Sonja Boon’s heritage is complicated. Although she has lived in Canada for more than 30 years, she was born in the UK to a Surinamese mother and a Dutch father. An invitation to join a family tree project inspired a journey to the heart of the histories that have shaped her identity, as she sought to answer two questions that have dogged her over the years: Where does she belong? And who does she belong to?Boon’s archival research—in Suriname, the Netherlands, the ...

Pop culture stereotypes, shopping frustrations, fat jokes, and misconceptions about health are all ways society systemically rejects large bodies. BIG is a collection of personal and intimate experiences of plus size women, non-binary and trans people in a society obsessed with thinness. Revealing insights that are both funny and traumatic, surprising and challenging, familiar and unexpected, 26 writers explore themes as diverse as self perception, body image, fashion, fat activism, food, ...

The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada explores the exciting world of nonfiction writing about the self, designed to give teachers and students the tools they need to study both canonical and lesser-known works. The volume introduces important texts and contexts for interpreting life narratives, demonstrates the conceptual tools necessary to understand what life narratives are and how they work, and offers an historical overview of key moments in Canadian ...

Dead Woman Pickney chronicles Yvonne Shorter Brown’s life growing up in Jamaica between 1943 and 1965 and teaching in Canada from 1969. Told with stridency and humour, the stories include both personal experience and history.Taking up the haunting memories of childhood, along with persistent racial marginalization of Black people, both globally and in Canada, the author sets out to construct a narrative that at once explains her own origins in the former s...

Madame Necker occupies a unique position in French social and cultural history. This study breaks new ground by examining the profoundly corporeal nature of Madame Necker’s life – her debilitating, decades-long psychic and somatic suffering and subsequent curious death.

This book takes an intimate, collaborative, interdisciplinary autoethnographic approach that both emphasizes the authors’ entangled relationships with the more-than-human, and understands the land and sea-scapes of Newfoundland as integral to their thinking, theorizing, and writing. The authors draw on feminist, trans, queer, critical race, Indigenous, decolonial, and posthuman theories in order to examine the relationships between origins, memories, place, identities, bodies, pasts, and f...

Sonja Boon’s heritage is complicated. Although she has lived in Canada for more than 30 years, she was born in the UK to a Surinamese mother and a Dutch father. An invitation to join a family tree project inspired a journey to the heart of the histories that have shaped her identity, as she sought to answer two questions that have dogged her over the years: Where does she belong? And who does she belong to?Boon’s archival research—in Suriname, the Netherlands, the ...

Dead Woman Pickney chronicles Yvonne Shorter Brown’s life growing up in Jamaica between 1943 and 1965 and teaching in Canada from 1969. Told with stridency and humour, the stories include both personal experience and history. Taking up the haunting memories of childhood, along with persistent racial marginalization of Black people, both globally and in Canada, the author sets out to construct a narrative that at once explains her own origins in the former slave society of Jamaica and trace...

In the second half of the eighteenth century, celebrated Swiss physician Samuel Auguste Tissot (1728-1797) received over 1,200 medical consultation letters from across Europe and beyond. Written by individuals seeking respite from a range of ailments, these letters offer valuable insight into the nature of physical suffering.Plaintive, desperate, querulous, fearful, frustrated, and sometimes arrogant and self-interested in tone, the letters to Tissot not only express the struggle o...

**Winner of the 2019 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for NonfictionA beautiful and haunting memoir of kinship and culture rediscovered.**Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea and adopted as an infant into a white family in small-town Canada. In her late twenties, she reconnected with her first family and returned to Seoul where she spent four months getting to know other adoptees, as well as her Korean mother, father, siblings, and extended family. At the guesthouse for t...

What happens when white people look at non-whites? What happens when the gaze is returned? Looking for the Other responds to criticisms leveled at white feminist film theory of the 1970s and 1980s for its neglect of issues to do with race. It focuses attention on the male gaze across cultures, as illustrated by women filmmakers of color whose films deal with travel.Looking relations are determined by history, tradition, myth; by national identity, power hi...

Postcolonialism has attracted a large amount of interest in cultural theory, but the adjacent area of multiculturalism has not been scrutinised to quite the same extent. In this innovative new book, Sneja Gunew sets out to interrogate the ways in which the transnational discourse of multiculturalism may be related to the politics of race and indigeneity, grounding her discussion in a variety of national settings and a variety of literary, autobiographical and theoretical texts. Using examp...