bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Modernism, Memory and Desire: Queer Cultural Production in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
Authors: Tolmie Jane
Published: April 2018

Using what Barbara Christian has called the technique of rememorying—the deliberate reconstruction of memory to void fixed categories—Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic expands the perimeters of graphic memoir and creates a sense of queer canonicity in the process. Fun Home’s structure is recursive rather than linear, returning again and again to the same sites of emotional pain: the author’s coming out, her father’s suicide, the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality, the always-impossible search for lost time. Like other graphic memoirs, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Fun Home tackles subjects rooted in trauma and memory. Fun Home offers a lesbian feminist counterpoint to texts such as Maus, adding queer autobiography to the purview of the growing canon of women’s alternative comic art. Moving freely from Marcel Proust to Roald Dahl, mixing memory and desire, Bechdel interrogates some comfortable perceptions of the autobiographical materials that constitute high culture.
Fortress Europe: Globalization, Militarization and the Policing of Interior Borderlands
Authors: Linke Uli
Published: April 2018

The intensification of militarized violence, racist terror and destructive dehumanization across the globe makes it imperative to examine the corresponding formations of securocratic regimes in the centres of power. With a focus on a united Europe, my essay interrogates the ubiquitous penetration of militarization into everyday life-worlds. My research suggests that in these interior borderlands, emergent cultures of militarization are normalized by recourse to racialization, criminalization and securitization, which in turn gives rise to new intimacies of violence, dehumanization and othering within expanding networks of fortification in a self-proclaimed white society.
Peter Jackson’s Use of Hollywood Film Genres in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and New Zealand’s anti-Nuclear Stance
Authors: Alemany-Galway Mary
Published: April 2018

In his screen adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s book, Peter Jackson appeals to the audience’s familiarity with a number of film genres, which are themselves related to the literary genres that Tolkien drew upon. In many of his films, Jackson uses the familiar modes of Hollywood genres but gives them some peculiar New Zealand twists. My article explores Jackson’s use of multiple genres in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the ways in which his appropriation of these genres evinces particular national concerns, especially those concerning nuclear power. The films fall within the fantasy genre but also feature elements of the war film and the horror film, and it is his use of these genres that I will discuss.
Mil-bot Fetishism: The Pataphysics of Military Robots
Authors: Roderick Ian
Published: April 2018

This paper begins by identifying a tendency in the mass media to represent military robotics in a manner that endows the devices with a degree of automation and agency that is actually beyond the technology. Military robot fetishism is not simply based upon an irrational or mistaken belief about the real capacities of the robots but, instead, their fetish value stems from their positive valuation according to a code of functionality (Baudrillard) that rests upon the risk-transfer labour of the robot. Acting as (Western) soldier surrogates, the promise of the military robot is one of casualty reduction but asymmetrically so. This fetishism arises, as Mulvey proposes, out of the difficulty of representing military reality— namely that waging war has not become a scientifically guided rational-antiseptic enterprise but continues to be a gruesome and violent activity. The fetishization of military robots can be attributed to the need to ameliorate a reality that is politically difficult for western governments and their militaries. In this context, military robotics becomes a science of imaginary technical solutions to the problem of war legitimation. The promotion of military robot fetishism in the mass media means that the military robot as fetish comes to circulate within both martial and civilian lifeworlds, re-legitimizing warfare and affording further militarization of civic life.
Preparing the Instantaneous Battlespace: A Cultural Examination of Network-Centric Warfare
Authors: King Mary Sterpka
Published: April 2018

The aftermath of the Cold War signalled a revision in the global position of the United States and a new emphasis on the country’s status as a military superpower. Liberated from the stand-off between rivals that existed with the Soviet Union, the United States military has been able to greatly expand its scope of operational theories and aspire toward global dominance, using such programs as the Air Force’s Global Reach, Global Strike, The Navy’s Aegis Program and the Department of Defense, Joint Vision 20/20 Full Spectrum Dominance. Each of these examples suggests the expansion of the battlefield to well beyond what had been understood as the limits of military ambition. By exploiting the strategic capabilities of information based technologies, military thinking has been reoriented in a number of fundamental ways, all of which are associated with the doctrinal conceptualization of the Revolution in Military Affairs and the development of Network-Centric Warfare. Despite a change in presidential administrations, the tendency to globalize the battlespace prevails.
Searching for the Militarization of Canadian Culture: The Rise of a Military-Cultural Memory Network
Authors: Fremeth Howard
Published: April 2018

During the past twenty years, there has been a shift in Canadian culture from representations that highlight a peacekeeping view of the military and its past to a hardened and more pervasive image. This paper explores the militarization of culture by outlining a theory and method to study the emergence of a militarycultural memory network. Specifically, I reassess the debate over The Valour and the Horror as a formative event in this network. I propose that the Dominion Institute has since emerged as an intermediary connecting various interested groups who use popular media forms to canonize and archive military history.
Spooks of Biopower: The Uncanny Carnivalesque of Zombie Walks
Authors: Orpana Simon
Published: April 2018

