The City, Urban Cultures and Sustainable Literatures: Representations of the Anglo-Canadian Post-Metropolis

Principal Investigator: Eva Darias Beautell
La Laguna University, Spain

Research Team Workshops

Summary

This project will provide an interdisciplinary articulation of representations of the city in contemporary Canadian literatures, arts, and cultures in English. It is designed as a methodological continuation of the work conducted as part of the research project "El bordado de Penélope: tradición literaria, identidades culturales y discursos teóricos en la narrativa anglocanadiense de finales del siglo XX" (HUM2006-09288FIL, 2007-2009) ("Penelope's Embroidery: Literary Tradition, Cultural Identities and Theoretical Discourses in the Anglo-Canadian Fiction of the Late 20th Century"), which we now mean to consolidate by means of three major strategic actions: a) giving it a finer methodological direction and more succinct focus at the thematic level; b) expanding the scope of the areas covered at the (inter)disciplinary level; and c) enlarging and strengthening both the national and the international dimensions of the research team.

In the course of our previous research work, we realized that almost every novel explored was in fact an urban novel, set in a Canadian city and/or narrating an urban experience. This finding was deemed especially relevant since the fact that Canada is an urban country (with more than 80% of its population living in cities) has been traditionally effaced from public discourses, national(ist) mythologies and sanctioned critical approaches to English Canadian culture until the 1990s, in favour of the wilderness tropes, the small-town imaginary and the metaphor of nordicity. The emphasis on the natural has not only created an important gap between the average Canadian reader (often an urbanite) and Canadian literature, but has also consistently ignored an important body of urban literature, culture and art produced in Canada since the beginning of the 20th century, and very prominently, after the 1960s. Therefore, we believe there is a large amount of research work to be done in that field.

This project proposes a study of the centrality of the city in Canadian literatures, arts and cultures after the 1960s from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives, in the belief that this type of work can produce fresh articulations of the relationship among (Canadian) identity, citizenship and the nation. If, in the field of critical urban studies, scholars use the term "urban restructuring" to describe the drastic transformation that all metropolitan regions of the world have gone through since the 1960s (Soja), in Canada, we believe, this phenomenon has been accompanied by a "literary restructuring" of its canon, largely consisting of a gradual shift of focus from the wild or rural to the urban. The term "postmetropolis" in our title alludes to the nature of those changes in contemporary cities and locates our theoretical framework within a critical postmodern paradigm. "Sustainable literatures," in its turn, intends to push that framework forward, suggesting the need for new tools of analysis and interpretation. It is our assumption that these new tools can be found in the intersection between disciplines such as literature and urban studies (as in planetarity studies and metropolitan postcolonialism), cultural studies and psychology (as in affect theory), gender studies and geography (as in geofeminism), or arts and ecology (as in ecocriticism). Most specifically, in terms of methodology, we will initially draw on the new research work conducted as part of the TransCanada project (TransCanada Institute, University of Guelph), with which we have already collaborated in our previous "Penelope" research, and whose Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (2007) offers an entry way into multiple new methodologies that may apply to the study of contemporary CanLit, as well as on the interdisciplinary work of Canadian urban studies critics and historians like Jon Caufield and David Ley. We will incorporate these studies and take them a step further by probing the critical methodologies, pushing the interpretative possibilities as well as the disciplinary boundaries.

Our international team is composed of scholars with sound and well reputed publications within the scope of this project. We count on five researchers from different Spanish universities, two from the UK and three from Canada, and there exists the possibility of co- funding of some of our events by the participating universities. Each team member will be in charge of one specific area of the proposed research. Given the topic and scope as well as the international character of the project's team, we have decided to present this grant application in English.

Project's Aims, Background and State of the Arts

This project will provide an interdisciplinary articulation of representations of the city in contemporary Canadian literatures, arts, and cultures in English. It is designed as a methodological continuation of the work conducted as part of the research project "El bordado de Penélope: tradición literaria, identidades culturales y discursos teóricos en la narrativa anglocanadiense de finales del siglo XX" (HUM2006-09288FIL, 2007-2009) ("Penelope's Embroidery: Literary Tradition, Cultural Identities and Theoretical Discourses in the Anglo-Canadian Fiction of the Late 20th Century"), which we now mean to consolidate by means of three major strategic actions: a) giving it a finer methodological direction and more succinct focus at the thematic level; b) expanding the scope of the areas covered at the (inter)disciplinary level; and c) enlarging and strengthening both the national and the international dimensions of the research team.

