Mikinaakominis / TransCanadas
Literature, Justice, Relation
May 24-27, 2017
University of Toronto
Program
Mikinaakominis TransCanadas Program (pdf)
Wednesday, May 24 | Thursday, May 25 | Friday, May 26 | Saturday, May 27
Wednesday, May 24 – Hart House
| 12:30-5:00 | Registration – Founders’ Prayer Hall (1030K) |
| 1:30-2:00 | Conference Opening – Great Hall (1022) Haudenosaune Ceremony Rev. Dr. Grafton Antone (Oneida of the Thames First Nation) Accompanied by the Wahahi:o Singers |
| 2:00-4:00 | Plenary One: Indigenous Voices – Great Hall (1022)Lee Maracle (UofT), “Memory Has Bias”Eileen Antone (Oneida of the Thames First Nation), “That Indian He Don’t Want to Be a Puppet Any More”Jordan Abel (SFU), “Positioning Intergenerational Trauma: Nisga’a Nationalism and the Materiality of Marius Barbeau’s Totem Poles”Chair: Smaro Kamboureli (UofT) |
| 4:00-4:15 | Coffee Break – Lower Gallery (1022K) |
| 4:15-5:30 | Keynote Address – Great Hall (1022) Warren Cariou (UofM) “Landsensing: Body, Territory, Relation” Chair: Larissa Lai (Calgary) |
| 5:30-7:30 | Reception & Cash Bar – Lower Gallery (1022K) & The Quad |
Thursday, May 25 – Hart House
| 9:00-5:00 | Registration – Founders’ Prayer Hall (1030K) |
| 9:00-11:00 | Plenary Two: Literature and Relation – Great Hall (1022)Rinaldo Walcott (UofT) “Black Gifts, Black People: ‘Lament for a Nation’ and Reading Canada in the Americas”Pauline Wakeham (WU) “#Indigenous Reads and the Public Pedagogy of Reconciliation”Sophie McCall (SFU) “Recognition, Resurgence and Arrival in the Work of Indigenous and Diasporic Writers”Chris Lee (UBC) “The World(liness) of Chinese Canadian Literature”Animator / Discussant: Margery Fee (UBC) “Diplomacy before Reconciliation” |
| 11:00-11:15 | Coffee Break – Lower Gallery (1022K) |
| 11:15-12:30 | Concurrent Sessions AA1: Roundtable ~ Race and Refuge: Photography and Making Stories Location: Debates Room (2034)Nadine Attewell (McMaster), “Interracial Intimacy and Institutional Form: Hong Kong, Liverpool, Salt Spring Island”Lily Cho (York), “Indexicality and Captivation in Kim Fu’s For Today I Am a Boy”Morris Lum (Independent Artist), “Tong Yan Gaai (Chinatown)”Thy Phu (WU), “Family Photography, Canadian History”Chair: Pauline Wakeham (WU) A2: Earth Memory Location: East Common Room (1034)Mathew Mathew Arthur (UBC) and Reuben Jentink (Vancouver), “Composting Settler Nationalism”Cheryl Lousley (Lakehead), “Public Memory, Mourning, and Extraction Industries: ‘The Glace Bay Miner’s Museum’ and February”Laura Moss (UBC), “Modified Seeds and Morphemes: Going from Farm to Page”Chair: Sonnet L’Abbé (Vancouver Island U) A3: Let Us Compare Mythologies: Quebec’s Cultural Myths Location: Music Room (2006)Norah Franklin (UofT), “‘Each in his holy hill’: Leonard Cohen’s Let Us Compare Mythologies and Secularism in Quebec”Myra Bloom (UofT), “Translating the Solitudes”Sarah Henzi (SFU), “Irreconcilable ‘Myths of Métissage’: Indigeneity and Settler Colonialism in Québec”Chair: Kit Dobson (Mount Royal) A4: Canlits and Pedagogy OR Reading & Teaching Canada Location: South Dining Room (2005)Elizabeth Galway (Lethbridge), “Young Readers for a Young Land: The Politics of Nation-Building in Early Canadian Children’s Literature”Erin Spring (Lethbridge), “‘This land carries all I’ll ever need to know’: Reading Canada from the Reserve”Jody Mason (Carleton), “Citizenship, Pedagogy, Institutions”Chair: Robert McGill (UofT) A5: Roundtable II ~ Insurrectionary Reading Location: North Dining Room (2007)Madeleine Reddon (UBC), “Indigenous Modernism: Dehabituating Reading Practices”Sebastiaan Boersma (UBC), “A Poethics of Affectability”Dallas Hunt (UBC), “‘But I want to survive’: Indigenous Futurities and Otherwise”Szu Shen (UBC), “Reading Beyond Our Settler Colonial Present”Chair: Margery Fee (UBC) |