At a zombie walk, participants dress up as zombies and parade through the city performing a spectacular representation of a “zombie apocalypse.” The popularity of these events has increased dramatically since the first recorded walk took place in Toronto in 2003. This paper considers the phenomenon in light of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque to argue that the modern zombie walk contrasts with older versions of carnival in its morbid suspension of life and death. I account for this mutation by referring to Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris’s concept of the society of control.
Tracing Histories in Oppenheimer Park: An Exercise in Cognitive Mapping
Authors: Aoki Julia
Published: April 2018

The following is an exploration of personal memories and historical narratives in Oppenheimer Park, a highly politicized park in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. Cognitive maps of Oppenheimer Park—maps drawn from memory by regular users of the Park—were collected via postcards in the summer of 2008. With attention to Fredric Jameson’s invitation to trace the relationship of individuals to broader social space, the purpose of this paper is to identify Downtown Eastside historical narratives—often marginalized or obscured in popular representations of Vancouver’s history—through the pathways, figures and landmarks indicated in the visual renderings of Oppenheimer Park, and to set those histories against broader processes of spatial reproduction. The interpretive analysis of the collected images brings to the surface the social histories embedded within the Park and postcards in a meaningful way without smoothing over or reconciling the conflicting, multiaccentual significations that refract the historical and social landscape.
Benevolence, Global Citizenship and Post-racial Politics
Authors: Jefferess David
Published: April 2018

This article explores how benevolence, as a discourse informing the rhetoric of global citizenship, seems to articulate a post-racial politics. By critically analyzing the construction of James Orbinski and Stephen Lewis as models of global citizenship in documentary film as well as the Aga Khan Foundation Canada’s travelling development education exhibition, Bridges that Unite, the essay argues that global citizenship presupposes, or seems to enact, an end to race. The performance of benevolence is not bound by race, but is indebted to, and rearticulates, race thinking in a way that belies the ongoing dynamics of colonial racism.
Capitalizing on Multiculturalism: Reading the Success of Canadian Comedian Russell Peters
Authors: Motapanyane Maki
Published: April 2018

Comedian Russell Peters has risen to the top of the North American comedy industry, selling out shows to audiences across Canada and the U.S., and increasingly, in venues around the world. A self-described Anglo-Indian and native of Brampton, Ontario, Peters is credited with voicing what many of us know but often dare not articulate in the area of culture and identity. His wide appeal across diverse audiences is deduced to his skill in telling “truths” about identity and multicultural diversity in Canada, while shirking the troublesome restrictions of political correctness.

This paper highlights the indebtedness of Peters’s winning comedic formula to Canadian multicultural discourse. Three key fables of official multiculturalism are featured in this critical reading of Peters’s work—the aim of which is to foreground the underlying ideological framework that informs the comedian’s approach and wide appeal. I argue that the question of what Canadians are laughing at in Russell Peters’s humour is central to a wider investigation of what his popularity reveals about the popular domain of Canadian public culture. To the extent that Peters’s popularity throws into question national receptivity to the problem of structural inequality, an examination of his wide appeal stands as a necessary point of departure for further assessments of the ideological climate in which Canadian social justice efforts are mobilized.
Vamps, Heroines, Otherwise: Diasporic Women Resisting Essentialism
Authors: Jiwa Fazeela
Published: April 2018

This paper examines the shift beyond a preoccupation with ethnic identity in Asian Canadian diasporic literary and cultural productions, challenging the generic conventions of autoethnography. Eisha Marjara’s Desperately Seeking Helen represents one form of South Asian women’s resistance to colonial and patriarchal claims about their subjectivity that are reinforced by Bollywood’s static female stereotypes. Marjara’s interruption inserts women’s experiences into the familiar postcolonial story, using experimental modes to break from methods of memorializing that easily perpetuate prescribed identities. In eliciting Eastern/ Western popular culture stereotypes in order to examine their effect on diasporic women, Marjara’s text refuses the submissive, exoticized or silent woman of Bollywood in favour of one who resists.
Ranis Making Rotis: Dreams of the Good South Asian Girl
Authors: Hirji Faiza
Published: April 2018

