Canada

Introduction

In the ten years of bibliographies that my research assistants and I have produced for The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and its new iteration as Literature, Critique, and Empire Today, I am struck by the currency of Canadian publishing and its responsiveness to material and ethical challenges in society. In fact, Canadian publishing — presumably like any literary industry in a mostly free market — not only responds to but also calls out for social change. When we started this work in 2015, Canada had just received the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which emerged from the biggest class-action settlement in the country’s history and which documented the many cultural and personal costs of the residential school system “for” Indigenous children here — the “for” being ironic because the schools served an imperial and religious agenda of suppressing Indigenous languages and customs for the sake of assimilationist ideals. Soon thereafter, we acknowledged Canada’s 150th anniversary of Confederation in 2017 (referring to the British North America Act of 1867 that made it official) and the counter-imperial writing that has been at the centre of Canadian literature for many years. In 2018, Canada reportedly welcomed more refugees than any other country, but some writers were justifiably wary of trumpeting this “welcome”, given Canada’s inconsistent record of helping substantively, and the systemic racism that often mitigates against opportunities for new Canadians. (For a related contradiction of Canada’s supposed niceness, see Lisa Moore and Jack Whelan’s Invisible Prisons in Letters and Auto/biography.) Of course, we all then experienced the COVID-19 pandemic and its at least temporary realignment of our priorities. Last year, in 2024, I described a return to an almost normalized apocalyptic view of the world, a view from which we use literature and other writing to address huge problems — such as climate change and environmental racism — and, often, simply bear witness to them. (See, for only a couple of examples this year, Carly Butler’s Apocalypse Child: Surviving Doomsday and the Search for Identity at the End of the World, in Letters and Auto/biography, and Steven Earle’s Runaway Climate: What the Geological Past Can Tell Us about the Coming Climate Change Catastrophe, in Non-fiction.) For all its influence, the publishing industry and the many critical writers in Canada recognize that this country and the world have much to do still — much reimagining, much rewriting.

In 2024, Canadian trends in literary publishing seem to be following a model from politics. After the two elections of Donald Trump to the presidency in the United States, in 2016 and 2024, a Liberal government was elected in Canada, first with Justin Trudeau and most recently with Mark Carney. (For context, see Stephen Maher’s The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau in Letters and Auto/biography.) Trump’s heteronormative and white-supremacist proclivities (with some arguably tokenistic exceptions) have turned American institutions toward male dominance and against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) principles that, in many cases, American writers, scholars, and activists helped to define and promote. Canada has its own populist movements, especially in Quebec and Alberta, that sometimes seek opportunities from American influences, but they have not recently been a winning strategy at the federal level. So, perhaps it is no surprise that, in 2024, writers in Canada produced a lot of books on disability, one of the interests of DEI activists and allies; and on neoliberalism, which I would loosely define as a culture’s insertion of capitalism from the economic sphere into all other spheres, public and private. Notions of American greatness depend on sacred cows of ability and of capitalism and a related, oversimplified Social Darwinist ideology of fitness and competition, but Canada has resisted these trends — partly because it could never compete with the United States on those metrics anyway.

In questioning neoliberalism, fiction writers in Canada have not held back. A prime example of the energetic speculation on the insidious reach of capitalism is Pasha Malla’s All You Can Kill (Fiction, as with all books in this paragraph). All You Can Kill targets bougie tourism at an island wellness retreat through an absurdist satire — with the juxtaposition of self-help lectures and all-you-can-eat buffets — that is also a murder mystery complete with a guillotine in paradise. Something of this irony also appears in Sheung-King’s Batshit Seven, where the main character’s return to Hong Kong to teach English, which could have been a return to paradise, is disrupted by protests in the city and by his depressive, alcoholic response to the commodification of life under pressure from formerly British and now Chinese imperialism. With an interior decorated with QR codes marking the millennial generation’s experience of smartphone-centered branding and advertising, Batshit Seven describes a modern life of integration with the internet and disassociation from the rest of the world. Something similar happens with Ivana Sajko’s Love Novel, translated from Croatian by Mima Simić. The income inequality in Hong Kong is paralleled in the unnamed city of Love Novel as a couple struggles with their unplanned parenthood, unemployment in the academy and abuse of cheap wine. In these novels, neoliberalism appears as a force of excess, sometimes in stark contrast with the inertia of privation, that remakes identity as an agent of capitalism.

That reconstitution, in the context of the identity of teachers such as those in Batshit Seven and Love Novel, has been studied recently by Anne M. Phelan and Melanie D. Janzen in Feeling Obligated: Teaching in Neoliberal Times [Non-Fiction]. Phelan and Janzen reflect on the neoliberal reimagination of teachers as skill-transferers in transactional relationships with employment-focused students, instead of thinking of teaching as a vocation or a position from which to care for people and foster their civic duty in their formative years. (On Indigenous identity and similar themes, see Katherena Vermette’s real ones, in Fiction.) In the context of transactionalism and its emphasis on growth, sometimes narrowly understood as the product of supposedly efficient exchanges, Kate Neville advocates for slowing and pausing instead of uncritically accepting our ever-increasing professional activities and domestic labours in Going to Seed: Essays on Idleness, Nature, and Sustainable Work [Non-fiction]. Relatedly, in the collected essays in Queering Professionalism: Pitfalls and Possibilities, [Criticism: General Studies] Adam Davies and Cameron Greensmith question the benevolence of the helpful services offered by teachers, social workers, dieticians and others. (See also Marion McKinnon Crook’s Always on Call: Adventures in Nursing, Ranching, and Rural Living, in Letters and Auto/biography.) The premise is that these jobs are complicit with oppression, and the conclusion is that queer theory can subvert oppressive practices in the professions that are often thought to empower others. In Emily Austin’s Gay Girl Prayers [Poetry], the queering of Catholicism and the Bible is another example of theory’s potential to remake institutions, and the eye-lined nun on the cover of the book implies that vocations or professions within the Church are also make-overable.

