interventions in political, environmental and economic issues to copyright (complex and problemat... more interventions in political, environmental and economic issues to copyright (complex and problematic) and artists’ income (chronically and shamefully low). First Nations and other Aboriginal people figure prominently in both books. Among the significant and sometimes surprising absences from Imagining Resistance are the exhibition and book, Indian Princesses and Cowgirls: Stereotypes from the Frontier, curated and written by Marilyn Burgess and Gail Guthrie Valaskakis; Toronto artist Maggie Dorning’s sculpture installations, exhibited and appreciated more in Europe than in Canada; the Mayworks celebrations across Canada; and the political and cultural impact of the programmes at Grindstone Island in Big Rideau Lake, Ontario. Shortcomings notwithstanding, the books comprise a valuable resource for teaching, research, and political and cultural work of many kinds. Valerie Alia, Independent Scholar
competing visions of the land being measured does not play a major role in Surveyors of Empire. G... more competing visions of the land being measured does not play a major role in Surveyors of Empire. Given the territorial strength of the Mi’kmaq and Wulstukwiuk (even after the Seven Years’ War), more could have been done to detail how the surveying process challenged (and was challenged by) Aboriginal concepts of space and geography. When Hornsby does examine surveying shortcomings, he offers nuanced and convincing arguments. For example, he challenges the traditional argument that renaming places was a form of possession, because maps of Cape Breton Island with imperial names circulated only among a small number of imperial officials. ‘‘As a result,’’ Hornsby notes, ‘‘maps and the toponyms they carried were never embedded in the customary, vernacular world of the region’s inhabitants’’ (141). Surveyors of Empire offers a richly detailed and beautifully illustrated account of a major moment in the history of the British Empire generally and British North America specifically. Tracing the men who made maps and the methods they used illuminates how imperial authorities attempted to exercise control over distant territory. By taking geographic knowledge seriously, Hornsby sheds new light on how empires were constructed and controlled in the eighteenth century. jeffers lennox Wesleyan University
In this dissertation, I examine how the themes of memory, storytelling, and the construction of n... more In this dissertation, I examine how the themes of memory, storytelling, and the construction of narrative identity develop in the works of Canadian authors Alistair MacLeod, Michael Ondaatje, and Jane Urquhart. As a means of delving more deeply into these themes, I focus on the specific narrative strategies that all three writers employ in the expression of the relationship between the individual and his/her community, as well as between physical and psychological realities. For the narrative voices in these authors’ works—given the different ways they envision and encode communal identity as constitutive of subjectivity—the past is inextricably embedded in the present. As they construct and record unfolding experience, a wider cultural history is written over with personal connections and significance. In the works of each of these authors, the act of telling stories (re)shapes people and events for the audience: speakers reform and reconstitute their experiences, allowing them bot...
This article develops ways of reading resonance and connection between Alistair MacLeod's sh... more This article develops ways of reading resonance and connection between Alistair MacLeod's short stories and his novel No Great Mischief (1999) by focusing not only on what is said but on what is not said. It does so by developing MacLeod's concern with the continuously ...
interventions in political, environmental and economic issues to copyright (complex and problemat... more interventions in political, environmental and economic issues to copyright (complex and problematic) and artists’ income (chronically and shamefully low). First Nations and other Aboriginal people figure prominently in both books. Among the significant and sometimes surprising absences from Imagining Resistance are the exhibition and book, Indian Princesses and Cowgirls: Stereotypes from the Frontier, curated and written by Marilyn Burgess and Gail Guthrie Valaskakis; Toronto artist Maggie Dorning’s sculpture installations, exhibited and appreciated more in Europe than in Canada; the Mayworks celebrations across Canada; and the political and cultural impact of the programmes at Grindstone Island in Big Rideau Lake, Ontario. Shortcomings notwithstanding, the books comprise a valuable resource for teaching, research, and political and cultural work of many kinds. Valerie Alia, Independent Scholar
competing visions of the land being measured does not play a major role in Surveyors of Empire. G... more competing visions of the land being measured does not play a major role in Surveyors of Empire. Given the territorial strength of the Mi’kmaq and Wulstukwiuk (even after the Seven Years’ War), more could have been done to detail how the surveying process challenged (and was challenged by) Aboriginal concepts of space and geography. When Hornsby does examine surveying shortcomings, he offers nuanced and convincing arguments. For example, he challenges the traditional argument that renaming places was a form of possession, because maps of Cape Breton Island with imperial names circulated only among a small number of imperial officials. ‘‘As a result,’’ Hornsby notes, ‘‘maps and the toponyms they carried were never embedded in the customary, vernacular world of the region’s inhabitants’’ (141). Surveyors of Empire offers a richly detailed and beautifully illustrated account of a major moment in the history of the British Empire generally and British North America specifically. Tracing the men who made maps and the methods they used illuminates how imperial authorities attempted to exercise control over distant territory. By taking geographic knowledge seriously, Hornsby sheds new light on how empires were constructed and controlled in the eighteenth century. jeffers lennox Wesleyan University
In this dissertation, I examine how the themes of memory, storytelling, and the construction of n... more In this dissertation, I examine how the themes of memory, storytelling, and the construction of narrative identity develop in the works of Canadian authors Alistair MacLeod, Michael Ondaatje, and Jane Urquhart. As a means of delving more deeply into these themes, I focus on the specific narrative strategies that all three writers employ in the expression of the relationship between the individual and his/her community, as well as between physical and psychological realities. For the narrative voices in these authors’ works—given the different ways they envision and encode communal identity as constitutive of subjectivity—the past is inextricably embedded in the present. As they construct and record unfolding experience, a wider cultural history is written over with personal connections and significance. In the works of each of these authors, the act of telling stories (re)shapes people and events for the audience: speakers reform and reconstitute their experiences, allowing them bot...
This article develops ways of reading resonance and connection between Alistair MacLeod's sh... more This article develops ways of reading resonance and connection between Alistair MacLeod's short stories and his novel No Great Mischief (1999) by focusing not only on what is said but on what is not said. It does so by developing MacLeod's concern with the continuously ...
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