Unhomely States

Unhomely States is the first collection of foundational essays of Canadian postcolonial theory. The essays span the period from 1965 to the present day and approach broad issues of Canadian culture and society. They represent the impassioned conflicts, dissonances, and intersections among postcolonial theorists in English Canada. Theories of Canadian postcolonialism are various and often contending. The questions proliferate: Is Canada postcolonial? Who in Canada is postcolonial? Are some Canadians more postcolonial than others? Together, the essays in this collection demonstrate both the historical development of this vigorous debate and its most prominent current perspectives. The anthology comprises work originally written in English, selected and arranged in order to demonstrate the dynamic nature of these discussions. Included here are essays by many well-known writers and theorists, such as George Grant, Northrop Frye, Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee, Robert Kroetsch, Linda Hutcheon, Diana Brydon, Thomas King, Terry Goldie, Arun Mukherjee, Smaro Kamboureli, Stephen Slemon, and Roy Miki. The collection covers such topics as anti-colonial nationalism, settler-invader theory, First Nations contexts, postcolonial pedagogy, and critiques of Canadian postcolonialism. A general introduction surveying the current field of postcolonial discourse in English Canada is also included.

How do Chinas mobile individuals create a sense of home in a rapidly changing world? Unhomely life, different from houselessness, refers to a fluctuating condition between losing home feelings and the search for home — a prevalent condition in post-Mao China. The faster that Chinese society modernizes, the less individuals feel at home, and the more they yearn for a sense of home. This is the central paradox that Xiaobo Su explores: how mobile individuals—lifestyle migrants and retreat tourists from China's big cities, displaced natives and rural migrants in peripheral China—handle the loss of home and try to experience a homely way of life. In Unhomely Life, Xiaobo Su examines the subjective experiences of mobile individuals to better understand why they experience the loss of home feelings and how they search for home. Integrating extensive empirical data and a robust theoretical framework, the author presents a journey-based critical analysis of “home” under constant making, un-making, and re-making in post-Mao China. Su argues that the making of home is not a solely economic or rational calculation for maximum return, but rather a synthesis of resistance and compromise under the disappointing conditions of modernity. Offering rich insights into the continuity and disruption of China's great transformation, Unhomely Life: Develops an original theory of unhomely life that incorporates contemporary research and traditional Chinese ideas of home Explores the process of homemaking and its implications for understanding the costs of high-speed economic growth in China Analyzes mobile individuals across different genders, ages, ethnicities, social classes, and economic backgrounds to address the balance between meaning and money in everyday life Containing in-depth and sophisticated empirical data collected from 2002 to 2020, Unhomely Life: Modernity, Mobilities, and the Making of Home in China is an invaluable resource for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, lecturers, and academic researchers in cultural studies, migration, tourism, China studies, cultural anthropology, sociology, and social and cultural geography.

Canadian Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror: Bridging the Solitudes exposes the limitations of the solitudes concept so often applied uncritically to the Canadian experience. This volume examines Canadian and Québécois literature of the fantastic across its genres—such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, indigenous futurism, and others—and considers how its interrogation of colonialism, nationalism, race, and gender works to bridge multiple solitudes. Utilizing a transnational lens, this volume reveals how the fantastic is ready-made for exploring, in non-literal terms, the complex and problematic nature of intercultural engagement.

This Companion is the first to explore postcolonial poetry through regional, historical, political, formal, textual and gender approaches.

Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic examines how Canadian writers have combined a postcolonial awareness with gothic metaphors of monstrosity and haunting in their response to Canadian history. The essays gathered here range from treatments of early postcolonial gothic expression in Canadian literature to attempts to define a Canadian postcolonial gothic mode. Many of these texts wrestle with Canada’s colonial past and with the voices and histories that were repressed in the push for national consolidation but emerge now as uncanny reminders of that contentious history. The haunting effect can be unsettling and enabling at the same time. In recent years, many Canadian authors have turned to the gothic to challenge dominant literary, political, and social narratives. In Canadian literature, the “postcolonial gothic” has been put to multiple uses, above all to figure experiences of ambivalence that have emerged from a colonial context and persisted into the present. As these essays demonstrate, formulations of a Canadian postcolonial gothic differ radically from one another, depending on the social and cultural positioning of who is positing it. Given the preponderance, in colonial discourse, of accounts that demonize otherness, it is not surprising that many minority writers have avoided gothic metaphors. In recent years, however, minority authors have shown an interest in the gothic, signalling an emerging critical discourse. This “spectral turn” sees minority writers reversing long-standing characterizations of their identity as “monstrous” or invisible in order to show their connections to and disconnection from stories of the nation.

The essays in Home Words explore the complexity of the idea of home through various theoretical lenses and groupings of texts. One focus of this collection is the relation between the discourses of nation, which often represent the nation as home, and the discourses of home in children’s literature, which variously picture home as a dwelling, family, town or region, psychological comfort, and a place to start from and return to. These essays consider the myriad ways in which discourses of home underwrite both children’s and national literatures. Home Words reconfigures the field of Canadian children’s literature as it is usually represented by setting the study of English- and French-language texts side by side, and by paying sustained attention to the diversity of work by Canadian writers for children, including both Aboriginal peoples and racialized Canadians. It builds on the literary histories, bibliographical essays, and biographical criticism that have dominated the scholarship to date and sets out to determine and establish new directions for the study of Canadian children’s literature.

Border culture emerges through the intersection and engagement of imagination, affinity and identity. It is evident wherever boundaries separate or sort people and their goods, ideas or other belongings. It is the vessel of engagement between countries and peoples—assuming many forms, exuding a variety of expressions, changing shapes—but border culture does not disappear once it is developed, and it may be visualized as a thread that runs throughout the process of globalization. Border culture is conveyed in imaginaries and productions that are linked to borderland identities constructed in the borderlands. These identities underlie the enforcement of control and resistance to power that also comprise border cultures. Canada’s borders in globalization offer an opportunity to explore the interplay of borders and culture, identify the fundamental currents of border culture in motion, and establish an approach to understanding how border culture is placed and replaced in globalization. Published in English.