The importance of gender in popular Indian cinema has been noted by a number of scholars, and indeed, even a casual observer may find it difficult to overlook. There are, of course, some significant differences between the Indian cinema of yesteryear and today’s popular Indian films, which are often aimed at a diasporic audience. In an effort to capture this audience, Bollywood films represent heroines who are not always as demure and submissive as in older films; many are assertive, educated and successful. A few engage in behaviour that would previously have been seen as taboo, including premarital sex. Yet beneath any veneer of equality, Bollywood films continue to portray gender, particularly femininity, in ways that are regressive. Despite their highly problematic depiction of gender, Bollywood films seem to have a significant effect on the way that some young adults living in diaspora understand femininity, masculinity and relationships, as indicated by findings from a recent study that I conducted on the reception of Bollywood films by young Canadians of South Asian origin. Although gender was not the focus of the study, some of the participants suggested that Bollywood was most significant to them in terms of the views it advanced about women. I argue here that while Bollywood cinema has made limited strides in its portrayal of women, its depictions may have had the unintended and positive effect of igniting feminist debate, however problematic, among some of its diasporic viewers.
The Complicated Pleasures of Hindi Cinema in Canada
Authors: Khan Shahnaz
Published: April 2018

Drawing on interviews with South Asian women in Toronto, I examine the role cinema plays in shaping these women’s imaginings of home as well as in helping to create cultural space for them in Canada. These women find their lives regulated by idealized nostalgia for the homeland and channelled into predetermined roles; the Muslim women I spoke to also challenge the anti-Islam messages found in many of the films they enjoy watching. I argue that while cinematic icons do indeed help reproduce an authentic homeland, they simultaneously allow for the emergence of transformative spaces. In effect, Hindi cinema allows South Asian women to see themselves, challenge what they see, and fashion new lives out of their imaginings of and nostalgia for their homelands.
Remembering Devdas: Travels, Transformations and Persistence of Images, Bollywood-Style
Authors: Mukherjee Madhuja
Published: April 2018

This essay studies different Hindi film adaptations of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s canonical Bengali novella Devdas, published in 1917. Briefly, the paper argues that the various iterations of Devdas produce a complex history of cinematic development in India, shaped as they are by significant moments: World War II; the 1947 Partition of British India into India and Pakistan and its resultant multiple displacements; the rural-urban transformations of the 1950s; postcolonial problems; and the cross-border migrations and circulation of people, audiences, films and capital in the post-globalization era. Thus, in my attempt to read the travels and transformation of cinematic codes through the various adaptations of Devdas, a larger historical trajectory of national and diasporic dislocation becomes evident, revealing a deeply complicated history of colonial and postcolonial India.
The Taser and Non-Lethal Economies of Touch in Canada
Authors: Gordon Aaron
Published: April 2018

By examining the police’s use of tasers in Canada, this paper attempts to gain some purchase on non-lethal policing: social relations created through non-lethal weapons (NLWs) and modes of force that get under the skin without breaking it. This paper maps out how discourses of “less” lethality, the Braidwood commission’s recommendations, military NLW strategy and closed notions of community coalesce within Canada’s national-security regime to authorize the use of nonlethal force while at the same time obfuscating the taser’s non-lethal capacities, which cause people to fall down and their bodies to leak in unprecedented ways. In closing, this essay outlines what I call a non-containerizing politics of touch that challenges this national-security regime and allows new frameworks for using tasers to develop.
Nanay: Drawing a New Landscape of Diasporic Mothers
Authors: Yoshimizu Ayaka
Published: April 2018

Over the last three decades, migration from Asia has been increasingly feminized as women find work abroad, primarily in highly gendered labour markets such as domestic services and health care services, where they are forced to live apart from their own families. This paper examines Nanay (Mother) (2009), a testimonial play, as an example of documentary theatre. The play was written by two geographers, Geraldine Pratt and Caleb Johnston. It explores Filipina domestic workers’ experiences of maternal loss and separation, which constitute what I refer to as their “diasporic motherhood.” I focus not only on the play’s narrative but also on its multimedial and polyphonic form, and discuss how the play invites members of the Canadian public to engage actively with the migrant workers’ life stories, ethically connect with the migrant subjects, and envision an alternative future to the current exploitative condition.
From Foreign to Canadian: The Case of Air India and the Denial of Racism
Authors: Seshia Maya
Published: April 2018

