Contested Spaces, Counter-narratives, and Culture from Below in Canada and Québec

by Roxanne Rimstead (Editor), Domenic A. Beneventi (Editor)

Overview

Contested Spaces, Counter-narratives, and Culture from Below in Canada and Québec explores strategies for reading space and conflict in Canadian and Québécois literature and cultural performances, positing questions such as: how do these texts and performances produce and contest spatial practices? What are the roles of the nation, city, community, and individual subject in reproducing space, particularly in times of global hegemony and neocolonialism? And in what ways do marginalized individuals and communities represent, contest, or appropriate spaces through counter-narratives and expressions of culture from below?

Focusing on discord rather than harmony and consensus, this collection disturbs the idealized space of Canadian multicultural pluralism to carry literary analysis and cultural studies into spaces often undetected and unforeseen – including flophouses and "slums," shantytowns and urban alleyways, underground spaces and peep shows, and inner-city urban parks as they are experienced by minorities and other marginalized groups. These essays are the products of sustained, high-level collaboration across French and English academic communities in Canada to facilitate theoretical exchange on the topic of space and contestation, uncover geographies of exclusion, and generate new spaces of hope in the spirit of pioneering works by Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Doreen Massey, David Harvey, and other prominent theorists of space.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442629929
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	03/14/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	360
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Roxanne Rimstead is a professor in the Département Lettres et communications, Université de Sherbrooke.

Domenico A. Beneventi is an associate professor in the Département Lettres et communications, Université de Sherbrooke.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Reading Space Through Conflict
ROXANNE RIMSTEAD and DOMENICO A. BENEVENTI (Université de Sherbrooke)

Part I: Contested Urban Spaces
Chapter 1 : Culture and Critique During Mega-Events: The 2010 Olympics and the Right to the City
JEFF DERKSEN (Simon Fraser University)

Chapter 2: The Ambivalence of Enclosed Spaces in Immigrant Fiction: Between Refuge and Prison
AMARYLL CHANADY (Université de Montréal)

Chapter 3: Montreal Marginalities: Revisiting Boulevard Saint-Laurent
SHERRY SIMON (Concordia University)

Chapter 4: Heterotopia and Its Discontents: Exploring Spatial, Social, and Textual Liminality in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach
RITA SAKR (University of London)

Chapter 5: "Laisser-aller": Homelessness and Contained Space in Kobo Abe’s The Box Man and Robert Majzels’s City of Forgetting
SIMON HAREL (Université de Montréal)

Part II : Counter-Narratives and Spaces of the Nation/State
Chapter 6: Unruly and Unremarked: Theatrical Spectatorship from Below in Nineteenth-Century Canada
ALAN FILEWOD (University of Guelph)

Chapter 7: Women’s Space in Postcolonial Perspective: France Théoret’s Une belle éducation and Assia Djebar’s Nulle part dans la maison de mon père
MARY JEAN GREEN (Dartmouth College)

Chapter 8: For King and Country? : War and Indigenous Masculinity
DEENA RYMHS (University of British Columbia)

Chapter 9: Reclaiming Indigenous Space through Testimonial Life Writing: An Antane Kapesh’s Je suis une maudite Sauvagesse as Territorial Imperative
NATASHA DAGENAIS (Université de Sherbrooke)

Chapter 10: Norman Bethune and the Contested Spaces of Canadian Public Memory
CANDIDA RIFKIND (University of Winnipeg)

Part III: Culture from Below
Chapter 11 : Knowing the Urban Other: Notes on the Ethics and Epistemology of Slumming in Novels and Reportage
ROXANNE RIMSTEAD (Université de Sherbrooke)

Chapter 12: "You Should Think about It, Think What It Means": Working Girls in Canadian Women’s Writing
PATRICIA DEMERS (University of Alberta)

Chapter 13: Border-Crossings and Alternative Social Spaces in Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion / The Tin Flute
D. M. R. BENTLEY (Western University)

Chapter 14: Growing Up Poor and Female in Montreal, 1930-1960: Women’s Autobiographies as Counter-Narratives
PATRICIA SMART (Carleton University)

Chapter 15: Tramping Across the Nation: Homeless Embodiment in Canadian Literature
DOMENICO A. BENEVENTI (Université de Sherbrooke)

Afterword