Land/Relations (Possibilities of Justice in Canadian Literatures)

Essential reading for those interested in questions of justice and cultural representation, Land/Relations speaks to and moves beyond the critical junctures in the study of Canadian literatures today.

In the aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and following Canada’s sesquicentennial, Land/Relations presents a collaborative effort at what Smaro Kamboureli and Larissa Lai call “counter-memory,” a collective effort to recognise “relationships that have always been”—between peoples, between humanity and other living forms, between us and the land—in an effort to avoid erasure, loss, and trauma. Twenty influential literary critics engage a variety of genres—essay, life writing, testament, polemic, poetry—to explore the ways Canadian cultural production has been shaped by social and historical relations and can be given new and various forms to decolonize the institutions associated with the creation of this country’s vision of Canadian literature.