The "Penelope" project offered a detailed study of the cultural and literary contexts and the narrative texts in English of the last quarter of the 20th century in Canada (see our webpage at http:// sites.google.com/site/penelopewebproject/). It had as starting point the nationalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when the supposed absence or weakness of a national sense had become the touchstone for official discourses about the cultural identity of the country. At the time, we argued, that type of metaphor provided the country with the distinctive elements it was looking for, contributing thus to the creation of a sense of tradition that had somehow survived to the end of the 20th century. We considered, however, that in the following decades (1980s, 1990s and 2000s) artists and writers had repeatedly questioned such a model of the national identity, introducing alternative perspectives. We suggested that the artistic and cultural flowering we are now experiencing in Canada at the beginning of the 21st century was, to a great extent, based on the dismantlement, from a number of theoretical and critical perspectives, of the few images constructed only 30 years ago to represent the nation. Our analyses, presented during the past three years at various international conferences and published in a number of journals and books, have attempted to elucidate the elements of that Penelopean process and the accompanying epistemological shift in the approach to the national culture and its literature. So does our final collection of essays, forthcoming from Wilfried Laurier UP, deal with these changes from the point of view of literary history, methodology, cultural memory, gender studies, postcolonial theories, diasporic, indigenous, regional and urban studies.

In the course of that research work, we have confirmed, as we had originally posited, the importance of the narrative form in the current process of deconstruction of unifying national images and refiguring of alternative forms of approaching nationhood. We have also realized that almost every novel explored is in fact an urban novel, set in a Canadian city and/or narrating an urban experience. This finding was deemed especially relevant since the fact that Canada is an urban country (with more than 80% of its population living in cities) has been traditionally effaced from public discourses, national mythologies and sanctioned critical approaches to English Canadian culture until the 1990s, in favour of the wilderness tropes, the small-town imaginary and the metaphor of nordicity.

Much has been written about the importance of space and "sense of place" in Canadian cultures. Since Northrop Frye's famous reformulation of the search for Canadian identity around the question "where is here?"(1965), many critics, writers, artists and cultural commentators have repeatedly tried to define the national ethos, often in accordance with the state- sanctioned "nationalization of nature," a continuation of the foundational myths of "the encounter." In this scheme, as Roy Miki asserts (paraphrasing O'Brian and White) in his afterward to the irreverent Roy Kiyooka's The Artist and the Moose, "Canadian identity came to be constituted through its northern sensibility and located its origins in the experience of the "wilderness" encountered by its settler-colonist" (153). Increasingly, on a parallel plane, a number of writers have been set on undermining the very basis of that search, undressing (as Kiyooka does) its colonialist and centralist intention, the bastion of post-war cultural nationalism, and problematizing the very possibility that the answer to the identitary question can be found in an untroubled unifying interpretation of the landscape. Instead, the recent methodological frameworks developed around spatial and gender theories, cultural geography, postcolonial theories, ecocriticism and diasporic studies are increasingly looking at space not as a given but as produced, the product of social and economic relations, practices and interactions (Lefebvre). Space is indeed seen as one important site for the articulation of national/local/global subjects, but it both produces and is produced by very unstable meanings of identity. The notion of spatial beings means that we shape as much as are shaped by the spaces and places, global, local, national, we live in and share with others (Soja).

That the city has become a privileged site of negotiation between global and local forces has not escaped the public and political discourses in Canada, where a sudden move towards the urban and an interest in the analysis of the intersections between cities and cultural production can be discerned in the late 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century. This is what has been called the "turn to the city" (Edwards and Ivison), a process in which literature has had a major role and is increasingly being seen as a field for the examination of those cultural, social and political transformations. In the larger North American context, two works may be said to have influenced the vision of this relationship between the spatial and the textual: Richard Lehan's analysis of the centrality of literature in the production of cities and vice versa in The City in Literature (1998), and Edward W. Soja's Post-Metropolis (2000) and his notion of "synekism" or "the stimulus of urban agglomeration" (3), by which he means that cities, apart from being places for the production and accumulation of capital, are also important sites of creativity and innovation, extremely dynamic places of technological and cultural advances. These synekistic forces, Soja argues, push the influence of the city beyond its borders into the notion of "cityspace" (16), which includes spaces that neither are strictly within the city limits nor look urban in a traditional way but are equally dynamic, urbanized and/or affected by the city's force. The notion of synekism seems thus particular relevant in the Canadian case, since it would break the traditional dichotomy between the urban and the wild, by considering the possibilities of the "urbanized wild" or of the "wild urban," by neither maintaining nor reversing traditional oppositions but transcending them and thus introducing new terms in the relationship between the city and the wilderness.

