Global Realignments And The Canadian Nation In The Third Millennium

With aggravating global realignments, the dynamics and contradictions of a world (risk) society are looming ahead in the unfolding Third Millennium while globalization is gaining further steam. To this bears witness a potpourri of often frightening geopolitical, social, cultural, economic, demographic, ecological and other changes and challenges that gives substantial cause for concern about getting lost in a 'trans-whatever' sea of turmoil, uncertainty and indeterminateness. The resultant current backlash or rather renewed interest in the nation as a collective identity-establishing category is an effort to gain some anchorage in ever more disintegrating times and proves especially those theoreticians wrong for whom the whole concept of the nation has worn off since long. In 16 resourceful essays internationally distinguished Canadian and European experts from a variety of fields take a fresh look at these developments by focussing on one of the most fascinating multicultural and multifaceted nation(-state)s in the world, Canada in the Third Millennium. The topics they discuss include, among others, Canada's difficult dissociation from Europe and the USA; the reframing and reclaiming of the Canadian story; the role of nations within the nation; the efforts to transcend the nation; pending geopolitical and (geo)ecological crises; glocal issues and new wars. Collectively, the entries prove that Canada is a very progressive nation and opens up new perspectives for other collectives currently reassessing their national identities in a global environment. Thus, the book reaches well beyond the study of 'Canada' and will be valuable to academics, professionals, teachers and students of various disciplines coping with the issue at stake as well as the general reader.

The twenty-seven original contributions to this volume investigate the ways in which the First World War has been commemorated and represented internationally in prose fiction, drama, film, docudrama and comics from the 1960s until the present. The volume thus provides a comprehensive survey of the cultural memory of the war as reflected in various media across national cultures, addressing the complex connections between the cultural post-memory of the war and its mediation. In four sections, the essays investigate (1) the cultural legacy of the Great War (including its mythology and iconography); (2) the implications of different forms and media for representing the war; (3) ‘national’ memories, foregrounding the differences in post-memory representations and interpretations of the Great War, and (4) representations of the Great War within larger temporal or spatial frameworks, focusing specifically on the ideological dimensions of its ‘remembrance’ in historical, socio-political, gender-oriented, and post-colonial contexts.

Transitional justice and national inquiries may be the most established means for coming to terms with traumatic legacies, but it is in the more subtle social and cultural processes of “memory work” that the pitfalls and promises of reconciliation are laid bare. This book analyzes, within the realms of literature and film, recent Australian and Canadian attempts to reconcile with Indigenous populations in the wake of forced child removal. As Hanna Teichler demonstrates, their systematic emphasis on the subjectivity of the victim is problematic, reproducing simplistic narratives and identities defined by victimization. Such fictions of reconciliation venture beyond simplistic narratives and identities defined by victimization, offering new opportunities for confronting painful histories.

In Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility, Arianna Dagnino analyzes a new type of literature emerging from artists' increased movement and cultural flows spawned by globalization. This "transcultural" literature is produced by authors who write across cultural and national boundaries. Dagnino's book contains a creative rendition of interviews conducted with five internationally renowned writers-Inez Baranay, Brian Castro, Alberto Manguel, Tim Parks, and Ilija Trojanow-and a critical exegesis reflecting on thematic critical, and stylistic aspects. By studying the selected authors' corpus of work, life experiences, and cultural orientations, Dagnino explores the implicit, often subconscious process of cultural and imaginative metamorphosis that leads transcultural writers and their fictionalized characters beyond ethnic national, racial, or religious loci of identity and identity formation. "The work is a significant contribution to scholorship, for it increases our theoretical awareness of today's literary developments, providing us with critical tools that enable us to approach literary texts with an innovative perspective."-Maurizio Ascari, Universita di Bologna.

A first of its kind, The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature provides an overview of Comparative North American Literature, a cutting-edge discipline. Contributors make important interventions into multiculturalism in North America and into U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada border literatures.

In sociolinguistic research on Englishes world-wide, little has been published on the pragmatics of postcolonial varieties. This interdisciplinary volume closes this research gap by providing integrative investigations of postcolonial discourses, probing the interstices between linguistic methodologies and literary text analysis. The literary texts under discussion are conceptualized as media both reflecting and creating reality, so that they provide valuable insights into postcolonial discourse phenomena. The contributions deal with the issue of how postcolonial Englishes, such as those spoken in India, Nigeria, South Africa and the Caribbean, have produced different pragmatic conventions in a complex interplay of culture-specific and global linguistic practices. They show the ways in which hybrid communicative situations based on ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity result in similarly hybrid social and communicative routines. The central pragmatic paradigms discussed here include im/politeness, speech act conventions, conversational maxims, deixis, humour, code-switching and -mixing, Othering, and linguistic exclusion.

This book explores the interplay between politics, managerialism, and higher education, and the complex linkages between politics and public universities in Hong Kong. Since the mid-20th century, literature on the state, market, and higher education has focused on the state’s shifting role from the direct administration to the supervision of higher education, and its increased use of market and managerial principles and techniques to regulate public universities. However, very few studies have addressed the political influences on university governance produced by changing state-university-market relationships, the chancellorship of public universities, or students’ and academics’ civic engagement with regard to sensitive political issues. The book examines both the positive and problematic outcomes of using market principles and managerialism to reform public higher education; questions the longstanding tradition of university chancellorship; explores the issue of external members holding the majority on university governing boards; probes into the dilemma of either relying on the system or a good chancellor and external members to preserve universities’ autonomy and academic freedom; and assesses the cost of students’ and academics’ civic engagement with regard to politically sensitive issues.

In Transforming the Nation, leading Canadian politicians and scholars reflect on the major policy debates of the period and offer new and surprising interpretations of Brian Mulroney. Mulroney had a tremendous impact on Canada, charting a new direction for the country through his decisions on a variety of public-policy issues - free trade with the United States, social-security reform, foreign policy, and Canada's North. The Mulroney government represented a dramatic break with Canada's past.