Contested spaces, counter-narratives, and culture from below in Canada and Quebec / edited and introduced by Roxanne Rimstead and Domenico A. Beneventi.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"This collection explores strategies of reading space and conflict in Canadian and Québécois literary and cultural performances. How do literary texts and popular cultural performances produce and contest spatial practices? What is the role of the nation, the city, the community, and the individual subject in reproducing space, even during times of global hegemony and neocolonialism? In what ways do marginalized individuals and communities represent, contest, or appropriate spaces through counter-narratives and expressions of culture from below? And how does space itself shape conflict, counter-memory, and culture from below?"-- Provided by publisher.

"Focusing on contestation instead of harmony and consensus, Contested Spaces disturbs the idealized space of Canadian multicultural pluralism to carry literary analysis and cultural studies into spaces often undetected and unforeseen; Contested Spaces exposes geographies of exclusion and difference such as flophouses and "slums," shantytowns and urban alleyways, underground spaces and peep shows, inner city urban parks as experienced by minority ethnics, the poor, women, social activists, Indigenous people, and Francophones in Canada. These essays are the product of sustained and high-level collaboration across French and English academic communities in Canada to facilitate theoretical exchange on the topic of space and contestation, to expose geographies of exclusion, and to generate new spaces of hope in the spirit of pioneering work by Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Doreen Massey, David Harvey, and other more recent theorists of space."-- Provided by publisher

Print version record.

Cover; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction: Reading Space through Conflict; PART I: Contested Urban Spaces; 1 Culture and Critique during Mega-Events: The 2010 Olympics and the Right to the City; 2 The Ambivalence of Enclosed Spaces in Immigrant Fiction: Between Refuge and Prison; 3 Montréal Marginalities: Revisiting Boulevard Saint-Laurent; 4 Heterotopia and Its Discontents: Exploring Spatial, Social, and Textual Liminality in Rawi Hage's Cockroach

5 "Laisser-aller": Homelessness and Contained Space in Kobo Abe's The Box Man and Robert Majzels's City of ForgettingPART II: Counter-narratives and Spaces of the Nation/State; 6 Unruly and Unremarked: Theatrical Spectatorship from Below in Nineteenth-century Canada; 7 Women's Space in Postcolonial Perspective: France Théoret's Une belle éducation and Assia Djebar's Nulle part dans la maison de mon père; 8 For King and Country? War and Indigenous Masculinity

9 Reclaiming Indigenous Space through Testimonial Life Writing: An Antane Kapesh's Je suis une maudite Sauvagesse as Territorial Imperative10 Norman Bethune and the Contested Spaces of Canadian Public Memory; PART III: Culture from Below; 11 Knowing the Urban Other: Notes on the Ethics and Epistemology of Slumming in Novels and Reportage; 12 "You Should Think about It, Think What It Means": Working Girls in Canadian Women's Writing; 13 Border-Crossings and Alternative Social Spaces in Gabrielle Roy's Bonheur d'occasion / The Tin Flute

14 Growing Up Poor and Female in Montréal, 1930-1960: Women's Autobiographies as Counter-narratives15 Tramping across the Nation: Homeless Embodiment in Canadian Literature; Afterword; Contributors; Index

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