New in WLUP’s Indigenous Studies series! Two works by Innu author An Antane Kapesh, translated into English for the very first time.
The English-language stories are presented with facing pages of the revised Innu text. Translation from French and Afterword by Sarah Henzi, Simon Fraser University.
https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/I/I-Am-a-Damn-Savage-What-Have-You-Done-to-My-Country-Eukuan-nin-matshi-manitu-innushkueu-Tanite-nene-etutamin-nitassi

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From Johanne to Janaki is the story of a woman’s journey, in 1895, from Denmark to India, where she immersed herself in the country’s rich heritage and its fight for Independence. Her writings, such as “The Hindu Woman’s Position” and “The Caste System” reveal her discerning views on cultural aspects of India, and her letters record her friendships with some key figures, including Annie Besant, in India’s political scene.

It is a work, in equal parts, of love and scholarship, as Nilambri moves from the personal to the historical aspects of her grandmother’s remarkable journey at a time when women had just started emerging from patriarchy to a measure of independence.”

Here is a link to the US site:

https://www.amazon.com/JOHANNE-JANAKI-BRINGING-VIKINGS-VARANASI/dp/177702921X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=from+johanne+to+janaki&qid=1601339617&sr=8-1

And the one below to the UK site:

FROM JOHANNE TO JANAKI: BRINGING VIKINGS TO VARANASI

Dear CACLALS Members,

Scholar Strike Canada begins today, September 9^th, and continues into tomorrow, September 10^th. This two-day event marks a collective labour action “to protest anti-Black, racist, and colonial police brutality in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere” (ScholarStrikeCanada). For those participating in the strike, we stand in solidarity with you, as well as with Black Lives Matter and other anti-racist organizations condemning the ongoing legacies of the colonial worlds in which we live. For those unable to participate in the strike, especially those in precarious positions, we invite you to contribute in whatever way you can. This might include using class time to address your students on the subject of anti-Blackness and police violence, communicating your solidarity with the strike to your institution, inviting your institution to take a more proactive stance against racist violence, or participating in the many teach-ins and talks unfolding across the country today. A full roster of events and talks can be found at https://scholarstrikecanada.ca/.

To keep our members informed of events that may be unfolding in their area, we invite you to advertise them with CACLALS. You can post information on Twitter, tagging the CACLALS page, so that more of our members can view the strike days’ offerings. You can also email our Secretary-Treasurer, Jesse Arseneault at jesse.arseneault@concordia.ca. We will promptly post any public events we receive notice of on our website and Twitter page.

Sincerely,

The CACLALS Executive

Dear CACLALS Members,

The Annual President’s and Treasurer’s reports have been posted, and we invite you to review them here. We wish our members the best as we enter a new academic year and look forward to sharing news of how our 2021 events will take shape.

Sincerely,

The CACLALS Executive

We are living through an exceptional time with the difficulties presented by the COVID-19 crisis. At the same time, we are witnessing a revitalized attention to incidents of racist policing that might appear exceptional to some, but that are extensions of the racism that has long been endemic to our social lives and institutions. In firm solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and global protests assembling against anti-Black racism worldwide, the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (CACLALS) remains committed to the difficult work of challenging institutional, relational, and systemic racism.

CACLALS’s mandate has long supported decolonial research and activism; our members continue not only to stand against racist incidents such as the murder of George Floyd, but to seek out ways to work through the systemic racism that marks the colonized worlds in which we live and that provides the conditions of possibility for the devaluation of Black lives. We also affirm that challenging racism goes beyond incidents of racist policing. It involves recognizing that violence against BIPOC lives is foundational to the police as an institution, as well as colonial states such as the United States and Canada whose very existences are predicated on the subjugation of Black and Indigenous peoples. With this in mind, we maintain in support of multiple activists and voices in Black studies scholarship that the violence through which we are living is endemic to the worlds we occupy. Challenging racism thus involves not only this statement of support, but continually working through systemic barriers presented to BIPOC lives, as well as the power dynamics embedded in the relationships that structure our everyday. This also involves, for us, rethinking the ways that the university has been and continues to be an agent of the colonial state. CACLALS itself must contend with our own organization’s implication in colonial institutions such as the university. As we go forward, the collective of BIPOC and settler scholars that regularly assembles at CACLALS looks forward to taking direction from activist voices and Black and Indigenous scholars within and beyond our organization as we navigate the necessary change that must take place if we are to ever inhabit a world in which racialized lives are not vulnerable to police violence.