| 12:30-1:30 | Catered Lunch – Lower Gallery (1022K) & The Quad |
| 1:30-2:45 | Concurrent Sessions BB1: Roundtable III ~ Performing Sovereignty from Palestine to Canada Location: Debates Room (2034)Jeff O’Brien (UBC), “The Labour of the Missing, the Work of the Dead: From Ruin to Archive”Wanda Nanibush (AGO Curator of Indigenous Art), “Performing Sovereignty in Contemporary Indigenous Art”Rehab Nazzal (WU), “The Olive Tree, the Land and the Palestinian Struggle against Settler Colonialism”Michael Farnan (WU), “Representing Wilderness: Community, Collaboration, and Artistic Practice”Chair: Dot Tuer (OCAD U) B2: Global Perspectives I ~ Spain Bodies in Transit / Precarious Narratives: TransCanadian Networks Location: East Common Room (1034)Pilar Cuder-Domínguez (Huelva), “Poetic (Re)Embodiments of Slavery: Cultural Memory, Social Justice and Blackness in Canadian Literature”Eva Darias-Beautell (La Laguna), “W’daeb-awae or the Limits of Knowledge: Indigenizing Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air”Belén Martín-Lucas (Vigo), “Posthumanism, Diaspora, and Indigeneity: Feminist Interventions in TransCanadian Speculative Fiction”Chair: Christl Verduyn (Mount Allison) B3: Memory in Black and South Asian Canadian Writing Location: Music Room (2006)Winfried Siemerling (Waterloo), “Memory and Witnessing, Documentary and Poetry: Sylvia Hamilton’s And I Alone Escaped to Tell You”Farah Moosa (Vancouver Island U), “Memory, Forgetting, and the Air India Story in children of air india and ‘Kanishka Poems’”Chair: Chris Lee (UBC) B4: Care, Ecology, Disability Location: North Dining Room (2007)Nora Foster Stovel (UofA), “‘All the People That on Earth do Dwell’: Equality and Ecology in the Essays of Margaret Laurence”Angelo Muredda (UofT), “‘What’s Goin’ To Become of Boys Like That in the End?’: Disability, Kinship, and National Entanglement in Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage”Stephanie Oliver (UofA-Augustana), “Burning Buried Ancestors: Bitumen and the Poetics of Relation in Warren Cariou’s ‘An Athabasca Story’”Chair: Laura Moss (UBC) B5: Storying the Border Location: South Dining Room (2005)Anna Sajecki (UofA), “Open Border, Open Road: Canada and the Road Trip Genre”Bart Vautour (Dalhousie), “Personal Libraries of the State: Theorizing the Libraries and Cultural Life of Canada’s Foreign Missions”Bridgette Brown (Carleton), “Transnational Feminine Civility: Florence Randal and E. Maud Graham, Canada’s ‘Teachers for South Africa’ (1902)”Chair: Robert Zacharias (York) |
| 2:45-3:00 | Coffee Break – Lower Gallery (1022K) |
| 3:00-5:00 | Plenary Three – Doctoral Students: Water, Bookkeeping, Archives Location: Great Hall (1022)Alec Follett (Guelph), “‘The path of peace’ in undercurrent: Rita Wong’s Water Activism”L. Camille van der Marel (UofA), “Bookkeeping: Discourses of Debt in Caribbean Canadian Literature”Max Karpinski (UofT), “Diddling the Archive: Rereading the Pastoral through Roy Kiyooka’s The Artist and the Moose”Chair: Christl Verduyn (Mount Allison) |
