Thesis (M.A.)--University of Guelph, 2001. / Author requested name be removed from all areas of the catalog record. Includes bibliographical references.

Dans la dernière décennie, est progressivement réapparue en Russie une représentation favorable du passé soviétique, dominée par les grandes réalisations de la période stalinienne et, en particulier, par la victoire sur le nazisme durant la ± Grande Guerre patriotique¿. Pourtant, à l'époque de la glasnost et de la perestroïka de Gorbatchev, les restrictions à la liberté de parole et de presse étant nouvellement levées, le processus de réintégration des pages les plus sombres du passé soviétique dans le récit historique national semblait irrépressible. En effet, la fin des années 1980, en URSS, se caractérise notamment par un déferlement de publications sur les répressions staliniennes et les camps du Goulag, dévoilant lè récit d'expériences individuelles où se reconnaissent des milliers d'autres personnes. Après un silence imposé par le régime soviétique pendant près de soixante-dix ans, plusieurs victimes des répressions décident de faire connaître leur histoire. Aujourd'hui, leur mémoire semble toutefois à nouveau menacée. Dans ce contexte, Larissa Kouderina multiplie les efforts pour faire connaître · l'histoire de ses parents: Djoumakhan Kouderin, un intellectuel kazakh victime des répressions pendant les années 1930, et Tatiana Nassonova, une institutrice d'origine russe qui a hérité de son mari le statut d'± ennemi du peuple¿. En 1994, Larissa publie les mémoires de sa mère et un essai, à ambition historique, sur l 'histoire de son père et de l'intelligentsia kazakhe dont il faisait partie, intelligentsia détruite par les purges staliniennes. Par le biais de ces publications, ainsi que par l'inauguration d'un petit musée, en 2001, elle tente de faire reconnaître l'histoire et les injustices subies par sa famille, son père et la génératiori de ce dernier. L'objectif principal poursuivi dans la présente thèse est de comprendre comm~nt un individu, vivant dans une société où il n'avait, jusqu'à tout récemment, aucune valorisation en dehors de la collectivité, tente de se réapproprier son passé et de redonner un sens à sa vie. L'analyse du projet commémoratif de Larissa Kouderina permet d'observer que celle-ci articule à la fois les discours mémoriel, historique et patrimonial, pour reconstruire l 'histoire de ses parents et pour tenter de réintégrer cette dernière à un récit historique plus vaste, en particulier à celui du Kazakhstan.

This thesis examines a recent trend in contemporary science and speculative fiction to produce new and/or alternative iterations of reproduction that are not limited by biology, gender, or species. Through Donna Haraway’s notion of “cyborg regeneration” and recent critical and theoretical revisionings of this concept, I investigate this trend in three key texts: Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, and Larissa Lai’s long poem “rachel” from her book of poetry Automaton Biographies. Each of these authors offers representations of reproduction that counter gender stereotypes and essentialism and produce new cyborg maternal or explicitly non-maternal figures unbound to patriarchal models of repronormativity and colonialist constructions of the mother. By portraying these nonunitary maternal figures and/or non-reproductive bodies, I argue that these sf texts present new forms of procreation that further feminist conversations about gender, the body, the limits of the human, future populations, and desire.

Speculative fiction is a genre that is gaining urgency in the contemporary Canadian literary scene as authors and readers become increasingly concerned with what it means to live in a nation implicated in globalization. This genre is useful because with it, authors can extrapolate from the present to explore what some of the long-term effects of globalization might be. This thesis specifically considers the long-term effects of globalization on communities, a theme that speculative fictions return to frequently. The selected speculative fictions engage with current theory on globalization and community in their explorations of how globalization might affect the types of communities that can be enacted. This thesis argues that these texts demonstrate how Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notion of “cooperative autonomy” can be uniquely cultivated in the conditions of globalization – despite the fact that those conditions are characterized by the fragmentation of traditional forms of community (Empire 392).

Speculative fiction is a genre that is gaining urgency in the contemporary Canadian literary scene as authors and readers become increasingly concerned with what it means to live in a nation implicated in globalization. This genre is useful because with it, authors can extrapolate from the present to explore what some of the long-term effects of globalization might be. This thesis specifically considers the long-term effects of globalization on communities, a theme that speculative fictions return to frequently. The selected speculative fictions engage with current theory on globalization and community in their explorations of how globalization might affect the types of communities that can be enacted. This thesis argues that these texts demonstrate how Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notion of “cooperative autonomy” can be uniquely cultivated in the conditions of globalization – despite the fact that those conditions are characterized by the fragmentation of traditional forms of community (Empire 392).

