Teacher, Detective, Witness, Activist: On Pedagogy and Social Justice in Asian Canadian Literature undertakes a critical consideration of the relationship between pedagogy, social justice, and Asian Canadian literature. The project argues for a recognition of Asian Canadian literature as a creative site concerned with social justice that also productively and problematically becomes a tool in the pursuit of justice in literature classrooms of Canadian universities. The dissertation engages with the politics of reading and, by extension, of teaching social justice in the literature classroom through analyses of six high-profile, canonical works of Asian Canadian literature: Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café (1990), Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field (1998), Madeleine Thien’s Certainty (2006), Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), and Rita Wong’s forage (2007). These texts are in many ways about the reproduction of national, colonial, and neo-colonial pedagogies, a reproduction of teachings informing subject formation and citizenship from which higher education is not exempt. The dissertation analyzes the texts’ treatment of familial and national reproduction, and the narrative temporalities this treatment invokes, in order to think through the political and social reproduction that occurs in classrooms of Canadian post-secondary education. This project raises a number of questions: Do literature instructors engage their students as investigators in the pursuit of justice? And, if so, what type of justice do we seek to reproduce in doing so? What happens when instructors engage students in the work of witnessing fictional testaments of historical trauma, albeit indirectly, as readers? How might we acknowledge and work through the resistance to learning that traumatic testimony can invoke? And finally, might it be productive to think of the work that literature instructors do as a form of activism? Can social justice be conceived of as a pedagogical project that unfolds in the literature classroom? / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertationt turns to the literature of Asian Canada to think through how we learn and are resistant to learning from historical injustice and about social justice. Chapter One argues that Joy Kogawa's Obasan, Kerri Sakamoto's The Electrical Field, and SKY Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe each play with the detective fiction genre in their treatments of anti-Japanese and -Chinese racism in Canada to upset a definition of justice as stable and finite. Chapter Two examines Madeleine Thien's Certainty and Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being as works of trauma fiction that can tell us a lot about the resistance difficult knowledge can provoke. Chapter Three turns to a book of poetry, Rita Wong's forage, to contemplate the temporal and emotional dimensions of everyday, anti-racist and ecological activism; this chapter highlights the limits of discourses of social justice predicated on risk and anxiety.

This dissertation examines current academic approaches to reading South Asian-Canadian literature as a multicultural “other” to Canadian national literature and proposes an alternative reading strategy that allows for these texts to be read within a framework of South Asian diasporic subjectivities situated specifically at the Canadian location. Shifting from the idea that “Canada” names a particular national identity and national literary culture to the idea that “Canada” names a particular geographic terrain at which different cultural, social, and historical vectors intersect and are creolized allows for a more nuanced reading of South Asian-Canadian literature, both in terms of its relationship to the complex history of the South Asian diaspora and in terms of the complex history of South Asian encounters with the Canadian space. Reading prose, poetry, drama, and theatrical institutions as locations where a specifically South Asian-Canadian diasporic subjectivity is reflected, I am able to map a range of individual negotiations among the cultural vector of the “ancestral” past, the cultural vector of the influence of European colonialism, and the cultural vector of this place that demonstrate that the negotiation of South Asian-Canadian diasporic subjectivity and its reflection in literature cannot be understood as producing a homogenous or “authentic” cultural identity. Instead, the literary expression of South Asian-Canadian diasporic subjectivity argues that the outcome of negotiations between cultural vectors that take place in this location are as unique as the individuals who undertake those negotiations. These individual negotiations, I argue, need to be read collectively to trace out a continuum of possible expressions of South Asian-Canadian diasporic subjectivity, a continuum that emphasizes that the processes of negotiation are on-going and flexible. This dissertation challenges the assumption that Canadian literature can be contained within the limits of a Canadian nationalist mythology or ethnography. Instead of the literature of the Canadian “nation” or the Canadian “people,” Canadian literature is best understood as the literature produced in this location by all the “minority” populations, including the dominant “minority.” Reading Canadian literature, then, is reading the differential relationships to history and community that occur in this place and which are inscribed in these collectively Canadian texts.

This dissertation examines current academic approaches to reading South Asian-Canadian literature as a multicultural “other” to Canadian national literature and proposes an alternative reading strategy that allows for these texts to be read within a framework of South Asian diasporic subjectivities situated specifically at the Canadian location. Shifting from the idea that “Canada” names a particular national identity and national literary culture to the idea that “Canada” names a particular geographic terrain at which different cultural, social, and historical vectors intersect and are creolized allows for a more nuanced reading of South Asian-Canadian literature, both in terms of its relationship to the complex history of the South Asian diaspora and in terms of the complex history of South Asian encounters with the Canadian space. Reading prose, poetry, drama, and theatrical institutions as locations where a specifically South Asian-Canadian diasporic subjectivity is reflected, I am able to map a range of individual negotiations among the cultural vector of the “ancestral” past, the cultural vector of the influence of European colonialism, and the cultural vector of this place that demonstrate that the negotiation of South Asian-Canadian diasporic subjectivity and its reflection in literature cannot be understood as producing a homogenous or “authentic” cultural identity. Instead, the literary expression of South Asian-Canadian diasporic subjectivity argues that the outcome of negotiations between cultural vectors that take place in this location are as unique as the individuals who undertake those negotiations. These individual negotiations, I argue, need to be read collectively to trace out a continuum of possible expressions of South Asian-Canadian diasporic subjectivity, a continuum that emphasizes that the processes of negotiation are on-going and flexible. This dissertation challenges the assumption that Canadian literature can be contained within the limits of a Canadian nationalist mythology or ethnography. Instead of the literature of the Canadian “nation” or the Canadian “people,” Canadian literature is best understood as the literature produced in this location by all the “minority” populations, including the dominant “minority.” Reading Canadian literature, then, is reading the differential relationships to history and community that occur in this place and which are inscribed in these collectively Canadian texts.

