Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014.

Critical Collaborations is the last of three essay collections that has emerged from what co-editor Verduyn describes as “three linked conferences that began in Vancouver in 2005, that continued in Guelph in 2007, and that concluded at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, in 2009. Canadian poets probably won’t discover much about the contemporary writing of poetry in this volume, nor fiction writers about the writing of fiction – though it could result something strangely welcome if they did. The collection is primarily about interdisciplinary methodologies of literary criticism that may be appropriate to current Canadian writing, or at least to current writing associated with the first three nouns of its subtitle.

It is the third and final volume in Smaro Kamboureli’s “Trans.Can.Lit” series that began in early 2005 with the call for papers for a “Trans.Can.Lit” conference at Simon Fraser on a growing “crisis” in the field of Canadian literature. The CFP’s “rationale” for the conference and possible follow-up ones was the belief of the organizers – then principally Kamboureli and Roy Miki – “that Canada has reached now yet another turning point, trying as it is to negotiate its multicultural phase of the last two decades with the pressures of globalization. While the unraveling of the nation's coherence may have resulted in a loss of purpose, this loss is not to be lamented. Instead, we see this turning point as representing a critical moment that invites a complete rethinking of the disciplinary and institutional frameworks within which Canadian literature is produced, disseminated, studied and taught.”

But the papers offered at the conference and published in its selected proceedings, Trans.Can.Lit (2007), showed little agreement about, or even interest in, the “turning point” and “national unravelling” that the CFP had proclaimed. In her introduction to the proceedings, Kamboureli made no reference to either – focussing instead on how Canadian

Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak Out on the Literary Marketplace. Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli, eds. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013.

This is a book of interviews that most serious North American writers would benefit from reading parts of, though not necessarily each part. A couple of the interviewees don’t entirely understand or share the assumptions of the book they are helping to create – a problem that may have stemmed from the requirements the editors were obliged to meet in their project design. Some of these requirements are, rather ironically, among the matters that the editors have set out to investigate: the silent co-authorship of many contemporary books by the practices of chain bookstores, the financial needs of publishers, the temptation of awards, and the hope of pleasing granting agencies. As co-editor Kamboureli tells Erin Moure, “one of the things we are trying to determine is whether there is a certain kind of cultural grammar, as it were, a grammar of economics, that determines the work that gets done” (97). Various of this book’s institutional co-authors are listed on its acknowledgements page and in Kit Dobson’s introduction – among them the Canada Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Canada Research Chairs Program, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose “ethics” policies required preapproval and standardization of the questionnaire the editors used to structure each of the interviews.

There was a time in Canadian Literature when a book of interviews like this would have featured on its cover, or within, fetching photos of the authors interviewed – a quizzical Margaret Atwood, a sultry Michael Ondaatje. There are no photos offered here  of its interviewees, although Christian Bok, Larissa Lai and others do often appear on Twitter or Facebook as similarly photogenic. The visual fetishization of authors is one of the practices of the literary marketplace that the editors have reservations about and have hoped to investigate. Instead on the cover are images of the cutting parts of a late nineteenth-century meatgrinder – presumably offered as a metaphor for the standard