Multimodality In Canadian Black Feminist Writing

This book develops a theory of multimodality – the participation of a text in more than one mode – centred on the poetry/poetics of Lillian Allen, Claire Harris, Dionne Brand, and Marlene Nourbese Philip. How do these poets represent oral Caribbean English Creoles (CECs) in writing and negotiate the relationship between the high literary in Canadian letters and the social and historical meanings of CECs? How do the latter relate to the idea of “female and black”? Through fluid use of code- and mode-switching, the movement of Brand and Philip between creole and standard English, and written orality and standard writing forms part of their meanings. Allen’s eye-spellings precisely indicate stereotypical creole sounds, yet use the phonological system of standard English. On stage, Allen projects a black female body in the world and as a speaking subject. She thereby shows that the implication of the written in the literary excludes her body’s language (as performance); and she embodies her poetry to realize a ‘language’ alternative to the colonizing literary. Harris’s creole writing helps her project a fragmented personality, a range of dialects enabling quite different personae to emerge within one body. Thus Harris, Brand, Philip, and Allen both project the identity “female and black” and explore this social position in relation to others. Considering textual multimodality opens up a wide range of material connections. Although written, this poetry is also oral; if oral, then also embodied; if embodied, then also participating in discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and a host of other systems of social organization and individual identity. Finally, the semiotic body as a mode (i.e. as a resource for making meaning) allows written meanings to be made that cannot otherwise be expressed in writing. In every case, Allen, Philip, Harris, and Brand escape the constraints of dominant media, refiguring language via dialect and mode to represent a black feminist sensibility.

This book develops a theory of multimodality - the participation of a text in more than one mode - centred on the poetry/poetics of Lillian Allen, Claire Harris, Dionne Brand, and Marlene Nourbese Philip. How do these poets represent oral Caribbean English Creoles (CECs) in writing and negotiate the relationship between the high literary in Canadian letters and the social and historical meanings of CECs? How do the latter relate to the idea of "female and black"? Through fluid use of code- and mode-switching, the movement of Brand and Philip between creole and standard English, and written orality and standard writing forms part of their meanings. Allen's eye-spellings precisely indicate stereotypical creole sounds, yet use the phonological system of standard English. On stage, Allen projects a black female body in the world and as a speaking subject. She thereby shows that the implication of the written in the literary excludes her body's language (as performance); and she embodies her poetry to realize a 'language' alternative to the colonizing literary. Harris's creole writing helps her project a fragmented personality, a range of dialects enabling quite different personae to emerge within one body. Thus Harris, Brand, Philip, and Allen both project the identity "female and black" and explore this social position in relation to others. Considering textual multimodality opens up a wide range of material connections. Although written, this poetry is also oral; if oral, then also embodied; if embodied, then also participating in discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and a host of other systems of social organization and individual identity. Finally, the semiotic body as a mode (i.e. as a resource for making meaning) allows written meanings to be made that cannot otherwise be expressed in writing. In every case, Allen, Philip, Harris, and Brand escape the constraints of dominant media, refiguring language via dialect and mode to represent a black feminist sensibility.

This volume of essays by scholars in the field of English and American studies brings together a variety of perspectives on the utopian literature originating from cultural communities from 1790-1910. Ranging from the Lunar society to the Nationalist movement, and from the Transcendentalists to the Indian Monday Club the fifteen peer-reviewed articles examine a wide range of contexts in which utopian literature was written, and will be of interest to scholars in the field of cultural and literary studies alike. Moreover, the volume presents the reader with a unique overview of developments in Utopian thinking and literature throughout the long nineteenth century. Specific attention is paid to the transatlantic nature of cultural communities in which utopian writings were produced and read as well as to the colonial contexts of nineteenth-century utopian literature. As such, the collection offers a novel approach to a tradition of utopian writing that was essentially transcultural. Marguérite Corporaal (Radboud University Nijmegen) and Evert Jan van Leeuwen (Leiden University) are lecturers in English and American literature in the Netherlands.