Air India Flight 182 exploded over the north Atlantic on June 23, 1985. The majority of passengers and suspects were Canadian citizens, the bombs originated from Vancouver, and the bombing is the worst act of terrorism in Canada’s history. In the immediate aftermath, Canada’s then-Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, responded by sending condolences to the government of India. Families of the victims subsequently reported “that they felt that they were not viewed as ‘real Canadians’ and that this was somehow not considered to be a Canadian tragedy” (Government of Canada, Commission of Inquiry 2007: 99). This article examines what discourses about the Air India case reveal about Canadian citizenship and conceptions of the Canadian nation. It draws on parliamentary debates, as well as government and Air India Inquiry reports, to demonstrate that the national story woven through the history of the Air India case is a racial one: it erases racism out of its narrative and ultimately imagines Canada and the country’s citizens as white. The article argues that the bombing of Air India was initially constructed as a non-Canadian tragedy involving non-Canadian citizens; hence this event, victims, victims’ families and suspects were discursively distanced from the Canadian nation. However, the events of 9/11 and persistent counternarratives have helped create a climate in which particular concerns expressed by victims’ families have been heard by the Canadian government, and the Air India case has recently been reframed as an act of terror that directly affected Canada, and the victims and surviving families have been embraced as “Canadians.” While unquestionably significant, this shift not only enhances security measures that predominantly and often unjustly target racialized subjects, but it is premised on a colourblind approach that ultimately obscures the central role that systemic racism has played throughout the history of the Air India case.
Academic Feminism’s Entanglements with University Corporatization
Authors: Newson Janice
Published: April 2018

Late 20th-century academic feminism has been impressively successful. In contrast to their sparse presence in pre-1970s academia, women make up the majority of students and faculty members in most social science and humanities disciplines, and in professions such as law and medicine; women’s recruitment to the natural and physical sciences has become an institutional priority; women occupy many high-level academic-administrative positions; and, feminist intellectual perspectives have undermined and in some cases replaced male-centred knowledge paradigms. Yet this successful intervention into the academy has taken place at the same time as another process, corporatization, has been reconfiguring the academy in significant ways. That these transformative interventions have been reshaping the academic terrain at the same time seems counterintuitive. A feminist vision for the university hardly seems compatible with the commoditization and commercialization of teaching and research that accompanies corporatization. Their concurrence thus raises important theoretical and political questions. Has the success of the feminist intervention intermingled with and been shaped by corporatization? Have academic women’s advancements actually aided corporatization? This article explores these provocative questions and their implications for the future of academic feminism and for the university as a public-serving institution. It calls on feminist scholars and activists to come forward with a renewed vision for the university, one that could help to bring together and provide focus to the various attempts by students and faculty to wrest universities from the grip of the neoliberal policies that have given them a corporate shape.
Reflections on Academic Cultural Studies and the Problem of Indigenization in the Philippines
Authors: San Juan E.
Published: April 2018

From a Filipino perspective, this speculative commentary ventures a brief critique of Eurocentric cultural studies by examining its philosophical premises and their ideological resonances. The resurgence of national-popular resistance to the “global war on terrorism” has exposed the limits of the current discipline’s bias for nominalism, indeterminacy, pleasure, performativity and relativism. Indigenization attempts may signal a return to the original radical vision of cultural studies. However, such indigenization (as exemplified by the Philippine example in contrast to the rest of Asia) requires a separate critique that would actualize the dialectical interface of local subaltern practices and the concrete universal of an anti-imperialist liberation project. This materialist regrounding of the discipline might be able to connect the systemic crisis of the global North with the revolutionary aspirations of the global South and thus renew the promise of cultural studies as an emancipatory unity of theory and practice.
Settling Accounts: On The Subject of Economic Confessions
Authors: Hayward Mark
Published: April 2018

This article traces the modern history of the “economic confession”—first person accounts of financial markets—in relation to the proliferation of confessional forms in contemporary popular culture. It is argued that the way these confessions position themselves as personal narratives of impersonal social forms like financial markets are important for understanding how the social relations that underwrite contemporary financial capitalism are maintained. The article concludes by placing the genre of the economic confession in the context of the modern confessional regime in which the techniques for speaking out have been structured in a way that preserves rather than transform the established social order.
Making Sense of the “Endless Play of Signs” in the Work of Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge
Authors: Smith Sarah E. K.
Published: April 2018

The shift to financialization has oriented economies towards the immaterial. As Marc C. Taylor explains, “what distinguishes financial capitalism is that wealth is generated by the circulation of signs grounded in a seemingly endless play of signs rather than in the sale or exchange of material objects or physical labour” (2011: 5). This abstraction of economic mechanisms increases the risk that misunderstandings of the system will occur, as demonstrated by the 2007–2009 financial crisis. This article explores how contemporary artists are addressing financial capitalism in Canada and what can be gained from artistic representations that attempt to assess the current economic system. Specifically, the works of Toronto-based artists Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge are examined. Their collaborative method, which combines community expression with political commentary, produces vivid photographic tableau that offer a clear criticism of financialization as a historical and contemporary issue that has implications in the everyday. Significantly, Condé and Beveridge’s representations of financial capitalism illuminate marginalized aspects of this economic system and contribute to a reexamination of the status quo.
The Art of (Bio)Surveillance: Bioart and the Financialization of Life Systems
Authors: Abergel Elisabeth , Magnusson Jamie
Published: April 2018

