Our Conference Goals:
In Interventions, the 50th Anniversary issue of Canadian Literature (2010), twenty-two contributors from across Canada provided intervention strategies aimed at challenging and furthering the scope and reach of future scholarship of Canadian Literature. The purpose of these intervention strategies was put forth as the following by scholar Laura Moss:
“…to consider a diverse range of perspectives on where the field of Canadian literature should go in the future, [and] to consider what the next fifty years of Canadian literature might look like and to ponder the significant obstacles we might face in getting there…”
(Moss, 103)
We will be producing a research plan which evaluates and considers one of these intervention strategies – Susan Gingell’s Negotiating Sound Identities in Canadian Literature . During the course of our collaboration, we aim to ascertain the ‘sound identity’ within the Indigenous cultures of BC, both written and spoken or sung, and to gain a better understanding of the significance of aural and oral traditions. Ultimately, we hope to clarify the idea that identity is the reciprocal of cultural tradition, and that this identity is directly represented and expressed within the oral and aural traditions of each culture.
Introduction of Our Team’s Research:
Our research will mainly engage with issues of orality, and examine how oral traditions intersect with cultural, political, sociological and literary skeins. Susan Gingell’s article “Negotiating Sound Identities in Canadian Literature” will be the scholarly heart of our conference. Gingell invites us to consider the “sound identities” of Indigenous poetics, and the revealing nature of cadences in regards to one’s cultural community.
Although oral traditions may seem dated in a steadily globalizing and technological world, we hope to prove in our research that there is indeed, a relevant and immeasurable value that orality possesses.
“Toni Morrison Refuses To Privilege White People In Her Novels!”, TheAntiIntellect, Youtube Video (2014).
Toni Morrison speaks about the presence of the white gaze within American literature.
This video serves to highlight the issue of sound identity across the world, in both indigenous and colonized societies; by being expected, or forced to adopt the language, culture, and worldview of colonizers, communities and cultures across the world have faced a removal of identity, and a disenfranchisement of humanity as a result of colonization, imperialism, and worst of all racism. Toni Morrison speaks about the stance her white audience and critics take on her thematic decisions within her novels, in which they suggest a lack of validity to her chosen (and inherent) sound identity, as compared with the ‘status quo,’ or Western, white perspective. This video highlights the same issues we would like to focus on within our intervention, and provides another example of oral storytelling from an individual, societal, linguistic and artistic point of view; it is this tradition of storytelling that will reconstitute the significance of sound identity in individuals and communities, and will ultimately allow for the growth and regained strength of Indigenous and other marginalized communities across Canada and the United States.
Lena River Delta. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Flickr. 27 July 2000. Web. 08 Apr. 2016.
Susan Gingell. Credit: University of Saskatchewan. 2015. Web. 08 Apr. 2016.
TheAntiIntellect. “Toni Morrison Refuses To Privilege White People In Her Novels!” YouTube. YouTube, 19 Feb. 2014. Web. 08 Apr. 2016.