Reports & Recommendations from Research Cells

RCL 2: Canadian Literature and the Politics of Representation Today

Submitted by Heather Latimer
Participants: Christopher Lee, Glen Lowry, Lydia Roupakia, Leslie Sanders, Frances Sprout.

Summary:

The title of the research cell I reported for was "Canadian Literature and the Politics of Representation Today" and most of the discussion concentrated on the second half of that title. After Christian Book, Christopher Lee, Glen Lowry, Lydia Roupakia, Leslie Sanders and Frances Sprout gave their papers, the discussion revolved around connections between the creative and the critical, aesthetics and politics, privilege and responsibility, and between what texts can do in the world versus how they are produced. Following a major thread of the conference itself, Susan Rudy, the discussant, asked those in the room to consider what the status of their work was in relation to the category of the research cell itself and to explore the tension between the desire for representation and our constant questioning of the whole possibility of representation. Some of the key points that came out of this discussion were; first, a continued desire to understand how the humanities can get to a point where we are able to affect public policy and social change; second, an understanding of where identity politics has left us/ got us/ is situated in our work today and how that connects both nationally and internationally to the politics of representation as well as to the production of artistic work; and third, an interrogation of the connections between aesthetics and politics and a critical examination of both the form and content of the texts that are privileged in our classrooms and by the general public.

Recommendations:

Two recommendations made for the next Transcanada conference were that there should be research cells on the first day so that people can work in smaller groups and get to know each other better earlier on, and that there should be more than one set of research cells so that participants can sit in on several discussions and presenters can go to cells other than their own. As well, there were suggestions made for online discussion boards and links from the Transcanada webpage to participants email addresses and research projects so that collaboration could potentially begin before the conference.

The cell talked so extensively about the politics of representation that there was not much time left for talk of collaboration, but three main points were brought up by Larissa Lai in the final section of the discussion. First, that the productive collaboration being done in our fields does not work off the SSHRC model and we should acknowledge that fact. Second, people need to figure out a way to take advantage of the money out there anyway if possible and learn how to "fake it" basically. Last, if the SSHRC model is unworkable, people need to be having conversations about how to restructure models of collaboration so that we can approach funding sources with models that work better for the humanities. Also, Susan Rudy and Leslie Sanders have agreed to investigate the possibility of putting together a collaborative project based on this research cell and its concerns about the representation, aesthetics, politics and production of Canadian Literature.

RCI 3: Accountability: Negotiating Personal, Pedagogical, and Institutional Responsibilities

Submitted by Pauline Wakeham

Participants:
Julia Emberley, Discussant, University of Western Ontario
Leslie Monkman, Queen’s University
Donna Pennee, University of Guelph
Rita Wong, Emily Carr College of Art and Design
Joanne Saul, Wilfrid Laurier University
Christl Verduyn, Wilfrid Laurier University
Aparna Mishra Tarc, York University
Jodi Lundgren, Thompson Rivers University
Aruna Srivastava, University of Calgary
Kathy Mezei, Simon Fraser University
Pauline Wakeham, Carleton

Summary:

Our Research Cell explored the concept of "accountability" with regard to the task of negotiating the personal, pedagogical, and institutional responsibilities that faculty, sessional instructors, and graduate students negotiate in different and yet inter-related ways. Leslie Monkman argued that university workers need to actively re-think the ways that the category of "Canadian Literature" is circumscribed by course design, candidacy reading lists, and job positions. Leslie also focused attention on the dissolution of 2-tier hiring policies in 2003 and the ramifications for the hiring of Canadian graduate students. Joanne Saul attempted to recuperate the concept of "fieldwork" as a potential model for practicing accountability and collaboration within and beyond the university. Recognizing the fraught traces of anthropology’s fetishization of the native informant at stake in the concept of "fieldwork," Joanne argued that such traces can provoke us to vigilantly keep at the forefront "questions about agency, authority, and engagement, about place and placement" and "about the academic as ‘expert’" that are crucial to thinking about interactions within the classroom and beyond. Aparna Mishra Tarc prompted us to return to the concept of reading and to consider it as an institutional practice that can be a tool of social oppression as well as one of social change. From this perspective, Aparna argued that accountability might be fostered through a re-reading of what it means to be human and what it means to be a human labourer within the institution. Finally, Rita Wong echoed Daniel Coleman’s call for re-distributing resources within institutions and to transform dominant institutions by considering alternative models that are managing to effect social change.

In grappling with how to effect such forms of social change within the university and beyond, problematics surrounding the idea of work-time surfaced repeatedly. How do university workers and graduate students change the institution when the institution disciplines them through forms of temporal management? Where do students and teachers find time to do committee work, to work within the community, to challenge curricula and hiring policies when we are disciplined by a structure of temporality, a principle of work-time, that is measured by dominant discourses of knowledge production and research productivity? How might we disrupt such temporalities of academic labour?

Attempting to translate these questions into concrete recommendations, our cell formulated the following key points:

  1. In order to effect institutional change, we need to first gain a clearer understanding of how academic institutions operate. To do so, we need to recognize that institutional knowledge–that is, knowledge about how institutions work at departmental, faculty, university, and national levels–is an important body of knowledge that cannot be left to forms of tacit or informal modes of sharing and dissemination. Rather, it is the responsibility of university workers and learners to make access to this knowledge less opaque and to develop some formal systems for disseminating and reviewing it. It was suggested that information and critiques of the machinations of academic institutions and their administrative systems should be taught to graduate students in courses or seminars and that other forms of mentoring might be developed.
  2. With regard to accountability in hiring practices and the professionalization and training of graduate students, it was recommended that academic workers demand greater transparency of the hiring practices of English departments across Canada and to collect statistics on the hiring of Canadian graduate students as well as the ways that graduate programs prepare their students for future participation as faculty members.
  3. With regard to the problems surrounding work-time and its constraints for academic labourers who want to effect institutional change by working on university committees and/or within the community, it was recommended that faculty members create "service dossiers" modelled on the teaching dossier concept in order to record and recognize important forms of labour that are often rendered invisible in the systems of institutional recognition. [Note that an emphasis upon "research" is reinscribed in the rubric of the "research cell" itself.]
  4. To foster more collaboration and dialogue between teachers, graduate students, and others, it was recommended that this conference’s website might establish a digital archive of course syllabi and pedagogical practices for teachers to consult.
Recommendations / Key Points:
  • knowing about how institutions work; how do we acquire that knowledge and how do we transmit it to our students (both graduate and undergraduate); how do we acquire institutional knowledge in order to make change?
  • recognize that institutional knowledge is a body of knowledge that should be integrated into the institutional structure
  • tacit knowledge needs to become implicated knowledge
  • how should this be implemented?: formalize this as a course for graduate students, mentoring
  • gather information/stats about hiring in the wake of the abolishment of the 2-tier policy; gain access to short-lists for hiring
  • gather information on how does each department prepare its students for the job market?
  • a conference website where people could send course outlines, pedagogical strategies, etc.; some kind of digital archive of these materials
  • opening up the classroom to the public; making it a more public space
  • strategies for valuing teaching and other forms of academic service
  • re-define the concept of service; effecting change at the university level
  • create dossiers that record service work; circulate a message to people in decision-making positions that this is very important; circulates information about what people are actually doing
  • in Australia, the concept of service is subdivided into university service and community service
  • collaboration in the form of information sharing; compiling data
Detailed Notes:

