http://hdl.handle.net/10366/160121 Fri, 01 May 2026 15:22:53 GMT 2026-05-01T15:22:53Z https://gredos.usal.es:443/bitstream/id/834126/ http://hdl.handle.net/10366/160121 http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166087 [EN] This paper is focused on interpreting the way in which twenty-first-century refugee writing in Canada is currently approached critically and theoretically. It proposes new reading strategies that contest the influence of nation-state powers over literary production deployed with an aesthetics of cosmopolitanism. In particular, this article takes up refugee writing by Kim Thúy and Sharon Bala, respectively, in order to show how its search for a "Good Life" leads to the transformation of the characters' subjectivity. This transformation responds to an epistemological shift which confronts issues of Western complicity in foreign human rights abuses and poses questions about alternative epistemologies to Eurocentric notions of healing and trauma recovery in the aftermath of mass violence. Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166087 2024-02-29T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166088 [EN] This article explores the representations of girlhood introduced in the recent additions to The Handmaid's Tale franchise: Bruce Miller's 2017 Hulu series and Margaret Atwood's 2019 novel The Testaments. Drawing on affect theory and girlhood studies, I analyze how the girls do not conform to the cultural expectations of ustopian Gilead but manage to challenge and contest them. Heterotopian spaces, where the girls are expected to undergo a process of self-transformation into stable identities, are employed by the nation to direct them towards their prescribed happiness markers. Sara Ahmed's notion of the feminist killjoy is used as key mode of dissent that arises when the girls encounter the dissonance produced between the objects that are collectively imagined to cause happiness and how they are affected by them. I argue that, through Kathleen Stewart's notion of ordinary affects and their liminal position as girls, they find radically joyful alternatives that clash with Gilead's fixed prescriptions. This article analyzes three depictions of girlhood across media in The Handmaid's Tale franchise, focusing on girlhood as a liminal category that empowers girls to become feminist killjoys to fulfill their own desires. Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166088 2024-02-29T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166089 [EN] Lauren Berlant's critical stance proves instrumental to carry out the analysis of Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God, a story dealing with personal insecurities and crises, related to feelings of loss, trauma, suffering or failure. There is no doubt that Rachel, the protagonist and first-person narrator, encompasses all the trappings around the notion of "cruel optimism," and the novel can be considered as a drama of adjustment, where the fantasies of the "good life" are interweaved with the suffocation of ordinary life. Rachel will have to dismantle the view that by being both a good citizen and a loving daughter she may achieve happiness or, at least, peace of mind. This story of personal struggle and emancipation can be eventually related to the political circumstances in Canada's long process towards autonomy and independence. Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166089 2024-02-29T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166084 [EN] In this paper I explore how girls living in a community economically reliant on the extraction of fossil fuels navigate gender expectations, loyalties, ideologies and moralities within their family structures, their places of employment and their affective communities. I describe how girlhood(s) within resource dependent communities are composed of and configured through the social, political, and economic conditions of extractivism, and the social relations that exist within these material conditions. The meeting of the material conditions of resource extraction and the social relations that exist within these environments, can be understood as "zones of entanglement." An exploration of girls' lives within these zones of entanglement, highlights how girls maneuver within the processes of social acceptance, belonging and notions of the "good life" by engaging in various strategies that work to create opportunities, while also reinforce foreclosures. These strategies include moving between speech and silence, learning to pick their battles, taking up space, and engaging in care-work. Through engagement in various strategies girls learn to protect themselves while maintaining opportunities for hope, connection, and transformation in their own lives, and in their interdependent relationships and attachments. Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166084 2024-02-29T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166085 [EN] In the novel, The Foghorn Echoes (2022) by Danny Ramadan, readers are introduced to two young men, Hussam and Wassim, who love each other but whose lives are forever changed by a terrible event. Though this event marks the beginning of their end, they are met with several encounters that continue to separate them, as they grapple with what it means to be queer in Syria and what it means to be refugees elsewhere. Both their stories, told back and forth between the two young men, reveal the cruel optimism that is situated in the relationship between the good life and the queer struggle of romantic life. In other words, their desire for a better life as queer refugees becomes cruel when it becomes an obstacle in and of itself. For Hussam, readers witness this devastating blow as he is haunted by the death of his father and then by his separation from Wassim, as he struggles to build a better life in the nation-state of Canada. Wassim, on the other hand, has become a refugee in his own homeland, in this case, Syria during the Civil War, and he comes to view himself as a problematic object. Through both of their lives, it is revealed that the reality of queer Syrian refugees is inseparable from the complicated and oppressive histories that mark them such as the war and their forbidden love, whether they remain in the homeland or seek to build a good life somewhere else. Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166085 2024-02-29T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166086 [EN] This article presents an intersectional reading of Hiromi Goto's The Kappa Child (2001) through the lens of Affect Theory. Particularly, I draw from Sara Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness and Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism to analyze the role these notions play in the novel. I focus on the economy of affects that circulates among the characters and the affective significance of their interactions as well as the novel's engagement with Ahmed's notion of the promise of happiness and Berlant's cruel optimism, specifically in relation to female, racialized, and migrant subjects both at a personal level and in the context of the settler colonial nation. My main argument is that the affects and expectations presented in the novel are monstrous. I defend that the protagonist's affective monstrosity is a direct consequence of her abusive childhood as a racialized migrant in the Canadian Prairies and that choosing to let go of her expectations leads to emotional healing and opens new possibilities towards happiness. Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166086 2024-02-29T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166082 This essay traces how community-based activist storytellers make room for emergent strategies in perilous times. It was sparked by the authors' experience of working between two distinct communities that are both deeply invested in understanding the function of story-and-art-making in troubled and troubling times. For brevity's sake, we will refer to the first community as the collective of "arts-based community-making" groups with whom we work under the auspices of the Centre for Community-Engaged Narrative Arts in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Our second community is the Spain-based RESHAP international group of literary and cultural studies scholars who are studying the theme of "Narrativas de la felicidad y la resiliencia / Narratives of Happiness and Resilience." In the context of "risk society"—the widespread perception of life on earth as dangerous, vulnerable, and fraught with complex hazards—popular media, governments, and corporations, in addition to school systems, public think tanks, and the self-help industry often urge people to generate what Sara Ahmed has called "happiness scripts," to keep positive and be resilient. These "scripts" become directive, insofar as stories of happiness, the good life, or resilience become mechanisms of discipline or coercive governance that can elicit what Lauren Berlant has called "cruel optimism." Our essay teases out the emergent possibilities, the creative potential, that we see arising from community-based story-makers' navigation of the tension between these (required) stories of the "good life" and the everyday, emergent strategies they invent in the midst of challenging times. Tue, 05 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166082 2024-03-05T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166083 [EN] Larissa Lai is a poet, fiction writer and academic who holds a Canada Research Chair at the University of Calgary, where she directs The Insurgent Architects' House for Creative Writing. She has authored nine books. Her most recent works are The Tiger Flu, Iron Goddess of Mercy and The Lost Century. She is a recipient of the Jim Duggins Novelist's Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Otherwise Honor Book. She was recently awarded a Maria Zambrano Fellowship at the University of Huelva in Spain and has been actively engaged in cultural organizing, experimental poetry and speculative fiction communities since the 1980s. Her work often explores themes of identity intertwined with elements of science fiction and the fantastical imagination. This interview took place in Parque García Sanabria on 24th March 2023 during a visit of Larissa Lai to the University of La Laguna. This interview focuses on the convergence of history, myth and affects, providing a reflection on the circularity of time and the promise of happiness. Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166083 2024-02-29T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166081 Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166081 2024-02-29T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166077 [EN] Ecocritical and ecofeminist studies have frequently borrowed from Indigenous epistemologies to conform new approaches to human-nature relations, particularly now that the pressing climate crisis is making western societies contemplate the need for radical solutions. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson remarks, "the western academy is now becoming interested in certain aspects of Indigenous Knowledge" such as "Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)" (373). However, the scope of this interest is reduced and disconnects ecological knowledge from decolonial practices, such as land claims or Indigenous feminisms. Maile Arvin et al. emphatically support that "settler colonialism has been and continues to be a gendered process" (8) and thus its ramifications and effects (upon nature or Indigenous communities) cannot be detangled without an Indigenous feminist perspective. In this article, I focus on an ecocritical analysis of several works by Lee Maracle, who dedicated her career to the regeneration and revalorization of Indigenous systems of knowledge, in order to pinpoint the intersections between feminism, decolonization, and nonhuman ecological thinking that might develop into a potential Indigenous ecofeminism that truly recognizes Indigenous epistemologies in their full context. Basing myself off Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's theories on Indigenous radical resurgence, which assert that a cultural resurgence (such as a revalorization of Indigenous ecological knowledge) cannot take place without a political resurgence (such as the acknowledgement of Indigenous sovereignty), I argue that Maracle's portrayal of natural elements and her imagining of human-nature relations is inextricably linked to a decolonizing perspective foregrounded on Indigenous feminism. Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166077 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166080 [EN] What does an understanding of the self as constantly rearticulated mean for ecopoetry and the lyric "I"? And how might an emphasis on a multiscalar semiotics, where different forms of writing are understood to carry the capacity to literally reorganize material life, reframe the possibilities for writing under the contested sign of the Anthropocene, in the midst of the Earth's sixth extinction event, the accelerating acidification of the planet's oceans, and the largescale climatic reorganizations wrought by climate change? This article reads the idiosyncratic mode of production and the poems of Adam Dickinson's Anatomic alongside recent scholarship in ecopoetics, environmental humanities, and science and technology studies to advance a particular and specific (that is, non-generic) understanding of Dickinson's experimental poetics. From its beginnings in the desire to catalogue and identify the presence of a dizzying array of bacteria, chemicals, metals, and other substances in the body, Anatomic narrates the movement from a misguided and despairing purity politics to a transformative conception of the individual body and consciousness as shot through with relations at multiple, unfathomable scales. Intervening in the discourses, techniques, and worldview of what Max Liboiron (Métis) has termed "dominant science" (20), Dickinson's text elaborates an experimental practice that invites us to rethink our modes and forms of relating to one another and the more-than-human entanglements that sustain, feed off, or simply co-exist with us. Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166080 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166079 [EN] We read differently outside. Discussing works by two experimental poets, a. rawlings and Christine Stewart, this essay draws on geocritical and ecocritical methodologies alongside Indigenous theories that link language, story, and land to consider how an outdoor pedagogical practice attunes readers not only to the spatial dynamics of language, but also to the linguistic dynamics of place. While the colonial, sedentary structures of traditional classrooms shut out the world, immersing us in literary realms as though they were separate from our physical realities, reading outside makes us viscerally aware of how land and language shape one another. Beyond the walls of our classrooms and homes, we can feel our entanglements with the land, its histories, and other species. In the colonial spaces of Canada, which continues to grapple with considerable ecological and social harms, cultivating such awareness matters: while reading outside is not enough to save us from the environmental crises we are facing or assuage colonial grief and guilt, doing so brings us closer to the living edges of language, which is where new forms of attention might nourish a more mutually sustaining relationship between land and words. Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166079 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166078 Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166078 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166075 [EN] Between February 2021 and March 2022, Ariel Gordon and Brenda Schmidt wrote a collaborative poetry manuscript, formatted like a call and response. Ariel intended to write about urban Manitoba, the city and its trees, and Brenda was to write about rural Saskatchewan and birds. Over the course of the year, the matter of place took over and the intentions branched and flew apart. They both wrote birds and trees but also moose and mushrooms, pronghorns and wild turkeys, and people making their way through it all. They wrote climate as it was manifested in drought-stressed trees and stunted crops covered in grasshoppers, in wildfires and wildfire smoke hanging over the prairies. They wrote home as they found it. Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166075 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166076 Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166076 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166073 Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/10366/166073 2023-10-20T00:00:00Z