The Hybridity of Violence : Location, Dislocation, and Relocation in Contemporary Canadian Multicultural and Indigenous Writing

This dissertation explores the relationship between indigenous and multicultural writing in Canada. While critics have paid increasing attention to minoritized literatures, indigenous and multicultural literary strategies are seldom examined together without the mediating presence of settler or dominant Canadian literatures. In order to perform such an analysis, this dissertation deploys the concept of hybridity as a category of literary analysis that comes from a history of colonial violence, but which adequately describes the forms of stylistic experimentation which indigenous and multicultural writers use to dramatize and subvert their marginalization. In order to avoid fetishizing indigenous and multicultural texts as markers of reified “otherness,” I examine them in relation to specific discourses and debates in Canadian literary studies, such as the Canadian long poem, prairie writing, city writing, multiculturalism, and indigeneity. Methodologically, my dissertation examines how each text under discussion contributes, yet radically reconfigures and particularizes, each of these literary categories. In addition, I develop a conceptual framework through which the relationship between multicultural and indigenous texts can be approached without rehearsing the conflations that have marked Canadian literary criticism. To this end, I provide close-readings of texts by Armand Garnet Ruffo, Suzette Mayr, Rawi Hage, and Jeannette Armstrong. My introductory chapter details the manner in which the relationship between indigenous and multicultural writing has been approached in Canadian literary studies so far, and elaborates my conceptual framework through critical re-interpretations of postcolonial, globalization, and hybridity theory as they relate to the field of Canadian literary studies. In my second chapter, I analyze Armand Garnet Ruffo’s long poem Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney. I focus on the generic and stylistic strategies Ruffo develops in order to indigenize the genre of the Canadian long poem and question Grey Owl’s identity. My third chapter examines Suzette Mayr’s Venous Hum as a text which challenges prairie writing, Canadian multiculturalism, and Albertan conservatism through stylistic experimentation, metaphor usage, and use of magic realism. In my fourth chapter, I interpret Hage’s Montreal novel Cockroach as a text whose local, national, and global scales intersect with colonialism and contest national narratives as the novel ultimately replicates Western humanitarian intervention. My final chapter explores Jeannette Armstrong’s Whispering in Shadows in order to illustrate the conceptual limits of this dissertation. Since hybridity always assumes (partial) assimilation, its application in the context of Armstrong’s work would bear coercive results. For that reason, this chapter draws on Armstrong’s definition of indigenous concepts in order to develop a non-hegemonic method of analysis.  My dissertation then examines the manner in which each text mobilizes hybridity in order to challenge and supplement the critical discourses that seek to contain them. It contributes to postcolonial Canadian literary studies by opening up the field to the complexities which competing definitions of the global generate, and by examining what literary strategies indigenous and multicultural texts share, yet deploy to different ends.

Keyphrases: Ruffo, Armand Garnet, Hage, Rawi, Armstrong, Jeannette, Canadian literature, hybridity, race, postcolonial theory, globalization