Leslie Monkman:

  • 3 concepts: the university, the discipline, the sub-discipline
  • ascendancy of the sciences at the expense of the humanities
  • the university of excellence is a product of the ascendancy of the sciences
  • theory wars are now being played out at the level of structure in the university
  • cultural studies has emerged as a potential alternative model, but hasn’t achieved institutional clout within the university
  • wants to resist easy chronological models regarding the rise and fall of CanLit
  • areas for discussion: (1.) the disciplinary containment of Canadian writing within our courses, programs, job categories, candidacy exam reading lists, departmental categories; (2.) the disconnect in praxis between Anglo-American theoretical dismissals of the nation-state as category and a post 9-11 academic nationalism in the U.S. and Europe (response to R. Cavell’s argument regarding Canadian literature as an "artificial" rather than a "lived" literature); (3.) the evidence that less Canadian writing is being taught in Canadian secondary schools than was the case 20 years ago (we don’t talk about the institution within the classroom enough; we could help to educate future teachers, etc.); (4.) the impact of the elimination of 2-tier advertising for academic appointments in Canada in 2003 (a call to engage at the local level).
  • Christl Verduyn noted that hiring outside of Canada is not just happening at the faculty level but also for high-ranking administrative positions.
  • The link to concerns regarding citizenship: citizenship and hiring practices. International graduate students in Canadian universities also aren’t getting hired in Canada.

Joanne Saul:

  • recuperating the concept of "fieldwork" for CanLit studies
  • starting this project with a study of the writer-as-critic and the multiple subject positions they inhabits as writers, critics, teachers, academics, activists (NeWest Press series, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt)
  • Daphne Marlatt’s feminist poetics and their relation to broader cultural concerns
  • a sense of community-building throughout Kamboureli’s writer-as-critic series; conversations going on between texts; a kind of intertextual and cross-textual dialogue
  • how do those of us who are not writer-critics get involved in "research sites" (a concept of collaborative space theorized by Pauline Butling)? How can we develop such collaborative networks?
  • a call to re-define the boundaries of the classroom to include or interact with other cultural spaces; and also to open up the classroom to the public
  • Christl Verduyn raised the problem of time and how it disciplines us to not communicate
  • Donna Pennee raised the term "fieldwork’s" association with the idea of the "native informant"; we need to think about who we bring into the classroom and how we do it as well as the risks and possibilities associated with it.
  • Donna Pennee also noted the desire for university workers to feel "authentic"; there’s something missing from peoples’ work lives right now. We need to consider the materiality of the job and the materiality of all the apparatuses we bring in to make our jobs better.
  • Christl Verduyn pointed out the damage that the emphasis on research has done to pedagogy and committee work. We have a personal accountability to tip that balance back to where it should have been. Donna Pennee argues that we have a personal responsibility to use terms other than "teaching release" or "teaching relief" due to the connotations and assumptions bound up in them.
  • Leslie Monkman noted that the President of the MLA calls for a broadening of the concept of "service."
  • Temporality and the disciplining of institutional subjects; no time; how do we make time/find time?
  • Aruna Srivastava said the terminology of "research cells" neglects the idea of pedagogy.

Aparna:

  • wants to draw attention to the work of affect; begins the paper by a reference to her own learning-to-read process and how she learned to read through her mother’s sorrow
  • philosophy, poetry, pedagogy: structures of thinking, feeling, and teaching
  • wants to theorize reading and literacy as an institutional practice and as an institution in itself
  • reading as a many-stranded textile; as a site for educational inquiry; as a practice of pedagogy, agency, colonization, oppression, social change, and justice
  • how we read and our methodology surrounding it is as important as what we read
  • reference to Peggy Kamuf’s "The Ends of Reading"
  • the work of literary studies should be how to teach us how to read the world differently
  • reading is an experimental form of action that can lead to sustained acting in the world
  • a proposal to re-name English departments according to the rubric of "literary studies"
  • Aparna contends that the rubric of "literary studies" shifts focus away from studying literary texts according to "periods" (i.e. "Renaissance" or "Victorian") or "areas" (i.e. "Canadian" or "American") and towards an approach that interrogates its own methodology.
  • the mere inclusion of literatures of difference is not enough; need to interrupt educational mandates and to forge a literal re-reading of what it means to be human
  • need to re-think the practice of literacy
  • we need to re-read our institutions according to a different order of being, a different recognition and understanding of what it means to be human
  • Donna Pennee said you can’t just add something to change the structure; we need to re-think Canadian Literature as an institution before we create another institution
  • Aruna Srivastava talked about how the teacher feels the need to be liked; why do we try to contain conflict within the classroom? Why does being a good teacher mean containing conflict and producing a kind of closure and coverage in the classroom?
  • Donna Pennee introduced the idea of classroom mediation rather than classroom management.

Rita:

  • echoes Daniel Coleman‘ call to re-distribute resources within academic institutions and beyond
  • "Define Indian" conference at Emily Carr; looks at misidentifications of Aboriginal and South Asian peoples
  • "Interdisciplinary Forms": a new course at Emily Carr College that is open to the public and that allows students from different disciplines to dialogue and interact
  • if the classroom is open to the public, there is less fear of the native informant being brought in; the space becomes multi-layered
  • the classroom needs to be re-occupied and re-deployed by those it attempts to assimilate
  • the Intra-Nation project: 1st event was a conference at Emily Carr
  • the concept of nations within nations can create new spaces of change
  • labour and the equity committee: considering both students and faculty
  • How does one argue for much needed ESL programs and services to be systemically integrated into the institution without feeding racist assumptions regarding non-native English speakers and/or reinstituting oppressive standards?
  • What kinds of arguments can be made that the practice of charging international students two and a half times the tuition of Canadian citizens is inequitable?
  • Julia Emberley drew attention to Rita Wong’s intent to look at alternative institutional formations that are working more effectively.

RCC 2: Citizenship and/in Literature: Diasporic Subjects, Insurgent Identities, Postcoloniality

Submitted by Sophie McCall

Participants: Barbara Godard (discussant), Warren Cariou, Wendy Pearson, Bev Curran
Participants: Hiromi Goto, Farah Moosa, Wendy Stewart, June Scudeler, Lily Cho, Lisa Chalykoff, and others.

Summary of Discussions

We discussed the terms in the title of our research cell, Aboriginality and Citizenship, and the difficulties of articulating their interrelationship. While recognizing the instability of these terms, we identified some paradoxes that they produce when they are "up against" each other. The historical shift that we traced was a movement from exclusion–Aboriginal people became enfranchised in 1960 in Canada–to enforced participation. Another way of putting this trajectory is from exclusion to interpollation. This insight enabled our discussion to focus on the economic underpinnings of any concept of citizenship. As Warren Cariou argued, there is a shift in the notion of citizenship from a political category to one of economic affiliation, that is from more "classical" citizenship to capitalist entrepreneurialism. In both cases, the Canadian State evades sharing its economic resources with First Nations and Metis peoples. A key term that complicated the dyad, Aboriginality and Citizenship, was sexuality. We examined the material consequences of how the double-focus on Aboriginality and Citizenship makes queer bodies disappear. In other words, in dominant representations, ’queer’ and ’Aboriginal’ force the disappearance of one or the other identity formation despite the reality of multiple overlappings. One clear illustration is the translation and production of Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters in Japan. According to Bev Curran’s analysis of a Japanese production, the lesbian narrative took precedence over the ’res’ narrative, effecting the excision or downplay of the Cree/Ojibway parts of the script.

