Contested Spaces, Counter-narratives, and Culture from Below in Canada and Québec

Description

Contested Spaces, Counter-narratives, and Culture from Below in Canada and Québec explores strategies for reading space and conflict in Canadian and Québécois literature and cultural performances, positing questions such as: how do these texts and performances produce and contest spatial practices? What are the roles of the nation, city, community, and individual subject in reproducing space, particularly in times of global hegemony and neocolonialism? And in what ways do marginalized individuals and communities represent, contest, or appropriate spaces through counter-narratives and expressions of culture from below? Focusing on discord rather than harmony and consensus, this collection disturbs the idealized space of Canadian multicultural pluralism to carry literary analysis and cultural studies into spaces often undetected and unforeseen – including flophouses and "slums," shantytowns and urban alleyways, underground spaces and peep shows, and inner-city urban parks as they are experienced by minorities and other marginalized groups. These essays are the products of sustained, high-level collaboration across French and English academic communities in Canada to facilitate theoretical exchange on the topic of space and contestation, uncover geographies of exclusion, and generate new spaces of hope in the spirit of pioneering works by Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Doreen Massey, David Harvey, and other prominent theorists of space. Cover Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Reading Space through Conflict PART I: Contested Urban Spaces 1 Culture and Critique during Mega-Events: The 2010 Olympics and the Right to the City 2 The Ambivalence of Enclosed Spaces in Immigrant Fiction: Between Refuge and Prison 3 Montréal Marginalities: Revisiting Boulevard Saint-Laurent 4 Heterotopia and Its Discontents: Exploring Spatial, Social, and Textual Liminality in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach 5 “Laisser-aller”: Homelessness and Contained Space in Kobo Abe’s The Box Man and Robert Majzels’s City of Forgetting PART II: Counter-narratives and Spaces of the Nation/State 6 Unruly and Unremarked: Theatrical Spectatorship from Below in Nineteenth-century Canada 7 Women’s Space in Postcolonial Perspective: France Théoret’s Une belle éducation and Assia Djebar’s Nulle part dans la maison de mon père 8 For King and Country? War and Indigenous Masculinity 9 Reclaiming Indigenous Space through Testimonial Life Writing: An Antane Kapesh’s Je suis une maudite Sauvagesse as Territorial Imperative 10 Norman Bethune and the Contested Spaces of Canadian Public Memory PART III: Culture from Below 11 Knowing the Urban Other: Notes on the Ethics and Epistemology of Slumming in Novels and Reportage 12 “You Should Think about It, Think What It Means”: Working Girls in Canadian Women’s Writing 13 Border-Crossings and Alternative Social Spaces in Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion / The Tin Flute 14 Growing Up Poor and Female in Montréal, 1930–1960: Women’s Autobiographies as Counter-narratives 15 Tramping across the Nation: Homeless Embodiment in Canadian Literature Afterword Contributors Index