Apocalyptic Travel: When Humanity Controls Nature in Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes

Abstract

My paper will argue that the events leading up to Aminata Diallo's watershed moment, her time on board the slave ship, constitute a personal apocalypse that enacts the death of her childhood and demonstrates that the natural world, when controlled by humankind, is easily made to tear asunder. Figuratively, water enables the watershed moment that I will discuss. Literally, water enables the removal and isolation from all that is familiar.

Bio

Ian Moy is a settler-scholar from Ontario where he completed his B.A. at Trent and his B.Ed. and M.A. at Queen's. He is currently in his third year of the PhD program at the University of Saskatchewan where his research focusses on Canadian literature, specifically questions of culture and family.

Bad Canadian: Citizenship, Water, and National Ruin in Douglas Coupland's Souvenir of Canada Series

Abstract

This presentation examines Douglas Coupland’s three-part Souvenir of Canada series, which includes two photo-essay collections and one documentary film. In the presentation, I argue that by establishing the figure of the Bad Canadian, defined by their mistreatment of water, Coupland’s series ties fears of ecological and national apocalypse to improperly practiced Canadian citizenship. The presentation reveals how Coupland attempts to discipline readers into taking action toward environmental justice by figuring that action as morally respectable dedication to the health of the nation, rather than to the health of the land and water. Drawing on scholarship undertaken by Métis fish philosopher Zoe Todd, I analyze the significance of these attempts—in particular, how the series renders ecological transformation a seemingly simple matter of individual humans’ agency, and how it paradoxically suggests that devotion to the nation will solve the environmental and social harms done by the settler-colonial state of Canada.

Bio

Jessica McDonald currently lives and works on Treaty 6 territory and the homeland of the Métis. As a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University, she studies contemporary writing in Canada, with a focus on how the politics of place shape and are shaped by literature.

Deep Dreaming: Water, Dreams, and the Apocalypse in Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves

Abstract

Keywords: survival, environmental apocalypse, social apocalypse, dreams, water, ecological crisis

Cherie Dimaline's young adult novel The Marrow Thieves depicts a world in crisis: in the wake of and as a response to an environmental apocalypse, non-Indigenous people have lost the ability to dream and now hunt Indigenous people, whose dreams still live inside them.  The commoditization of water, land, and human beings is ruinous to all.  However, by maintaining their relationship with the natural world, Indigenous people in The Marrow Thieves retain an essential component of their selves, which manifests in their capacity to dream when the rest of humanity has broken from the very concept of relationship – with Indigenous peoples and with the natural world.

Bio

Dr. Shakti Brazier-Tompkins is a sessional lecturer at St. Thomas More College and the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, on Treaty 6 territory.  Her research focus is on representations of animals in Canadian literature, which often interacts with narratives regarding eco-justice, anthropocentrism, and anthropomorphism.

The Gardeners' Waterless Flood: Survival and Resistance in Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood (2009)

Abstract

In The Year of the Flood, second book in her trilogy MaddAddam, Atwood focuses on The God’s Gardeners who live outside the Corporations’ compounds in the pre-apocalyptic world of the story. The Gardeners’ society is filled with social inequality, environmental crises and corporate domination. The Gardeners resist their social marginalization through the creation of a radical eco religion: they condemn consumerism and technology, and try to diminish their ecological footprint on the planet by developing more eco sustainable actions. The God’s Gardeners decide to behave differently as the environment is responding to human actions bringing to the surface of the Earth significant new changes: ice melting, droughts, and polluted waters. 

In The Year of the Flood, the eco-anarchical cult of The God’s Gardeners produces an array of Water images through the idea of the apocalypse, an event they predict and call “The Waterless Flood.” From the Gardeners’ eco-religious perspective, the apocalypse as an event itself is resignified, as well as the notion of nature. Everything The Gardeners do centres the “The Waterless Flood;” as visionaries, these people take the Waterless Flood as a watershed moment for human civilization to approach life in a different way.

Finally, in Atwood’s novel, not only The Gardeners are used to call attention to a depredating relationship between humans and the natural world, but also to instigate change in human behaviour in the face of degeneration of life, a concern in our reality.

Bio

Mabiana Camargo is an English Ph.D. student at the University of Saskatchewan. She is interested in Canadian Speculative Fiction, Women’s literature and Feminisms. She works as a Research Assistant for Professor Dr. Wendy Roy, who is also her supervisor. Mabiana comes from Brazil.