Saturday, October 31th 2:45 – 4:15

Session Room: Studio Theatre

1) Philip Mosley, Pennsylvania State University
Decentered Identity: The City Essays of Guy Vaes

Guy Vaes (1927-2012) was a Belgian author, a francophone Fleming whose magic realist fiction also drew on modernist psychological investigation and on existentialist ideas of alienation.  Vaes, who made his name with Octobre long dimanche (1956; tr. Philip Mosley, October Long Sunday, 1997), returned to writing novels later in his career: L’Envers (1983), L’Usurpateur (1994), Les Apparences (2001), and Les Stratèges (2002).  These titles met with renewed critical acclaim.  An accomplished photographer, Vaes was also a film critic for the Brussels magazine Spécial, and his collected reviews were published in 2007.

A native of Antwerp, Vaes had an intimate knowledge of his city and wrote about it obliquely in his fiction and more directly in essay form, An Antwerp Palimpsest exploring his sense of presence in yet absence from his home city.

As a francophone Fleming, a minority writer in a Dutch-speaking region, he also found a way to decenter his own identity by writing poems and essays on various foreign cities that inspired him, cities that in his own phrase “measured his exile.”  Cities in the British Isles particularly drew him and gained his lasting affection:  Dublin, Edinburgh and, above all, London. A dedicated flâneur, he loved exploring such cities and had a boundless enthusiasm for their quirkier, less evident aspects and prospects.  His essays on London (London, or the Broken Labyrinth; The Cemeteries of London) and Edinburgh (The City of Interrupted Time) reveal the paradoxes of an intimate vastness and a strange familiarity.  His essays demonstrate the art of a subtle psychogeographer whose refined sensibility marries aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual insights into the meaning of places and of the author’s often complex relation to them in his search for an alternative identity.

2) Lana Wylie, McMaster University
Memories and National Identity in Canadian Foreign Policy

Since 2006 the Canadian government has made significant changes to Canada’s approach to international relations. These changes include reversing Canada’s position on climate change, adopting a pro-Israeli position in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and emphasizing military force over peacekeeping, frequently in opposition to international opinion. It is clear that the new direction in Canadian foreign policy diverges considerably from earlier policies that were tied to the image of Canada as a good international citizen. This paper will explore the relationship between Canadian identity, public diplomacy, and these new policies. In particular, this paper investigates how the government has attempted to change how Canadians understand their past in an effort to remake how Canadians think about their identity and international role. In particular, this paper will examine the current government‘s effort to modify cultural and historical sites and narratives to reflect the desired identity.

3) Natalee Caple, Brock University
The Recuperative Power of Art in the Indigenous Comic Book: An Examination of Images and their Arrangement in David Alexander Robertson’s 7 Generations

In contemporary Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Indigenous contemporary art works, academic and popular texts, and political movements (including Idle No More) are currently engaged in examining the cultural legacy of the residential school system from the point of view of Indigenous individuals, families, and communities. One example of such cultural object is David Alexander Robertson collection of graphic novels: 7 Generations. 7 Generations refutes the ownership/appropriation of academic and historiographical text-styles over Indigenous Canadian stories, embracing instead the popular culture approach of the comic book to re-tell North American history through the linked stories of one family across four books.

7 Generations acts on the history it narrates, demonstrating not only the need for truth and reconciliation but also the recuperative power of art. 7 Generations challenges missing history, emphasizes the real, and illustrates the quotidian balance that traumatized groups must strike between North American social myth (as found for example in the Western genre) and shattered Indigenous identities.

This paper performs an extended close reading of the images and their arrangement in the comics to show how 7 Generations works to break stereotypes and demonstrates the completeness of pre-settlement Indigenous life; as well, how 7 Generations models for young Indigenous readers new routes to maturity, access to spirituality, and links to history. The comic is increasingly becoming a form that deals with material that falls outside of the reach of formal styles of historical examination. Comics like those collected in 7 Generations contribute to the study of North American and Indigenous history by collapsing the distance between study and object, and illustrating new ways to link communities across generations, education levels, and economic spheres.