Recommendations
  1. Engagement with the question, "Why citizenship now?" could provide a critical tool for addressing the institutionally reinforced divisions between the social sciences and the humanities.
  2. "Collaboration" could be thought of as "affiliation building" for institutional change.
  3. Academics, activists, legal professionals, artists and others should mark the year 2006, the 10-year anniversary of the release of the Report on the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), by organizing panels, discussions, workshops or symposia at Congress 2006 at York University
  4. We identified the need for nonfiction activist publishing, including analyses of institutionally enforced changes, like those occurring at SSHRC.
  5. We also identified the need for encouraging collaborations between scholarly and artistic communities.
  6. We thought that Canadian citizenship, because it doesn’t seem to be worth much, should be rewritten in some way.
  7. We wondered how to bring about or facilitate redress and / or material redistribution.
  8. For Phase 2 of TransCanada, we thought that more Aboriginal scholars and artists needed to be included.
  9. More multidisciplinary participants are also needed, not just for the sake of including more people, but in the particular context of our research cell, "Aboriginality and Citizenship." This recommendation relates to point number 9.
  10. We recommended greater involvement of artists and writers in Phase 2 of TransCanada
  11. Research cells should not be assigned but rather should be more finely articulated problematics. Delegates should choose which research cell they wish to participate in. Research cells should have more focused, follow-up tasks.
  12. Research cells (or small group discussions of some kind) should meet earlier on in the conference program.
  13. While some of us thought the TransCanada website could enable the sharing of longer papers, others warned against over-technologizing of our TransCanada collaborations, thereby over-burdening our work-loads.

Detailed [but not complete] Notes on our Meeting

Barbara Godard (BG) asked whether presenters identified ‘citizenship’ as a key issue in their work, or have they been assigned this topic? The disjunctive relationships of ‘citizenship’ become particularly fraught when placed alongside ‘Aboriginality.’ Maracle’s presentation, for example, seemed to suggest that Aboriginality + Citizen + Canada becomes an incommensurable equation.

[Following BG’s introduction, Warren Cariou (WC), Margery Fee (MF), Wendy Pearson (WP) and Bev Curran (BC) presented their research projects, which I will not attempt to summarize. Instead, interested presenters could send written versions of their presentations to the group.]

Warren Cariou (WC), "Aboriginals and / as Corporate Citizens"
Margery Fee (MF), "Getting out of the fort: Citizens Minus and ‘Landed’ Citzenship"
Wendy Pearson (WP), "Multiplying Belongings: Questions of Indigeneity, Citizenship and Sexuality"
Bev Curran, "Linguistic Camouflage: The Translator Embedded in Canadian Fiction and International War Zones"

BG: In response to the papers, BG identified 3 shifts, or migrations, that might help frame our ensuing discussion:

  1. Link between authenticity and Aboriginality in lived culture and cultural production
  2. Enlargement or manipulation of citizenship away from the state and moving towards a field of capital. Economic relations underpinning any notion of citizenship
  3. Sexuality intersection: complexities of sexuality multiplied in communities differently marginalized.
Lily Cho (LC) suggested that academics, activists, legal professionals, and others should mark 2006, the 10-year anniversary of the release of the Report on the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), by organizing panels, discussions, workshops or symposia at Congress 2006 at York University. She also questioned BC’s broad generalizations about the reception of translated Canadian cultural productions in Japan. BC responded that the Japanese audience is not singular and that her own positioning in Japan is partial, situated and particular. MF mentioned that Tomson Highway’s article in Prairie Fire expresses deep disappointment in "political correctness" debates, which have made it impossible to stage his plays in Canada [due to an alleged lack of available Native actors]. MF added that in her opinion, people sometimes get frozen in debates over the appropriation of voice. WP mentioned that the collaborator she is working with, a 60-year-old Aboriginal man [didn’t get his name], can’t get anyone to perform his plays in Australia because they are written in dialect. Ironically, one of his plays has been staged in the US, performed by African Americans. MF found this highly problematic. BG said that in light of WC’s presentation it seems that Native people rejected citizenship under the nation-state, but now are facing new interpollations in the late-capitalist, global economy. The historical trajectory might be characterized as a movement from exclusion to interpollation. MF agreed, adding that citizenship for Aboriginal peoples could be characterized as enforced inclusion. Even though this inclusion also includes the enforced acceptance of $, the bureaucrats still end up saving money. WC said that citizenship is predicated on economics. $ is given to Aboriginal groups as a way of covering up how something else is being taken away [ie, sovereignty, land, title, etc]. MF raised the question of the so-called "casino tribes" in the US. Ironically, this $ enables the maintenance of family structures and makes possible cultural continuance. Tourist economies can contribute to the maintenance of community. Lisa Chalykoff (LC) agreed, citing as an example the "tourist trap" of the Dead Dog Café in Green Grass Running Water. MF reminded the group of the artist Ron Hamilton, who refused to participate in the commodification of his own ‘authenticity’ and walked out of the elite art gallery market economy. BG asked if, alongside these questions of economic compensation, there were other horizons to consider? Other forms of belonging? MF asserted that the work of envisioning a future, or articulating forms of belonging, was something Native peoples need to work out themselves. She said that "we" [referring to non-Aboriginal academics] need to concentrate on "our" side of the equation–which is dealing with the legacy of genocide. She contended that otherwise, it’s not a conversation. June Scudeler (JS), in response to BG’s question, cited Taiaiake Alfred, who has argued that decolonization movements and the promise of revolutionary social change often get bogged down in mountains of paper work. She cited RCAP as an example. MF said that she doesn’t buy revolution anymore–running around with guns. Lily Cho said that "sui generis citizenship," as articulated by Sakej Henderson, might offer a way of thinking about Aboriginal citizenship. MF wondered if Taiaiake Alfred might also help, but wasn’t sure if he addressed citizenship specifically. BC asked WP about Australian Aboriginal Englishes. WP said that Australia is now trying to "recognize" Aboriginal Australian history on the continent by renaming places with Aboriginal names. Road signs offer translations of these names. But the way in which these translations are conceptualized and worded [ie, "In Aboriginal, X means…"] serves to erase 100s of Aboriginal languages. WP asked BC how, in stagings of The Rez Sisters in Japan, the Cree parts were represented. BC said that generally the Cree parts were removed. Wendy Stewart (WS) said that the term "First Nations" likewise erases languages. MF said that "First Nations" perpetuates a very status-oriented conception of Aboriginal identity–as in the "Assembly of First Nations." BG countered that "First Nations" is a strategic assertion of Aboriginal presence in relation to the so-called "founding nations" of Quebec and Canada. MF said that in any case, the vast array of terminology pertaining to Aboriginal identities points to the tight control the federal government has maintained over Aboriginal individuals and communities. Even band-specific and nation-specific names for Aboriginal communities are interpollated by the government. BG asked if there were other ways of thinking Aboriginal identity and its relation to place and community. Ie, geographical? Regional? Treaty-based? WC said that each treaty has its way of naming, and ensuring the ongoing control of the federal government. He wondered if, in West-coastal First Nations, there is the possibility of greater autonomy. He added that he is more familiar with Metis identity which doesn’t readily associate with "First Nations" authenticity. JS said that "Metis" itself is not singular; there exists divisions between Metis who assert their belonging to the historic homeland of the Red River Nation and those who identify with mixed race identities. MF said that this is another example of "divide and conquer." BG countered that citizenship categories work through precisely these kinds of divisions and cohesions. Differences in languages for example do not always match divisions in territory, nation or culture. BC said that most translation theory is Eurocentric, and so much of the critical work misunderstands the relationships between groups in Native North America, whose national/cultural divisions do not match up easily with linguistic divisions. Multilingualism becomes the smothered tongue. WC asked how orality might connect to this discussion. Is there an "oral citizenship"? What is the relationship between orality and belonging? Lisa Chalykoff also asked what might be the relationship between nation, orality and place. MF said that this is the relationship that Chamberlin is getting at in the title of his book, "If this is your land, where are your stories?" Sophie McCall (SM) said that Margery Fee has written a lot about the relationship between land, language, stories and community in settler discourses. She said that Fee calls it Romantic nationalism. MF said that there are worrisome echoes of Romantic nationalism in eco-criticism and deep ecology discourses. Nature comes first and the people don’t count. There is an implied or even explicit moral judgement in the possibility of Native people securing land title in land claims trials and then using the land in bad ways. BG mentioned the legal decision of Delgamuukw, which is an example of orality facing the state apparatuses. WP mentioned that in Australia there has been a real failure to recognize orality in land claims proceedings. In Australia there are no treaties. Farah Moosa (FM) asked whether, in Thomas King’s story "Borders", in which the character asserts her Blackfoot identity at the Canadian/American border and refuses to identify as either Canadian or American, this was an example of an oral performance of citizenship. BG pointed out the oral utterance is what the character refuses. SM said the oral utterance is only ‘heard’ once it is mediated through mainstream media outlets, which points to the role of the media in any understanding of citizenship and nationality. JS reminded the group that Blackfoot is on both sides of the Canada/US border. WP said that until recently, Beth Brant [a Mohawk writer] couldn’t bring her lesbian partner across the border because the state did not recognize the common-law rights of same-sex couples. BG said that the time has come for the group to consider the question of "collaboration." Before we begin discussing possibilities of collaboration between us, we should consider what’s at stake in the call for collaboration. What does collaboration mean? Why does SSHRC consider it the "right way" to research? For some time now FCAR in Quebec has privileged "research groups" but these groups often foreclose the possibility of longer term research. SM wondered if "collaboration" could be thought of as group efforts to bring about institutional change. MF agreed with BG that group research often requires a 3-year end date. For Phase 2 of TransCanada she suggested more focused research questions on Aboriginality and citizenship. BG said that research in the humanities tends to be more individual than in the social sciences. She also said that she has done a lot of collaborative work in the past and that now she’d like to get some of her own work done. One big issue in collaborative work is the role of technology, which can quickly compound the amount of administrative work. She asked the group about the special SSHRC grants that are designated for Aboriginal communities. These grants necessitate the participation of Aboriginal community members in designing the objectives of the research project. The outcomes of the research have to be responsible to the community. Lisa Chalykoff said that this well-meaning requirement can put the scholar in an awkward position. It also assigns the scholar a more bureaucratic role which the scholar may not be trained to carry out effectively. MF said that UBC has instituted a surprisingly successful collaboration with the Musqueam nation on Musqueam language studies. For this kind of collaboration to work, which involves partners with vastly asymmetric accesses to power, the participants need to stick to very clear protocol. Not only is it difficult to sustain the partnership between the university and the community; this project has also brought to the foreground a lot of painful, divisive discussion amongst Musqueam participants: ie, which community members are the experts; what dialect should be used; what’s the purpose of the research; what can be shared; what would be considered stolen knowledge…. BG: [referring to stolen knowledge]: so much for collaborative work! She added that the administration of collaborative work takes people away from the research itself. MF said sometimes she wonders why academics bother applying for grants. The answer is they hire students. She added that ‘collaboration’ doesn’t have to be about grants. Collaboration includes having discussions with others and finding like-minded people. For example, reading groups. Exchange–that’s collaboration. BG agreed and added that the lateral thinking and accidental connections that occur in non-structured face-to-face dialogues don’t get online. WP suggested nonfictional activist publishing as a way for academics to participate as public intellectuals. She also thought that academics could facilitate/participate in artistic collaborations. WC wondered if there were other, or more, ways of involving artists/writers in Phase 2 of TransCanada. MF suggested that we need to write about the institutional contexts of our research in more explicit ways. For example, if we don’t like the changes that are occurring at SSHRC, we should write about it. BG shared her experience in pushing for changes at Heritage Canada by writing reports on cultural policy. Lisa Chalykoff thought that at Phase 2 of TransCanada more Aboriginal participants should be invited. She also thought that people from other disciplines would help advance the discussion. She detected a strong hunger for transformation and political relevance amongst the delegates. WP also thought that TransCanada was not transDisciplinary enough. In particular, work on sexual citizenship is going on elsewhere, not in literary critical debates. WC said that he’s cross-appointed with Native Studies at the University of Manitoba, which he finds productive but strange. WP suggested that the keynotes include non-literary scholars. MF: said that her citizenship doesn’t seem to be worth much. So how could we rewrite it? It’s a big project but Canada has to do it.
LC: said that redress and material redistribution need to happen. With respect to the research cells, she suggested that delegates choose the cell they wish to be a part of. The cells should be organized around a question.
WC: agreed.
MF: also agreed: Research cells should not be assigned, but rather should articulate a problematic that people could choose to be a part of or not.
BG: thought that the research cells could be assigned specific, focused follow-up tasks.
MF: suggested that longer papers should be posted in advance on the website.
BG: again warned of escalating labour, as well as physical strain on the eyes, when we involve increasing levels of technologized research.
At this point, due to considerable finger strain and fear of exposure in the freezing temperatures of the room, SM stood up and made a move for the door.

RCL 5: Canadian Literature and Transnationalism

Submitted by kit Dobson
Presenters: John P. Corr, Jennifer Delisle, Heike Harting, Andrea Medovarski, Karina Vernon , Eva Darias Beautell.

Summary

The discussion in the fifth Research Cell on Literatures, ostensibly themed around Canadian literature and transnationalism was, I think, very fruitful. Primarily, however, we found ourselves working around Steven Slemon’s directive towards "problem finding" rather than "problem solving," so the recommendations that our panel came up with consist much more of questions than answers.

To summarize briefly, our panel began with the presentation of the five speakers’ current research, which I will not get into in depth, as they are available on the website. We did, however, generate strong and productive questions about the projects, which generated for us a series of methodological problems that we attempted to phrase in terms of collaborative work. We found that our focus very quickly and easily slipped from a focus on the transnational to one on diaspora, as a number of us expressed more comfort with that term than the transnational, which was seen as an often vague term. Diaspora, however, presented us with a series of problems itself, as the varying terrain of the research projects demonstrated that diaspora is an open-ended term in much critical discourse and usage, reminding us of the need for vigilant awareness of the methodologies that we employ as scholars.

