Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Study of selected works of Canadian literature, including Indigenous, diasporic, and settler texts. May draw from a variety of methods, critical debates, regions, and historical periods. This course may be repeated for credit if a different topic is taught.

COURSE DETAILS:

Creative Collaborations: Boundary Crossers in Canadian Literatures

This course will examine the work of Indigenous writers in Canada who work across genres and disciplines, who collaborate with diasporic and settler artists and writers, and whose complex cultural productions work intertextually and intermedially at the seams between text, film, and visual art. These writers and artists are boundary-crossers, drawing on traditions of storytelling, witnessing, and history-telling, and underlining fluid connections across text, image, and sound. Not only do they work across genres, but they also work in other artistic disciplines and engage collaboratively with artists in other fields.

For example, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, scholar, musician, and oral historian. Some of her short stories, poems, and retellings of oral stories are arranged as musical lyrics, and they are also the inspirations for films, including Amanda Strong’s Bidaaban and Cara Mumford’s Leaks. katherena vermette is a fiction writer, poet, graphic novelist, and documentary filmmaker. We will read her book of poetry, river woman, her graphic novel, A Girl Called Echo, and we will watch her co-directed film, This River. Nisga’a poet, photographer, scholar, and visual artist Jordan Abel not only creates visually striking poems using techniques of erasure which have been described as “word carvings,” but he has also created works at the intersections of photography, poetry, autobiography, and carving. While Secwepemc artist Julian Brave NoiseCat has made a documentary film (Sugar Cane) and written a novel (We Survived the Night), Cree author Tracey Lindberg has a published a collaborative book of poetry and short stories, The Cree Word for Love: Sâkihitowin, with visual artist George Littlechild.

In working across genres, disciplines, and languages, and in working collaboratively with other artists in other fields, these writers address the ethics of speaking for others in representing the ongoing impacts of settler colonial violence, appropriation, and extraction, and they build relationships across differences in language, cultures, races, and genders. Not only will we “study” boundary-crossing works at the intersections of writing, film, visual art, and music. In addition, we will challenge ourselves to produce creative-critical projects that work at the intersections of scholarship and artistic practice, that explore different genres and ways of speaking, and/or that incorporate other media.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

·       to read, interpret, and creatively engage with texts by BIPOC and Euro-Canadian settler authors based in Canada
·       to acknowledge the diversity and complexity of Canadian literary and cultural production in a variety of forms and formats.
·       to analyze texts, films, and visual arts across a range of genres and media
·       to synthesize and evaluate a range of critical approaches to literature, in particular relating to decolonization, self-positioning, writing diasporas, and Indigenous resurgence.
·       to recognize complex relationships between texts and contexts (historical, social, cultural, literary)
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Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Important Note: I have ordered the books from the SFU Bookstore. You may also consider ordering the books from your local bookstore. Please check out the Indigenous-owned bookstores Iron Dog Books (https://irondogbooks.com/) and Massy Books (massybooks.com). 

Shorter readings and links to films/videos will be available on Canvas.

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: