Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian
Literary Studies is the third volume of essays produced as part of the
TransCanada conferences project. The essays gathered in Critical
Collaborations constitute a call for collaboration and kinship across
disciplinary, political, institutional, and community borders. They are
tied together through a simultaneous call for resistance--to
Eurocentrism, corporatization, rationalism, and the fantasy of total
systems of knowledge--and a call for critical collaborations. These
collaborations seek to forge connections without perceived
identity--linking concepts and communities without violating the
differences that constitute them, seeking epistemic kinships while
maintaining a willingness to not-know. In this way, they form a critical
conversation between seemingly distinct areas and demonstrate
fundamental allegiances between diasporic and indigenous scholarship,
transnational and local knowledges, legal and eco-critical
methodologies. Links are forged between Indigenous knowledge and
ecological and social justice, creative critical reading, and
ambidextrous epistemologies, unmaking the nation through translocalism
and unsettling histories of colonial complicity through a poetics of
relation. Together, these essays reveal how the critical methodologies
brought to bear on literary studies can both challenge and exceed
disciplinary structures, presenting new forms of strategic
transdisciplinarity that expand the possibilities of Canadian literary
studies while also emphasizing humility, complicity, and the limits of
knowledge.