Thinking about diaspora and its connection to racialization led us to a series of questions relating to issues of collaborative work. Recognizing that diasporic studies encompasses a broad range of approaches, we discussed possibilities for creating work to which various scholars could contribute based on their individual strengths. In discussion, however, we found that such work leads towards objectivist and scientifist methods that posit research and knowledge as something that is limitable and knowable. Creating collaborative research in which individual scholars simply fill in the gaps in each others’ knowledge, then, presented us with difficulties and we suggested that such an approach did not seem terribly viable.

Instead, much of the discussion focused upon collaborative approaches that dealt specifically with methodologies. In thinking about these issues we were particularly guided by questions about what we hope to achieve through collaboration. One obvious point was that through creating intellectual networks we are able to access more and different resources, including financial ones. We discussed the potential for taking on more research across the borders of nation-states, which struck the group as productive in a time in which we want to constantly challenge nationalist imperialism. We also discussed the SSHRC transformation process, and wondered whether or not some of the more coercive aspects of these shifts should push us towards seeking other avenues of funding and what the consequences of such actions would be. Collaborative approaches towards working with American archives of Canadian materials as well as European institutions that take on Canadian work were both discussed.

Given the limitations of funding structures, we further wondered what avenues might be open to reforming how academic work is valued in order to foster collaborative approaches. Literary scholars seem to be awfully attached to their own writing! It is noteworthy that despite an often-articulated desire to challenge the rapacious individualism into which we are interpolated by late capitalism, workers in the humanities continue to produce single-authored papers as almost our sole means of publishing, which in turn has consequences for the evaluation of academic performance. Seriously challenging how work is evaluated in, for example, tenure review committees and hiring processes is necessary for collaborative approaches to become not only the norm, but even a possibility for more than the occasional piece of writing.

In asking what our goals are for collaborative work and in thinking about how this work might, in fact, be done, we finally came around to an acknowledgement that this conference itself is, of course, a part of this process. Sessions have variously frustrated and compelled the participants in this research cell on literatures, making us look forward to the ongoing work of TransCanada, in which so much is at stake.

Detailed Notes on Research Projects

Starting off: John P. Corr: "Mapping Diasporic Sexualities in Canadian Fiction"

Beginning with a recent Globe & Mail article on Mexican queer sexuality and the denial of refugee status in Canada. Refugee claim denied because claimant was not visibly effeminate enough to be harassed in Mexico. Sexual prejudice in Canada is thus based upon stereotypical notions of gendered performance in Canada. John is working on novels that pressure the dominant white centre of queer subjectivity. Funny Boy, Jade Peony, In Another Place, Not Here, Cereus Blooms at Night are all included. All are queer novels that do not name same-sex gendered acts according to dominant scripts ("gay," "lesbian," "bisexual," etc.). Insufficiency of the closet and dominant frameworks of naming is made apparent in these narrative performances. A sense of discovery and becoming is used to characterize these novels, following Butler’s performativity. Performativity is read here as one means of circumventing Foucault’s repressive hypothesis via open-endedness. The project is pushing for interventions at moments where a lack of clarity relative to dominant terms undoes gender – contesting the institutionally privileged models of naming and commodification of gendered difference. What are those terms? What are their limits? In a racialized and diasporic context, how do they change? Unevenness of queerness and non-homogeneity of difference becomes evident when asking these questions. Texts such as Diasporas and Global Diaspora offer a slipperiness of terms, but adequate recognition of the differences within diaspora, when made singular, is frequently erased (as "the Chinese diaspora," etc.). Sexuality is one aspect that is erased in discussions of diaspora. These texts present challenges to non-Anglo/Franco diasporic cultures within official multiculturalism.

Jennifer Delisle: "Newfoundland Expatriate Literature: Nationalism and Diaspora"

Jennifer is focusing on shifting the concept of transnationalism by viewing Newfoundland as a national category. She is thus examining how Newfoundland constructs a nationalism and how Newfoundland writers have married the concept of nationalism yo the idea of diaspora (which is self-consciously loaded in this context). Newfoundland is recognized as a formerly separate dominion, still contested at the cultural level. Its place within Canada affects identity formations – federal control of fisheries and oil continues to provide a source of irritation and contestation. Confederation is thus a major theme in the literature. Wayne Johnston’s writing equates confederation with death, as does Joan Clark’s. Confederation meant a demise of the country of Newfoundland in this context. Stan Dragland, on the other hand, is seeing it as future-oriented discourse. Not as a failed nation, but as a work-in-progress. Literature and nationalism becomes interdependent in Newfoundland. The texts studied thus express a cultural nationalist tendency, through stereotypical or recurrent images (fisheries, etc.). It is a "Country of no country" (Johnston’s Baltimore’s Mansion) or an imagined nation (Anderson). Newfoundland ethnicity builds nation and diaspora, through a constructed homeland. Its literature of diaspora constitutes the place from an external perspective. 50 000 Newfoundlanders were in the US and Canada by 1931, constituting a substantial portion of the population. E.J. Pratt is seen as the first significant literary figure of this diaspora. How to read him in this context? What is an authentic Newfoundlander? These questions are read through publications such as Atlantic Guardian, an expatriate magazine from Montreal. The literature of exile presents an artificial nostalgia, presenting a frozen Newfoundland. Writers in exile are thus producing nostalgia: Patrick Cavanaugh, Morrissey, etc. Gordon Pincent, David French, etc., writing about migration itself. David McFarland, in The Danger Tree, shows a continuation of themes into second generation emigrants. The diasporic dimension of this shift is, however, generally unnoticed in criticism.

Heike Härting "Global War and the Politics of Corpses in Canadian Narratives of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda"

