I have been browsing through the belated festshrift to Canadian literary theorist Barbara Godard, Trans/Acting Culture, Writing, and Memory, published last year in the TransCanada Series by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. I say “belated” partly because Barbara died unexpectedly in 2010 and so will never see the work that the editors and contributors have put into this collection, and partly also because this was a project her colleagues – I include myself – probably should have thought of undertaking many years before they did. Several contributors here remark on how often Barbara seemed ahead of her time in both her thinking and her interventions – ahead in recognizing the cultural power of poststructuralism, ahead in recognizing that accurate translation required something quite other than the simple domestication of a ‘foreign’ text, ahead in recognizing that feminism was a language project as much as a social justice one, ahead in recognizing that the contributions that First Nations women were making to conceptions of feminism were as specific, creative and urgent as more visible or ‘mainstream’ feminist projects. Moreover Barbara was often ahead in all of these areas of her colleagues’ ability to respond to her urgings.
I write that I ‘browse’ through this volume because it is unlikely to be one that anyone can easily read through. The editors invited contributors to address any of the many areas that Barbara cared passionately about. No longer tied together by that passion, her wit, her knack for startlingly productive juxtapositions, her ability to make her own limitations the ground for an abruptly illuminating shift of context, the areas of her attention here drift apart into separate subject areas, no matter how sound the writers’ scholarship or incisive their analyses. Two of Barbara’s most important assets were her distractibility and her skill at analyzing her moments of distraction, asking why she had been distracted, what was the obscure connection between the two focuses – letting her investigations be informed by the unlikely rather than the obvious.
Many of the contributors are aware of being challenged by Barbara’s unorthodox routes toward insight, particularly the York University librarian, Lisa Sloniowski, who Barbara, shortly before her death, lured into becoming the curator
I write that I ‘browse’ through this volume because it is unlikely to be one that anyone can easily read through. The editors invited contributors to address any of the many areas that Barbara cared passionately about. No longer tied together by that passion, her wit, her knack for startlingly productive juxtapositions, her ability to make her own limitations the ground for an abruptly illuminating shift of context, the areas of her attention here drift apart into separate subject areas, no matter how sound the writers’ scholarship or incisive their analyses. Two of Barbara’s most important assets were her distractibility and her skill at analyzing her moments of distraction, asking why she had been distracted, what was the obscure connection between the two focuses – letting her investigations be informed by the unlikely rather than the obvious.
Many of the contributors are aware of being challenged by Barbara’s unorthodox routes toward insight, particularly the York University librarian, Lisa Sloniowski, who Barbara, shortly before her death, lured into becoming the curator
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