| 5:15-6:00 | Literary Readings & Book Launch Location: Great Hall (1022) George Elliott Clarke (UofT) & SKY Lee (Toronto/Vancouver) Launch of new edition of Disappearing Moon Cafe Chairs: Larissa Lai (Calgary) & Smaro Kamboureli (UofT) |
| 6:00-7:00 | Book signing, Reception & Cash Bar Lower Gallery (1022K) & The Quad |
Friday, May 26 – Hart House
| 9:00-10:15 | Concurrent Sessions CC1: Roundtable IV ~ Digital TransCanadas Location: Debates Room (2034)Kate Siklosi (York) and Paul Barrett (McMaster), “Neoliberal Tools or New Humanist Critique? Theorizing Class, Race, and Nation in the Digital Humanities”Jordan Abel (SFU), “Towards an Inclusive Corpus: Topic Modeling, Indigenous Poetry and Colonial Borders”Sara Megan Humphreys and Lauren Burr (Waterloo), “Digital Gaming Paradigms and the Decolonization of Indigenous Texts”Dean Irvine (Agile Humanities Agency), “This DH Went to Market: Indigeneity, Neoliberalism, and Digital Economies”Chair: Joshua Whitehead (Calgary) C2: Gender and Kinship Location: South Dining Room (2005)Mathieu Aubin (UBC-Okanagan), “Re-Radicalizing Contemporary Queer Activism: Modelling blewointment press’s Intersectional Creative Space”Gregory Fenton (McMaster), “‘Not just about me and my body’: Exploring Racial and Sexual Kinships in For Today I Am a Boy”Erin Wunker (Acadia), “Archives Undone: Towards a Poethics of Feminist Archival Disruptions”Chair: Suzette Mayr (Calgary) C3: Global Perspectives II ~ UK / Canada / US Writing Across Borders Location: East Common Room (1034)Gillian Roberts (Nottingham), “Cross-Border Adaptations and the Told-To Paradigm”David Stirrup (Kent), “Fast Borders and Loose Borders: Sovereign Rhetorics”Jennifer Andrews (UNB), “Americans Write Canada”Chair: Robert Zacharias (York) C4: Affect, Place, Body Location: Music Room (2006)Libe García Zarranz (Cambridge), “Feeling Sideways: Shani Mootoo’s Decolonial Affects”Clint Burnham (SFU), “Irreconciling Psychoanalysis: Settler Affect, the Cree Mirror, and the Indigenist Gaze”Aritha van Herk (Calgary), “The GPS of Place: Navigating Embodiment and Escape”Chair: Sonnet L’Abbé (Vancouver Island U) C5: Global Perspectives III ~ Italy / Poland / Japan Literary, Cultural, and Disciplinary Perspectives Location: North Dining Room (2007)Eugenia Sojka (Silesia), “Oh, Canada! How have you been constructed in Poland? Polish Translators, Writers, and Publishers and Their Representations of Canada”Eleonora Rao (Salerno), “Cinderella Lit? Canadian Literature in the Italian Context”Chair: Larissa Lai (Calgary) |
| 10:15-10:30 | Coffee Break – Lower Gallery (1022K) |
| 10:30-12:30 | Plenary Four: Literature and Justice Location: Great Hall (1022) Ato Quayson (UofT), “Delirious Sovereignty and Affronted Ethno-nationalism: Concerning Cosmopolitanism and National Identities”Sedef Arat-Koç (Ryerson), “From Islamophobia to Islamophilia? Public Discourse, Dancing Orientalisms and the Unspeakability of Muslim Women’s Experiences”Imre Szeman (UofA/Waterloo), “Pipelines and Territories: On Energy and Environment Futures in Canada”Deanna Reder (SFU), “Recuperating Indigenous Narratives: Making Legible the Documenting of Injustices”Animator / Discussant: David Chariandy (SFU) “‘Just Us’: Statehood and the Language of Kinship” |
