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Literary Criticism Canadian

The Homing Place

Indigenous and Settler Literary Legacies of the Atlantic

by (author) Rachel Bryant

Publisher
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Initial publish date
Oct 2017
Category
Canadian, Regional, Indigenous Studies
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781771122894
    Publish Date
    Oct 2017
    List Price
    $29.99
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781771122863
    Publish Date
    Oct 2017
    List Price
    $49.99
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781771122870
    Publish Date
    Sep 2018
    List Price
    $31.99

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Description

Can literary criticism help transform entrenched Settler Canadian understandings of history and place? How are nationalist historiographies, insular regionalisms, established knowledge systems, state borders, and narrow definitions continuing to hinder the transfer of information across epistemological divides in the twenty-first century? What might nation-to-nation literary relations look like?
Through readings of a wide range of northeastern texts – including Puritan captivity narratives, Wabanaki wampum belts, and contemporary Innu poetry – Rachel Bryant explores how colonized and Indigenous environments occupy the same given geographical coordinates even while existing in distinct epistemological worlds. Her analyses call for a vital and unprecedented process of listening to the stories that Indigenous peoples have been telling about this continent for centuries. At the same time, she performs this process herself, creating a model for listening and for incorporating those stories throughout.
This commitment to listening is analogous to homing – the sophisticated skill that turtles, insects, lobsters, birds, and countless other beings use to return to sites of familiarity. Bryant adopts the homing process as a reading strategy that continuously seeks to transcend the distortions and distractions that were intentionally built into Settler Canadian culture across centuries.

About the author

Rachel Bryant is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at Dalhousie University in K’jipuktuk.

Rachel Bryant's profile page

Awards

  • Joint winner, AUP Book Jacket and Journal Show Selected Entry
  • Short-listed, Atlantic Book Awards for Scholarly Writing
  • Winner, Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick Book Award for Non-Fiction

Editorial Reviews

The Homing Place enacts and advocates for a paradigm shift in ‘literary relations’ in North America, revealing the ’invisible wall ’ in colonial perceptions that may at first seem as impermeable as the nation-state borders that divide the continent. Yet just as Indigenous people and homelands have always traversed those borders, so may our readings transcend that wall. Rachel Bryant foregrounds and leads us to acknowledge the active ways our embodied minds evade or engage Indigenous contexts and communities, producing greater awareness of the impacts of our activities as readers and writers, Native people and settlers, those who make policy, and those who are most impacted by it.

Lisa Brooks, Amherst College