<p>This thesis examines sexual trauma in Lydia Kwa’s <em>This Place Called Absence</em> (2000), <em>Pulse</em> (2010), and <em>The Walking Boy</em> (2005), and establishes how the domain of sexuality becomes operative in post-trauma healing. This project engages not only the traditional, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder model of trauma, but, using Laura Brown and Maria Root, expands the definition of trauma by drawing attention to the insidious, everyday trauma that affects minority groups and sexual minorities. Kwa’s novels reveal the dynamics and complexities of sexual trauma, which encompasses acts of sexual violence such as rape and abuse, but also what is rarely acknowledged – the trauma that queer individuals face in a heteronormative society. This thesis also investigates the possibility of healing sexual trauma and locates viable modes of therapy in the area of sexuality, including sexual intimacy, sexual practices such as erotic bondage, and the formation of queer communities. This project seeks to illuminate the connections between queerness and trauma, and, via Kwa’s fiction, considers alternative avenues of healing and therapy beyond the medical field.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

Submitted by Maike Costa (maiksebas@gmail.com) on 2016-06-14T13:12:26Z No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivo total.pdf: 2452775 bytes, checksum: 90b59391db598d0ed4ca581e373d1e40 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-14T13:12:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivo total.pdf: 2452775 bytes, checksum: 90b59391db598d0ed4ca581e373d1e40 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-05-29 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / O presente estudo analisa, pelo viés comparativo, os romances Obasan (1981), de Joy Kogawa, e Everything Was Good-Bye (2010), de Gurjinder Basran, escritoras canadenses inseridas na diáspora asiático-canadense, enfocando os impactos da exclusão e discriminação que permeiam essas narrativas das escritoras selecionadas para compor nosso corpus literário. Entendemos as escritas de ambas autoras como tentativas literárias de “quebrar o silêncio” imposto pelo privilégio branco, promovendo uma releitura de caráter pós-colonial e contra hegemônico do Canadá contemporâneo. Desenvolvemos, assim, uma revisão do contexto histórico, literário e cultural canadenses, lançando um olhar mais aprofundado sobre a escrita da minoria asiático-canadense (mulheres de cor), parte da produção significativa dos povos asiáticos que migraram para aquele país e que expõe frequentemente as memórias do passado e as experiências do presente. Após isso, desenvolvemos uma necessária compreensão do contexto de um país tão múltiplo, através da discussão do conceito de transculturação (ou transculturalidade) que muito nos auxilia na leitura das narrativas em tela, apontando a intensidade com a qual esses textos são cortados por referências linguísticas e culturais diversas. Por fim, enfocamos e problematizamos os tradicionais conceitos de Bildungsroman, ou romance de formação, trazendo vozes críticas atreladas ao feminismo e à critica literária em sentido mais amplo, a fim de destacar quais as inovações que o Bildungsroman transcultural produzido por mulheres traz para as análises da literatura contemporânea no contexto canadense. Dessa forma, os romances escolhidos se abrem às experiências de negociação propostas pelo transculturalismo e que tem no gênero – Bildungsroman – o espaço adequado para formulações alternativas no que se refere às personagens, principalmente as femininas. Defendemos, assim, que o Bildungsroman, nesse contexto, cria um novo espaço às literaturas das minorias, sendo o lócus apropriado para apresentar os conflitos e negociações entre a cultura ancestral e a de chegada, aqui contempladas pelas etnias nipônica e indiana. / This dissertation analyzes, through a comparative bias, the novels Obasan (1981) by Joy Kogawa, and Everything Was Good-Bye (2010) by Gurjinder Basran, both Canadian writers inserted in the Asian Canadian diaspora. Our study focuses on the impacts of exclusion and discrimination that permeate the threads of the narrative warp of the selected writers to compose our literary corpus in attempt to “break with the silence” imposed by the White Privilege, thereby promoting a rereading of post-colonial and counter-hegemonic features of contemporary Canada. Developed as a review of the historical, literary and cultural Canadian context, casting a closer look at the writing of Asian Canadian minority (women of color), part of the significant production of Asian peoples whom migrated to that country and often bring to light memories of the past and experiences of the present. Furthermore, we present a necessary understanding of such a multiple country as Canada by discussing the concept of transculturation (or transculturality) that greatly assists us in reading the analyzed narratives, highlighting the intensity through which these texts are crossed by linguistic and various cultural references. Finally, we focus on and confront the traditional concepts of Bildungsroman, or novel of