| 12:30-1:30 | Catered Lunch – Lower Gallery (1022K) |
| 1:30-2:45 | Concurrent Sessions DD1: Global Perspectives IV ~ Brazil / Taiwan / Jamaica Black Atlantic, Transpacific, and Translocal Approaches to Canlits Location: Debates Room (2034)Sandra Almeida (Minas Gerais), “Beyond Global/Local Spatial Politics: Analyzing Canlit from a Comparative Perspective”Guy Beauregard (Taiwan), “Transpacific Precarities: Reading Asian / Canadian Writing in Asia”Michael Bucknor (West Indies), “Postcolonial Intimacies and the Black Atlantic: The Cultural Production of Caribbean/Canadian Writing”Chair: Emily Gilbert (UofT) D2: Decolonize This! Location: Music Room (2006)Christine Kim (SFU), “Decolonizing Minor Empires”Gale Coskan-Johnson (Brock) and Neta Gordon (Brock), “Decolonizing the Survey Course: Trading in the Timber for Trees”Olivia Burgess (UVic), “‘Let’s Settle This’: Reconciliation and Resource Politics in Canada”Chair: Imre Szeman (UofA/Waterloo) D3: The Past in the Present Tense Location: North Dining Room (2007)Jeff Derksen (SFU), “Productive Presentism”Gregory Betts (Brock), “Before Decolonization / Avant Decolonization: On New Futures from New Pasts”Scott Herder (UofT), “Cultural Memory, Critical Gestures, and the Politics of Literature”Chair: Kyle Kinaschuk (UofT) D4: Transformations and Belongings Location: South Dining Room (2005)Jennifer Adese (Carleton), “From Racialization to Relationships: Decolonizing Métis Literary Analysis”Shaun Stevenson (Carleton), “Shifting the Terrain: Water and Indigenous Land Rights in Canada”Tavleen Purewal (UofT), “Port Geographies: Indigenous and Diasporic Kinship in Dionne Brand and Lee Maracle”Chair: Neil Surkan (Calgary) D5: Asian Canadian Counter Narratives Location: East Common Room (1034)Lara Okihiro (UofT), “The Ethics of Materialism: Caring for Things in Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being and Miki’s Mannequin Rising”Malissa Phung (Trent/Sheridan), “Decolonizing Asian-Indigenous Relations through Narratives of Sino-Indigenous Indebtedness”Candida Rifkind (Winnipeg), “Countervisual Tactics in Tings Chak’s Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention”Chair: Sophie McCall (SFU) |
| 2:45-3:00 | Coffee Break – Lower Gallery (1022K) |
| 3:00-4:15 | Concurrent Sessions EE1: Residential Schools and Chinatown Location: Debates Room (2034)Jennifer Henderson (Carleton), “Residential Schools Gothic: Generic Trace and Public Memory”Zhi Lei (Queen’s), “The Concubine’s Children and Disappearing Moon Cafe :Vancouver’s Chinatown as a Porous and Transgressive Space”Lindsay Diehl (UBC), “Disrupting the National Frame: A Postcolonial, Diasporic (Re) Reading of Disappearing Moon Cafe and The Concubine’s Children”Chair: Erin Wunker (Acadia) E2 Indigeneity and Storytelling Location: North Dining Room (2007)Petra Fachinger (Queen’s), “Ethical Challenges and Artistic Choice in Residential School Narratives”Isabella Huberman (UofT), “Indigenous Futurities in Quebec: The Case of Amun”Alexandra Lépine (WU), “Authentically Inauthenic: A Discussion of Tradition and Hybridity in Drew Hayden Taylor’s Motorcycles and Sweetgrass”Chair: Christina Turner (UofT) E3: Undoing Colonial Violence: Critical and Media Poetics Location: South Dining Room (2005)Julia Polyck-O’Neill (Brock), “Unmaking Place: (Re)Reading Vancouver in Jordan Abel and Jeff Derksen’s Critical Poetics”Lucia Lorenzi (UBC), “Reconfiguring Responses to Colonial Violence: Silence in Marie Clements’ The Unnatural and Accidental Women”Brendan McCormack (UBC), “‘It Sounded Like Us’: Nesika and the Poetry of Indigenous Newsletters”Chair: Gregory Betts (Brock) E4: Kinship Location: Music Room(2006)David Garneau (Regina) and Ashok Mathur (UBC Okanagan), “O trans-K’inādās and complicated reconciliations: how artists make meaning by walking around together”Maral Moradipour (WU), “Relationality, Kinship, and Continuance in Leanne Simpson’s ‘nogojiwanong’”Orly Lael Netzer (UofA), “Witnessing Kinship: Reading Mini Aodla Freeman’s Life Among the Qallunaat”(cont’d) Chair: Joshua Whitehead (Calgary) E5: Performing Critical Race Thought Location: Chapel & East Common Room (1034) NB: Singh’s talk / performance will take place at the Chapel; afterwards, the session will move to the East Common Room right across the hall.Deanna Fong (SFU), “Un/enclosure: Race, Sound, and Performance in Roy Kiyooka, Wayde Compton, and Jordan Abel”Judit Nagy (Karoll Gaspar, Hungary), “Palimpsestic Reflections of the Korean Canadian Diaspora through Ins Choi’s Kim’ s Convenience”Cyrus Sundar Singh (York/Ryerson), “Africville: Dogs, Gods, & City Hall”Chair: Karina Vernon (UofT) |
| 4:15-4:30 | Coffee Break – Lower Gallery (1022K) |
| 4:30-5:45 | Keynote Address – Great Hall (1022)Afua Cooper (Dalhousie), “Blackness Rejected: The Canadian Federal Government and the 1911 Order-in-Council Banning Black Migration to Canada”Chair: Smaro Kamboureli (UofT) |
| 8:00-9:15 | Literary Readings – Great Hall (1022) Chair: Suzette Mayr (Calgary)Pamela Mordecai Michael Helm Tracey Lindberg Roy Miki Liz Howard |
| 9:15-10:00 | Reception & Cash Bar – Lower Gallery (1022K) |
Saturday, May 27 – Hart House & Trinity College
| 9:30-10:45 | Keynote Address – George Ignatieff Theatre, Trinity CollegeDina Al-Kassim (UBC), “Listing Waters: Towards a Poetic Theory of Indigenous and (Un)Settled Solidarities”Chair: Larissa Lai (Calgary) |
| 10:45-11:30 | Coffee Break– Lower Gallery (1022K) |
| 11:30-12:30 | Concurrent Sessions FF1: Roundtable V ~ Indigeneity & Black and Asian Diasporas in the Canadian City: Critical, Artistic and Pedagogical Approaches Location: Debates Room (2034)Victoria Freeman (York) and Ange Loft (Jumblies Theatre), “Talking Treaties in Toronto”Victoria Freeman (York) and Ange Loft (Jumblies Theatre), “Talking Treaties in Toronto”Karina Vernon (UofT), “‘Making Things Right’: Black Settlement and the Politics of Urban Territory”Evangeline Holtz (UofT), “‘no inward limits’: Activating the Downtown Eastside in Maria Campbell and Sachiko Murakami”Joanne Leow (Saskatchewan), “Lost Islands: Wayde Compton Writes Back to Pauline Johnson”Chair: Rinaldo Walcott (UofT) F2: Engaging the Non-Human Other Location: South Dining Room (2005)Hannah McGregor (SFU), “Podcasting, Pedagogy and Canadian Literature”Heike Harting (UdeM), “Critical Animal Studies and Trans-Speciesism in Andre Alexis’s 15 Dogs”Lauren Cross (UBC), “Decolonial Relations: Reading Land / Place and Language in Leanne Simpson and Junot