Identity, Community, Nation
Essays on Canadian Writing
This collection of essays by scholars from Canada, England, France, India and Israel explores the intersections of identity, community and nation within Canadian culture. Multiple waves of immigration and the intermingling of histories, memories and cultures have engaged Canadians in cross-cultural exchanges that have rendered definitions of identity increasingly complex. Modern-day mobility fosters cultural diversity and transnational identities, calling for a redefinition of subjectivity and belonging as well as challenging nationalist discourses. The essays in Identity, Community, Nation discuss a variety of literary texts by writers from a wide variety of origins — Canadian born and not. These texts grapple with the problematics of identity, investigate community attachments and articulate desires of belonging. By examining the diversified axes at which these notions intersect, the essays foreground hybridity and diversity while suggesting new negotiations of community and nationhood. The critics draw on feminist, philosophical, postmodernist or postcolonial approaches to study the subject. A photographic essay at the end of the collection offers a visual counterpart to the textual analyses. With its emphasis on the possibilities for identity formation, belonging and nationhood, this volume will encourage further enquiries into these contemporary concerns and will thereby prove useful to students and researchers alike in the fields of Canadian Literature, Comparative Literature, Human Geography, the Social Sciences and Women Studies.
