Corporeal Itineraries: Body, Nation, Diaspora in Selected Canadian Fiction

Corporeal Itineraries: Body, Nation, Diaspora in Selected Canadian
Fiction is an attempt to situate the body as central to the reading of
literature and to approach national(ist) and diasporic issues from a
corporeal perspective influenced by phenomenological, postcolonial, and
feminist discourses. Although the book interrogates the mechanisms of
the exclusion of bodies perceived asabject from the Canadian family of
the nation, in her analyses of Chorus of Mushrooms by Hiromi Goto, Fall
On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald, At the Full and Change of the Moon
by Dionne Brand, Le livre d?Emma by Marie-Célie Agnant, and News from a
Foreign Country Came by Alberto Manguel, Anna Branach-Kallas moves
beyond the Canadian context. The transnational and comparative
frameworks she employs in her interpretation situate Canada as part of
the Americas, a geo-cultural perspective that foregrounds multiple
migrations and complex (de)colonization processes. As a result, her
study provokes disturbing questions about the relation between bodies,
nations, and diasporas in a globalized world. Branach-Kallas shows how
material bodies both incorporate and resist gendered and racist
stereotypes and proposes to see the (female) body as a locus of
resistance to the manipulations of patriarchal, racist, nationalist, and
homophobic ideologies. Through its engagement with corporeality, her
study suggests that the body plays a crucial role not only in the realms
of ontology and cognition, but also aesthetics, sociology, politics, and
ethics.

• author: Anna Branach-Kallas