TransCanadian Feminist Fictions: New Cross-Border Ethics 9780773549562

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface: On Borders and Paradoxes
Introduction: Corporeality, Biopolitics, Affect. Twenty-First-Century TransCanadian Fictions
PART ONE: Crossing the Bordersof Corporeality
1 Trans-corporeal Materialities Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries
2 Unruly Corporealities Hiromi Goto’s Hopeful Fictions
3 Corporeal Citizenship Deviant Bodies in Emma Donoghue’s Room
PART TWO: Biopolitical Border-Crossings
4 Biopower and Practices of Freedom Hiromi Goto’s The Water of Possibility
5 The Biocapitalization of the Female Body Emma Donoghue’s Historiographic Fictions
6 Necropower Assemblages Dionne Brand’s Inventory
PART THREE: Cross-Border Affects
7 Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return Cross-Border Pathogeographies
8 Affecting the Ethical Imagination Emma Donoghue’s Astray
9 Hiromi Goto’s Darkest Light Assembling a New Cross-Border Ethic
Coda
10 “I Dream an Ethic” Larissa Lai’s Posthuman Borderlands
Conclusion: The Borderlands of the Possible
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

T r a n s C a n a d i a n F e minist Fictions

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TransCanadian Feminist Fictions New Cross-Border Ethics

L i b e G a rc í a Z a rr a n z

McGill-­­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-­­Queen’s University Press 2017 ISBN 978-0-7735-4955-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-4956-2 (eP DF ) ISBN 978-0-7735-4957-9 (eP UB) Legal deposit second quarter 2017 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication García Zarranz, Libe, 1979–, author TransCanadian feminist fictions: new cross-border ethics / Libe García Zarranz. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4955-5 (cloth). – I S BN 978-0-7735-4956-2 (eP D F). – ISBN 978-0-7735-4957-9 (eP UB) 1. Canadian literature (English) – 20th century – History and criticism.  2. Canadian literature (English) – Women authors – History and criticism. 3. Canadian fiction (English) – Minority authors – History and criticism. 4. Feminist literary criticism – Canada.  5. Boundaries in literature.  6. Ethics in literature.  I. Title. PS8089.5.W6Z 37 2017

C 813'.54099287

C 2016-908241-5 C2016-908242-3

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5/13 New Baskerville.

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Contents

Acknowledgments vii Preface: On Borders and Paradoxes  xi Introduction: Corporeality, Biopolitics, Affect: Twenty-FirstCentury TransCanadian Fictions  3 PA R T ONE   C r ossi ng t he B or d e rs o f Co rp o re al ity   1 Trans-corporeal Materialities: Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries 21   2 Unruly Corporealities: Hiromi Goto’s Hopeful Fictions  35   3 Corporeal Citizenship: Deviant Bodies in Emma Donoghue’s Room 46 PA R T TWO  B i op ol i t i c a l B ord e r- Cro s s in g s   4 Biopower and Practices of Freedom: Hiromi Goto’s The Water of Possibility 61   5 The Biocapitalization of the Female Body: Emma Donoghue’s Historiographic Fictions  77   6 Necropower Assemblages: Dionne Brand’s Inventory 91 PA R T TH R E E  C r oss-B or de r Af f e cts   7 Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Cross-Border Pathogeographies 105   8 Affecting the Ethical Imagination: Emma Donoghue’s Astray 115

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vi Contents

  9 Hiromi Goto’s Darkest Light: Assembling a New Cross-Border Ethic 126 CODA 10 “I Dream an Ethic”: Larissa Lai’s Posthuman Borderlands  141 Conclusion: The Borderlands of the Possible  151 Notes 157 Bibliography 165 Index 175

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Acknowledgments

Where and how to begin this inventory of feelings? This book simply would not exist without the wonderful friends, colleagues, and family members who have supported me from both sides of the Atlantic. Your love, wisdom, and laughter have kept me going throughout this exciting journey. I feel so lucky! My deepest admiration for the writers that I address in this book: I am in awe of their captivating work, vivid imaginations, and bold creativity. I have warm memories of Halifax with Hiromi Goto, Edmonton with Dionne Brand, Vancouver with Larissa Lai, and Calgary with Emma Donoghue. I am also extremely grateful to McGill-Queen’s University Press for their commitment to seeing this book come to light. A special mention to former editor James MacNevin for his enthusiasm and support, Mark Abley for ensuring the smooth progress of this project, Carolyn Yates for her exquisite editorial eye, and the two anonymous readers for their careful reading and invaluable feedback. Thank you to the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences for supporting this project through their publication grant. Earlier versions of chapter 1 and chapter 9 appeared in Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies 2.1–2 (2012) and Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review 224 (Spring 2015) respectively. Some sections of chapter 2 also appeared, in different form, in the collection Lire le corps biomedical / The Biomedical Body (2016), edited by Daniel Laforest et al. I am very grateful to the editors for granting me permission to reprint the materials here. Heartfelt thanks to those institutions instrumental to the development of this book: the Department of English and Film Studies

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viii Acknowledgments

at the University of Alberta, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, the Centre for Globalization and Cultural Studies at the University of Manitoba, and the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta. Thank you for allowing me to discover new worlds, new theories, and new paths of intervention. In particular, my deepest gratitude to my doctoral supervisor and mentor, Heather Zwicker, for supporting my work with a perfect combination of rigour and passion. You are an inspiration. Special thanks to Marie Carrière, academic partner in crime, for her invaluable advice and mentorship. A big thanks to the Trudeau community for believing in this project from such an early stage and for giving me the wings to fly. I am grateful to Diana Brydon, my postdoc supervisor, and to the Critical Posthumanism(s) group in Winnipeg for their challenging insights. This book is also indebted to the outstanding support from the international research project “Bodies in Transit.” A warm thanks to its director, dear colleague and friend Pilar CuderDomínguez, for her relentless energy and invaluable support. This book is also the result of conversations and exchanges with a wide network of CanLit and gender studies scholars. My thanks to  Henrietta Moore and Sally Hines for welcoming me into the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Leeds. My deepest admiration to Rosi Braidotti for leading us, captivated readers, to George Eliot’s passage, encouraging us to listen to that roar on the other side of silence. My gratitude and love to feminist comrade Belén Martín-Lucas, for her unyielding passion, hard work, and commitment to the advancement of Canadian literature. A special mention to Erin Wunker and the whole community at C WILA: Canadian Women in the Literary Arts for reminding me of the importance of fighting sexism outside the rigid walls of academia. Last, but not least, merci to my colleague Hugo Azérad for his generosity and to all the wonderful Magdalene College students in my critical theory seminars for their enthusiasm and curiosity about all things feminist. A big hug to my friends in Spain, Canada, and the United Kingdom for keeping me sane all these years. Ana Belén, Melissa, Veronika: your love, friendship, and support are felt in every page of this book. A special mention to my first mentor and dear friend, Robert Miltner, for believing in me at such early stage in my career. I will always carry with me those sweet memories of Mayagüez. And

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Acknowledgments ix

merci to the team from Côte Brasserie Cambridge, my other home – what would I have done without your coffee? My deep love goes to my family. To my dad for his strength and enthusiasm for teaching, and for respecting me for who I am. To my mum, an extraordinary woman, for her unconditional passion for literature and for always telling me to keep going. To my sister, Elia, a writer, for always reminding me to be aware of the darker sides of the literary world. My heart goes to you, Fran, for your unconditional support, your kindness, your stubbornness, for loving me at my best and my worst, and for being such an extraordinary father. Our conversations, our disagreements, keep me going always forwards into new adventures. I dedicate this book to my son Mark, a truly joyful border-crosser. You are everything.

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P r e fac e

On Borders and Paradoxes

In the last months of 1999, two great friends formed a cross-border orchestra that came to represent a renewed possibility of novel forms of dialogue between a variety of cultures in the Middle East. These two men were Palestinian intellectual Edward W. Said and Jewish composer Daniel Barenboim, and this institution was the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. For decades, Said and Barenboim collaborated on various intellectual projects, always problematizing, in their public personas and very intimacy, the cultural, sociopolitical, and ethical implications of crossing a border. The friendship between these two figures forged between 1991, when they met by chance in the lobby of a London hotel, and 2003, when Said passed away, lasts through the cultural archive they left in their cross-­ border collaborations. In Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, Said and Barenboim discuss art, music, and politics, among many other concerns, always bearing in mind the poetics and politics of border-crossing. Barenboim writes, “I don’t collect memorabilia – so my feeling of being at home somewhere is really a feeling of transition, as everything is in life. Music is transition, too. I am happiest when I can be at peace with the idea of fluidity. And I’m unhappy when I cannot really let myself go and give myself over completely to the idea that things change, evolve, and not necessarily for the best” (4). This moment of artistic and affective possibility of the transient interests me for the purposes of this book. What Barenboim calls transition is in fact “a plastic process” where identity is understood as a set of “flowing currents” (5), impregnated with tensions, paradoxes, and contradictions and always in a constant becoming. Significantly, Barenboim interrogates the notion

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xii Preface

of fluidity, raising a crucial concern: this porosity of boundaries can enable, but it can also destroy. With the phrase “feeling of transition,” Barenboim thus points to how the geographical, bodily, and affective dimensions of border-crossing gather in a particular moment in time and space. What pertains to music might be applied to other artistic expressions such as literature and the visual arts, in the sense that these are all forms of the transient while paradoxically part of the lasting and enduring dimensions of everyday life. The productive paradox that characterizes the complexity of artistic and lived experience fuels this book. I believe that borders and boundaries work in similar ways, forging and disallowing alliances, approximations, and collaborations. In this sense, in this book I do not seek to define, describe, or prescribe what borders are or are not. Instead, I look at literary and other artistic expressions as contested sites from which to examine what borders do and undo; in which ways borders shape social and bodily space; and how borders affect the circulation of human and nonhuman materialities. I thus read borders as paradoxical systems of connectivity and disjuncture; approximation and distance; as contested spaces where new apertures and old ruptures merge with ethical, cultural, and sociopolitical repercussions. Paradox, tension, and unpredictability therefore become crucial elements in my understanding of the functioning and circulation of borders as assemblages of the material and immaterial world. Similarly, the artistic and political dimensions are also characterized by this paradoxical and unpredictable nature, particularly in current analyses of the global and the transnational.

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T r a n s C a n a d i a n F e minist Fictions

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Introduction

Corporeality, Biopolitics, Affect Twenty-First-Century TransCanadian ­Fictions The so-called war on terror, one of the many perverse outcomes of 9/11, has not only reified geopolitical frontiers in the form of intensified border security worldwide, but also generated new biopolitical borders in the form of a tightened governance of migrant populations and their bodies.1 This book emerges out of a post9/11 context and its aftermath, characterized by a global crisis that cuts across ecological, sociopolitical, and, I would add, cultural and ethical realms, particularly after the 2008 economic collapse. The ghosts of 9/11 certainly haunt my own position as a literary and cultural critic, and the work I analyze in this project. I, nonetheless, insist on gesturing towards 9/11 not as a point of origin but as a cross-border event. Philosopher Brian Massumi considers 9/11 to mark a threshold, and claims that “it can be considered a turning point at which the threat-environment took on ambient thickness, achieved a consistency, which gave the preemptive power mechanisms dedicated to its modulation an advantage over other regimes of power” (62). This turning point interests me for the purposes of this book. One of the many outcomes of the war on terror targeting places such as Iraq or Afghanistan has involved the displacement of civil populations, leaving growing numbers of refugees to move every day; to turn and return; to orient and reorient themselves through uncertain roads, leading to poverty and, in many cases, death. Similarly, we systematically witness other border zones in the Middle East, such as Syria, Gaza, or Lebanon, where political corruption and economic greed reign while human rights are suspended in an  everyday basis. In the US-Mexico context, border controls in

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4  TransCanadian Feminist Fictions

contested territories such as El Paso or Ciudad Juárez are increasingly militarized, always ready to target those precarious peoples that, out of necessity, attempt to cross the frontier in search of a  sustainable future. Racialized populations, more pervasively after 9/11, are systematically held up by border patrols that subject their bodies to various surveillance assemblages under the name of security and protection (Hier). As social anthropologist Henrietta L. Moore aptly puts it, “Technologies of security and surveillance record bodily affects, and deploy neural imaging, iris recognition and a host of other techniques designed to distinguish those who are acceptable from those who are not – a biopolitics of racism that goes well beneath the skin” (173). Thus crossing a geopolitical border not only involves a spatial and temporal shift but also, and often most importantly, generates a bodily response with social, political, and ethical repercussions. It is therefore of uttermost priority for the critic and the public intellectual today to interrogate and to think again about how the border becomes a contested site where the corporeal, biopolitical, and affective realms of everyday life assemble. Let me stress, then, that besides the geopolitical dimension of border-crossing, it is the simultaneous circulation of corporeal, biopolitical, and affective forces that interests me for the formulation of a new cross-border ethic as illustrated in the work of the writers that I discuss in this book.

U n p r e d i c ta b l e B o r ders i n U n c e rta i n T i m e s In a lecture delivered at the Edward Said Memorial Conference in  April 2013, philosopher Étienne Balibar refers to the “institution of the border” in terms of uncertainty. I find this specification relevant in my theorization of borders understood not only as contested institutionalized entities, but also as sites of artistic possibility. Borders share the uncertain quality that seems to characterize the first decade of the twenty-first century, as articulated by a variety of critics and commentators. It seems, on the one hand, that the term “uncertain” has been co-opted by a number of voices in the neoliberal financial and economic sectors as a strategic way to intensify regulatory measures, systems of control, and surveillance mechanisms that often involve the reification of hegemonic boundaries.2 In turn, the concepts of “uncertainty” and “unpredictability”

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Introduction 5

are also employed by scholars in the humanities and social sciences as spaces of artistic creativity and ethical possibility.3 I borrow this terminology with regards to borders in that boundaries shift and change, often in unexpected shapes and trajectories. I also invoke other concepts such as “reversibility” and “reciprocity” in my discussion of cross-border assemblages in terms of the tension between the relations of interiority and exteriority of boundaries, together with their temporality. In the study Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, literary critic Rob Nixon contends that the first decade of the twentyfirst century witnessed a gravitational shift around issues of environmental justice, particularly within some sectors in the environmental humanities that are striving to counteract the “full stomach” environmentalism that has characterized discourses and practices in the Global North (Guha and Martinez-Alier). Nixon proposes the concept of “slow violence” to understand how catastrophes that are not rendered spectacular or instantaneous pose representational challenges, particularly because such slow-motion disasters do not appear to require immediate action. Casualties, as Nixon explains, are thus postponed for generations, which allows for the dispersion of slow violence to prevail. The paradoxical nature of this form of residual toxicity, together with its intrinsic temporality, also intrigues me for my examination of borders. In this regard, TransCanadian Feminist Fictions emerges out of a sense of urgency that characterizes the first decade of the twentyfirst century, in its accumulation and intensification of processes of uneven globalization, and the subsequent crises across the borders of the economic, sociopolitical, cultural, and ethical realms. The imperative need for action and change in the present, nonetheless, requires a careful attentiveness towards other temporalities in order to understand the complexity of today’s world. In other words, my interest in the present is ultimately both complemented and also informed by the critic’s responsibility to position herself at the crossing – the border – between temporalities where the traces of the past and pull of the future meet in productive ways. And this crossing of temporal boundaries is a constant trait in the work of the authors I analyze. Resisting received versions of nostalgia or melancholic renderings, they explore alternative temporal circuits, often exposing a variety of slow violences along the way. The border itself, I argue, occupies a contested space where material

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6  TransCanadian Feminist Fictions

and immaterial bodies gather across time. In its complexity, the border therefore translates the slow structural violences of the past into the urgency of the present, while simultaneously projecting them into the pull of the future. As such, the border, as these writers’ oeuvre illustrates, becomes a matrix of transtemporality.