Heike presented strands of where her research is going and where it is coming from. Her current focus is on Canadian policy-making, while she ended with recommendations for TransCanada coming out of her policy engagements. She is involved with the project from MCRI in Globalization and Autonomy at McMaster. In this work, she notes the absence of a theoretical approach that links global warfare and postcolonial theory. Postcolonialists have been retooling selves in the face of globalization to become transnational scholars (cf. Timothy Brennan). This is part of a larger historical project. What postcolonial studies needs to bring to the global is an analysis of how competing narratives of warfare are produced and a recognition of the racialization of global war. Global capitalism is read as producing identities and militarizing national and global relationships. Canadian studies always implies postcolonial studies, and therefore these issues are inextricable from work situated in Canada. How does Canadian "peacekeeping" contribute to a de-racialized global imaginary? Through the discourse of "white civility" (Dan Coleman), for one. Hegemonic narratives, from federal policies to Roméo Dallaire’s autobiography of Canadian self-imagining as good global citizen, override recognitions of Canada’s complicity in global war. These dominant narratives deny the connection between nationalism, race, and war. See Achille Mbembe’s "Necropolitics" in Public Culture. Necropolitics is read there as a form of biopolitics that extends Foucault’s biopolitics to a politics of controlling death. This is read as a part of the project of historicizing war and racialization. Narratives deny relationships, while emphasizing rupture and chaos, instead of continuity as driving force of globalization. Mass amnesia is thus afoot. Heike works with a Foucauldian terminology – looking at Foucault’s lectures from 1975–76, collected in Society Must Be Defended. Foucault addresses the relationship of war and racism in his final lecture. Racism is seen there as a precondition that allows murder and killing. Neither Foucault nor recent critics have looked at war and racism through imperialist history, leading to a dehistoricized sense of Canadian history. Meanwhile, the right wing is hijacking the rhetoric of diaspora to shore up the borders and the nation, and needs to be contested. The project involves a reading of Shake Hands with the Devil and Canadian policy documents. See Donna Pennee, for whom capitalism is projected as a quality and cultural value in dominant narratives. The specific policy under investigation focuses on building global capitalism through concepts of citizenship. The war in Rwanda, similarly, is viewed as an aspect of global developments in Dallaire rather than part of racialized history. Paul Martin suggests that Canada is simulatneously "doing well" and "doing good" in the global – enlarging "defence" budget through rhetoric of peacekeeping (against "failed states" as breeding-grounds for terrorism), while profiteering throughout the process. Fragile states are now blamed for the world’s ills. These "failed states" are euphemisms for postcolonial nation-states, and are thus part of racialized histories. This discourse connects to Derrida’s Rogues – envisioning democracy within globalization. Global war as a question of policing, that is, of "stabilizing states" through foreign policy. Peace–building becomes a way of celebrating "ethical intervention" and waging war against the poor. See that Canadian government document called "A New Multilateralism" (contrasting to US unilateralism). Multilateralism is surfacing as a new term to replace multiculturalism, with consequences for creating new waves of historical amnesia.
Andrea Medeovarski, "Un/Settling Migrations: Citizenship, Kinship and the Second Generation in Post-Immigrant Black Canadian and Black British Women’s Texts"
Andrea is investigating the representation of migration. Hers is an attempt to gender diaspora, away from masculinist imagings of diaspora (scattering the seed, etc.). Many people surface in her in work, although they are not in the process of migrating – she is instead examining a post-migration rhetoric. What We All Long For, Out of My Skin, White Teeth, and Small Island, all appear. These texts feature second-generation children of migrants. Questions of settlement and negotiating new space are key concerns, in which there is less emphasis on "back home" and more on "right here." They are thus glocalized texts. Andrea’s UK texts depict migrations, but are set in London. Brand’s are set entirely in Toronto, while others are similarly limited to localities. These texts articulate a shift in recent writing. Why is this shift marked by women writers? How are writers depicting processes of occupying space and remaking national spaces of Canada and the UK? Here they can invoke home, but there is no return. There is a shift in tone – less focus on loss and trauma, more on a persistent effort to inhabit the nation. Radhakrishnan’s "Ethnicity in an Age of Diaspora," tracing the difference between the Indian self as emigrant and Indian-American son, provides one avenue into this investigation. Hyphenations remake the nation there and in post-immigrant discourse. Hyphenation thus informs the term "post-immigrant" itself. Lillian Allen: first and second generations are seen as post-immigranted. Immigrants and children are shaped by the histories, but negotiate the spaces. The Narratives dismantle false binaries around assimilation and ethno-nationalism as a reductive paradigm. They thus call into question the idea that place and rootedness are opposed to migration and routedness. Settled and unsettled therefore becomes a false binary. Theories of space and spatialization are derived from Henry LeFebvre, Edward Soja, in which spaces are reinscribed and altered. Andrea’s work is further informed by Michel de Certeau’s notion of resistance in everyday life as she traced shifts in Brand’s corpus and shifts in concepts of space over time. Toronto becomes less frightening, from the generation of parents to children, from In Another Place to The full and Change of the Moon to What We All Long For. Out of My Skin, similarly, is read as a narrative of adoption and incest. Black / white binaries as disrupted therein. The text’s protagonist is left with no choice but to lay claim to the current space, which is occupied first nations’ land. How does one occupy space ethically? How to negotiate the complexities of living in the Americas? Diaspora is read as a rejection of a correlation between identity and place. Transnationalism is seen as problematic, as a means of containing the rhetoric of economics. Andrea is actively questioning the rhetoric of globalization are one of inevitable nomadism, working with the analyses of the need to migrate in Globalization: The Human Consequences.

Karina Vernon, "Black History on the Prairies"

Karina aims to construct a dense archive of black prairie writing and orature from mid-nineteenth century until the present in her dissertation. This archive is situated in the context of black history on the prairies, which is often erased. Her governing pun is that this history is a "Black Atlantis" – an erased space. She is thus examining the repression of black history against prairie regional criticism. How does Canadian postcoloniality neglect black history on the prairies? A regional focus looks to the dominant centre, rather than analyzing how the region itself represses difference. By looking at the disappearance of the prairies in black criticism, it is possible to see how regional discourses continually construct the prairies as an undisrupted microcosm, leaving black writing out of anthologies, etc. Claire Harris, for example, is frequently unacknowledged as a prairie writer. The current centennial projects of Alberta and Saskatchewan demonstrate, with shocking forthrightness, the racist exclusions of prairie space. Can we begin to think about the prairies as a black space? Blacks in Canada, Deemed Unsuitable, and Thompson’s Blacks in Deep Snow are all key works that allow blackness to be seen as far from a new or recent prairie phenomenon. Karina’s history thus starts in 1795, when the first black fur trader comes to the prairies in the employ of the Hudson’s Bay Company. HBC frequently used black interpreters, who were thought to have more facility in indigenous languages. Karina thus explores the origins of migration, examining patterns of settlement in Amber Valley, Keystone, and near Swan River, which led to government fears of a black racialization of the prairies and a forbidding of black immigration. Black immigration started again after 1955, when restrictions on immigration were relaxed. In the 1996 census, it was found that Alberta has a larger black population than Nova Scotia, and Edmonton and Halifax have equivalent-sized black populations. The archive thus brings together writers and orators from the 19th century to the present. It is unique in that much material beyond the literary is used. It consists of taped interviews, census results from black families, amateur essays, annd archival letters. It fills a crucial lack, as, for example, George Elliott Clarke’s bibliography omits most prairie materials. The archive here is a space of racially-inflected memory, which is otherwise erased. It is not closed or self-contained: the black prairie archive is interconnected to other cultural exchanges and communities. Suzette Mayr is now often claimed as diasporic German author, but can be read as prairie black writer as well. Claire Harris gets reclaimed to the local as prairie spaces become radically hybridized. Karina focuses on the rhizomatic network of the archive, which is here regional, questioning national motives and notions of the writer as citizen.

Notes on Discussion EDB (refer to list of attendees for full names): Eva sought connections between the presentations. Panel should perhaps be "literature and diaspora" rather than "transnationalism." But the "trans" emphasizes the idea of movement implicit in diaspora. Diaspora is thus the connecting thread between the five projects, illustrating a commitment to the past connected to history of displacement and oppression. An idea of the spatialization of identity emerged as a shared value. Identity is seen as the body in space, or in movement. For John: there remains an assumption that an intersection of same-sex desire and diaspora is unique and should be addressed interactively. Canadian fiction is seen as an ideal site – why? For Jennifer: applying the notion of diaspora to Newfoundland is controversial, recasting the diaspora as intranational, affecting the notion of nationalism as regional, coinciding with the imagined community. The thesis that Newfoundlanders are diasporic because of nostalgia and distance is problematic, as is idea that they provide literary sensibility. For Heike: if diaspora is about a connection to the past, how does the project look to that? It seems to look to the continuity of violence in the present, looking from the outside of Canada in. For Andrea and Karina: there is a clear connection between presentations. For Andrea: the interaction between race and gender needs development. The project starting from the assumption that race and gender are constantly interacting to produce identity and experience; this could use firmer justification: how and why? The idea that a post-immigrant sensibility involves a rejection or displacement of race is troubling. How does race connect to the new ways of belonging in the local? For Karina: the project reconceptualizes prairie literature, writing back to Kroetsch, van Herk, and Laurence’s concept of the prairies as an empty space. Could you connect the feminization of land in prairie writing to the issue of racialization in the project? Historiographic work going on at the same time. All projects connect in particular to the issue of diaspora, upon which we might focus now.
JPC: diasporas don’t exist alone. Identities are crossed and improvised. Compromises are made in diaspora.
AM: it is about diaspora and more than diaspora. The ways in which diaspora hijacked as an identity politics is an interesting issue. It is a bothering process: it goes from a counter-discourse of nation to a discourse of nation in the mainstream. The idea that post-immigrant writing transcends race is too limited or simple. In Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia, diaspora / race is questioned as a grounds for automatic solidarity. Should we be working within or moving beyond diaspora? Wanting to move to a beyond.
EDB: moving beyond comes in conflict with Karina’s project, however, which seeks to recuperate racialized histories of diaspora.
JF: It is questionable how diaspora has been discussed so far. It seems to be forgetting Canada’s relationship to the US. Where is NAFTA and other cross-border movements? William Faulkner in Absolom, Absolom! has a strong awareness of the prairies, for example. Canadian policy is closely influenced by the US too. The assumption about diaspora seems to be that it always comes from a place strongly associated with an "elsewhere."
HH: Looking at such cross-border interconnections is a major part of the project, which tries to recognize how these erasures are made.
JF: How does diaspora allow a skipping over of the Canada – US relationship?
LC: How so?
AM: Rinaldo Walcott says Canadian blackness is read through American blackness.
JF: Okay, but according to whom and on which grounds?
KV: The way in which Oklahoman blacks came across the border is frequently narrated without reference to the US. Following that narrative trajectory, the cross-border movements are erased.
EDB: Would it be more fruitful to approach projects of diaspora in terms of comparative Canada – US approaches?
JF: How does diaspora function in this context?
JPC: There is certainly no singular diaspora; instead there are complexities within diasporas. Trying to define diaspora becomes problematic as a result.
HH: Diaspora is, within Canada, a national project. Not a comparative one, but one that looks at and commodifies difference vis–à–vis the nation, if it is looked at as a constraining concept. But to be looked at also as something connected to trauma and memory, which brings us back to identity politics. There is a need to negotiate between coercive practices of diaspora and an understanding of diaspora as something beyond identity politics.
KD: How about Stuart Hall’s call for looking instead at identity in difference and identifications instead of the ossifications of identity politics as such?
AM: Her own project started as themed with migrating, with US, Canada, and UK texts. Shrunk to exclude the US. Comparative work becomes too large with the US.
HH: Where is the comparative angle regarding the francophonie? Black criticism and theory is frequently francophone, but usually only appraised through an Anglophone angle. For example, the reception of Fanon is much earlier in French than in English.
AM: Then there is the Spanish black diaspora too. These issues seem to spiral out of control if we attempt to cover all of the bases.
KD: Is this an opportunity for collaboration?
HH: What do we think about collaboration? It should not be about filling the gaps, but about hashing out the important questions. It cannot be about the division of labour, but about methodological, conceptual work.
LC: Her collaborative work on Asian and black diaspora has ended up being more overlapping than initially planned. A model of filling in the gaps leads into empirical, social science paradigms, which feign objectivism.
HH: Even within the humanities, one ends up overlapping and working through differing methodologies. Moments of connection exist in terms of space. Racializing and deracializing spaces as a methodological grounds for collaboration emerges most strongly. Space becomes a key starting point.
JF: The tendency to conflate diaspora and race is disabling; thinking about it spatially is useful. How does this work for Karina? At what point does calling something a diaspora become problematic or disabling? When does it reinforce binaries of belonging and exclusion?
KV: The project doesn’t call all black people on the prairies diasporic. Various relationships differ. Some are reterritorialized.
KD: That point is very useful – deterritorialization is too often disconnected from reterritorialization. In Deleuze and Guattari’s formulations, any deterritorialization is followed by a reterritorializing process; theories of the transnational often view the deterritorial our of context, neglecting the ways in which space is continually recoded and shut down.
AM: Issues of situating prairies as part of the Americas becomes key here, when we view creolization as a process in motion since 1492. "When Columbus came we became postmodern"; Stuart Hall: "for me, postmodernism began in 1492."
B: A black presence demonstrates itself in connections to indigenous cultures through creolization. There is a close connection to Cherokee cultures in specific narratives. There is a presence and legacy that connects to indigeneity.
HH: How about Toni Morrison’s use of those images? Cherokee guides on the underground railroad, for example.
B: Morrison provides, as ever, a very useful rethinking of relationships of oppression.
EDB: Question of the signature – what is one allowed to say based on who he or she is? Morrison can do it because of her blackness, Sky Lee can connect Asian and native cultures. These exclusions need to be rethought.
HH: But we might link this to Lee Maracle’s comments on chronic invasion yesterday, in which white culture continually makes use of the indigenous. We need to tread carefully here.
EDB: With Jennifer’s project, for example, we have an association of term diaspora and Newfoundland being reclaimed, while Native writers state that they are not diasporic. Instead we are to view their culture as invaded. Is there a risk of creating oppositions between reclaiming and rejecting?
AM: Do we need to rethink the connection between movement and displacement? Can we talk about first Nations as displaced without movement?
JPC: Have you worked through differences between immigrants and children of immigrants vis–à–vis diaspora?
AM: Diaspora is an always-shifting and slippery term. It can’t be a checklist of identity qualities and movements. Such a stance would assume an objective study. Instead, it has to be slippery.
JD: Needs to be slippery!
JPC: And yet it is problematic to not have any criteria.
AM: So it needs to be linked to specific histories, as a multi-generational phenomenon. See Against Race (Gilroy), ch. 2.
KD: So how do we connect diaspora and race?
LC: Intimately!
JF: One way can be through appreciating the archive. How do fictional archives connect (Compton’s Performance Bond, Brand’s Thirsty, Clarke’s Execution Poems) to the historical ones?
KV: Compton made up the missing texts from the archives in his own writing, and they’ve now become a part of the black B.C. archive. They are now a locus of black-inflected memory. Identities have thus been created around fictitious archives.
