Landed: Labour, literature, and the politics of mobility in twentieth-century Canada

Despite the currency of interrogations of the so-called natural emanation of cohesive identities from particular geographical spaces, there has not yet been a sustained critical examination of how relationships between identity and place in Canada are articulated in literary representations of labour. While there is an important historical relationship between the conventions of literary realism and representations of labour, the representation of what I call "mobile labour" in literature published since 1930 almost exclusively occurs in literary forms that in some way experiment with the conventions of literary realism. In particular, these diverse texts demonstrate the contradictions embodied in what Raymond Williams calls the realist convention of the "knowable community." This thesis employs theorizations of citizenship in historically attentive ways to analyze how writers from various periods use the theme of mobile labour to either explore the impossibility of the "knowable community" or to lament its passing. Part One analyzes the rail-riding and road motifs of the Depression era in short fiction and poetry published in leftist magazines, in Irene Baird's novel Waste Heritage (1939), and in Hugh Garner's novel Cabbagetown (1968). These chapters explore how a distinction between native-born vagrants and foreign-born immigrants emerged in socialist and social realist writing as a means of asserting the white, Anglo mobile labourer's claim to the nation and, by extension, to the social rights of citizenship that became such an important component of the social welfare state in the postwar period. Part Two of the study turns to fiction published since the late 1960s. Chapter Three considers the contradictory tension between nostalgic realism, the sedentarist assumptions of literary regionalism, and diasporic labour practices in Alistair MacLeod's fiction. Chapter Four looks at Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion and posits that the novel's postmodern "nomadic metaphysics" privileges mobility and deterritorialization, while simultaneously erasing the diversity it ostensibly celebrates. The final chapter discusses the work of Afro-Caribbean writers in Canada and argues that their use of counterrealist satire promotes a cosmopolitan ethics of reading and a model of negotiated citizenship that offers a potential alternative to the binary of sedentarist and nomadic thinking that I trace throughout the project.

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