Land/Relations: Possibilities of Justice in Canadian Literature

Essential reading for those interested in questions of justice and cultural representation, Land/Relations speaks to and moves beyond the critical junctures in the study of Canadian literatures today.

In the aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and following Canada’s sesquicentennial, Land/Relations presents a collaborative effort at what Smaro Kamboureli and Larissa Lai call ＂counter-memory,＂ a collective effort to recognise ＂relationships that have always been＂--between peoples, between humanity and other living forms, between us and the land--in an effort to avoid erasure, loss, and trauma. Twenty influential literary critics engage a variety of genres--essay, life writing, testament, polemic, poetry--to explore the ways Canadian cultural production has been shaped by social and historical relations and can be given new and various forms to decolonize the institutions associated with the creation of this country’s vision of Canadian literature.

Smaro Kamboureli is a Professor and the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. The author of On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem and Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literatures in English Canada, which won the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian criticism, she is also the editor of the anthology Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature and Lee Maracle’s Memory Serves: Oratories, and the co-editor of many volumes, including (with Robert Zacharias) Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies and (with Christl Verduyn) Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology.
Larissa Lai is the author of The Lost Century; The Tiger Flu; Salt Fish Girl; Iron Goddess of Mercy; Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s; and four other books. Recipient of the Jim Duggins Novelist’s Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Astraea Award, and the Otherwise Honor Book and finalist for seven more, she holds a Canada Research Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary and directs The Insurgent Architects’ House for Creative Writing there. She is currently a Maria Zambrano Fellow at the University of Huelva in Spain.