development, which brings to discussion critical voices mainly linked to feminism and literary criticism in the broadest sense, in order to highlight what innovations the transcultural Bildungsroman produced by women brings to the analysis of contemporary literature in the Canadian context. Thus, the chosen novels are open to experiences marked by transculturalism and so this genre - the Bildungsroman - becomes the appropriate space for alternative formulations with regard to the characters, especially to female characters. We argue, therefore, that the Bildungsroman, in this context, creates space to minority literatures, here connected to Japanese and Indian ethnicities, as the locus for presenting the conflicts and negotiations between ancestral and after contact cultures. / Cette étude analyse, par le biais de comparaison, les romans Obasan (1981), de Joy Kogawa, et Everything Was Good-Bye (2010), de Gurjinder Basran, écrivains canadiens insérés dans la diaspora canado-asiatique, en se concentrant sur les répercussions de l'exclusion et de la discrimination qui imprègnent ces récits d'écrivains sélectionnés pour composer notre corpus littéraire. Nous comprenons les écrits des deux auteurs comme des tentatives littéraires pour briser le silence imposé par le privilège blanc, promouvant une relecture de caractère post-coloniale et contre hégémonique du Canada contemporain. Nous développons, ainsi, une révision du contexte historique, littéraire et culturel canadiens, en jetant un regard de plus près à l'écriture de la minorité canado-asiatique (femmes de couleur), une partie de la production significative des peuples asiatiques qui ont migré vers ce pays et qui exposent souvent les mémoires du passé et les expériences du présent. Après cela, nous avons développé une compréhension nécessaire du contexte en tant que pays diversifié en discutant le concept de transculturation (ou transculturalité) qui nous aide grandement à la lecture des récits concernés, montrant l'intensité avec laquelle ces textes mélangent des références linguistiques et culturelles diverses. Enfin, nous nous concentrons et confrontons les concepts traditionnels de Bildungsroman, ou roman de formation, en ramenant les voix critiques liées au féminisme et à la critique littéraire dans le sens le plus large, afin de mettre en évidence les innovations que le Bildungsroman (Roman d'apprentissage) transculturel produit par des femmes apporte à l'analyse de la littérature contemporaine dans le contexte canadien. Ainsi, les romans choisis s’ouvrent aux expériences de négociation proposées par la transculturalité existant dans le genre - Bildungsroman - un espace adéquat à des formulations alternatives en ce qui concerne les personnages, surtout les femmes. Nous soutenons, par conséquent, que le Bildungsroman, dans ce contexte, créé un nouvel espace à la littérature des minorités comme un lieu approprié pour présenter les conflits et les négociations entre la culture antique et celle d’arrivée, ici envisagée par les ethnies nippone et indienne. / O presente estudo analisa, pelo viés comparativo, os romances Obasan (1981), de Joy Kogawa, e Everything Was Good-Bye (2010), de Gurjinder Basran, escritoras canadenses inseridas na diáspora asiático-canadense, enfocando os impactos da exclusão e discriminação que permeiam essas narrativas das escritoras selecionadas para compor nosso corpus literário. Entendemos as escritas de ambas autoras como tentativas literárias de “quebrar o silêncio” imposto pelo privilégio branco, promovendo uma releitura de caráter pós-colonial e contra hegemônico do Canadá contemporâneo. Desenvolvemos, assim, uma revisão do contexto histórico, literário e cultural canadenses, lançando um olhar mais aprofundado sobre a escrita da minoria asiático-canadense (mulheres de cor), parte da produção significativa dos povos asiáticos que migraram para aquele país e que expõe frequentemente as memórias do passado e as experiências do presente. Após isso, desenvolvemos uma necessária compreensão do contexto de um país tão múltiplo, através da discussão do conceito de transculturação (ou transculturalidade) que muito nos auxilia na leitura das narrativas em tela, apontando a intensidade com a qual esses textos são cortados por referências linguísticas e culturais diversas. Por fim, enfocamos e problematizamos os tradicionais conceitos de Bildungsroman, ou romance de formação, trazendo vozes críticas atreladas ao feminismo e à critica literária em sentido mais amplo, a fim de destacar quais as inovações que o Bildungsroman transcultural produzido por mulheres traz para as análises da literatura contemporânea no contexto canadense. Dessa forma, os romances escolhidos se abrem às experiências de negociação propostas pelo transculturalismo e que tem no gênero – Bildungsroman – o espaço adequado para formulações alternativas no que se refere às personagens, principalmente as femininas. Defendemos, assim, que o Bildungsroman, nesse contexto, cria um novo espaço às literaturas das minorias, sendo o lócus apropriado para apresentar os conflitos e negociações entre a cultura ancestral e a de chegada, aqui contempladas pelas etnias nipônica e indiana.