show how they work in (in)visible ways in the narrative. Secondly, I consider how Skim faces institutional control and oppression, as her high school operates as an institution of invisible surveillance that creates obedient subjects and that contributes to the further stigmatization of vulnerable characters. Thirdly, I research the mental illness of the protagonist, which is closely linked to surveillance and also works to stigmatize her. Lastly, I explore how the analysis of injurious language in Skim proves that language functions as a tool of hegemonic power to create valid subjects while silencing othered subjects that cannot fit in the domain of the speakable. Throughout, I argue that comics, as a hybrid medium composed by the visual and the verbal, have the capacity to represent the vulnerability of the non-normative subject
Chinatown Children during World War Two in The Jade Peony
(Universidad de Huelva, 2018) Liu, Zhen
In The Jade Peony (1995) Wayson Choy captured vividly the lives of three children growing up in Vancouver’s Chinatown during the 1930s and 1940s when the Depression and the Second World War constituted the social backdrop. In the article, I argue that the Chinatown residents exemplify the type of vulnerability defined by Judith Butler as "up-againstness" and especailly the children in the novel suffer from a greater vulnerability as they are caught up in the crossfire of both sides. Growing up in two conflicting cultures and restricted to the liminal cultural and physical space, the children are disorientated and confused as if stranded in no man’s land. More importantly, in their serious struggles, the children show great resilience and devise their own strategies, such as forming alliance with others, to survive and gain more space in spite of the many restraints imposed on them
Apocalypses Now: Two Modes of Vulnerability in Last Night and The Mist
(Universidad de Huelva, 2018) Orán Llarena, Fabián
This paper draws on Judith Butler’s notions of vulnerability, precarity, and grievability to examine two filmic texts: the Canadian Last Night (Don McKellar, 1998) and the American The Mist (Frank Darabont, 2007). Both primary sources feature the apocalypse as their principal narrative and thematic concern –a trope virtually unexplored from the standpoint of the production of vulnerability and the bodily dimensions of political and ethical life. In the present contribution I conduct a close analysis of both films so as to identify and evaluate the significantly contrasting modes of vulnerability produced in these two narrations. I argue that these conflicting worldviews originate from the differentiated episodes of (de)valuation, legitimization, and recognition experienced by and in bodies in the face of the ultimate phenomenon of vulnerability: the apocalypse. My structuring argument is that Last Night complies with the notion of vulnerability as a locus of ethical cohabitation and affective engagement while constructing a heterogeneous sense of Canadianness. The Mist, on the other hand, deploys vulnerability as a discursive mechanism that causes individual and social bodies to be subjected to a range of violence-prone asymmetries and processes of dehumanization, rearticulating key rhetoric and imagery from American cultural history

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