Our paper examines the complex relations between bioart and the financialization of life itself through the bioeconomic apparatus of biosurveillance. Briefly, the bioeconomy, or the relocation of genetic, microbial and cellular productive processes within capitalism (see Melinda Cooper 2008), involves the expansion of the life sciences industries into every domain of society. Bioart explores the “mobilization of the biological” to understand how culture confronts and/or collaborates with neoliberal forces. One key aspect of the bioeconomy is the financialization of living systems via the increasing importance of financial markets within the biotechnology industry and post-genomic technologies (synthetic biology). The concept of biosurveillance, originally developed for disease surveillance and monitoring, is now, in the era of the post-terror state, strongly linked to national security; it concerns “a wider biopolitical strategy” connected to the active gathering and surveillance of “person-specific biological information” (Parry 2012: 718). The use of biosurveillance to secure populations is aimed at securitizing populations in the context of both defence and financialization. Major science and technology innovations (RFID tags, VeriChips, animated tattoos, DNA chips, human barcodes, etc.), which enable the policing of “biological threats” have become integrated into the bioeconomic cultural apparatus and have inspired several bioartists. What does bioart uncover about the complex relations between risk-based surveillance and the accumulation of insecurity in an era of financialized capital?
Streaming Precarity: The Polar Bear Cam and the Display of Migration
Authors: Lafontaine Constance
Published: April 2018

The figure of the polar bear is used more extensively than any other faunal or floral species as the image through which to express and communicate human anxiety about the effects of global warming on the North. This paper considers representations of polar bears in Canada by discussing the spectacularization of the animal afforded by the Polar Bear Cam, a live online stream of the species’ yearly migration near Churchill, Manitoba. The Polar Bear Cam, like several other popular contemporary representations of the polar bear, has been conjugated within a discourse of global warming. Precarity, threats of extinction and impending death operate as impetuses for the display and viewing of the animal. This article considers some points that arise at this intersection of sight and survival and argues that the Polar Bear Cam operates within an anthropocentric framework. In several ways, the Polar Bear Cam symbolically cements the animal as a being that is removed from the human, both geographically and ontologically. Even beyond its own endeavour of visual commodification, the cam is complicit with a system that is predicated on a sustained and institutionalized subjugation of the non-human. By discussing the polar-bear tourism industry in Churchill, I explore how spectacular displays of wildlife efface the complex ways in which humans and polar bears are connected.
On the Fluidity of Grounds: Sea Ice and Digital Mediation of Inuit Experience
Authors: Vardy Mark
Published: April 2018

The decline of sea ice is one of the most visible markers of climate change in the Arctic, but much more than the subject of a scientific anomaly, sea ice constitutes Inuit territory and is foundational to a way of life. The threatened vitality of the foundations of Inuit homeland raises the ethical and political question of how populations in southern Canada should respond, a question which is complicated by the lack of proximity. The digitally mediated Inuit Siku (Sea Ice) Atlas (Laidler, 2011) can impart singular experiences of sea ice, and is treated in this paper as a substantive example of vital mediation (Kember and Zylinska, 2012). The paper addresses the fluidity of ground as both a material fact and theoretical postulate by considering theories of vitalism, radical democracy, and Chakrabarty’s (2012) conception of political subjectivity as three disjunctive registers, which includes human agency as a geophysical force.
Iceberg Economies
Authors: Ruiz Rafico
Published: April 2018

In A Postcapitalist Politics (2006), J.K. Gibson-Graham deploy an image of a floating iceberg to illustrate what we commonly understand by “the economy.” In their reading of the diverse economy framework, the proverbial tip of the iceberg economy is comprised of “wage labor, market exchange of commodities, and capitalist enterprise” (2006: 70). By contrast, its submerged body can include a multiplicity of sites and actors such as producer cooperatives, bartering practices, and gifts.

On the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, in the once-thriving fishing port of St. Anthony, icebergs are being harvested for bottling and sale in the global premium water market. At international trade fairs from Dubai to Shanghai, iceberg water is marketed as the purest water on the planet and a resource originating from a time before the dire effects of pollution and mass industrialization. This article traces the various encounters between icebergs and human actors in the geographical region known as “Iceberg Alley,” in order to assess the social, cultural, economic, and political stakes of these “new” natural resources. The article asks, “If Newfoundland’s Iceberg Alley is ‘the economy,’ what lies below its surface?”
When Does Fat Matter? Obesity, Risk and the Politics of Futurity
Authors: Stoneman Scott
Published: April 2018