T owa r d s a n O n to - e pis temology of Borders In this contradictory era of rampant neoliberalism, where information and capital benefit from a borderless free-trade system and human populations are subjected to strict forms of surveillance, borders have become paradoxical entities that need to be further interrogated. Anthropologists and philosophers such as Arjun Appadurai (Modernity at Large) and Balibar (We, the People), among others, insist on the urgent need to consider the human and cultural dimensions in current theories of globalization to counteract previous accounts that strictly focused on economic discourses. Along the same lines, there is a need to incorporate the creative and imaginative realms into current discourses of the global and transnational in order to open new paths into the territory of feminist border studies. Finding novel commonalities and shared materialities, theorists across the social sciences and the humanities strive to resist the apocalyptic tone that characterizes some current discourses of sociopolitical critique by articulating instead alternative ontologies, temporalities and spatialities, and affective routes to reshape selfother relations (Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth; Moore). While acknowledging persistent difficulties, they underscore the need to “envisage and theorize what links human agency and human subjectivity to forms of the possible, to ways of living that open up new ways of being” (Moore 13). Simultaneously, therefore, in this book I prioritize the ethical and the affective in an attempt to think again about how fantasy, desire, and hope can be rearticulated as sites of possibility to renew self-other relations between human and nonhuman bodies. In the study Still Life: Hopes, Desires and Satisfactions, Moore offers a thought-provoking analysis of the interconnections between artistic expression, social critique, and political intervention in the context of contemporary discussions of globalization. Placing fantasy and desire at the centre of self-other relations,

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Introduction 7

Moore insists on the need to combine strategies from within the epistemological and ontological realms. She thus shares the need to reconnect human subjectivity to the material world in order to activate change in the line of many contemporary theorists in the field of material feminisms (Tuana; Alaimo, Bodily). And yet, while acknowledging the centrality of the material, Moore remains cautious about completely disregarding language and knowledge as conducive to social transformation. Instead, she proposes a combined onto-epistemological approach to agency and difference by understanding writing as an “everyday embodied practice, and one that is generative of affect” (185). Following Moore’s argument, I propose to look at contemporary literary landscapes by combining epistemological and ontological efforts in order to generate alternative ethical, material, and political frameworks within the field of  transCanadian feminist literary production at the turn of the twenty-first century.

T r a n s C a n a d i a n B o r derlands : E n ta n g l e m e n t s a nd Ruptures In these uncertain times, the role of culture and the arts occupies a shifting space imbued with potential for social and political transformation. It is in this light that I here formulate an ethical theorization of borders through the lenses of contemporary feminist and queer transnational writers in Canada. Focusing on the first decade of the twenty-first century, I examine how transCanadian authors such as Dionne Brand, Emma Donoghue, Hiromi Goto, and Larissa Lai dismantle and rearticulate a variety of literal and symbolic boundaries that cut across corporeal, biopolitical, and affective structures. By doing so, they are assembling a new crossborder ethic that creates unexpected alliances between material bodies and proposes novel forms of relationality and affect, often reshaping the cultural and social fabric of our contemporary world. Significantly, the turn to ethics that I propose here is simultaneously a political commitment. Thus, in this project I look at the ethical choices and practices with which feminist writers are engaged, not at the expense of politics, but to the containment of them. The theoretical framework of the transnational, in its multiple iterations, has gained currency among contemporary critics, artists, and scholars in Canadian studies, becoming a crucial instrument

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8  TransCanadian Feminist Fictions

to  examine a number of diverse literary and cultural processes within and beyond the nation-state. Post-2000 influential interventions include, among many others, Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization by literary and cultural critic Kit Dobson; Transnational Poetics: Asian Canadian Women’s Fiction of the 1990s, edited by literary scholar Pilar Cuder-Domínguez et al.; In Flux: Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing by poet and scholar Roy Miki; Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue, edited by literary and cultural scholars Diana Brydon and Marta Dvořák; and Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s by Lai. In this book, I want to set a dialogue between the numerous ramifications of the transnational in connection to the related designation of the transCanadian, which I trace back to the work of Japanese Canadian writer, photographer, and filmmaker Roy Kiyooka, and his TransCanada Letters and Pacific Rim Letters. Written between 1965 and 1985, these poetic sets of letters cross the borders of genre by incorporating what the  poet refers to as “other writings, obsessions, [and] truculent thoughts” to build a “biography of self” (Pacific) that is intimately intertwined with social and cultural processes within and beyond the Canadian nation-state. In doing so, Kiyooka asserts what literary scholar Donald Goellnicht describes as “a self-fashioned, expansive, transnational identity” (380). Importantly for the purposes of this book, the designation transCanadian here becomes an assemblage where local, transnational, and diasporic subjectivities and locations are historically entangled. Honouring this multiple heritage, critics Smaro Kamboureli and Miki have refashioned the term through a number of initiatives, which include the conference TransCanada: Literature, Institutions, and Citizenship (Vancouver, B C , 2005), a new edition of Kiyooka’s TransCanada Letters edited by Kamboureli through NeWest Press, the co-edited volume Trans. Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature, the creation of the TransCanada Institute at Guelph, which ran from 2007 to 2013, and the ongoing TransCanada Series, edited by Kamboureli through Wilfrid Laurier UP . As stated in the institute’s original online mandate: “The ‘Trans’ in TransCanada, then echoes the various processes – historical, political, national, economic, global – that impact on Canadian literature as an institution that has gone through various stages of development: from being ignored as a colonial product, and thus seen as inferior to the British and

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Introduction 9

American literary traditions, to being reified as a national, read ‘white,’ literature, from encompassing, under the aegis of multiculturalism, diasporic authors to becoming indigenized and reaching international acclaim to being studied in the context of the humanities” (TransCanada Institute). National, transnational, and diasporic processes are here understood as unavoidably intertwined to comprehend recent turns in Canadian literature. While taking into account these important early conceptualizations of the term, in this book I redeploy the designation transCanadian in various ways. First, my use of the term refers to a number of contemporary feminist and queer writers in Canada whose twenty-first-century work proposes new ways to think about location and subjectivity alongside and beyond national and transnational discourses. As a border concept, “transCanadian” is thus construed relationally through an inseparable mixture of coalitions, ruptures, entanglements, tensions, and alliances. In Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Culture, literary and film theorist Rey Chow claims that “one outcome of entangled relationships, then, would be the fuzzing-up of conventional classificatory categories due to the collapse of neatly maintained epistemic borders” (10). Within the scope of this book, which focuses on feminist literary and cultural production, the realm of the transCanadian certainly becomes a porous borderland; a site of paradoxical entanglements where nation, transnation, narration, history, ecology, economy, and citizenship are rendered unstable valences, always in the process of becoming, and thus susceptible to change and transformation. By posing the prefix “trans-” before the term “feminist” in the formulation TransCanadian Feminist Fictions, I also seek to incorporate non-normative practices of gender and sexuality, engage with the presence of queer and other bodies, and thus move beyond strictly geopolitical border-crossings.4 Let me clarify that my use of the term “queer” in this project is twofold. First, I refer to how transCanadian writers such as Brand, Goto, Lai, and Donoghue introduce an array of characters and communities in their work who question and often challenge normative representations of gender, sexuality, and the body. Following Elisabeth Freeman’s innovative contribution to queer theory in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, I further argue that this queerness often impregnates spatial and temporal structures with important ethical consequences. Second, I employ the designation queer in relation to a feminist analysis of