What are the fundamental tenets of African-Canadian feminism? What are the elements of feminist theory that have contributed to African-Canadian feminist thought? African-American feminists have influenced thinking and writing in Canada. As well, Black-Canadian feminists have published on a wide range of issues relating to Black women's lives, history and experience. Back to the Drawing Board builds on this existing literature and maps out a new space in which to articulate a stronger vision of African-Canadian feminism. While the essays focus on key concepts and debates that underlie Black feminist theory and challenge the dominant structures that continue to exclude Black women, the objective is to bring the plurality of African-Canadian women's voices and experiences into the centre of analysis. To accomplish this, the editors draw on different theories and insights. The fourteen contributors come from different race and gender backgrounds and are committed to creating an empowering space where Black women can speak to and about each other and find a home for their words. They write on the subjects of Black-Canadian feminist thought, African-Canadian feminist historiography Black feminist political activism, white mainstream feminism as a liberatory movement Black women in the white feminism and anti-racist education Native education and spirituality that form and shape identity, how the media and law construct Black identity, the social consequences of interracial relationships. Includes a Glossary, Bibliography and Index. Back to the Drawing Board initiates a dialogue critical for defining feminisms that validate the contributions and experiences of African-Canadian women.

The Routledge Introduction to Gender and Sexuality in Literature in Canada charts the evolution of gender and sexuality, as they have been represented and performed in the literatures of Canada for more than three centuries. From early colonial texts by Frances Brooke, to settler texts by Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill, to more contemporary texts by Jane Rule, Alice Munro, Joshua Whitehead, Ivan Coyote, and others, this volume will introduce readers to how gender and sexuality have been variably conceived in Canada and the work they perform across multiple genres. Calling upon recent currents of gender theory and examining the composition, structure, and history of selected literary texts—that is, the “literary sediments” that have accumulated over centuries—readers of this book will explore how those representations shift over time. By examining literature in Canada in relation to crucial cultural, political, and historical contexts, readers will better apprehend why that literature has significantly transformed and broadened to address racialized and fluid identities that continue to challenge and disrupt any stable notion of gendered and sexualized identity today.

This collection explores the links between multimodality and multilingualism, charting the interplay between languages, channels and forms of communication in multilingual written texts from historical manuscripts through to the new media of today and the non-verbal associations they evoke. The volume argues that features of written texts such as graphics, layout, boundary marking and typography are inseparable from verbal content. Taken together, the chapters adopt a systematic historical perspective to investigate this interplay over time and highlight the ways in which the two disciplines might further inform one another in the future as new technologies emerge. The first half of the volume considers texts where semiotic resources are the sites of modes, where multiple linguistic codes interact on the page and generate extralinguistic associations through visual features and spatial organizaisation. The second half of the book looks at texts where this interface occurs not in the text but rather in the cultural practices involved in social materiality and text transmission. Enhancing our understandings of multimodal resources in both historical and contemporary communication, this book will be of interest to scholars in multimodality, multilingualism, historical communication, discourse analysis and cultural studies. Chapters 1, 4, and 5 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. Chapters 1 & 4 have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license, with Chapter 5 being made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

This groundbreaking work takes multimodality studies in a new direction by applying multimodal approaches to the study of poetry and poetics. The book examines poetry’s visual and formal dimensions, applying framing theory to such case studies as Aristotle’s Poetics and Robert Lowell’s "The Heavenly Rain", to demonstrate both the implied, due to the form’s unique relationship with structure, imagery, and rhythm, and explicit forms of multimodality at work, an otherwise little-explored research strand of multimodality studies. The volume explores the theoretical implications of a multimodal approach to poetry and poetics to other art forms and fields of study, making this essential reading for students and scholars working at the intersection of language and communication, including multimodality, discourse analysis, and interdisciplinary literary studies.

Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond is an interdisciplinary collection that gathers the work of scholars and performance practitioners who together explore questions about the oral, written, and visual. The book includes the voices of oral performance practitioners, while the scholarship of many of the academic contributors is informed by their participation in oral storytelling, whether as poets, singers, or visual artists. Its contributions address the politics and ethics of the utterance and text: textualizing orature and orality, simulations of the oral, the poetics of performance, and reconstructions of the oral.