While books are often cast as axiomatically good, Professor Jody Mason’s new book Books for Development: Canada In the Late Twentieth-Century World, argues that this idea can be troubled by revisiting the history of development. 

, published this month by McGill-Queen’s University Press, considers how state and non-state actors used books within the late twentieth-century development paradigm between 1945 and the end of the 1970s or so. Doing so allows her to track the ways the book, which came to function as a key representative of settler exceptionalism, was used within the context of the development paradigm to express solidarity with newly decolonized nations; to argue for the importance of Canadian leadership in the new international order; and to consolidate settler liberal rule at home. 

The post Spotlight on Research: Professor Jody Mason has published a new book appeared first on Department of English Language and Literature.

Dr. Stuart Murray has published new articles in Rhetoric Society Quarterly and in The Conversation. 

 in Rhetoric Society Quarterly:

in The Conversation:

The post Professor Stuart Murray has published new articles in Rhetoric Society Quarterly and The Conversation appeared first on Department of English Language and Literature.

In a little-known chapter of World War II, Black people living in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe were subjected to ostracization, forced sterilization, and incarceration in internment and concentration camps. In the absence of public commemoration, African diaspora writers and artists have preserved the stories of these forgotten victims of the Third Reich. Their works illuminate the relationship between creative expression and wartime survival and the role of art in the formation of collective memory.

This groundbreaking book explores a range of largely overlooked literary and artistic works that challenge the invisibility of Black wartime history. Emphasizing Black agency, Sarah Phillips Casteel examines both testimonial art by victims of the Nazi regime and creative works that imaginatively reconstruct the wartime period. Among these are the internment art of Caribbean painter Josef Nassy, the survivor memoir of Black German journalist Hans J. Massaquoi, the jazz fiction of African American novelist John A. Williams and Black Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan, and the photomontages of Scottish Ghanaian visual artist Maud Sulter. Bridging Black and Jewish studies, this book identifies the significance of African diaspora experiences and artistic expression for Holocaust history, memory, and representation.

The post Faculty Publication: Black Lives Under Nazism: Making History Visible in Literature and Art appeared first on Department of English Language and Literature.

Join us for Sarah Phillips Casteel’s book launch and discussion presented by ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University’s Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis. 

In a little-known chapter of World War II, people of African descent in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe were subjected to a variety of forms of persecution, including imprisonment in internment and concentration camps. Paradoxically, this hypervisible victim group has remained largely invisible in the memory of World War II and the Holocaust. In the absence of public commemoration, African diaspora artists and writers have preserved and imaginatively reconstructed the stories of these forgotten victims of the Third Reich. Probing the boundaries of Holocaust memory and representation, this book talk draws attention to a largely unrecognized artistic corpus that challenges the erasure of Black wartime history.

The post Professor Sarah Phillips Casteel Book Launch – Black Lives Under Nazism: Making History Visible in Literature and Art appeared first on Department of English Language and Literature.

The latest issue of the journal features the work of not fewer than three members of our department! Prof. Sarah Brouillette’s article argues that Wattpad’s success reflects and reinforces trends in the distribution of publishing work and profits. Key among these trends, Brouillette argues, is the feminization of labour and the habits of thinking about reading and writing that support it.

With Sarah Pelletier, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in English, Prof. Jody Mason co-authored Examining how reconciliation folds Indigenous writers and their work into a creative-economy logic that depends on cultural diversity as a unifying sign, Mason and Pelletier contend that a campaign more attentive to the unique needs of Indigenous-owned and -operated publishers in Canada would make visible the fact that reconciliation is not simply a matter of culture but always also a matter of political and economic sovereignty.

The post Spotlight on Research: Department of English Faculty and Students featured in the latest issue of Book History appeared first on Department of English Language and Literature.

In the Québécois political vision of the twentieth century, sovereignty became synonymous with mastery. French

Canadians sometimes claimed solidarity with racialized and Indigenous peoples, yet they saw their liberation as a matter of taking their rightful place in the seat of the oppressors. The idea of mastery has prevented the Québécois from seeing that their liberation is bound up with that of other groups oppressed by colonial powers.

The Eye of the Master confronts the missed opportunities for a decolonial version of indépendance in Quebec by examining the quest for mastery that has been at the root of every version of independence offered to the people of Quebec since the mid-twentieth century. Exploring political discourse, popular culture, and the family photo album, Dalie Giroux revisits the mythology of being “masters in our own house” and identifies the obstacles blocking a more comprehensive version of liberation based on solidarity. Drawing from the living forces of Indigenous thought and anti-racist, ecological, and feminist movements, Giroux envisions life without conquest, domination, exploitation, and surveillance. Making the case for a different future, beginning in the here and now, The Eye of the Master offers a major new intervention in contemporary political thought to Canadian readers and all those who imagine a different North America.

The post Faculty Publication: The Eye of the Master: Figures of the Québécois Colonial Imaginary appeared first on Department of English Language and Literature.

In this moment of climate precarity, Victorian studies scholar Barbara Leckie considers the climate crisis as a problem of time. Spanning the long nineteenth century through our current moment, her interdisciplinary treatment of climate change at once rethinks time and illustrates that the time for climate action is now.

Climate Change, Interrupted argues that linear, progress-inflected temporalities are not adequate to a crisis that defies their terms. Instead, this book advances a theory and practice of interruption to rethink prevailing temporal frameworks. At the same time, it models the anachronistic, time-blending, and time-layering temporality it advances. In a series of experimental chapters informed by the unlikely trio of Walter Benjamin, Donna Haraway, and Virginia Woolf, Leckie reinflects and cowrites the traditions and knowledges of the long nineteenth century and the current period in the spirit of climate action collaboration.

The current moment demands as many approaches as possible, invites us to take risks, and asks scholars and activists adept at storytelling to participate in the conversation. Climate Change, Interrupted, accordingly, invests in interruption to tell a different story of the climate crisis.

The post Faculty Publication: Climate Change, Interrupted: Representation and the Remaking of Time appeared first on Department of English Language and Literature.

Arguing that biopower can be fully exposed only through an analysis of those whom society has “let die,” Stuart J.

Murray employs a series of transdisciplinary case studies to uncover the structural and rhetorical conditions through which biopower works. These case studies include the concept of “sacrifice” in the “war” against COVID-19, where emergent cultures of pandemic “resistance” are explored alongside suicide bombings and military suicides; the California mass hunger strikes of 2013; legal cases involving “preventable” and “untimely” childhood deaths, exposing the irreconcilable claims of anti-vaxxers and Indigenous peoples; and the videorecording of the death of a disabled Black man. Murray demonstrates that active resistance to biopower inevitably reproduces tropes of “making live” and “letting die.” His counter to this fact is a critical stance of disaffirmation, one in which death disrupts the politics politics of life itself.

The post Faculty Publication: The Living and the Dead: Disaffirming Biopolitics appeared first on Department of English Language and Literature.