We stand in solidarity against the violence of the American state, but we also call attention to the Canadian and Québécois states’ long histories of violence against BIPOC lives. Public consciousness in what many call Canada often refutes that such violence exists, and yet the evidence is glaring in ways that—as the recent change of heart of RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki suggests—do not allow leaders within the state to deny the existence of racism for long. Amidst the courageous work of activists who are the frontline workers against state racism, we join in public mourning for those murdered by police, including Rodney Levi, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Jason Collins, Eishia Husdon, D’Andre Campbell, and Randy Cochrane. This is but a
meagre mention of the devastation that has affected many families. The Canadian state thus must also recognize and dismantle its ongoing participation in the everyday policing of Black and Indigenous lives, its participation in slavery, its founding on the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the way that these ongoing histories continue to shape the relationship between the state and BIPOC lives. Indeed, while we at CACLALS speak from our specific location, this movement resonates with the policing of Black life globally.

Despite the cancellation of Congress 2020 and the loss of this opportunity to foreground the politics of Black life and anti-Black racism, we hope that conversations on this front will continue. For CACLALS, participating in this conversation goes beyond the act of putting out a public statement in response to the murder by police of George Floyd and the numerous Black and Indigenous lives that have been met with police violence; rather, it involves an ongoing process that precedes and extends beyond our current moment. Amidst this time of social distancing, we instead insist on social cohesion against racialized violence.

Moving forward, we invite our members to participate in this movement in whatever way is possible from their specific location. This might involve joining ongoing protests against police violence and publicly supporting calls to defund the police. It might also involve drawing our university institutions’ attention to their implication in systemic, racialized violence, and calling for further action on their part. For those of us involved in the university, we can pressure our institutions for funding for Black, Indigenous, and decolonial scholarship; demand that universities cut ties with police; lobby for the hire of BIPOC scholars against the Canadian university’s widespread racially exclusionary hiring practices and for financial support for students in Black and Indigenous communities who have long faced barriers in tertiary education; take seriously the call to “Indigenize the curriculum” by taking direction from Indigenous communities and elders and recognizing that the university in its current form is ill-equipped to realize this mandate; and encourage departments and university bodies to publicly participate in the work that is taking place against police violence. We encourage our members to contact our Secretary-Treasurer, Jesse Arseneault (jesse.arseneault@concordia.ca) with resources that merit sharing with the CACLALS community, whether in the form of policy recommendations for universities or activist bodies; reading lists helpful to working through interlocking issues of racism, imperialism, policing and its history as an agent of the colonial state, state terror, or being BIPOC in academia; and research on systemic forms of racism in academia, particularly in Canada. As we receive material, we will circulate it to our membership via our website, Twitter page, and email.

The task ahead is daunting but, whatever direction we choose to pursue, we cannot afford to be complacent.

In solidarity,
CACLALS

The Department of English at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton invites applications for a Tenure-Track position at the rank of Assistant Professor to commence July 1, 2021, subject to final budgetary approval.

Candidates should have a completed PhD, or be close to completion, with research and teaching interests in Indigenous literatures; candidates with a record of achievement in creative writing, drama production, and/or film will be given special consideration. Candidates should be grounded in Indigenous knowledge systems, committed to working with Indigenous students and communities, and able to contribute to UNB’s TRC Strategic Action Plan.

