Contested Spaces, Counter-narratives, and Culture from Below in Canada and Québec Browse Inside

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Contested Spaces, Counter-narratives, and Culture from Below in Canada and Québec

Edited and Introduced by Roxanne Rimstead and Domenico A. Beneventi

© 2019

Contested Spaces, Counter-narratives, and Culture from Below in Canada and Québec explores strategies for reading space and conflict in Canadian and Québécois literature and cultural performances, positing questions such as: how do these texts and performances produce and contest spatial practices? What are the roles of the nation, city, community, and individual subject in reproducing space, particularly in times of global hegemony and neocolonialism? And in what ways do marginalized individuals and communities represent, contest, or appropriate spaces through counter-narratives and expressions of culture from below?

Focusing on discord rather than harmony and consensus, this collection disturbs the idealized space of Canadian multicultural pluralism to carry literary analysis and cultural studies into spaces often undetected and unforeseen – including flophouses and "slums," shantytowns and urban alleyways, underground spaces and peep shows, and inner-city urban parks as they are experienced by minorities and other marginalized groups. These essays are the products of sustained, high-level collaboration across French and English academic communities in Canada to facilitate theoretical exchange on the topic of space and contestation, uncover geographies of exclusion, and generate new spaces of hope in the spirit of pioneering works by Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Doreen Massey, David Harvey, and other prominent theorists of space.

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Product Details

  • World Rights
  • Page Count: 360 pages
  • Dimensions: 6.1in x 1.3in x 9.1in
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SKU# SP004346

  • PUBLISHED FEB 2019

    From: $71.25

    Regular Price: $95.00

    ISBN 9781442629905
  • PUBLISHED MAR 2019

    From: $71.25

    Regular Price: $95.00

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Quick Overview

Contested Spaces investigates space and conflict in novels, short stories, life writing, and journalism from Canada and Québec by asking how counter-narratives challenge geographies of exclusion from below.

Contested Spaces, Counter-narratives, and Culture from Below in Canada and Québec

Edited and Introduced by Roxanne Rimstead and Domenico A. Beneventi

© 2019

Contested Spaces, Counter-narratives, and Culture from Below in Canada and Québec explores strategies for reading space and conflict in Canadian and Québécois literature and cultural performances, positing questions such as: how do these texts and performances produce and contest spatial practices? What are the roles of the nation, city, community, and individual subject in reproducing space, particularly in times of global hegemony and neocolonialism? And in what ways do marginalized individuals and communities represent, contest, or appropriate spaces through counter-narratives and expressions of culture from below?

Focusing on discord rather than harmony and consensus, this collection disturbs the idealized space of Canadian multicultural pluralism to carry literary analysis and cultural studies into spaces often undetected and unforeseen – including flophouses and "slums," shantytowns and urban alleyways, underground spaces and peep shows, and inner-city urban parks as they are experienced by minorities and other marginalized groups. These essays are the products of sustained, high-level collaboration across French and English academic communities in Canada to facilitate theoretical exchange on the topic of space and contestation, uncover geographies of exclusion, and generate new spaces of hope in the spirit of pioneering works by Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Doreen Massey, David Harvey, and other prominent theorists of space.

Continue Reading Read Less

Product Details

  • World Rights
  • Page Count: 360 pages
  • Dimensions: 6.1in x 1.3in x 9.1in

  • Reviews

    "Contested Spaces showcases editors and authors at the top of their game, with a clear sense of the field of Canadian literary studies and the capacity to interest some of its most interesting practitioners."


    Will Straw, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University

    "Contested Spaces, Counter-narratives, and Culture from Below in Canada and Québec is an important and compelling edited collection that will add complexity and nuance to Canadian and Québécois literary and cultural studies. Deploying new materialist approaches to analyse present and historical contested spaces/spaces of contestation, including those that are embodied, the essays attend to processes of spatialization that are rarely noticed."


    Jody Mason, Department of English Language and Literature, Carleton University

  • Author Information

    Roxanne Rimstead is a professor in the Département Lettres et communications, Université de Sherbrooke.


    Domenico A. Beneventi is an associate professor in the Département Lettres et communications, Université de Sherbrooke.

  • Table of contents

    Acknowledgements

    Introduction: Reading Space Through Conflict
    ROXANNE RIMSTEAD and DOMENICO A. BENEVENTI (Université de Sherbrooke)

    Part I: Contested Urban Spaces
    Chapter 1 : Culture and Critique During Mega-Events: The 2010 Olympics and the Right to the City
    JEFF DERKSEN (Simon Fraser University)

    Chapter 2: The Ambivalence of Enclosed Spaces in Immigrant Fiction: Between Refuge and Prison
    AMARYLL CHANADY (Université de Montréal)

    Chapter 3: Montreal Marginalities: Revisiting Boulevard Saint-Laurent
    SHERRY SIMON (Concordia University)

    Chapter 4: Heterotopia and Its Discontents: Exploring Spatial, Social, and Textual Liminality in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach
    RITA SAKR (University of London)

    Chapter 5: "Laisser-aller": Homelessness and Contained Space in Kobo Abe’s The Box Man and Robert Majzels’s City of Forgetting
    SIMON HAREL (Université de Montréal)

    Part II : Counter-Narratives and Spaces of the Nation/State
    Chapter 6: Unruly and Unremarked: Theatrical Spectatorship from Below in Nineteenth-Century Canada
    ALAN FILEWOD (University of Guelph)

    Chapter 7: Women’s Space in Postcolonial Perspective: France Théoret’s Une belle éducation and Assia Djebar’s Nulle part dans la maison de mon père
    MARY JEAN GREEN (Dartmouth College)

    Chapter 8: For King and Country? : War and Indigenous Masculinity
    DEENA RYMHS (University of British Columbia)

    Chapter 9: Reclaiming Indigenous Space through Testimonial Life Writing: An Antane Kapesh’s Je suis une maudite Sauvagesse as Territorial Imperative
    NATASHA DAGENAIS (Université de Sherbrooke)

    Chapter 10: Norman Bethune and the Contested Spaces of Canadian Public Memory
    CANDIDA RIFKIND (University of Winnipeg)

    Part III: Culture from Below
    Chapter 11 : Knowing the Urban Other: Notes on the Ethics and Epistemology of Slumming in Novels and Reportage
    ROXANNE RIMSTEAD (Université de Sherbrooke)

    Chapter 12: "You Should Think about It, Think What It Means": Working Girls in Canadian Women’s Writing
    PATRICIA DEMERS (University of Alberta)

    Chapter 13: Border-Crossings and Alternative Social Spaces in Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion / The Tin Flute
    D. M. R. BENTLEY (Western University)

    Chapter 14: Growing Up Poor and Female in Montreal, 1930-1960: Women’s Autobiographies as Counter-Narratives
    PATRICIA SMART (Carleton University)

    Chapter 15: Tramping Across the Nation: Homeless Embodiment in Canadian Literature
    DOMENICO A. BENEVENTI (Université de Sherbrooke)

    Afterword

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