The “obesity epidemic” has become one of the most divisive public health issues of our time. It divides us politically by creating factions: those who believe immediate intervention is necessary to scale back obesity rates to pre-millennial levels struggle to communicate productively with those who dismiss governmental measures to combat obesity as attempts to resuscitate the “nanny state.” Those who believe being overweight or obese is the effect of an irresponsible individual’s lifestyle choices give little credence to advocates of a more structural critique emphasizing free market capitalism’s establishment of parameters that compel people—and, in particular, economically disadvantaged people—to make unhealthy choices. In this essay I align with the group of critics who identify as obesity sceptics: scholars who read any ideological formulation of the obesity problem with irreverence and do not concede the veracity of the “epidemic” without some reservation. My focus here is on the rise of a certain state paternalism in response to obesity and what this shift in risk-perception suggests about the role of belief in creating the conditions for a public health emergency. The crucial factor here is potentiality: while dangers are concrete situations that imply a requisite reaction, risks represent emerging and often contentious threats. Rather than reducing the politics of obesity-fighting projects to cost/benefit analysis, then, I seek to find a language that re-opens the problem and complicates the diverse assumptions about individuals, structures and temporalities informing the epidemiology of obesity.
A Breed Apart? Narrating Innocence and Viciousness in Breed-Specific Legislation
Authors: Wallace Molly
Published: April 2018

Narratives of vicious pit bulls and children at risk are foundational to arguments in favour of breed-specific legislation (BSL), a pre-emptive form of governance, implemented in select provinces, states, and municipalities around the world, that works (or does not work, as the case may be), not by policing vicious dog behaviour, but by preventing the existence of supposedly intrinsically vicious members of chosen breeds. Though the breed targeted differs depending on context, most often included is, not surprisingly, that canine-non-grata, the pit bull. Taking Ontario’s “pit bull ban” (Bill 132) as a case study, this essay tracks the figure of the pit bull, first in the parliamentary debates leading up to the passing of the law, and then in a subsequently published juvenile novel, Ingrid Lee’s Dog Lost (2008), a text that deploys a familiar narrative of boy-and-dog as an explicit response to Ontario’s BSL. If BSL is predicated on pit bulls being, as Ontario’s Attorney General Michael Bryant put it, “a breed apart”—that is, they must be recognizable, first as “a breed,” and second as a breed that is distinct from all others, or at least from all others that are not covered by BSL—Lee’s narrative too suggests that these dogs might be exceptional, for, like so many canine protagonists, Lee’s “Cash” is hyperbolically noble, the polar opposite of the “commonsense” narrative of the pit bull—the pit bull that “everyone knows.” And, in narrating the experience of her exceptional pit bull under the looming threat of BSL, Lee offers a productive reminder that—attacks by particular, individual dogs notwithstanding—the essentially vicious pit bull, the one that is, as Bryant put it, “a breed apart,” is itself a social construction, and one with very material consequences for dogs and children alike.
Copyright, Empire and the Politics of Print: The Case of Canada
Authors: Nadel Ira
Published: April 2018

This article analyzes Canada’s fight for an autonomous copyright act as the foundation for the establishment of the professional status of Canadian writers. The overall focus of the discussion is the idea of authorship as a construct enhanced by the orderly circulation of intellectual goods, a key to “cultural expression” affiliated with independent copyright. The article traces in detail Canada’s fight with Great Britain for literary independence, and also examines the stability of authorship in English and French Canada, which led to the establishment of Canadian copyright and an independent literary culture.
“In Another Place, Not Here”? Black Feminist Histories and Dionne Brand’s No Burden to Carry
Authors: Zackodnik Teresa
Published: April 2018

While No Burden to Carry has been taken up largely within Caribbean-Canadian women’s labour historiography, this article argues for its position within a transnational history of feminist Black nationalism in which that politics crosses the Canada-U.S. border with Black immigrants as early as the 1840s. The connective history it offers challenges preconceptions of Black nationalism as a masculinist and early-to-mid-twentieth century political movement, and historical dismissals of Black nationalism as unimportant or ineffectual in the Canadian context.
Spirit Possession and the Transformation of Space in the Fiction of Dionne Brand
Authors: Goldman Marlene
Published: April 2018

This paper analyzes Brand’s short story “Blossom” in light of Freud’s notion of the uncanny. As I argue, Brand invokes the uncanny to illustrate that in a country like Canada, with a history of arrivals and departures, the trope of haunting is a particularly useful way to think about the relationship between history and memory, about displacement, about ancestors, and about inheritance. My contribution to the discussion of the role played by haunting in Brand’s corpus lies in suggesting that her fiction is not solely informed by embodied experiences of trauma and dispossession. Instead, I argue that Brand’s early engagement with Afro-Caribbean understandings of spirit possession, evident in her first short story collection Sans Souci, provides the foundation for her critique and transformation of the racist, classist, and sexist dimensions of Toronto’s urban space. While scholarly accounts of Brand’s work informed by Western paradigms of poststructuralist performance and trauma theory remain helpful, Brand’s fictions exceed these paradigms because they self-consciously explore the muted consciousness of volatile, possessed female bodies and, in so doing, demonstrate a profound knowledge of alternatives to Western epistemology and ontology afforded by Afro-Caribbean possession rituals and spiritual traditions.
Dionne Brand’s Transnational Sublime
Authors: Barrett Paul
Published: April 2018