In Canada, a number of works that explicitly address these changes have seen the light in the past twelve years. In fiction, the anthology Concrete Forests: New Fiction of Urban Canada, edited by Hal Niedzviecki (1998) attempted to shift the focus of Canadian literature and criticism with uneven results. In art criticism, John O'Brian and Peter White's recent collection Beyond the Wilderness (2007) effectively deconstructs a model of nationhood based on the painting aesthetics of the Group of Seven by presenting and discussing the art of prominent post-1960s artists who look questioningly at the landscape and challenge the traditional wilderness myths, "offering counter- narratives and counter-images of a "post-wilderness" landscape and its social relations" (5). In literary and cultural criticism, the groundbreaking collection Downtown Canada, edited by Edwards and Ivison (2005), opens as follows: "Canada is an urban country. Indeed, by some measures Canada is one of the most urban countries on earth, with the vast majority of its population concentrated in a handful of cities" (3). The volume is then presented as an attempt "to assert the centrality of the city and the urban within the Canadian spatial and cultural imaginaries, to help us see the city as a place of Canadian society and culture, including its literature" (4). These collected essays invariably draw on critical alliances between the spatial and the textual and together succeed in achieving the editors' declared double objective of "shift[ing] the focus to that most placeless of places, the city" (6) and "providing the grounds for a literature and a criticism that can engage with the global without losing sight of the local" (6).

Downtown Canada addresses the centrality of the city in Canadian literature from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. The volume's basic assumption, deliberately post-Fryegian, is that a literary approach to the cityspace and its citizens can elucidate fresh articulations of the relationship between Canadian identity and the Canadian nation. Our project takes these essays as their starting point and intends to expand their analyses. We will analyse selected texts of literature as well as cultural and artistic production, including photography and film, of contemporary English Canada around the following issues and relations:
Urban ecologies: The Organic City
Indigenous City: Synekism vs Violence
Urban Citizenship and the Performance of Place
Gendered Approaches to the Post-Metropolis
Race, Multiculturalism and the City
Edible Multiculturalism: Food and the Urban Chic
The Virtual City: Cyborgs and the Techno-Body
The Filmed City: Performance and Simulacrum
Museumized City, Theme Park City, Simulacra
Embodying the City: Architecture and Corporeal Desire
Commodification, Gentrification and the Homeless City
Cityspace/Cityscapes: The Urban and the Wild
The City as History, Monument, Cultural Memory
Placelessness, Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Grounding
Tourism, Exoticism, Extravagance in the City
Diasporic City: The Urban Postcolonial
The City and the Trans-Canadian: Globality, Locality, Trance
Utopian/Dystopian Post-Metropolis

Objectives

This project is designed as a methodological continuation of our previous research, in the course of which we have realized the fundamentally urban nature of contemporary Canadian cultures. This finding is deemed especially relevant since the fact that Canada is an urban country has been traditionally effaced from public discourses, national mythologies and sanctioned critical approaches to English Canadian culture until the 1990s, in favour of the wilderness tropes, the small-town imaginary and the metaphor of nordicity. The emphasis on the natural has not only created an important gap between the average Canadian reader (often an urbanite) and Canadian literature, but has also consistently ignored an important body of urban literature, culture and art produced in Canada since the beginning of the 20th century, and very prominently, after the 1960s. Therefore, we believe there is a large amount of research work to be done in that field. If, in the field of critical urban studies, scholars use the term "urban restructuring" to describe the drastic transformation that all metropolitan regions of the world have gone through since the 1960s (Soja), in Canada, we believe, this phenomenon has been accompanied by a "literary restructuring" of its canon, largely consisting of a gradual shift of focus from the wild or rural to the urban.

Methodology and Working Plan

Our methodological framework is poststructuralist in its base, since our research owes its force to the work of key theoreticians who have been interested in the spatial dimension of subjectivity and who have been loosely located within that label. We are indebted to Michel Foucault's study of the mutliple, uncanny interesections among knowledge, space and power (1991), to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's articulation of the (spatial) rhizomatic structure of experience (1983), to Jacques Derrida's positing of the dislocating, supplementary, textual structure of subjectivity (1992), to Judith Butler's notion of performance and its relation to the (spatial) body (1993). All these works deal in one way or another with the spatiality of human life (and, by extension, of literature and the arts). The performance of our subjectivity begins with the body, and extends in space to larger geographical scales such as rooms, buildings, neighbourhoods, cities, regions, countries and the world (all of which we make and are made of). In this context, Gayatri Spivak's proposal of the idea of planetarity as a strategy to counteract the (neo)colonialist impetus of globalization is illuminating: "The globe is on our computer. No one lives there. It allows us to think that we can aim to control it. The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan" (72). Our cross-disciplinary approach will be inspired by this paradigm of alterity, also articulated by Elizabeth Grosz's notion of "the outside" (2001) as a spatial trope to mark a position of alterity, a spatial and temporal distance, the place of inter-disciplinarity (drawing from two or more disciplines as always fundamentally outside one another). This creates a third critical space, a place from which to deal with the ever-growing productive exchange between different disciplines. Outside refers thus to the position of the critic as well as of the various discourses that are brought in.

