Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (TransCanada)

The study of Canadian literature—CanLit—has undergone dramatic changes since it became an area of specialization in the 1960s and ’70s. As new global forces in the 1990s undermined its nation-based critical assumptions, its theoretical focus and research methods lost their immediacy. The contributors to Trans.Can.Lit address cultural policy, citizenship, white civility, and the celebrated status of diasporic writers, unabashedly recognizing the imperative to transfigure the disciplinary and institutional frameworks within which Canadian literature is produced, disseminated, studied, taught, and imagined.

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.

Roy Miki teaches contemporary literature at Simon Fraser University. He has published widely on Asian- Canadian literature as well as writers such as bpNichol, George Bowering, and Roy Kiyooka. He is the author of Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing and received the Governor General’s Award for his poetry book Surrender.