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10  TransCanadian Feminist Fictions

borders under transnational and globalization processes in our contemporary times. Necessarily, a discussion of how processes of racialization intersect with these markers of differentiation is crucial in order to fully comprehend how queer transCanadian b ­ odies are often rendered expendable by bio- and necropolitical mechanisms of control. TransCanadian writers systematically interrogate and challenge what critical race theorist Rachel C. Lee describes as a kind of biosociality sustained by “the creation of a population whose demise and limited lives are required to promote the enhanced, limitless lives of others” (Exquisite 22). In this sense, transCanadian literature shares a “decolonization imperative” (Lai, Slanting I 31) with feminist, queer, and transgender indigenous writing; a potential coalition that could open novel cross-border spaces of critical enquiry in relation to gender, social justice, colonization histories, and their complex entanglements.5 At the same time, transCanadian feminist writing also proposes an alternative poetics and politics of affect that shape the ethical, economic, sociopolitical, and cultural realms. What I call a deliberate imprecision often characterizes the term “affect” when discussed in certain philosophically oriented academic circuits. Following anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, I employ “affect” in the singular and plural indistinctively. I favour affects over feelings in that affects entail the possibility “to become” whereas feelings often contribute to the stabilizing of “being” (Davy and Steinbock; Crawford; Deleuze and Guattari). In Queer Phenomenology, feminist killjoy Sara Ahmed discusses how emotions involve affective forms of orientation towards other bodies and spaces. These entanglements systematically shape bodily, spatial, and social boundaries. I am interested in unravelling the ways in which transCanadian feminist literary productions question and contest the naturalized orientation of bodies towards hegemonic structures of power and dominance. Brand, Donoghue, and Goto creatively explore how the failed orientations of those bodies that refuse to be pulled by economic neoliberalism, compulsory heterosexuality, or racial imperialism can become vehicles for alternative ethical routes. Reconsidering the roles of fear, shame, love, and loss allows these transCanadian authors to propose novel forms of coalition, community-based activism, and social justice in this complex age of global crisis. With an emphasis on the corporeal, biopolitical, and affective terrains, the work of the authors analyzed in this book thus addresses

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Introduction 11

and questions the porosity of borders and its sociopolitical and ethical implications for human and nonhuman populations. In doing so, these transCanadian writers are assembling a cross-border archive that expands, and arguably queers, traditional conceptualizations of what is commonly understood by Canadian literature at the turn of the twenty-first century.

T r a n s C a n a d i a n F e minist Fictions i n t h e T w e n t y - F i r st Century An established voice within Canadian literary circles, Toronto’s 2009 to 2011 Poet Laureate Dionne Brand has explored, for over two decades, the impact of multiple violences, slow and fast, positively affirming her identity as a queer Black Canadian author with an Afro-Caribbean heritage. Founder of Our Lives, Canada’s first Black women’s newspaper, Brand systematically moves between genres, always inscribing her transcultural identity and voice within them. While I take into account some of her early writings from the late 1980s and early 1990s, here I focus primarily on Brand’s twenty-first-century work, which directly problematizes the ways in which transnational impulses shape borders, deeply affecting the disposable bodies of expendable subjects – the migrant, the queer, the refugee, the activist. As Lai convincingly puts it, Brand’s is “a call for an ethics of relation that crosses borders. It depends on intergenerational memory, desire, and artmaking to counter the violence of globalization” (Slanting I, 35). Particularly in long poems such as Inventory (2006) and Ossuaries, Brand portrays the permeability of the borders between the human body, technological sphere, and natural worlds as a strategy to signal the violent impact of power structures on vulnerable populations. By doing so, her work attends to human and more-than-human materialities, while simultaneously pushing readers beyond epistemology and the reliability of language structures. And yet, rather ironically, Brand’s use of language is highly persuasive, as also illustrated in the memoir A Map to the Door of No Return (2001), especially in the ways she attends to political and ethical matters, particularly by looking at how bodies affect and are affected by material spaces. From the 1980s, voices from Black Canadian poets, like Brand’s, exposed the institutional racism integral to Canadian society at the same time as Asian Canadian activists and writers like Joy Kogawa

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12  TransCanadian Feminist Fictions

and Miki denounced Canada’s embarrassing history of internment. The important work of these anti-racist cultural workers throughout the 1990s enabled the designations “race” and “ethnicity” to become an integral part of the discussion of how Canada has historically behaved towards “minority populations.”6 In the short piece “Alien Texts, Alien Seductions: The Context of Colour Full Writing,” Japanese Canadian writer Hiromi Goto exposes how racialized peoples in Canada have been systematically constructed as Others in a supposedly multicultural and thus tolerant society. Goto’s work, as Lai contends, “queries the act of representation while using representational strategies to write Japanese Canadian women out of the racist and patriarchal history that would otherwise contain them, and into vividly imagined histories of their own. In so doing, she commits herself to non-realist modes, and a kind of radical carnival that does not ever return to what Mikhail Bakhtin calls ‘the daylight world.’ Instead, her stories transform the geographies into which they are propelled” (Slanting I, 34). Through the integration of queer and anti-racist politics that so often characterizes her literary corpus, Goto has maintained a key place within the Canadian literary scene, especially from the publication of her award-winning novels A Chorus of Mushrooms in 1994 and The Kappa Child in 2001. In this study, I turn my attention to Goto’s post-9/11 work, which is saturated by a number of ethical conundrums: tensions, dilemmas, ruptures, and hopes of the feminist racialized subject living under rigid biopolitical regimes, as illustrated in her first children’s novel The Water of Possibility (2001). The porosity of borders between human, nonhuman, and posthuman bodies and nonlinear spatio-temporal frameworks, I argue, also occupies a central position in Goto’s twenty-first-century fictions. Through the formulation of alternative ties of affection and reproduction, young-adult novels such as Half World (2009) and Darkest Light (2012), together with the short-story collection Hopeful Monsters (2004), further advocate renewed alliances between human, nonhuman, and posthuman beings as a way to activate counter-hegemonic political actions and practices. In similar fashion to Brand and Goto, Chinese Canadian writer and critic Larissa Lai, particularly in her poetry collection Automaton Biographies (2009), posits a feminist, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist critique of current issues such as the impact of economic globalization on environmental degradation and the human body.7 Of

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Introduction 13

Chinese ancestry, Lai was born in the United States and then moved to Canada, where she is now the Canada Research Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary. Some of her works include the acclaimed novels When Fox Is a Thousand (1995) and Salt Fish Girl (2002), and Sybil Unrest (2008), a collaborative long poem with Rita Wong. I am interested in teasing out the different ways in which Goto’s and Lai’s speculative worlds address the destructive impulses that characterize today’s societies, while insisting on portraying a  variety of expressions of freedom displayed by the population. Through the systematic exploration of the border-crossings between forces of power and resistance, Goto and Lai, I argue, promote alternative forms of social justice in this age of global crisis. This project also brings Irish Canadian writer Emma Donoghue into conversation. A fitting example of the frontier-crossing author, Donoghue grew up in Dublin, moved to Cambridge, United Kingdom, to complete her PhD, and finally settled in London, Ontario, in 1998, where she has since become an award-winning writer with a growing reputation in the Canadian canon. Donoghue’s oeuvre is characterized by a constant crossing of the boundaries of genre, so critics have examined her early short-story collections like ­Kissing the Witch through a blend of traditions ranging from revisionist m ­ ythmaking and postmodern pastiche (García Zarranz, “Intertextuality”) to lesbian gothic fiction and contemporary queer writing (Orme). In this book, I focus on Donoghue’s ­post-2000 work given that in the last decade, and coinciding with the author’s move to Canada, her novels and short-story collections – especially The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002), Room (2010), and Astray (2012) – have shown a broader interest in addressing the historical complexity of borders under transnational and globalization processes. The texts under discussion here articulate a cross-border ethic that is not only understood as a transgressive force of resistance but also, at times, unavoidably complicit with certain global processes of uneven globalization. Donoghue’s work, for instance, could be accused of privileging mobility in ways synonymous to the elitist cosmopolitanism of current ideological discourses that signal the liberatory conditions of globalization. By showing this ambivalence, however, Donoghue’s creative endeavours propose a “contrapuntal reading,” in Said’s formulation of the term, that invites for a careful analysis of our own involvement in the reification of frontiers in the Global North

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14  TransCanadian Feminist Fictions

and Global South. Out of this awareness, in this book I seek to escape the glamour of easy globality to engage instead with the imperative to be attentive to the historical and the affective contingencies of border-crossing, which stands as an integral force in the ethic that these transCanadian writers are assembling.