Díaz”Chair: James Ellis (Calgary) F3: Documentary Materialities and Poetics Location: North Dining Room (2007)Joel Deshaye (Memorial), “Transnational Nostalgia and ‘Cowboys & Riels’ in Frank Davey’s The Louis Riel Organ & Piano Co.”Ryan Fitzpatrick (SFU), “Poetry and Racialization in the Thick of Canadian Space”James Hahn (UofT), “Documentary and Orality in The Hundred Cuts and Blue Marrow”Chair: Jeff Derksen (SFU) F4: Storytelling and/as Activism Location: Music Room (2006)Geoffrey MacDonald (York), “Marvellous Counteractions: Metaphysical Resistance in Lee Maracle’s Celia’s Song”Erin Ramlo (McMaster), “Community Song-Work in Lee Maracle’s Celia’s Song”Aparna Mishra Tarc (York), “Re-storying Justice: The Reparative Potential of Storytelling”Chair: Christina Turner (UofT) |
| 12:30-1:30 | Catered Lunch – Howard Ferguson Hall, University College |
| 1:30-2:45 | Concurrent Sessions GG1: Global Perspectives V ~ France / Germany National and Global Land/Scapes Location: Debates Room (2034)Claire Omhovère (Montpellier), “Landscape Manuals: How to Do Landscape in Words and Pictures after the Centennial”Martin Kuester (Marburg), “Ecological Indians in the Global Indian Village: Contemporary Canadian First Nations Writing”Katja Sarkowsky (Muenster), Imagining Land/Scapes Across Oceans: Transnational Memories of Place in Canadian Life Writing”Chair: Emily Gilbert (UofT) G2: 2 Novelists/Critics+1 Critic: Representations of the Vietnam War Location: North Dining Room (2007)Robert McGill (UofT), “The Vietnam War and Canadian Nationalism”Vinh Nguyen (Waterloo), “The Emergence of Southeast Asian Canadian Literature”Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer (UofT), “Enchanting History: Translating truth into Truth”Chair: Chris Lee (UBC) G3: Translation, Reconciliation, Gentrification Location: South Dining Room (2005)Lianne Moyes (UdeM), “Translating Natasha Kanapé Fontaine’s ‘Mes lames de tannage’”Katrin Urschel (UofT), “Dancing Together? Reconciliation through Dance in Indigenous Literature”Jeff Fedoruk (McMaster), “Literary Speculations on Vancouver’s Eastside: Reading Gentrification, Tracing Displacement”Chair: Cheryl Lousley (Lakehead) G4: Reconciliation Discourses: Kinship, Limits, Assimilation Location: Music Room (2006)Alison Calder (UofM), “Poor Old Kaw-Liga: Truth, Reconciliation, and the Limits of Colonial Fantasy in Dianne Warren’s Liberty Street”Lindsay Nixon and Gage K. Diabo (Concordia), “Kinship and Healing in Indigenous Literature”Jeremy Haynes (McMaster), “Canada Reads The Orenda: Obscuring Assimilatory Logics in the Discourses of Reconciliation”Chair: Jody Mason (Carleton) |
| 3:00-5:00 | Plenary Five: An Activist Agora Location: George Ignatieff Theatre, Trinity CollegePhanuel Antwi (UBC), “Anti-Colonial Alphabets: Calculations of Activism and Archives”Tasha Hubbard (Saskatchewan), “Re-storying and Restoring the Buffalo to the Indigenous Plains”Erín Moure (Montreal), “Being Closer: Rethinking Time and Public Space”Rita Wong (Emily Carr), “Imagine Peace: Starting with Water’s Humble Autonomy”Animator / Discussant: Len Findlay (Saskatchewan) “Federal State, Feral Culture: (Not) Withstanding Canada in its 150th Year” |
| 7:00-10:00 | Performances & Closing Reception – Debates Room (2034) Lillian Allen (OCAD U) & Lindsay Eekwol (Saskatoon) |