A small, research-intensive department with a reputation for high-quality teaching located on unceded Wolastoqey lands in New Brunswick’s capital city, UNB’s Department of English offers a wide range of undergraduate and graduate programs, including MA and PhD degrees in the academic and creative writing streams, an undergraduate drama program, and expertise in film studies and screenwriting.

Demonstrated excellence in scholarship and teaching is required. Interested individuals should ask three referees to send letters of reference and should themselves send a letter of application, a detailed curriculum vitae, and a sample of their scholarly work of no more than 30 pages (preferably in electronic format) to:

                                    Dr. John C. Ball, Chair
Department of English
Room #247, Carleton Hall
University of New Brunswick
P.O. Box 4400
Fredericton, NB     E3B 5A3
CANADA

                                    english@unb.ca

The deadline for applications is October 1, 2020.

Short-listed candidates will be required to provide satisfactory proof of credentials including appropriately certified translations of credentials into English, as applicable.

The University of New Brunswick is committed to employment equity, fostering diversity within our community and developing an inclusive workplace that reflects the richness of the broader community that we serve. The University welcomes and encourages applications from all qualified individuals who will help us achieve our goals, including women, visible minorities, Aboriginal persons, persons with disabilities, persons of any sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. Preference will be given to Canadian citizens and permanent residents of Canada.

Dear CACLALS members,

The Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences has announced that the in-person Congress at Western University has been canceled as a result of the currently unfolding COVID-19 crisis. After weighing the possibilities and limitations of putting on an e-conference, the CACLALS executive has decided to cancel the 2020 conference.

We plan to defer the current conference and CFP to Congress 2021 at the University of Alberta. This would mean that all currently accepted papers would automatically be added to the 2021 program (pending their authors’ attendance), and we would also extend our CFP to next year to allow for new submissions. In the coming months, we will contact those whose papers have already been accepted to confirm whether they plan to attend the 2021 conference.

Our decision was not made lightly. In our discussion we considered the time and training commitment of those administering the conference (including panel chairs); concerns about childcare for those presenting from home; the limited experience that a digital conference offers when many attend CACLALS for the experience of gathering face-to-face; that the theme of “Confronting Anti-Blackness” requires the ethos of an in-person gathering; cancellations among our partner organizations; limits to Indigenous participation and the potential cancellation of our central event, the Indigenous Roundtable; and issues of accessibility, particularly for our international members. In light of these concerns, and many more, we felt it was not appropriate to continue this year. Nonetheless, we appreciate the efforts of the FHSS team who are currently working tirelessly to offer an online platform for those associations who will continue their conference electronically.

Please note the following policies for those seeking refunds:

• Conference and Congress fees are administered by FHSS and not CACLALS. We therefore cannot offer refunds for these fees directly. Our understanding is that FHSS will refund the fees and send a confirmation email; we will be in touch when FHSS provides further guidelines about those seeking refunds on conference fees, which we will promptly communicate to our members upon receiving them.
• As many of you will have purchased membership fees specifically for the conference, we realize that you may want to request a refund for these as well, particularly for members with limited funding. We will grant these requests. However, we kindly ask that members with secure funding consider maintaining their membership. As many of you know from our previous AGMs, CACLALS is consistently in a tight financial position, and we depend on membership fees to keep our conferences going at their current quality, and secure membership allows for more robust programs. Please note that requests for refunds on membership fees for the year should reach CACLALS no later than April 30. Please email membership refund requests to the Secretary-Treasurer, Jesse Arseneault (treasurer@caclals.ca) with the subject heading “Membership Refund.” You should also include in the body of the message your mailing address so that a check can be sent to you.

For active members, we will also be posting Treasurer’s and President’s Reports on our website and are exploring the feasibility of an AGM via Zoom in the coming months.

In the meantime, we wish all our members safety and good health. We will be reaching out to you as we work through these unforeseen times.