C r o s s - B o r d e r M e t h odology TransCanadian Feminist Fictions is divided into three separate yet interconnected parts. The recursive structure is deliberate and serves a purpose – it echoes some of the key points that I raise in this book regarding the porosity and malleability of boundaries, and the unpredictable outcome of cross-border alliances between entities that might seem disparate at a first glance. For example, the main aim of the preface is to highlight the productive possibilities of unexpected cross-border collaborations, as Said and Barenboim’s artistic and personal friendship illustrates. Thus, while addressing the distinctiveness of each methodological section, I want to also emphasize the common theoretical roots and potential entanglements between the approaches employed. In this study I thus provide a transversal cross-border analysis in order to further understand transCanadian feminist literary productions at the turn of this messy but hopeful twenty-first century. In terms of an overarching methodological framework, I seek to intervene in the fields of transnational and border studies by combining critical approaches from material feminist theory and queer studies (Barad; Alaimo and Hekman; Freeman), critical race theory (Puar, Terrorist; R. Lee, Exquisite), nonhumanist political philosophy (De Landa; Foucault, Security, Discipline), and affect studies (Ahmed, Cultural, Queer; Stewart; Berlant, Cruel). Moreover, the cross-border ethic articulated here questions the limits of the category of the human, together with the humanist framework, understood by ­philosophers such as Rosi Braidotti (Posthuman) and Cary Wolfe as a normative civilizational model sustained by multiple exclusions. Thus, I here propose a careful consideration of posthumanist critical thought as a methodological tool from which to rethink the role of ethics in contemporary transCanadian fictions. In particular, I am interested in finding alliances between posthuman ecologies and other material feminist theories that propose alternative logics of corporeality and embodiment, allowing for the articulation of

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Introduction 15

cross-border ethical epistemologies and practices. The posthuman framework, in its multiple ramifications, cuts across corporeal, biopolitical, and affective boundaries simultaneously, and as such occupies a central position in the cross-border ethic formulated in this book. More specifically, the entangled methodological questions that fuel TransCanadian Feminist Fictions can be summed up as follows. In part 1, “Crossing the Borders of Corporeality,” I question how material feminist approaches, in their articulation of the contact zones between human and more-than-human worlds, allow for a reconfiguration of ethico-political boundaries. I here adopt the lenses of material feminist theory (Barad; Alaimo and Hekman) and critical race studies (Chow; R. Lee) to examine how transCanadian poets and writers such as Brand, Donoghue, and Goto question and rearticulate the boundaries of materiality, embodiment, and corporeality through the portrayal of the porous contact zones between human, natural, and nonhuman bodies. In chapter 1, I examine the representation of the racialized female body as a site of transcorporeal toxicity in Brand’s long poem Ossuaries. Also putting corporeal relations at the centre of attention, in chapter 2 I analyze how Goto’s young-adult novel Half World and short story “Stinky Girl” offer alternative possibilities for reconfiguring material-­ discursive apparatuses of bodily production by introducing a series of abjected populations that are granted the possibility to activate change. These texts propose a posthumanist cross-border ethic that interrogates how bodies shape and are shaped by other bodies, while simultaneously being involved, and at times complicit, in the circulation of affective economies of oppression and dominance. Further drawing on Michel Foucault’s insights on disciplinary power (Discipline), I articulate the concept of “corporeal citizenship” in chapter 3 to examine the reconfiguration of bodily and spatial borders in Donoghue’s bestselling novel Room. In related ways to Brand’s poetry, particularly with regards to the treatment of imprisonment and surveillance, the narrative also raises concerns about the impact of the war on terror on the bodies of so-called expendable populations. How did events such as 9/11 and its aftermath affect cultural practice within Canadian borders? What spaces of critique have been generated? What are the ethical responsibilities that writers face towards the politics of terror and fear that have shaped the

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16  TransCanadian Feminist Fictions

turn of the twenty-first century? In part 2, “Biopolitical BorderCrossings,” I draw upon Foucauldian theory of biopower (Sunder Rajan; Nadesan; Foucault, Security) to examine how transCanadian authors such as Goto, Donoghue, and Brand systematically interrogate, cross, and rearticulate a variety of biopolitical borders in their oeuvre in order to formulate new ethico-political paradigms. I open chapter 4 with a commentary on Goto’s children’s novel, The Water of Possibility, and discuss how the text critically engages with the crossing of biopolitical boundaries in an attempt to explore contemporary ethico-political issues of government, sovereignty, and power. Significantly, some of the abject bodies in Goto’s text not only manage to gain access to public political life, but also disrupt mechanisms of power and normative conduct. In chapter 5, I look at the representation of women’s bodies as a site of biocapital in Donoghue’s collection The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits. Stories such as “The Last Rabbit,” “Cured,” and “A Short Story” denounce, in various ways, the historical instrumentalization of women’s bodies in the hands of male authorities such as physicians or surgeons, who have systematically regulated female sexuality as a source of perversion. And yet, employing a similar strategy of resistance to Goto’s, some of the female characters in Donoghue’s collection exploit the biocapitalization of their bodies to their own benefit. Finally, I deploy Deleuzian-inflected queer and affect philosophy in chapter 6 to analyze Brand’s long poem Inventory in terms of necropower, as defined by Mbembe (“Necropolitics”) and Puar (Terrorist), and its ethical repercussions. By exposing how current processes of uneven globalization, racial profiling, and surveillance technologies sustain and reify biopolitical and necropolitical boundaries, I contend that Brand’s critique opens up spaces where an alternative cross-border ethic can be formulated. How does affect circulate across human and nonhuman materialities, shaping bodily and social spaces, and constantly displacing the subject/object dyad? How are contemporary transCanadian writers reimagining an affective archive by problematizing and redefining multiple boundaries beyond negative critique? In which ways is the affective realm intertwined with the economic, aesthetic, technological, and ethical spheres? Framed under recent interventions in the field of affect studies, particularly through queer and anti-racist analysis (Ahmed, Cultural, Queer; Stewart, Ordinary Affects; Berlant), in part 3, “Cross-Border Affects,” I focus on how twentyfirst-century transCanadian feminist writing proposes alternative

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Introduction 17

ways to interrogate and rearticulate the poetics and politics of affect. In chapter 7, I examine the circulation of affect in Brand’s memoir A Map to the Door of No Return. I borrow the concept “pathogeography” from the Feel Tank Chicago to look at how spaces such as the Black Atlantic are depicted in the text as cross-border geographies where loss and longing circulate in ambiguous ways. Similarly, Donoghue’s short stories in Astray, as I claim in chapter 8, assemble an affective archive that gathers in the very life and bodies of the subjects that live on the move. Donoghue crosses temporal boundaries, which helps to trace a genealogy of bodies gone astray and activates circuits of affect with ethical repercussions for migrants and other non-normative populations. To close this part, in chapter 9 I examine Goto’s novel Darkest Light, the companion to the earlier Half World. The narrative illustrates how necropolitical forces shape the circulation and reification of material borders, shunning certain expendable bodies from the possibility of sustaining affective communities. I here employ recent interventions in affect theory to examine how Goto’s novel proposes a posthumanist cross-border ethic as a strategy to counteract those necropolitical assemblages that seem to govern contemporary societies. Closing the book, in chapter 10 I engage with Lai’s poetry collection, Automaton Biographies, through a combination of the critical posthumanist and race theories of R. Lee in The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies and Braidotti in The Posthuman. Lai’s poetics problematize what I call the limitations of affect by introducing “rachel,” a racialized posthuman automaton, as a subject capable of embodying alternative ethicopolitical paradigms. In doing so, Lai poses a critique of masculinist and racist ontological conceptualizations of the subject as a way to advocate an ethic of inclusivity characterized by a redistribution of affect. Thus, Lai, in similar ways to other transCanadian authors such as Goto, not only interrogates the limits of the human, but also shows how affects are unevenly distributed among bodies and spaces with a number of important ethical consequences.