Speculative fiction is a genre that is gaining urgency in the contemporary Canadian literary scene as authors and readers become increasingly concerned with what it means to live in a nation implicated in globalization. This genre is useful because with it, authors can extrapolate from the present to explore what some of the long-term effects of globalization might be. This thesis specifically considers the long-term effects of globalization on communities, a theme that speculative fictions return to frequently. The selected speculative fictions engage with current theory on globalization and community in their explorations of how globalization might affect the types of communities that can be enacted. This thesis argues that these texts demonstrate how Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notion of “cooperative autonomy” can be uniquely cultivated in the conditions of globalization – despite the fact that those conditions are characterized by the fragmentation of traditional forms of community (Empire 392).

Speculative fiction is a genre that is gaining urgency in the contemporary Canadian literary scene as authors and readers become increasingly concerned with what it means to live in a nation implicated in globalization. This genre is useful because with it, authors can extrapolate from the present to explore what some of the long-term effects of globalization might be. This thesis specifically considers the long-term effects of globalization on communities, a theme that speculative fictions return to frequently. The selected speculative fictions engage with current theory on globalization and community in their explorations of how globalization might affect the types of communities that can be enacted. This thesis argues that these texts demonstrate how Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notion of “cooperative autonomy” can be uniquely cultivated in the conditions of globalization – despite the fact that those conditions are characterized by the fragmentation of traditional forms of community (Empire 392).

This thesis examines how patriarchal dystopian societies attempt to control their citizenry through the homogenization of discourse and the employment of Foucauldian panopticons. In the context of these power structures, I argue that nonviolent storytelling and restorative memory are more effective in resisting oppression than violent, openly subversive forms of rebellion. In my discussion of The Handmaid’s Tale, I examine how Gilead’s manipulation of public discourse through religious hegemony and restrictions on literacy suppresses the efficacy of individually heroic acts by characters such as Ofglen and Moira. I assert that Offred’s playful deconstruction of language, defiant remembering of her past experiences, and insistence on bearing witness to Gilead’s atrocities without the promise of a listener allows her to successfully resist power and maintain a distinct self. In the analysis of Salt Fish Girl that follows, I study how the Big Six employ a series of cooperative hegemonies to promote neoliberal policies, dehumanize Othered bodies, and rob people in diaspora of cultural memory. Though protagonist Miranda fails in a conventional sense, I conclude that she succeeds due to her remixing of Western texts, hybridization of histories and values, and role in birthing a new, more hopeful future. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This dissertation examines selected literary works by Anita Rau Badami, Denise Chong, Hiromi Goto, Larissa Lai, and Kerri Sakamoto, exploring how their stories respond both to the absence of representations of Asian Canadian women in literary discourses of the early twentieth century and to homogenizing assumptions in official histories. My formulation of (re)presentation in the title recognizes the multiplicity and constructedness of these denoted identities and experiences and the self-representations of these writers as a response to this elision and misrepresentation. The term repair borrows from philosopher Hilde Lindemann Nelson’s theorizing of “narrative repair,” which involves telling counterstories, but also is used in psychological contexts as a healing mechanism. An elaboration of both models, as applied in this study, is optimally useful in diasporic contexts as resistance to the elision and/or racist and gendered discursive constructions of Asian Canadian women and as restoration of damaged identities. The texts under study—Tamarind Mem, The Concubine’s Children, Chorus of Mushrooms, When Fox Is a Thousand, and The Electrical Field—were all published in the mid-1990s, after the initial forays into the writing of novels by Asian Canadian authors such as Joy Kogawa (1981) and SKY Lee (1990). My choice of these sister narratives recognizes the family as central to identity construction and intergenerational (mis)understanding and emphasizes the importance of this period’s second-generation explosion of writings by Japanese, Chinese, and Indo Canadian women that paved the way for the current plethora of writings by authors from these cultural groups that contribute significantly to Canadian representations of diasporic identity. This study explores the nuances and pluralisms of the representations of Asian Canadian women. The texts under consideration are cultural autobiographies and matrilineal or sexually transgressive narratives that reinvent the cultural memory of Canadian women of Asian ancestry; produce cultural fusions through the transcreation of oral traditions and simulations of the oral, transcoding of ancestral tongues, and discursive strategies of silence; and address connections between self and place in examinations of Canada, the adopted country, as (un)homely territory. Presenting unhyphenated diasporic female subjects who exceed socially scripted boundaries of gender, sexuality, race, and nationality, in terms of both Canada and the writers’ and protagonists’ ancestral Asian nations, these “acts of narrative insubordination” (Nelson 8) exemplify emancipatory politics and recuperative and revisionary projects. Interrogating questions of (re)presentation and repair from positions of liminality and across gendered, racial, linguistic, and geographical divides, this research contributes to current urgent discussions of identity, transculturation, multiculturalism, and globalization in literary and cultural studies.