On a parallel level, there will be a conscious methodological overlapping with some theoretical works that seem to push the poststructuralist critique of knowledge to its own limits, suggesting the possibility of escaping the self-reflexive labyrinth and articulating a notion of culture that can function "as a symbolic reference system whereby humans manufacture and reproduce a meaningful, real world in action and interaction" (Allan 4). This approach to the production of meaning would involve not only analytic knowledge but also emotional one, what has been called affect-meaning. The spatial studies of Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau could be categorized in this latter mode of approach to knowledge, which can be particularly seen in their emphasis on lived spatiality. So will some key notions from the field of urban studies move our methodology in what could be called a post-poststructuralist direction. The terms "cityscape" and "synekism" provide only two examples of what we mean by this. The first one will be used to refer to "the particular configurations of social relations, built forms, and human activity in a city and its geographical sphere of influence. It actively arises from the social production of cityspace as a distinctive material and symbolic context or habitat for human life. It thus has both formal or morphological as well as processual or dynamic aspects" (Soja 8). "Synekism," in its turn, is defined by Soja as "the economic and the ecological interdependencies and the creative—as well as occasionally destructive—synergisms that arise from the purposeful clustering and collective cohabitation of people in space—in a "home" habitat" (12). Both are notions that do not only refer to the material, static, physical grounds, but also (and most importantly) to "the spatially specific context for active and affective processes of social formation, innovation, development, growth and change" (13). We will apply these definitions to our analyses of literature, culture and the arts.

It is our assumption that new, useful tools can be found in the intersection between disciplines such as urban studies and literature (as in planetarity studies and metropolitan postcolonialism), psychology and cultural studies (as in affect theory), geography and gender studies (as in geofeminism), or ecology and the arts (as in ecocriticism). Our methodology, in other words, would broaden the scope of literary, art and cultural studies and propose fruitful interdisciplinary collaborations, especially with the field of urban studies. It would also bring forward the connections between material and symbolic, local and global, real and imagined experiences of space, and the multiscaled analyses derived from these connections would elucidate the dynamics of social and economic relations that take place in the cities and beyond. Most specifically in the Canadian context, we will initially draw on the new research work conducted as part of the TransCanada project (TransCanada Institute, University of Guelph), with which we have already collaborated in our previous "Penelope" research, and whose Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (2007) offers an entry way into multiple new methodologies that may apply to the study of contemporary CanLit, such as the notions of rooted cosmopolitanism (Appiah via Cavell), diasporic citizenship (Cho), or wry civility (Coleman). We will also take into account the important interdisciplinary work of Canadian urban studies critics and historians like Jon Caufield and David Ley.

Our three-year plan (2011-2013) will begin with the set-up of a restricted-access Project Blog which will provide an active collaborative space for our research. This is an idea we put into practice in our previous research project and proved very useful, especially given the scattered geography of the group. As a rule, the results of our working progress and the new ideas that may derive from it will be posted on the blog for every other member to read and comment.

It will also be noted that we have planned a number of events, always open to the public, and specifically designed for and by the project as venues for the exchange of ideas among the team members and with the academic world. These are two International Conferences (Salamanca and London) and two workshops (Guelph and La Laguna). Besides, there will be three project meetings coinciding with these events and designed to discuss our work in progress, evaluate the project's development as well as to plan and organize the remaining tasks.

Working Plan (Research Area)

Our project is structured around the following thematic areas of research, each of which will be covered by one team researcher. Always within the parameters established by the project's definition, our selection of areas intends to be somehow representative in terms of geography (the Canadian cities covered), the issues analysed (race, diaspora, gender, class, food, tourism, mobility, ecology, globalization, etc), and the selected media and the interdisciplinary methodologies used. It will be noted that some areas focus on a particular city (Toronto, St John's, Vancouver), where others offer a comparative view of two or three Canadian cities. The overlapping of certain topics as well as of some of the primary sources suggested in each area is intended to stress the level of interconnection between them and to underline the project's conceptual coherence. The preliminary bibliography is offered only tentatively, since an initial task for this project will be to select, among the many possible sources, a representative corpus of texts/films/artworks in each of the areas (see chronogram below).