C r o s s - B o r d e r A rc h ives : N e w A s s e m b l a g e s , New Beginnings This book attempts to illustrate how contemporary transCanadian feminist writers are assembling a contested and shifting cross-­ border archive beyond conventional routes. Borrowing decolonial

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18  TransCanadian Feminist Fictions

critic Sneja Gunew’s words, authors such as Brand, Goto, Donoghue, and Lai “chart a course through the minefields of our transnational existence, illustrating new and flexible subjectivities that are surely our best chance for ethical and proximate survival amidst unequal global mobilities” (43). These writers’ cross-border assemblages open up a space where an alternative onto-­epistemological ethic can be formulated. Furthermore, I also propose to consider this book as an assemblage, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, where the critic engages with the work of the writer in the hope of participating in an exercise of collaboration through a shared interest in how borders shape, and often transform, bodily, social, and affective spaces. With this purpose, I have assembled a variety of literary, theoretical, and cultural artefacts that would otherwise be scattered; in this sense, this book mirrors the work examined, becoming a cross-border archive in itself. In the process, I have found unexpected alliances, productive differences, and unpredictable resemblances between these contemporary texts. In a way, this points back to this project’s preface where I contend that borders circulate in paradoxical ways, perhaps more pervasively in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In a 2013 keynote lecture, philosopher G.C. Spivak convincingly claims that we cannot afford a borderless world; and yet, she adds, “where there are walls, you must think borderlessness.” I believe that the writers analyzed in this book also tend to blur the constructed differentiation between theorist and writer in myriad ways. A careful reading of contemporary transCanadian feminist fictions has certainly enabled me to further comprehend how critical theory and cultural production are mutually informing. In this sense, I believe that literature can produce, and sometimes anticipate, innovative theoretical insights and philosophical approaches, and I admire these writers and poets particularly for that. In other words, I invite the reader to consider the figures of the writer and the critic, together with their oeuvre, as cross-border assemblages capable, through their collaboration, to remap alternative aesthetic, sociopolitical, and ethical routes.

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P ART O N E Crossing the Borders of Corporeality

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1 Trans-corporeal Materialities Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries she steps into another country, another constellation of bodies, her compass reset to what reckonings Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (120)

Toxic bodies may provoke material, trans-corporeal ethics that turn from the disembodied values and ideals of bounded individuals toward an attention to situated, evolving practices that have far-reaching and often unforeseen consequences for multiple peoples, species, and ecologies. Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (22)

The first decade of the twenty-first century has been dramatically shaped by a series of geopolitical events that partly originated in the aftermath of a post-9/11 scenario of destruction and death. Considering that nearly 3,000 people perished in the attacks, that many families received only body parts of their loved ones, and that 1.5 million tons of debris were pulled out of the site, I suggest referring to this material ethnoscape as one of monstrous trans-­ corporeality – a “time-space where human corporeality, in all its material fleshiness, is inseparable from ‘nature’ or ‘environment’” (Alaimo, “Trans-corporeal” 238). However, as philosopher Slavoj Žižek contends in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, coverage of streets filled with soot and rubble consciously avoided displaying footage of the actual carnage, in contrast to common coverage of disasters and conflicts happening in the so-called Third World (13). Mostly

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22  Crossing the Borders of Corporeality

through mediated ways, millions of people witnessed the US superpower become vulnerable to external threats, thus generating a sense of collective trauma. And yet, in a perverse turn of events, the 9/11 attacks granted the country illegal military nation-building interventions and foreign policy actions self-justified under the ­supposedly unavoidable war on terror that has contributed to the uneven restructuring of the world for the last fifteen years. This ongoing war has been accompanied by a “rhetoric of mass deception,” as Larissa Lai aptly puts it (Automaton 62), characterized by such vicious sentences as enduring freedom, infinite justice, state of exception, and the threat of bioterrorism. In this climate of fear, endless references to toxic bacteria, virus, disease, contagion, and suspicious liquids have permeated both political and cultural discourse as a strategy to manage those disposable, and often racialized, populations, such as the refugee or the migrant, who do not conform to normative conceptualizations of the subject. This toxic post-9/11 context, now intensified by the threat of global terrorism after the 11M Madrid (2004), London (2005), and Paris (2015) attacks, has enabled the dissemination of intensified biopolitical mechanisms of control that help regulate those the state perceives as undesirable and thus expendable bodies. In other words, today’s age of global crisis has become characterized by the proliferation of what anthropologist Ghassan Hage calls “anthrax-culture” that “prevails when a generalised culture of ‘threat’ permeates the whole society” (45). Here, Hage continues, “the national interior becomes subverted; the citizens begin to perceive everything and everywhere as a threat, as a border; a supposed Islamic threat on the border becomes an Islamic threat everywhere. Every breath of fresh air becomes imagined as a line behind which the enemy (always ready to infiltrate the nation) lurks” (46). As I contend in this book, one of the results of this politics of fear, which has spread far beyond the frontiers of the United States, has been the systematic reconfiguration of corporeal, biopolitical, and affective borders with long-lasting ethical repercussions. In an attempt to address and counteract some of these hegemonic structures of power, many twenty-first-century transCanadian activists and writers have voiced their strong opposition to such strategies of domination and control. Let me begin the discussion by posing a few open questions: how did 9/11 and the subsequent war on terror shape the ways bodies are produced and policed? How can ethical

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Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries 23

and aesthetic approaches help us understand the complexity of material borders in this age of paranoia and fear? In order to begin to shape some tentative answers to these complex concerns, I turn to recent interventions in material feminist theory – a transdisciplinary field that advocates new ontologies from which to readdress ethical and sociopolitical relations and practices. Material feminist theory distinguishes itself from the tradition of materialist feminism in several ways. As feminist theorists Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman explain in the introduction to their edited collection Material Feminisms, materialist feminism comes from a Marxist tradition that focuses on labour and class relations, whereas material feminism draws on the traditions of corporeal feminism, science studies, and environmental feminism to explore how the discursive and the material interact in the constitution of natural, human, and nonhuman bodies. Prioritizing the ethical, material feminist theories stress the need to rethink the interactions between “culture, history, discourse, technology, biology, and the ‘environment,’ without privileging any one of these elements” (Alaimo and Hekman 7) in an attempt to articulate alternative, and often unexpected, political coalitions and alliances. In her discussion on trans-corporeality, Alaimo, for instance, calls for a theoretical rearticulation of the contact zones between human corporeality and the more-than-human worlds so as to situate materiality at the centre of feminist analysis. As such, trans-corporeality also becomes a theoretical site where “corporeal theories, environmental theories, and science studies meet and mingle in productive ways” (Bodily 3). Along similar lines, feminist philosopher and physicist Karen Barad contends: What is needed is a robust account of the materialization of all bodies – “human” and “nonhuman” – and the material-­ discursive practices by which their differential constitutions are marked. This will require an understanding of the nature of the relationship between discursive practices and material phenomena, an accounting of “nonhuman” as well as “human” forms of agency, and an understanding of the precise causal nature of productive practices that takes account of the fullness of ­matter’s implication in its ongoing historicity. (810) In order to question the supremacy of language and culture over matter, Barad articulates a posthumanist notion of performativity

