Hi, ENGL 470! Welcome to our Conference website, To Indigenous Literature and Beyond!
Image by Jocelyn Bussieres
The ENGL 470 online conference is a class-wide project that aims to create dialogue on how unique interventions can affect the future of Canadian literature. It is inspired by Canadian Literature’s 50th anniversary edition, which “suggests some strategies for changing the ways we read, write, publish and think about literature in Canada” (Erika Paterson). Each conference group will research either one of the interventions featured in Canadian Literature or a new intervention of their creation, will engage in dialogue with other groups and their research, and will synthesize their finished research and dialogue into a final summary, to be presented at the conference’s end.
Our group’s research is based on Daniel Coleman’s intervention, “Epistemic Justice, CanLit, and the Politics of Respect.” Coleman resurrects Charles Taylor’s “call for epistemic justice,” a call that seeks to make us “as students of the Canadian literatures” aware of the assumptions inherent in how we not only judge but analyze literature. Our “Continentally-derived theories” make us interpret works of non-Continental literature through the Continental lens, resulting in knowledge bases that facilitate incongruities such as classifying “the works of Thomas King or Eden Robinson as examples of postmodernism.” We are thus diverted from the native epistemologies of the non-Continental literature that we seek to understand by our own native, Continental epistemology–our theory of knowledge.
Following Coleman’s intervention, we intend to explore the following questions:
- How is Indigenous literature being read through the Continental epistemology?
- How is this epistemology being challenged?
- How can we separate from our epistemology and move into the epistemology surrounding Indigenous literature?
- What does the “politics of respect” entail? How have we/how can we engage with it?
Our ultimate goal is to achieve a new understanding of our engagement with literature, of how we can read not only the non-Continental storytellers, but the Continental storytellers—“the Moodies and Atwoods”—as well.
Works Cited
Coleman, Daniel. “Epistemic Justice, CanLit, and the Politics of Respect.” Canadian Literature 204 (2010): 124-126,163. ProQuest. Web. 24 July 2015.