Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Canada
considers how the terms of critical debate in literary and cultural
studies in Canada have shifted with respect to race, nation, and
difference. In asking how Indigenous and diasporic interventions have
remapped these debates, the contributors argue that a new "cultural
grammar" is at work and attempt to sketch out some of the ways it
operates.
The essays reference pivotal moments in Canadian literary and cultural
history and speak to ongoing debates about Canadian nationalism,
postcolonalism, migrancy, and transnationalism. Topics covered include
the Asian race riots in Vancouver in 1907, the cultural memory of
internment and dispersal of Japanese Canadians in the 1940s, the
politics of migrant labour and the "domestic labour scheme" in the
1960s, and the trial of Robert Pickton in Vancouver in 2007. The
contributors are particularly interested in how diaspora and indigeneity
continue to contribute to this critical reconfiguration and in how
conversations about diaspora and indigeneity in the Canadian context
have themselves been transformed. Cultural Grammars is an attempt to
address both the interconnections and the schisms between these multiply
fractured critical terms as well as the larger conceptual shifts that
have occurred in response to national and postnational arguments.