This article reads moments of the sublime in Dionne Brand’s novels through the framework of Sylvia Wynter’s analysis of the discursive category of Man. I argue that Brand depicts the doubled sense of violence and possibility that arises from occupying the border of the category of Man. The moments of the sublime in her work emerge from confronting the terror and violence committed against black bodies alongside the hopeful gesture of using that violence and history as grounds for reimagining what it means to be human.
Troublesome Indigestion: The “Return” of Omar Khadr and Post-Racial Politics of Citizenship in Canada
Authors: Mackey Allison
Published: April 2018

This article examines the relationship between legal, political and media discourses surrounding the much publicized return of Canadian Guantánamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr. Three main figures of return appear here: first, Khadr’s literal return to Canada, his country of birth, in September of 2012. This homecoming has sparked lively political, legal and public debates about Canadian citizenship, which lead to a second form of return: the return of racism, in its contemporary “post-racial,” colour-blind and/or civilizationalist forms, that permeate debates surrounding Khadr’s (and his family’s) membership in Canada. Finally, I consider what happens when Khadr is neither successfully assimilated nor “excreted” by the state or by its imaginary community of citizens. This return, which I figure as a kind of troublesome indigestion, is revealed on the rare occasions when Khadr’s own words have been made public, when he insists on speaking as a rights-bearing citizen and a normal Canadian young person, despite relentless legal, political and discursive attempts to cast him out. I suggest that these can be read as moments when that which has been deemed “indigestible” makes a claim for incorporation within the imaginary and civic community, thereby revealing the mechanism of expulsion as in fact constitutive of national or civic identity.
There Goes the Neighbour Hood: on Feral Children and Alien Invaders
Authors: Trimble S.
Published: April 2018

This article was prompted by the return of the feral child—a figure shaped by the infantilizing racial logics that animate(d) the project of empire—in conservative responses to the August 2011 “riots” in and around London. I argue that the casting of young people, especially young people of colour, as animalistic and wild fleshes out a neoliberal plot that narrates the “nanny” state as failed and beseeching authoritarian correction. To consider how this works and, more importantly, to re-turn the trope that equates hoodies with “wild beasts,” I read Joe Cornish’s science fiction/horror/comedy film, Attack the Block (UK, 2011), as a comment on the invasiveness of neoliberal metaphors. Cornish’s “too black” aliens dramatize the force with which the trope of the feral child invades and inhabits the bodies of racialized young people, turning them toward the reproduction of a convenient narrative and, at the same time, exposing them to injury, violence and death. By staging this invasion as in-process and contested rather than accomplished, ATB opens up the possibility of telling different stories about young black Britons in urban England. But I also attend, here, to the film’s imaginative limits, which are signalled by the persistent abjection of the only “female” alien in the story. To multiply the “convivial” future possibilities to which ATB gestures, I meditate on the implications of doubling down on alienness: a turning and turning again that might usher in alien new worlds.
The Stratford Anomaly and Canadian Cultural Clusters
Authors: Rae Ian , Smeltzer Sandra
Published: April 2018

This article examines the anomalous status of Stratford, Ontario, as the city with the highest percentage of arts-related employment per capita in Canada and as the home of North America’s largest classical theatre, the Stratford Festival (SF). The authors assert that this small city’s diverse cultural achievements are not accidents of history, as they are typically portrayed in theatre and cultural criticism, but rather effects of a civic tradition that connects citizenship to cultural infrastructure in the interest of developing an amenity-rich city. To illustrate this point, the authors review the literature on cultural clusters as it pertains to small cities, show how Stratford differs from the statistical norms, then demonstrate how Stratford’s history of financial, political and social investment in cultural infrastructure undergirded the founding of the SF in 1953. This infrastructure, which dates back to the 1850s, is largely overlooked in academic criticism on the SF because critics depend on founder Tom Patterson’s portrait of the SF in First Stage: The Making of the Stratford Festival (1987, reissued 1999) as the origin, not the outgrowth, of Stratford’s cultural economy. In contrast to Patterson’s argument, which gets reiterated in academic and popular publications about Stratford, this article maintains that Stratford’s thriving cultural economy is not the product of a single institution or individual genius, but rather the outgrowth of an interconnected ecology of cultural agents, materials, influences, traditions and modes of communication.
From a Fishy Place: Examining Canadian State Law Applied in the Daniels Decision from the Perspective of Métis Legal Orders
Authors: Todd Zoe
Published: April 2018