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24  Crossing the Borders of Corporeality

that interrogates the assumptions around given differences between human and nonhuman categories. In an attempt to reinvigorate interdisciplinary approaches, feminist science studies critic Nancy Tuana also urges all theorists to embrace an ontology that rematerializes the social and takes the agency of the natural seriously, underscoring what she calls the “viscous porosity” between humans and the environment; between social practices and natural phenomena (188). As these material feminist theorists convincingly argue, the literal “contact zone” between human, natural, and ­nonhuman materialities would allow for the emergence of non-­ normative ethical and political subjects, relations, and positions. The rendering of material borders as productive sites of invention and intervention is also a constant in the work of contemporary transCanadian feminist writers, who imagine novel representations of corporeality and forms of embodiment in an attempt to develop alternative ethical and political frameworks. Dionne Brand’s fictional landscapes have been saturated by a sense of loss and desolation, particularly in her examinations of racist, nationalistic, and sexist structural violences within the Canadian context. As literary critic Cheryl Lousley claims, Brand’s oeuvre shows “an attention to  the violent exclusions enacted through normalizing universals, such as standard English, Canadian national identity and heterosexuality, and an acute interrogation of the danger yet necessity of collective identities for political mobilization” (38). Brand’s recent work, though still unravelling such environmental, cultural, and political ruptures, now further problematizes the impact of transnational and globalization impulses on the bodies of racialized populations under processes of rampant technocapitalism. In her discussion of extra-human subjectivity in Brand’s novel What We All Long For, Lai claims that “Brand offers us a glimmer of hope by constructing the citizen-subject-reader in a profound historical, bodily, and blood kinship with those whom the state, through the logic of exception, seeks to exclude” (Slanting I 35). I will address the complicated question of hope in Brand’s work more fully in my discussion of affect in part 3. In this chapter, I want to tease out how these historical, material, and bodily processes that Lai points out become intimately intertwinned with technological and environmental impulses in Brand’s work. With this purpose, I want to offer a material feminist reading of Brand’s long poem Ossuaries. Yasmine, the central figure in the text, embodies a trans-corporeal toxicity

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Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries 25

inscribed by the violence of multiple histories and discourses across different temporal and spatial frameworks. As Alaimo convincingly contends: “By emphasizing the movement across bodies, trans-­ corporeality reveals the interchanges and interconnections between human corporeality and the more-than-human. But by underscoring that ‘trans’ indicates movement across different sites, trans-­ corporeality opens up an epistemological ‘space’ that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors” (“Trans-corporeal” 238). I argue that Brand’s poem brings the paradoxical nature of trans-corporeality to the forefront by providing a material feminist account of the intimate, and sometimes deadly, outcomes of the crossing of material borders, particularly for the racialized female body. By dealing with the permeability of boundaries between the human body, technology, and the natural world as a site of interconnectedness, agency, and dependency, the poem provides a material feminist critique of the ethical and political impact of current hegemonic structures and practices of power. Ossuaries opens with an image of environmental toxicity where the narrative persona looks at the past as a site of contaminated dreams and imprisonment. This exercise of looking back, of tracing the past, is not nostalgic, since the sense of violence and paralysis is  rendered as never-ending. Racialized and other “minoritized” populations (R. Lee 235) have historically endured a genealogy of ­toxicity and trauma, exacerbated by multiple biopolitical mechanisms of control whose function is precisely to sustain those systemic violences. These disposable bodies consequently bear the material trace of such ruptures: let us begin from there, restraining metals covered my heart, rivulets of some unknown substance transfused my veins at night, especially at night, it is always at night, a wall of concrete enclosed me, it was impossible to open my eyes I lived like this as I said without care, tanks rolled into my life, grenades took root in my uterus, I was sickly each morning, so dearly1 (11)

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26  Crossing the Borders of Corporeality

References to bodily organs collapse with material objects that saturate the woman’s body with a multitude of toxic materialities. As a result, it is not a foetus but grenades that grow in Yasmine’s uterus, thus disallowing the possibility of reproduction for the human species. Queer theorist Wendy Pearson claims that the pregnant body is a public body in the sense that it is the locus of future citizens and nations. As Pearson contends, “the ownership of national futurity by iconic citizens erases the possibility that racialized and sexualized bodies can themselves bear futurity” (78). In contrast to Hiromi Goto’s work, Brand seems reluctant to read this lack of futurity as a potential site for alternative futures. The precarious female body in the long poem is scarred by the violent traces of history; it is debilitated – which for gender theorist Margrit Shildrick entails “to never reach the putative security of corporeal, affective and cognitive standards of flourishing” (14) – and exhausted after centuries of exploitation; it is forever rendered unproductive. The result, Brand suggests, is that there is no escape from this barrenness; there is no space for an alternative futurity. In related ways to Emma Donoghue’s novel Room, which I shall discuss in chapter 3, Brand’s Ossuaries depicts a landscape populated by bodies that are not only presented as wasted and toxic, but also subjected to systems of surveillance and imprisonment: an arm electrified and supplicant, spiked with nuclear tips, its transmutation in the verdant shoulder of penitentiaries to come, who would mistake these wounds, who call these declarations nothing, these tender anatomies (85) The reference to tenderness in the last stanza suggests certain innocence and redemption for humanity, despite our characteristic impulse for destruction and annihilation. And yet, Brand resists giving these tender anatomies hope, as the rest of the poem illustrates. In her discussion of the material agency of multiple chemical sensitivity, Alaimo suggests that toxic bodies are potentially able to generate counter-hegemonic versions of history: “Thinking through toxic bodies allows us to reimagine human corporeality, and materiality itself, not as a utopian or romantic substance existing prior to social inscription, but as something that always bears the trace of

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Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries 27

history, social position, region, and the uneven distribution of risk” (“Trans-corporeal” 261). In related ways, Brand’s poems are characterized by a nonlinear sense of time, together with a transnational sense of space, where bodies have been abused through history’s perversities across past, present, and future geo-temporalities. The central character, Yasmine, not only traces a genealogy that challenges chronological temporal frameworks, but also moves across a multiplicity of spatial locations, thus infusing the collection with a general sense of wandering and purposelessness. Her dislocation and strangeness, however, allow her to summarize the world, as she puts it, in similar fashion to the unnamed central character in Brand’s long poem Inventory. Both female figures generate a political and material archive that reflects the trans-corporeal materialities that permeate today’s contaminated world. The contradiction here lies in the fact that this apparent lack of purpose is systematically counteracted by the imperative to undo, in Penelopian fashion: “this is how she wakes each day of each underground year,/… the atmosphere coaxed to visible/molecules, definite arrangements of walls and doors/… how then to verify her body, rejuvenate the blood-dead/arm, quell her treacherous stomach …/but where was she, which city, what street/… the prepositions are irrelevant today, whichever house,/which century, wherever she was” (Ossuaries 22, 23, 26). The need to unravel fuses Brand’s poems with a queer rendering of time that challenges what Freeman calls “chrononormativity” – or “the use of time to refer to  individual human bodies toward maximum productivity” (3). Instead, Ossuaries inscribes nonsequential forms of temporality, allowing gaps, ruptures, and fissures to disrupt naturalized conceptualizations of history as a linear entity. This queer sense of time in the poem also permeates spatiality. The ongoing deterritorialization and reterritorialization of space in the poem is, interestingly, combined with a strong sense of location. In A Thousand Plateaus, philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari highlight the mutual dependency of these processes in the constitution of the subject understood as a complex assemblage of forces and intensities always in the process of becoming: “How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterritorialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one another?” (10). Along these lines, I suggest that Brand’s poetry manages to negotiate seemingly contradictory strategies like the deterritorialization of space with a

