Waste Heritage

A new critical edition of the acknowledged best Canadian novel of the 1930s. Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage is a ground-breaking work of Canadian fiction based on the dramatic and violent labour disputes that took place in British Columbia in 1938. The story follows the progress of two friends, Matt Striker, a 23-year-old from Saskatchewan, and his simple-minded companion Eddy, as they travel from Vancouver to Victoria following the occupation of the Vancouver Post Office. Like the unemployed masses that took siege of the Post Office, Matt and Eddy yearn for relief after years of economic depression. Empathetic and tragic, Waste Heritage has been praised as Canada’s Grapes of Wrath and the most important Canadian novel of the 1930s. A new critical apparatus surrounds Baird’s original text, informing the reader of the historical and literary contexts of the work, as well as providing exhaustive textual analysis.

Toxic Heritage addresses the heritage value of contamination and toxic sites and provides the first in-depth examination of toxic heritage as a global issue. Bringing together case studies, visual essays, and substantive chapters written by leading scholars from around the world, the volume provides a critical framing of the globally expanding field of toxic heritage. Authors from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and methodologies examine toxic heritage as both a material phenomenon and a concept. Organized into five thematic sections, the book explores the meaning and significance of toxic heritage, politics, narratives, affected communities, and activist approaches and interventions. It identifies critical issues and highlights areas of emerging research on the intersections of environmental harm with formal and informal memory practices, while also highlighting the resilience, advocacy, and creativity of communities, scholars, and heritage professionals in responding to the current environmental crises. Toxic Heritage is useful and relevant to scholars and students working across a range of disciplines, including heritage studies, environmental science, archaeology, anthropology, and geography.

Most critics and literary historians have ignored Marxist-inspired creative literature in Canada, or dismissed it as an ephemeral phenomenon of the 1930s. Research reveals, however, that from the 1920s onward Canadian creative writers influenced by Marxist ideas have produced a quantitatively substantial and artistically significant body of poetry, drama, fiction, and non-fiction. This book traces historically and evaluates critically this tradition, with particular emphasis on writers who were associated with, or sympathetic to, the Communist Party of Canada. After two chapters surveying the work of anti-capitalist writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the book concentrates on the development of Marxist-inspired writing from the 1920s to the end of the twentieth century. Besides devoting attention to both social and theoretical backgrounds, this study provides critical commentary on work by prominent writers who spent part of their literary careers as Communist Party members, including Dorothy Livesay, Patrick Anderson, Milton Acorn, and George Ryga, as well as less well known but more fervent Communists such as Margaret Fairley, Dyson Carter, Joe Wallace, Stanley Ryerson, and Jean-Jules Richard. Although primarily concerned with the older generation of Marxists who flourished between the 1920s and the 1970s, the book also includes a chapter on the post-1970s “New Left.”

Heritage Ecologies presents an ecological understanding of heritage that furthers a concern for how its making and unmaking always involves a wide range of human and other-than-human actors. Recognizing the entangled nature-cultures of heritage is essential in the Anthropocene era, where uncertainty and rapid environmental change force us to recast common conceptions of inheritance and to envision new strategies for preservation. Heritage sites are meant to be open and shared spaces, and a recurring argument in the cases presented here is that this openness inevitably also overrides our selections, orders and appreciations. Through a diverse range of case studies, the chapters collected in this book aim to explore the affects and memories engendered by diverse heritage ecologies where humans are neither the sole makers nor the only inheritors. The common call is that the experiential, perceptive and informational plenitude enabled through contributions of other-than-human actors is key to an ecological rethinking of heritage in the twenty-first century. Heritage Ecologies is unique in bringing heritage studies into closer proximity with a wide variety of non-representational and object-oriented theories and is an important volume for students and researchers in archaeology and heritage studies.

Preservation of natural and cultural heritage is often said to be something that is done for the future, or on behalf of future generations, but the precise relationship of such practices to the future is rarely reflected upon. Heritage Futures draws on research undertaken over four years by an interdisciplinary, international team of 16 researchers and more than 25 partner organisations to explore the role of heritage and heritage-like practices in building future worlds. Engaging broad themes such as diversity, transformation, profusion and uncertainty, Heritage Futures aims to understand how a range of conservation and preservation practices across a number of countries assemble and resource different kinds of futures, and the possibilities that emerge from such collaborative research for alternative approaches to heritage in the Anthropocene. Case studies include the cryopreservation of endangered DNA in frozen zoos, nuclear waste management, seed biobanking, landscape rewilding, social history collecting, space messaging, endangered language documentation, built and natural heritage management, domestic keeping and discarding practices, and world heritage site management.

Just a thousand years ago, India was dotted with universities across its length and breadth, where international students flocked to gain credentials in advanced education. This illustrated book describes how these multi-disciplinary centers of learning existed in several forms such as forest universities, brick-and-mortar universities and temple universities. It examines the funding for these citadels of learning and their graduation ceremonies. The process by which India’s ancient systems of education helped to fuel a knowledge revolution around the world with its manuscripts, forming the basis for monographs and academic papers, is explained with references. The marauding incursions by Muslim invaders, which disrupted the idyllic world of university learning in India, followed by European colonization, which led to further erosion and degeneration of India’s traditional learning systems, have been taken up in some detail. Readers will get a snapshot view of India's education system down the ages from ancient to modern times.