Chapter XVII. New Literatures

The most interesting work in Canadian literature in 2023 applied a sceptical pressure to both the adjecive and the noun. What work does ‘literature’ do, and where—and what—is Canada? Margery Fee and Deanna Reder, in their chapter ‘First Peoples, Indigeneity, and Teaching Indigenous Writing in Canada’ (pp. 60-79), part of the book Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum, edited by Ato Quayson and Ankhi Mukherjee, [2023], ask what it ‘would mean for us as scholars of literary studies to read and teach literature as if our central social ethic, our most important value, was that there was no separation between people and nature?’ (p. 62). How might we study literatures from the state called Canada, there and elsewhere, in such a way ‘that the responsibilities embedded in relationships should come first’ (p. 65)? Their challenge to ‘those of us’, such as the writer of this section, ‘who teach literature in the standard low-context classroom, which could be anywhere’ prompts us to ‘rethink the idea of setting’ (p. 62). Their own work does that in a series of short but suggestive entries on positioning ourselves as scholars; knowing the limitations of our discipline; learning to recognize the tensions between ‘school way’ (p. 64) academic rhetoric and Indigenous forms of knowledge; ‘reading on the edges, reading from here’ (p. 69); and Indigenous interpretation and pedagogy. Fee and Reder offer reflections on teaching that work equally as guides to writing and research. Who is producing it, from where, to and for whom and in what forms of dialogue? Deanna Reder’s own Autobiogaphy as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition: Cree and Métis âcimisowina [2022] is a good example of the kind of insights generated when these questions are posed. Reacting against the reduction of Indigenous traditions to oral traditions only, Reder thinks with how she comes from ‘oral and literary cultures, even if this writing hasn’t made it to the libraries or into school curriculum yet’ (p. 133). Core definitional terms in her study, then, are always in contest: published and unpublished, literary and historical, archival and public, oral and written. The results are exciting. Blending and combining personal memoir, archival research, literary close reading and intellectual history, Reder pays particular attention to the sustaining, innovative and critical work personal stories provide in Indigenous intellectual traditions. The importance of Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed [1973] to the author’s own mother prompts wider thinking on autobiography and an argument that ‘Indigenous autobiographies are not examples of a European literary genre that has mutated to adapt to the life stories of Indigenous authors, but are instead examples of vibrant, innovative Indigenous intellectual production’ (p. 29). Reder’s individual case studies cover thinkers as diverse as Maria Campbell, Edward Ahenakew, James Brady, Absolom Halkett and Harold Cardinal. The study is wrapped up in personal stories that gives its intellectual contribution a grounding in a particular somewhere and someone of the kind Fee and Reder’s chapter challenges from us all. From another angle, Sarah Hernandez’s We are the Stars: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition [2023] challenges ‘Canadian’ and ‘literature’ too, its intellectual frame (the Oceti Sakowin literary tradition) refusing the boundary of the forty-ninth parallel, and its literary-critical formation leaving open and (deliberately) unresolved questions and controversies around translation, negotiation and meaning-making with crucial terms. Hernandez shows how scholarship need not, and ought not, always mean a desire for mastery.

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