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This book examines how concepts of citizenship have been negotiated in Anglophone Canadian literature since the 1970s. Katja Sarkowsky argues that literary texts conceptualize citizenship as political "co-actorship" and as cultural "co-authorship" (Boele van Hensbroek), using citizenship as a metaphor of ambivalent affiliations within and beyond Canada. In its exploration of urban, indigenous, environmental, and diasporic citizenship as well as of citizenship's growing entanglement with questions of human rights, Canadian literature reflects and feeds into the term's conceptual diversification. Exploring the works of Guillermo Verdecchia, Joy Kogawa, Jeannette Armstrong, Maria Campbell, Cheryl Foggo, Fred Wah, Michael Ondaatje, and Dionne Brand, this text investigates how citizenship functions to denote emplaced practices of participation in multiple collectives that are not restricted to the framework of the nation-state.
List of contents
1. Recognition, Citizenship, and Canadian Literature.- 2. "This is my own!": Negotiating Canadian Citizenship in Joy Kogawa's Novels.- 3. "Dismissing Canada"? AlterNative Citizenship and Indigenous Literatures.- 4. Writing Lives: Cartographies of Citizenship and Belonging.- 5. Cityzenship? Writing Immigrant and Diasporic Toronto.- 6. Cultural Citizenship and Beyond.
About the author
Katja Sarkowsky is Professor of American Studies at the Westfaelische Wilhelms-University at Muenster, Germany, and author of the monograph AlterNative Spaces: Constructions of Space in Native American and First Nations Literatures (2007). Recent publications include the edited volume “Cranes on the Rise”: Metaphors in Life Writing (2018).
Summary
This book examines how concepts of citizenship have been negotiated in Anglophone Canadian literature since the 1970s. Katja Sarkowsky argues that literary texts conceptualize citizenship as political “co-actorship” and as cultural “co-authorship” (Boele van Hensbroek), using citizenship as a metaphor of ambivalent affiliations within and beyond Canada. In its exploration of urban, indigenous, environmental, and diasporic citizenship as well as of citizenship’s growing entanglement with questions of human rights, Canadian literature reflects and feeds into the term’s conceptual diversification. Exploring the works of Guillermo Verdecchia, Joy Kogawa, Jeannette Armstrong, Maria Campbell, Cheryl Foggo, Fred Wah, Michael Ondaatje, and Dionne Brand, this text investigates how citizenship functions to denote emplaced practices of participation in multiple collectives that are not restricted to the framework of the nation-state.
