By Leisa Desmoulins
Amber Dean. Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance. University of Toronto Press, 2015. 188 pp.
What remembrances survive after death? For whom? In her 2015 book, Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler colonialism and the difficulty of inheritance Amber Dean asks what lives on after the violent deaths and disappearances of a group of women.
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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 Bob Johnson
Candis Callison. How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts. Duke University Press, 2014. 316 pp.
Bookshelves (well, at least virtual bookshelves) burst, like breached reservoirs, with new literature on climate change. Only a few years ago, our climate scholarship suffered from a long drought, fed only by a limited stream coming out of the natural sciences and political sciences.
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By Karl Jirgens
Thomas King. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 287 pp.
Thomas King’s book was released shortly before the final Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings held in Edmonton (March, 2014) and more recently, in Ottawa (June, 2015), at which survivors of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools recounted abuse, suffering and hardship (1).
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By Leslie Allin
Nadine Attewell. Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire. University of Toronto Press, 2013. 324 pp.
This work is a refreshing and timely intervention in the ongoing process that nation states formerly part of the British Empire use to determine who belongs within a political community. Nadine Attewell’s Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire investigates how ideas about British and settler citizenship in the 20th and 21st centuries are forged through the policing and politics of reproduction.
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By Aubrey Hanson
Chadwick Allen. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. xxxiv + 302 pp.
Chadwick Allen’s Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies is an exciting new book. Trans-Indigenous earns itself a noteworthy place within the growing body of work on Indigenous approaches to research and cultural studies.
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By Shaun Stevenson
Margot Francis. Creative Subversions: Whiteness, Indigeneity, and the National Imaginary. University of British Columbia Press, 2011. 252 pp.
Soon after relocating to Vancouver, British Columbia, I made an obligatory tourist excursion to Capilano Suspension Bridge Park on the North Shore. While struck by the beauty and lushness of a West coast rainforest, the enormity of the trees, and the vastness of the cliffs traversed via narrow, swinging bridges, I found my attention drawn to other things residing in the these dense, damp woods.
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By Erin Wunker
Barbara Godard. Canadian Literature at the Crossroads of Language and Culture. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli. NeWest Press, 2008.
I met Barbara Godard once. She was the plenary speaker at the McGill English Graduate Students’ Conference when I was in the first year of my Master’s. I remember being awed first by the vertigo-inducing complexity of her plenary paper, and then, later, when I was able to talk with her at the evening reception.
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