AM: 49th Parallel Psalm speaks to that. How about regionalism? Let’s connect it by thinking about Jennifer’s use of disapora. Newfoundland is seen here as a nation and ethnicity – let’s talk more about them. What makes Newfoundland different? Anyone seen the film Goin’ Down the Road about two guys going from rural Nova Scotia and go to Toronto? Is it diasporic? Could we have an Alberta diaspora or a B.C. diaspora?
JF: What is our relationship to the past? All of our texts are from the 1990s.
JD: She is not committing self to a position that Newfoundland is different. She feels that it is different because of the magnitude of out-migration, but that evaluation is relative. Every family in Newfoundland is affected by it. The fact that Newfoundland joined confederation very recently continues to impact. A 2003 study found that 12% of Newfoundlanders want to separate from Canada. The popular feeling is that Canada has economically colonized Newfoundland. This leads also to a further question as to what constitutes Newfoundland literature – whether it includes work from the outside. These are all ongoing concerns.
AM: She sees the exodus from Newfoundland as being primarily economic.
JF: Sure, but it also connects to trauma, making diaspora a potentially useful tool.
HH: So diaspora is connected to questions of power, and its uneven relations. Newfoundland is connected to such unevenness. Colony of Unrequited Dreams is empowering and emasculating all at once. There is a tremendous loss in terms of joining Canada in confederation. Jennifer’s work pushes diaspora into spaces of whiteness, which is unusual, but uneven relations of power are definitely there.
JD: Newfoundlanders are often subject to prejudice that is erased or else accepted because of whiteness or because it is part of Canada. It is easy for power relations to be erased to be erased in this context.
LC: Is it useful to look at the specific histories of diasporas for Jennifer? Lots of unresolved issues abound here. Whiteness has histories that need excavation. Also, diaspora is usually looked at as an urban phenomenon, but it happens outside of the metropolitan centre as well.
KV: How do we talk about regional imaginaries without reinscribing difference? Without working with problematic discourses of the region?
EDB: Let’s move to a discussion more focused on issues of collaboration. How do we avoid dealing in or repeating stereotypes? Perhaps by introducing intersections between categories. Critique is implied when moving into more than one category. We likely don’t imagine we can avoid repeating certain stereotypes, but we can be at least self-conscious about the dangers.
HH: For collaboration: let’s be practical. How do we collaborate until next year? Is this going to be based around workshops around themes? Methodologies? Institutional projects? How do we implement these plans?
KD: It seems like discussions of methodologies are key here.
KV: How will we be reconstituted in the future?
EDB: Out of these discussions we will have a discussion tomorrow, which will lead to web publications, leading to ongoing discussion. We are not committed to anything definite yet.
HH: We need some recommendations to take to the larger organization. [SEE LIST OF RECOMMENDATIONS forwarded by Heike to the TransCanada committee.] These are all specifically coming out of her own desires and current research. 1) We need to engage cultural studies in the face of war. Questions of sovereignty, legitimacy, and so forth, are needed in the context of citizenship. 2) We need an engagement with Canadian studies, looking at moments of colonial modernity and racialized violence. Linking biopolitics to the history of necropolitics is one avenue for investigation here. 3) Canadian studies needs to foster an awareness of how critical and political terms get co-opted in the national body. 4) We need an engagement with generically diverse texts (i.e. policy, etc.), while reclaiming the language of postcolonial critique. The push towards the new is always worrying in this context, as we risk losing the past.
LC: There is thus a need for a TransCanada memory. We need to be going through our discussions over and over – the website is one obvious site. How do we carry forward the conversations?
KV: The original conference looked like it would have history, but the conference has been remarkably presentist.
EDB: The focus has been very much on the 90s and 00s.
JPC: Details that are lacking have to do with people’s work. His work gets into analysis of past issues, but these are difficult to engage here.
LC: There seems to be very little engagement with the issues themselves. Position paper givers didn’t get much direction, so there were lots of disconnections.
AM: This open-endedness led to plenty of misreadings.
HH: Collaborative work is a ton of work, but we shouldn’t fear the process.
EDB: Could we look at a methodological recommendation that states that we cannot address diaspora as an isolated category, but that it connects to multiple categories of identity?
AM: We need to come back to seeing diasporas in relation to each other.
KD: But once again we face the problem with fixed categories of identity – can we get out of that box?
B: What are the goals of collaboration? There are different types of collaboration, beyond the individual work of research papers. Institutional collaborations. What are our goals? Should we set aside some sort of objective? Something connected to diaspora? Connected to methodologies? Institutional work?
JPC: There is already a performative dimension where this isn’t just a conference, but a process of working together.
KD: So we’re already doing collaborative work at this conference. But what are the goals of collaboration?
JPC: Establishing networks for mentorship, peer discussion, and peer review (before the paper level) are all already goals that are in evidence here.
KV: Collaboration is very symbolic. Theorizing black Canada has been very personal. This project needs to stop being driven by individual personalities. Black Canada is bigger than any one scholar.
AM: One of the goals of collaboration would be to call into question or intervene in the insistent individualism in the academy, especially in our field. Unofficially, we can’t do our projects alone, since people read our work, etc. Collaboration doesn’t really get acknowledged. We’re always rewarded as individuals in competition with one another. Institutional acknowledgement of collaborative work is needed.
KD: We’re trained to be so protective of our own writing!
JF: We need to work also beyond Canadian borders, especially looking to the US. Let’s take their money! And much Canadian material is in American archives.
B: There should be more cross-border collaboration, but US materials relevant to Canada tend to privilege the east and fugitive slave narratives. There is not much about the west.
EDB: If we’re transcending nationalism, then we should get over our lack of connections to the south.
B: Americans are interested in Canada, when it gets brought up. There is funding available.
JPC: How does that work? How to we make those connections? How do we initiate?
KD: To rephrase: how do we get the money?
JF: Winfried writes about being in Canada and the Americas. People are there in the US and are networking.
EDB: In Europe there are many programs that fund people from multiple countries. There are a number of Canadian studies programs that integrate people from Canadian universities.
JPC: There is the Fulbright program.
KD: How about the SSHRC transformation and do we turn away from it? The focus on the applicability of research and new for a for discussion seems to inform this conference already. Are we to accept the social sciences model that SSHRC is advocating in our own research? The consequences of doing so seem to push us towards collaborative work that risks taking on objectivist and empiricist models that we might want to challenge at a theoretical level. So we are being asked to conform in new ways in order to retain our funding, based upon often external perspectives about what constitutes socially "relevant" research. While the emphasis on applicability and responsibility can all be appreciated on the surface, they have ramifications that we want to think about very seriously. Alternatively, looking towards other sources of funding has potential consequences for the involvement of the humanities in SSHRC processes, and the impression is often given that many of the people who run SSHRC would love to see the humanities disappear from the body. The SSHRC transformation has been an alarming process from a humanities point of view.
AM: But a lot of it is not new. CWS / cf is 25 years old, and has substantial public crossover. Why do we have to make it new? The ongoing fetishization of newness is disturbing!
EDB: Let’s sum up, as we’re running out of time.
KD: How shall I present this discussion?
EDB: Concentrate on the final part.
AM: Don’t summarize statements. Move onwards. Focus on diaspora – reframing our research cell towards diaspora. Use the questions, not the answers (which we don’t have!) Steven Slemon’s directive towards "problem finding" rather than "problem solving" is a good one here.
KD: Including Heike’s suggestions.
AM: Can you phrase them in more general terms? Beyond just her work on war and militarism.
EDB: Summarize!
KV: How about breaking down the student hierarchies further – could we have grad students giving position papers? This conference as reflecting the new SSHRC funding formulae …