By Margaret Boyce
Emilie Cameron. Far Off Metal River: Inuit Lands, Settler Stories, and the Making of the Contemporary Arctic. UBC Press, 2015.
I was attending an undergraduate survey of Canadian History when I first encountered the 1771 story of Samuel Hearne watching in horror as his Dene companions slaughtered a group of Inuit in the Central Arctic.
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By Graeme Macdonald
“I should have thought of it before, it’s too late now.”
Italo Calvino, The Petrol Pump
The opening sentence of Italo Calvino’s 1974 story “The Petrol Pump” expresses a regret wearily familiar to 21st century energy-angst.
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By Tristan Sipley
Nicole Shukin. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
While it may seem redundant to assert the materiality of animal life, the emerging branch of cultural theory known as “animality studies” has in fact been riddled with philosophical idealism. On one hand, poststructuralist approaches have tended to reduce animals to linguistic and cultural signifiers, overlooking their historical role as actual bodies.
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