Smaro Kamboureli - Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature

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University of Toronto Quarterly – Writing the “Foreign” – 2012

University of Toronto Quarterly Interdisciplinary Special Issue on:

Writing the “Foreign:”
The Cultural and Representational Politics and Poetics of the Foreign in Canadian Literature and Culture (tentative title)

Guest-edited by Smaro Kamboureli

A TransCanada Institute Project

Deadline:  June 30, 2012

While debates about the ethics and politics of cultural appropriation in Canadian cultural representations have received ample critical attention, the question of how to read Canadian authors’ representations of foreign geopolitical spaces and their impact on the Canadian socius has only recently begun to receive the sustained treatment it deserves. Recent scholarship, emerging out of the study of discourses of security and humanitarianism has pointed out that an understanding of contemporary Canadian culture—and the role the nation-state plays in constructing foreign “others” in relation to its self-imaginary—must pay attention to how cultural discourses place Canada in relation to the world. In the literary realm, the work of Canadian authors from Earle Birney and Margaret Laurence to Karen Connelly and David Bergen exemplify the ongoing centrality of foreign spaces in Canadian literature. These authors have not only drawn on their own experiences abroad to inform textual representations of “foreign” subjects and spaces, but have also attempted to problematize the very possibility of representing cultural differences from a Canadian perspective. At the same time, these representations hold an increasingly privileged position with the Canadian literary economy, where accounts of “foreign” spaces gain authenticity through a collapsing of representation with the author’s own experiences. Similar issues emerge as much from media and NGO discourses about “others” in Canada and elsewhere, as well as from government policies. This special issue focuses as much on the theoretical and sociopolitical implications of these questions as in actual engagements with different kinds of cultural discourses. Some of the questions contributors could address include:

  • What kinds of desires motivate such travels and representations?
  • What is the relationship between desire for the “foreign” and “foreign” subjects’ racialization?
  • How does empathy for the “other” contribute to the construction of both the author/traveler and “others”?
  • What is the politics that invariably accompany empathy as a sign of affect?
  • What constitutes the “foreign,” and how the does the “foreign” signify in Canadian cultural and media discourses?
  • How is complicity represented and problematized?
  • How might the representational strategies in such discourses provide a point of resistance to the very politics with which they are potentially complicit?
  • How does gender inflect such representations?
  • What are the broader political concerns—of complicity and the legacy of colonial discourse—that inform the circulation of these representations?
  • How is the “foreign” represented in its “otherness” within the Canadian national imaginary?

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