The study of Canadian literature—CanLit—has undergone dramatic changes since it became an area of specialization in the 1960s and ’70s. As new global forces in the 1990s undermined its nation-based critical assumptions, its theoretical focus and research methods lost their immediacy. The contributors to Trans.Can.Lit address cultural policy, citizenship, white civility, and the celebrated status of diasporic writers, unabashedly recognizing the imperative to transfigure the disciplinary and institutional frameworks within which Canadian literature is produced, disseminated, studied, taught, and imagined.

Smaro Kamboureli is Canada Research Chair in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature at the University of Guelph. Her publications include Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada, which won the Gabrielle Roy Prize, and, with Roy Miki, Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (WLU Press, 2007). She is currently completing a new edition of her anthology Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature.

Robert Zacharias is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. His research interests include migration literature, Canadian literature (with a focus on Mennonite literature), 18th-century studies, and critical pedagogy. His work has been published in Mosaic and Studies in Canadian Literature, as well as in the edited collections Embracing Otherness and Narratives of Citizenship.

Smaro Kamboureli's profile page

Roy Miki
Roy Miki is a writer, poet, and critic who has taught and written about the work of bpNichol for many years. He was the editor of Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka which won the 1997 Poetry Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. His major bibliographic study, A Record of Writing: An Annotated and Illustrated Bibliography of George Bowering, won the Gabriel Roy award from the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures as the best book on Canadian Literature for 1991. Miki is also the editor of This Is My Own: Letters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese Canadians (1985); Tracing the Paths: Reading‚ Writing The Martyrology (1988); co-editor with Cassandra Kobayashi of Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement, and Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol.

Cassandra Kobayashi
Cassandra Kobayashi helped shape the grass-roots community movement in Vancouver to seek redress for the forced removal, internment, and abrogation of the rights of Canadians of Japanese ancestry. She served on the national Redress Committee that negotiated the historic 1988 settlement with the Government of Canada. The struggle for redress is documented in her book, Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement, co-authored with Roy Miki.

Roy Miki's profile page

The essays that make up this volume were initially presented at the inaugural Transcanada conference (2005), which asked participants to rethink 'the disciplinary and institutional framework within which Canadian literature is produced, disseminated, studied and taught.' In this, they have succeeded admirably.... The preface, written by editors Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki, does an excellent job of mapping the issues, ideas, and critical methodologies that are re-shaping the study of Canadian literature.... [T]his rigorous and far-reaching collection is necessary reading for those working within the discipline today.

Carrie Dawson, Dalhousie University, Dalhousie Review, Vol. 88, No. 1, Spring 2008, 2008 June

While Trans.Can.Lit does not engage overtly with how postcolonial studies and its dissenters and offshoots--including Indigenous, diasporic, and critical race studies--inform the study of CanLit, a quick look at the contents pages reveals an impressive list of some of the foremost Canadian critics working in these fields.... One of the strengths of organizing this collection around the intersecton of literature, institutions, and citizenship is that the essays become a multivoiced call for revolution to critics and teachers working in a field under attack... Trans.Can.Lit reminded me, as an academic who teaches and researches CanLit in Australia, not only of the specificities of debates occurring within Canada but also of how many of the concerns in Canada transfer with frightening ease to an Australian context. The 'trans' in CanLit moves beyond the porous borders of Canada, reminding academics working in literary studies about the power of what we do and of the responsibility attached to this power.

Debra Dudek, Canadian Literature, No. 199, Winter 2008, 2008 October