http://hdl.handle.net/10366/154192 2026-04-21T19:08:49Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/167192 This article examines Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality (2022) as a formally innovative response to the representational challenges of the Anthropocene. Drawing on scale theory and assemblage thinking, it argues that the text’s fragmented, polyvocal narratives and temporal disjunctions illuminate three key Anthropocene features: latency, entanglement, and scalar complexity (Horn). Through nonlinear storytelling, Arboreality enmeshes divergent temporalities and perspectives, staging a critical dialogue between ecomodernist and ecological posthumanist imaginaries. It advances Indigenous epistemologies, multispecies kinship, and community-based ecological practices as vital alternatives to technocratic interventions, reconfiguring human-nature relations and offering a compelling aesthetic for imagining resilience amid planetary crisis. 2025-09-17T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/164872 This chapter suggests that Lawrence Hill’s writing develops forms of consciousness through the practice of a critical aesthetics of cultural resilience that foregrounds language from the perspective of mixed-race subjectivity. Placed at the crossroads of the fraught notions of resilience, Black exceptionalism, and language, this chapter reveals how Hill’s fiction veers away from traditional trauma narratives that view trauma as dissociative and unrepresentable and dwells instead on the potential of the trope of narrative to disclose the hegemonic distortions, omissions, and misrepresentations of chattel slavery and its aftermaths, while at the same time offering new ways to build cultural resilience as an effective form of resistance and self-re/creation. 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/157690 This article stems from the assumption that the stories emerging from distinct cultural traditions constitute discrete epistemologies that determine how human individuals and societies face ontological vulnerability and precariousness. Focusing on Thomas King’s novel The Back of the Turtle (2014), it examines the differential agency of two interlocking sets of stories and their respective epistemological systems. Consequently, the article is divided in two main parts. The first examines the novel’s rendering of the tensions between the Enlightenment’s investment in the search for empirical truth, and its current alignment with unfettered neoliberal capitalism and post-truth discourse. The second part reads the novel’s use of ancestral Indigenous stories as a counterpoint to the stories of modern progress underlying western epistemologies. The emerging question is whether Indigenous ways of knowing embedded in ancestral stories may potentially show the way toward an “ecology of knowledges” that lessens precarity and works toward ecological sustainability. 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/157687 This article heeds the recent shift in cultural criticism and creative writing toward imagining “a functional ecology of knowledges in Canada” (Coleman, “Toward” 8) that takes its conceptual lead from Indigenous epistemologies. Through close reading Thomas King’s novel The Back of the Turtle (2014), Wayde Compton’s short story collection The Outer Harbour (2014), and Daniel Coleman’s nonfiction book Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place (2017), the article connects Indigenous notions of kinship to the turn to trans-systemic epistemologies in contemporary Canadian literature and criticism. My analysis draws on Indigenous theories of kinship underlying Indigenous resurgence and decolonization and sets them in conversation with King’s reflections on storytelling and world-building, Compton’s theoretical charting of African Canadian space as Afroperipheral within diaspora criticism, and Coleman’s self-retraining to redefine settler belonging and knowledge. This analysis concludes that, by promoting an awareness of the interdependence between the natural environment, humans, and other-than-human beings that is central to Indigenous epistemologies, these works contribute to the shift toward the construction of an ecology of knowledges and hold the potential for renewed decolonizing efforts, social justice, and environmental sustainability. 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/154221 This article posits the centrality of stories as agents of potential harm and healing in the revalorization of Indigenous epistemologies and contemporary decolonizing efforts. Reading in tandem the stories woven within the novels Ravensong (1993) by Salish-Métis author Lee Maracle and its sequel Celia’s Song (2014), it brings to light a model of community-centred health policing in the earlier novel that turns into a powerful call for decolonization and Indigenous resurgence in Celia’s Song. The use of illness tropes in these novels goes beyond exposing the damaging by-products of colonialism, manifested as a transgenerational epidemic of violence amongst the Indigenous population, to create powerful images of Indigenous resurgence and Indigenous–settler engagement. These analyses are contextualized within the current COVID-19 pandemic and draw on, among other sources, Lee Maracle’s own critical reflections on the cultural and healing roles of stories, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s writing on Indigenous resistance and resurgence. 2021-01-01T00:00:00Z