The Politics of Sleep and Dreams in The Marrow Thieves

Abstract

An emerging field sometimes known as critical sleep studies examines the contested roles sleep plays within cultural experiences, forms of representation, and social practices. These studies challenge us to re-examine assumptions about how we sleep, how we conceive of sleep, and how we might confront the cultural forces through which our inequitable encounters with sleep take shape. In this paper, I argue that Cherie Dimaline’s novel The Marrow Thieves represents colonization, in the context of ecological collapse, as a conflict between two different cultural models of sleep and dreams, such that the survival of Indigenous sleep signifies the survival of Indigenous worldviews. I also hope for this reading to serve as an example of what we might gain by developing critical sleep studies in relation to Indigenous and Canadian literature. Literary texts are in a unique position to engage with sleep as both aesthetics and politics, as both practice and representation.

Bio

Paul Huebener is an Associate Professor of English at Athabasca University. His new book, Nature’s Broken Clocks: Reimagining Time in the Face of the Environmental Crisis, has been reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada and on CBC Radio. His previous book, Timing Canada: The Shifting Politics of Time in Canadian Literary Culture, was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize.

"knee-deep in the black smoldering waters": Ecocritical Dystopianism and Bacigalupi's Extractive Futures

Abstract

In a time when a tension exists between capitalism’s hyper-extractive processes and the lifetime of resources, the demand for fossil fuels, minerals, and water also raises the question of what kind of environmental spaces will be left behind. What will a specific place look like postextraction; will affected landscapes ever be fully returned to what they were before? The outcome involves a fundamental change to a sense of place, and recent speculative narratives about the future imagine both the detriments from “business as usual” models and the potentialities of more environmentally-conscious societies emerging; these narratives present a spectrum from “nightmarish” (Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky 148) futures to ones informed by hopeful dreaming. Through a brief discussion of Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The People of Sand and Slag” (2004) and The Water Knife (2015), I will examine a recent development in dystopian fiction that I argue hinges on narrative employment of environmental changes to place. That is, a distinct subgenre has arisen within contemporary dystopian fiction since Tom Moylan, Ildney Cavalcanti, Raffaella Baccolini, and Lyman Tower Sargent categorized the now-common “critical dystopia” for narratives written in the 1980s and 1990s. My intervention with the term “ecocritical dystopia” demonstrates that, sometime after the first critical dystopias, sf writing has been engaging with realism in a manner that entangles concerns about social activities like resource extraction with not only environmental crises, but with how near-future societies—and therefore present ones—might engage with a sense of place.

Bio

CONRAD SCOTT holds a PhD from and is an Instructor in the University of Alberta’s Department of English and Film Studies, on Treaty 6 / Métis lands. He researches contemporary sf and environmental literature, and his current project examines the interconnection between place, culture, and literature in a study of environment and dystopia in contemporary North American fiction. His reviews and essays have appeared in Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, Paradoxa, The Goose, Environmental Philosophy, UnderCurrents, and Canadian Literature. He is also the author of Waterline Immersion (Frontenac House 2019).

Dreams as Radical Reparations: Exploitation and Extraction in The Marrow Thieves

Abstract

Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves reads as a powerful social critique on past and current colonial relations with the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, while also projecting these concerns into a future destroyed by capitalist consumerism, technological advancement, relentless industrialization, models of extraction, and exploitation of the land. I seek to explore how the dreams experienced by Frenchie and his chosen family, the threat and extraction of dreams, and the overarching dream narrative contribute to a communal and land-based hermeneutic, one which potentially provides healing and is healed, and how this furthers the novel’s narrative of resistance and hope. In this way, I hope to provide examples of the complexities and radical potentialities which dreaming offers in Indigenous narratives of resistance and resurgence.

Bio

Leah Van Dyk (she/her) is a SSHRC-funded doctoral student and Killam Laureate in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. She gratefully researches and studies as a settler on the traditional territory of Treaty 7, with her primary research interests located around the environmental humanities and radical revisionings of being in community—both pedagogically and practically—as a model of literary practice. She recently published an article in English Studies in Canada, is passionate about community projects, and is overly fond of coffee.