This piece examines the Supreme Court of Canada’s Daniels decision through the lens of Métis legal orders and human-fish relations. It offers watershed-level analysis of Métis relationships and responsibilities through space and time. In order to meet the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Call to Action number 45, which acknowledges the need for Canada to reconcile Indigenous legal orders with Canadian law, courts must stop defining the Métis through outside discourses of who they are and how they govern themselves. Instead, there must be a shift towards acknowledging complex and rich Métis legal orders. Further, it is important for legal scholars to acknowledge how specific aspects of Métis legal orders are coconstituted through relationships with, and responsibilities to, more-than-human beings such as fish, and that these relationships are bound to and enacted through ongoing labour between humans and fish in particular waterways throughout the prairies. Scholars and policy-makers alike must de-anthropocentrize understandings of how Métis conceive of and govern their relationships to lands and waters.
Reading the Real in Survivor: Unearthing the Republican Roots in Reality Narrative
Authors: Tremblay Tony
Published: April 2018

Reading the Real’ uses cultural, Marxist, and psychoanalytic theory to analyze Survivor and reality narrative generally. The essay begins with two questions—what constitutes the popularity of reality-TV shows such as Survivor? And in what ways do they so pleasurably accommodate us?—and moves from there to uncover both the historical fascination with the survivalist narrative and the functional assumptions that inform it. In so doing, the essay takes a broad sweep in considering how Enlightenment attitudes, Social Darwinism, and other republican ideologies—such as individualism, competition, and surveillance—sustain the contemporary fascination with reality simulations. Finally, the essay considers the five dominant codes of the Survivor text—primitivism, authenticity, sexuality, play, and celebrity— and theorizes how the manifest nature of those codes actually informs the popularity of the show. The essay concludes by suggesting that the overdetermined nature of Survivor’s reigning manifest codes is necessary for unobstructed seeing, for when that which is seen is already familiar, both historically and ideologically, popularity and delight are guaranteed.
The Colonial Climbs of Mount Trudeau: Thinking Masculinity through the Homosocial
Authors: Erickson Bruce
Published: April 2018

This paper juxtaposes the self defined elitism held within some mountaineering circles to the debate surrounding the failed renaming of Mount Logan. By considering male homosocial desire, this reading demonstrates that we cannot consider masculinity in Canadian leisure habits (and politics) without examining gender, race and sexuality.
Simplifying the use of prognostic information in traumatic brain injury. Part 1: The GCS-Pupils score: an extended index of clinical severity
Authors: Brennan Paul M. , Murray Gordon D. , Teasdale Graham M.
Published: April 2018

OBJECTIVE

Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) scores and pupil responses are key indicators of the severity of traumatic brain damage. The aim of this study was to determine what information would be gained by combining these indicators into a single index and to explore the merits of different ways of achieving this.

METHODS

Information about early GCS scores, pupil responses, late outcomes on the Glasgow Outcome Scale, and mortality were obtained at the individual patient level by reviewing data from the CRASH (Corticosteroid Randomisation After Significant Head Injury; n = 9,045) study and the IMPACT (International Mission for Prognosis and Clinical Trials in TBI; n = 6855) database. These data were combined into a pooled data set for the main analysis.

Methods of combining the Glasgow Coma Scale and pupil response data varied in complexity from using a simple arithmetic score (GCS score [range 3–15] minus the number of nonreacting pupils [0, 1, or 2]), which we call the GCS-Pupils score (GCS-P; range 1–15), to treating each factor as a separate categorical variable. The content of information about patient outcome in each of these models was evaluated using Nagelkerke’s R2.

RESULTS

Separately, the GCS score and pupil response were each related to outcome. Adding information about the pupil response to the GCS score increased the information yield. The performance of the simple GCS-P was similar to the performance of more complex methods of evaluating traumatic brain damage. The relationship between decreases in the GCS-P and deteriorating outcome was seen across the complete range of possible scores. The additional 2 lowest points offered by the GCS-Pupils scale (GCS-P 1 and 2) extended the information about injury severity from a mortality rate of 51% and an unfavorable outcome rate of 70% at GCS score 3 to a mortality rate of 74% and an unfavorable outcome rate of 90% at GCS-P 1. The paradoxical finding that GCS score 4 was associated with a worse outcome than GCS score 3 was not seen when using the GCS-P.

CONCLUSIONS

A simple arithmetic combination of the GCS score and pupillary response, the GCS-P, extends the information provided about patient outcome to an extent comparable to that obtained using more complex methods. The greater range of injury severities that are identified and the smoothness of the stepwise pattern of outcomes across the range of scores may be useful in evaluating individual patients and identifying patient subgroups. The GCS-P may be a useful platform onto which information about other key prognostic features can be added in a simple format likely to be useful in clinical practice.