If some of these professions were supposed to be separate from, and critical of, neoliberalism’s systemic oppressions, the mall — or the suburban retail centre — was never supposed to be a site of reflection and critique. Enter Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning [Non-fiction with elements of memoir] by Kate Black. Having grown up in the largest such site in North America, West Edmonton Mall (a tourist attraction for visitors from far and wide), Black points out that malls offer equality to everyone because everyone is equal as a consumer, but she recognizes, too, that malls also make us feel bad — for instance, as captive audiences of Mammon in claustrophobic mazes of choice paralysis and bad food. Deborah Kimmett’s Window Shopping for God: A Comedian’s Search for Meaning [Letters and Auto/biography] refigures the retail experience as a parallel of her experiments with various religions. For a related ironic point of view, see Guy Babineau’s short stories about queer lives in Channel Surfing in the Sea of Happiness [Fiction].

Neoliberal effects on spiritual and emotional well-being are often implicated in our experiences of natural environments, as suggested by Cynthia Woodman Kerkham’s Water Quality [Poetry]. Right or wrong, nature — the forest, the desert, the mountains, the sea — is often figured as the place we go for solace. In Water Quality, Kerkham’s speaker claims to “find my bearings by clouds of moon jellies / afloat beneath my anchored boat,” and the water, too, has its own “bearings,” in the sense of a path and a drive. It is also an essential element of our bodies and both a source of ingested toxins and a medium for flushing them out. We so often take it for granted, but in Canada we should not, as Susan Blacklin demonstrates in a book with a self-explanatory title, Water Confidential: Witnessing Justice Denied — The Fight for Safe Drinking Water in Indigenous and Rural Communities in Canada [Non-fiction]. And for Christine McNair in Toxemia [Poetry but also memoir], water manifests itself in our blood and the high blood pressure of pre-eclampsia, leading to reflections on a series of near-death experiences.

Quite to the contrary of its reputation as a country with a social safety net and a free health care system, Canada’s reality is less rosy, less hale. Getting care is often a major problem, with barriers related to sexism, racism and poverty. In this context, disability emerged in 2024 as a theme. In A Fate Worse than Death [Poetry], Nisha Patel criticizes the system for its tendency to seek simple answers to complexes of physical disability. In terms of mental illness as disability, Susan Grundy considers a sister’s schizophrenia in Mad Sisters [Letters and Auto/biography, as with the next two], and Miranda Newman’s Rough Magic describes the struggle with a daughter’s borderline personality disorder. K.J. Aiello is even more literal with magic, going so far as to refract mental illness through the lens of literary fantasy in The Monster and the Mirror. For a coincidence in title and topic, see Brad Necyk’s All Sky, Mirror Ocean, in the same category. Meanwhile, in the two novellas that comprise In Sickness and In Health / Yom Kippur in a Gym [Fiction], Nora Gold considers epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease and the difficulties of accepting the realities of disabilities in a society that shames them. As a final example of recent Canadian interest in disability, Kara Stanley, in The Pain Project [Letters and Auto/biography], describes a year-long experiment in alternative pain relief after her husband’s decade of prescribed opioids for a spinal-cord injury had done too much collateral damage to his sense of self.

I will indulge in only this one bad joke about the parallel between a decade of pain and a decade of bibliographical work. More seriously, I do wonder about the future of this work, as artificial intelligence (AI) becomes a powerful tool for completing data-centric projects with little human involvement. Wade Rowland’s The Storm of Progress [Non-fiction] offers a sobering critique of our ethical blindspots concerning artificial intelligence and its relationship to climate change. Not on AI but germane to it is The Story of Upfront Carbon [Non-fiction], in which Lloyd Alter argues for the pursuit of sufficiency, not the efficiency co-opted for capitalism, in mitigating the environmental crisis. (Also on sufficiency, see Robert McGill’s Simple Creatures, in Fiction.) There is a potential social crisis, too, with the further rise of automation. In Eris [Fiction], Larry Gaudet conjures the story of a virtual game designer who retreats to the metaverse for the sake of his son and learns that a former cryptocurrency trader is planning to deter the creation of digital words by assassinating their corporate makers, people just like him. For a more positive outlook, see Lorene Shyba and James R. Parker’s Ascenti: Humans Opening to AI [Anthologies] (and for digital humanities methods besides AI, Klara du Plessis’s Post-Mortem of the Event in Poetry). From my perspective, however, I worry about trusting an algorithm to do the right thing in processes of selection that involve ethical principles of diversity in representation, such as our decisions to foreground topics in Indigenous literature in several past years, or topics such as disability this year. Humans doing this work get the big picture of the industry, shaping our understanding of trends and shifting values, and it trains new scholars in where to find original sources of information and ideas. As I wrote about teaching, above, there is more to it than transactions. It is hard to imagine that these benefits would materialize if AI did our jobs, or, indeed, if publishers no longer thought that curated bibliography was a worthy form of information. Let us pray.