

Canadian Literature Forum at the MLA
January 7, 2016 @ 2:15 pm - 3:30 pm MST
Session 632: Respect, Responsibility, Coalition, RelationSaturday, 7 January, 5:15-6:30pm, 110B Pennsylvania Convention Centre
Philadelphia, PA
In the wake of Idle No More and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists, writers and scholars are called to self-reflexively articulate and act upon a politics or poetics of relation. What forms might such a politics or poetics take? How are these reflected in literary or cultural production? Papers may address culturally specific ways of knowing, culturally specific ways of being, embodied experience, historically-sedimented experience, legal systems and their material fallout, ways of understanding rights and obligations, human/nonhuman relation, the elements (earth, water, fire air, metal), land, climate/weather, or activist culture.
Larissa Lai and Joshua Whitehead (co-presiders), University of Calgary
Joshua Whitehead, University of Calgary
“Native-to-Native Reconciliations: Queer, Two-Spirit, and Female Relations”
Lee Maracle, University of Toronto
To Whom Am I Responsible?: Salish Concepts of Responsibility
Dina Al-Kassim, University of British Columbia
“Denunciation and the P.A. System: Notes Against the New Civility”
Pushpa Acharya, University of Toronto
“Narrative Care: Relating and Responsibility in Canadian Fiction”