Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism

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Cynthia Sugars
Broadview Press, Feb 11, 2004 - Literary Criticism - 408 pages

Unhomely States is the first collection of foundational essays of Canadian postcolonial theory. The essays span the period from 1965 to the present day and approach broad issues of Canadian culture and society. They represent the impassioned conflicts, dissonances, and intersections among postcolonial theorists in English Canada.

Theories of Canadian postcolonialism are various and often contending. The questions proliferate: Is Canada postcolonial? Who in Canada is postcolonial? Are some Canadians more postcolonial than others? Together, the essays in this collection demonstrate both the historical development of this vigorous debate and its most prominent current perspectives. The anthology comprises work originally written in English, selected and arranged in order to demonstrate the dynamic nature of these discussions.

Included here are essays by many well-known writers and theorists, such as George Grant, Northrop Frye, Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee, Robert Kroetsch, Linda Hutcheon, Diana Brydon, Thomas King, Terry Goldie, Arun Mukherjee, Smaro Kamboureli, Stephen Slemon, and Roy Miki. The collection covers such topics as anti-colonial nationalism, settler-invader theory, First Nations contexts, postcolonial pedagogy, and critiques of Canadian postcolonialism. A general introduction surveying the current field of postcolonial discourse in English Canada is also included.

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Contents

The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism 1965
3
Editorial to the Journal of Canadian Fiction 1975
37
Writing in Colonial Space 1973
43
A Canadian Strategy 1989
61
PostColonialism and Postmod
71
Contamination as Literary Strategy
94
English Canadas Postcolonial Complexities 199394
107
Resistance Theory for the Second World
139
The PostColonial Imagination 1992
204
Surviving the WhiteOuts 1987
221
Canadian Ethnic Minority Writing
235
How Shall We Read South Asian Canadian Texts? 1998
249
What Use is Ethnicity to Aboriginal Peoples in Canada? 1995
267
On Being an InsiderOutsider to the Canadian
289
Is This the Question?
323
Postcolonialism Pedagogy and Politics 1997
335

Postcolonial Theory and the Settler Subject 1995
151
Reading Postcoloniality Reading Canada 1995
165
Godzilla vs PostColonial 1990
183
The Diasporic Critics Self Location
349
The Radical Humanities in the Postcolonial
367
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About the author (2004)

Cynthia Sugars is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. She has published numerous articles on Canadian literature and has edited a collection of essays on postcolonialism and pedagogy entitled Home Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature (University of Ottawa Press).

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