Abstract
Historically speaking, the city has played a crucial role in the conceptualization of citizenship as status and as practice. In Canadian literature, the city—the multicultural city in particular—is a central location where citizenship as both co-actorship and co-authorship is negotiated. This chapter focuses on the city of Toronto as a location where the possibilities of urban citizenship are examined. The readings of Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987) and Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For (2005) and Love Enough (2014) explore strategies of cultural citizenship in the novels. Furthermore, the chapter carves out a shift in literary negotiations of urban citizenship from a framework of multicultural recognition, with the city as a metonymization of the nation (Ondaatje), to the city as a transnational and diasporic space that is not easily mapped onto the nation-state (Brand).
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- 1.
The terms are related but by no means identical. For the purpose of this study, I define ‘stranger’ as the broad category for those who are identified partly or wholly as being outside a specific social order; in this context then, the ‘foreigner’ and the ‘immigrant’ are subcategories, that is, specific forms of the ‘stranger.’ All of these categories, however, are relationally defined and have to be contextualized in constellations marked by power asymmetries.
- 2.
It needs to be noted that the characters’ backgrounds reflect upon the colonialisms of the two European charter groups, the English (Jamaica) and the French (Indochina).
- 3.
This remains more elusive with regard to Carla’s parents, as her mother’s dislocation is told in terms of community rather than space, namely her being ostracized by her Italian Canadian family because of her relationship with a (married) black man. Her father, beyond the circumstances of the family tragedy, is not fleshed out as a character, even though he is briefly used as a focalizer.
- 4.
I taught What We All Long For in the summer term of 2016 in a class on literary citizenship, and Love Enough in the winter term 2016/2017 in a class on Canadian Literature at the University of Muenster; a number of students attended both seminars and remarked on the close overlaps between the texts. One student even suspected that the later novel might have picked up narrative strands that Brand had decided not to pursue in her earlier novel. I relate this experience for I remain puzzled by the relation between the texts. I would like to thank the students of both seminars for their engaging discussions and astute observations.
- 5.
The car’s brand is spelled differently in the two novels, ‘Beamer X5’ in What We All Long For and ‘Beemer’ in Love Enough.
- 6.
I am deeply grateful to Taija McDougall for alerting me to this aspect and for her insightful feedback on this subchapter.
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Sarkowsky, K. (2018). ‘Cityzenship’? Writing Immigrant and Diasporic Toronto. In: Narrating Citizenship and Belonging in Anglophone Canadian Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96935-0_5
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