Sincerely,

The CACLALS Executive

Dear CACLALS Members,

The Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences has announced that the in-person Congress at the University of Western Ontario has been cancelled as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. You can find their official statement at this link. CACLALS is currently exploring options with the Federation on the feasibility of an e-conference and we will announce our intentions for this year’s event in the coming days via the CACLALS website (http://caclals.ca/), our Twitter page (https://twitter.com/caclals_ca), and an email to our members and presenters.

Many of you will understandably have questions about refunds for conference and membership fees, and we are committed to responding to your queries. Since conference fees are processed through the Congress membership system, however, we ask that you wait until we receive information from the Federation on how refunds will be processed before seeking them from us. We aim to have more information for you within the next week, at which time we will promptly update our members through the above channels.

Sincerely,

The CACLALS Executive

Please find more information here: SMU Indigenous Literature and Culture Job Posting.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The 20^th International Baltic Conference on Canadian Studies,

9-10 October, 2020

Vilnius University

Canadian Ecologies: Thinking about Illness, Wellness, and Wellbeing

Since Michel Foucault’s delivery of his lectures on bio-politics, there has emerged in contemporary critical theory a whole spate of reflections on the perils of “neoliberal governing” (Wendy Brown), “virtuoso labour” (Isabel Laurey), “precarity” (Judith Butler), “slow violence” (Rob Nixon), and “cruel optimism” (Lauren Berlant), which call to reexamine the Western narratives of progress and modernity. At the heart of these intellectual accounts is the observation that the neoliberal condition, by substituting economic principles for political agency, exacerbates human vulnerability and social insecurity derived from government practices of precarization and bio-political segmentation. As a result, the social formation is depleted of its ethical ligaments that bind individuals to one another in a shared experience of precariousness and structural inequality. In such a magnified state of anxiety the old idea of “the good life” loses traction, bringing to surface the different ways in which ‘the ordinary becomes a landfill for overwhelming and impending crises of life-building and expectation whose sheer volume so threatens what it has meant to ‘have a life” that adjustment seems like an accomplishment.’ (Berlant, 2011: 3)

Concomitant with the cultural critique of neoliberal subjectivity is a new attentiveness to material contexts and counter-hegemonic knowledges, which call for a conceptual revision of the normative scenarios of life-building underlying the logic of the Anthropocene. The intellectual work of ecocriticism, the new materialism, and posthumanist thought has put us on notice to biospheric connectedness, ‘the ecological space of attunement’ (Morton, 2018: 139), and the solidarity with what is given, on the one hand, and technological penetration, violence of efficiency, and waste culture, on the other.

Given these conceptual premises, the conference invites Canada-related critical perspectives on both human and nonhuman historicities, theories and practices of wellbeing, subversive impulses, utopian dreams, minoritarian contexts, and artistic forms, which test the interpretive possibilities of sustainable existence. Conference participants are welcome to address wide-ranging topics that involve variously framed Canadian views on illness, wellness, and wellbeing. These topics include (but are not limited to):

• Corporate Canada and its “merry bonds”: narratives of wealth vs. a wealth of narratives
• Indigenous sovereignty and storytelling: place, body, voice, power
• Rethinking health: historical traumas and the body politic
• Ecocriticism and bioethics
• Ethics of vulnerability: narratives of anxiety, contingency, and precarity
• Theories of “the good life” and “sustainable life”
• “Going viral”: medicine, market, imagination
• Food as pharmakon: taste, nourishment, poison
• Modes and ethics of recycling and upcycling
• Composted emotions: biopolitics, affect, and the Anthropocene
• Waste as/and resources: desire, consumption, affect, effect
• The ethics and aesthetics of the ordinary: narrating domesticity
• Biodiversity and the arts: plants, animals, and humans in discourse
• Ecologies of remembering: orthodoxies and alternatives

LENGTH OF PRESENTATIONS: 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of discussion.

LANGUAGE OF PRESENTATIONS: the working language of the conference is English, but presentations in French are very welcome.

Please send the title of your paper, an abstract (about 100 words), and a brief bio to Rūta Šlapkauskaitė (ruta.slapkauskaite@flf.vu.lt) no later than 15 September, 2020.