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.