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redefinition of a politics of location for queer and other non-­ normative subjects. I therefore call for a theorization of a deterritorialized politics of location to decipher how Brand incorporates these apparently conflicting devices in her work.2 What I previously referred to as the queer rendering of time and space that typifies the beginning of Ossuaries suddenly clashes with the explicit reference to the twin towers, thus localizing the narrative in a crucial moment and place in recent history: 9/11 in Manhattan: the spectacular buildings falling limpid, to nothing, rims, aluminum, windowless, fragile staircases, she wanted, wanted to whisper into telephones it’s done, someone had done it, someone, had made up for all the failures, she looked, pitiless, at the rubble, the shocked … the flights of starlings interrupted, the genocides of September insects, … here’s to the fatal future (26, 27) The image of the “powdering towers” encapsulates a variety of ­discourses and materialities such as the vulnerability of solid contained spaces, the boundaries of material objects, and the pervasiveness of imprisonment and surveillance in our globalized world. Once the towers fall, what remains is rendered in terms of destruction, desolation, and loss. The inevitable absence that characterized ground zero for a time further suggests an openness of boundaries, together with the triumph of the unexpected and unpredictable. Containment, control, and power proved to be an ephemeral illusion that vanished in minutes only giving way to the absence of presence and the presence of ghosts. Brand’s scenario is saturated by the collapse of material human bodies with concrete, glass, dirt, and other chemical materials; a trans-corporeal landscape understood as “an ontological orientation that expresses the imbrication of human and nonhuman natures. It denies the myth that human bodies are discrete in time and space, somehow outside of the natural milieu that sustains them and indeed transits through them” (Neimanis and Walker 563); a toxic space where the future is only understood backwards.

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Notwithstanding the fact that 9/11 was primarily experienced through the medium of television, Brand insists on portraying the  trans-corporeal materiality of such an event in history, hence reminding readers of the unavoidable relationship between the human and the more-than human worlds. Drawing on physicist Niels Bohr’s insights, Barad explains how “‘we’ are not outside observers of the world. Nor are we simply located at particular places in the world; rather, we are part of the world in its ongoing intra-activity” (828). Barad thus breaks down the binary opposition human versus nonhuman and instead advocates a materialist approach to the world’s becoming. Brand’s poetry similarly problematizes the complex entanglements and dependencies between human and more-than-human corporealities in an attempt to raise a series of political and ethical issues. In doing so, as critical race scholars Katherine McKittrick and Rinaldo Walcott claim, Brand “provides her readers with the opportunity to imagine another world in which human and other life forms are conceived as central to our well-being beyond the realm of their exploitability” (7). Yet, it is not any body but the racialized female body that appears at the centre of material, social, natural, and cultural processes in Ossuaries. And the traumas that her body incorporates leave marks that remain, so no redemption seems possible: the crate of bones I’ve become, good I was waiting to throw my limbs on the pile, the mounds of disarticulated femurs and radii but perhaps we were always lying there, dead on our feet and recyclable, toxic and imperishable … each bone has lost dialectic now, untranslatable though I had so many languages (49–50) Despite the feelings of despair and purposelessness that Yasmine experiences, the trans-corporeality of the body remains, leaving readers with uncertain feelings about their place in history and a subsequent sense of collective crisis. What happens, on the other hand, to the materiality of language? As discussed earlier, material feminist theorists contend that language has been granted too much power, and so they advocate a

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material turn in feminist theory: “The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every ‘thing’ – even materiality – is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation … Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter” (Barad 801). In related ways, Ossuaries calls for an interrogation of language and master narratives through a reconfiguration of what constitutes corporeality – in its multifaceted trans-corporeal spheres – at the turn of the twenty-first century: “after consideration you will discover, as I,/that verbs are a tragedy, a bleeding cliffside, explosions,/I’m better off without …/a promise of blindness, a lover’s clasp of/violent syntax and the beginning syllabi of verblessness” (14, 20). Notice how the narrator’s loss of sight and name is accompanied by a mistrust for linguistic structures. Then, what kind of alternative discourses should be used? What is the solution for despair? Brand seems to suggest that neither trauma nor mourning are enough for political transformation: “and she had mourned enough for a thousand/broken towers, her eyesight washed immaculate and/caustic, her whole existence was mourning, so what?” (30). The usefulness of mourning is questioned here in that it seems to lead to a lack of political and ethical action. In the essay “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” philosopher Judith Butler asks a crucial question that can be applied to Brand’s narrative: “Is there something to be learned about the geopolitical distribution of corporeal vulnerability from our own brief and devastating exposure to this condition?” (Precarious 29). This vulnerability is exacerbated under certain social and political conditions, particularly when violence is a way of life. Arguably, Butler claims that grief and loss, instead of leading to passive powerlessness, can lead to a sense of human vulnerability where collective responsibility for each other’s physical lives is experienced. In related ways to Goto’s young-adult fictions, Brand’s poetry, however, suggests that human beings as such form a paradoxical community where no clear boundaries between victims and perpetrators are delineated: “if we could return through this war, any war,/as if it were we who needed redemption,/instead of this big world, our ossuary” (82). In Brand’s poetic oeuvre, human beings are systematically exposed to violence, while simultaneously complicit in it.

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In similar fashion to Lai’s provocative poetry collection Automaton Biographies, as I will discuss at the end of this book, Brand’s Inventory and Ossuaries introduce several female figures that problematize the role of bearing witness to the contemporary world. Which populations are allowed to bear witness today? Are these women portrayed as mere spectators who indulge in voyeuristic pleasure? Are they instead alternative populations capable of introducing new ways to engage with today’s panorama of global crises? In order to transform contemporary evils in society, it is not enough to “change the bourgeois state,” the narrative voice in Ossuaries explains, you have to “bring it down” (29). This call for action introduces a shift in the tone of the poem, providing the characters portrayed with a higher degree of social and political agency. Inspired by the riots in Egypt in 1977, the woman now has awakened from her slumber: “conscious as bees,/to the finest changes of sound,/and shadow, sweat and heat, she knows what she is to do” (46). Interestingly, the anti-government protesters in Egypt in the Bread Uprising denounced the corruption that characterized the political situation at the time, when the population was punished with the elimination of public subsidies. Months after Ossuaries was published, the 2011 Egyptian revolution began, again a popular spontaneous uprising to protest a series of political and legal inequalities and injustices. The timing is relevant here in that Brand’s poems somehow bridge a series of political events that happened in the late 1970s with the contemporary moment, establishing a genealogy of revolutionary practices and resistances; a trans-corporeal temporality where “everything has a trace, an echo, a past” (Neimanis and Walker 571). Current global phenomena such as the Arab Spring or the worldwide Occupy movements illustrate how collective action is every day present, thus allowing for the appearance of a series of practices of freedom and resistance. As part of the 99%, the underground activist in Ossuaries is fully aware of the axis of differentiation that excludes her from public visibility and discourses: “Yasmine knows in her hardest heart,/that truth is worked and organized by some,/and she’s on the wrong side always” (53). An eternal migrant, Yasmine finds herself yet again in a different location; this time in an unidentified North American urban space where she reflects on the toxic relationship she has had with a man. Surrounded by this city’s “calculus of right

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and left angles” (55), this woman reflects on the death of love and the power dynamics involved in her heterosexual relationship: how she’d become, some receptacle for his spit, his sperm, his combed-out hair, the shavings of his fingernails, each liquid phrase he had uttered, she had drowned, in the shell of her ear, until his voice seemed to come from her … she’d pinned her life to his existence when what she wanted was to be at the crossing (57, 58, my emphasis) Yasmine’s identity had become exclusively defined by this male figure and his bodily waste, which slowly intoxicated her body, symbolically leading her into a paralyzed existence. Instead, she longs for a cross-border subjectivity; a life “at the crossing,” where new possibilities of struggle might emerge. The woman’s constant nomadic movement across time and space systematically underscores her singularity, and thus calls into question notions of political collectivity and community. Ossuaries, then, seems to suggest that we are living in an age of impossible intimacies where love and life can only exist in opposition: “to love is an impediment to this hard business/of living/so I cannot have loved, not me” (34). Yasmine’s experience of life is one of survival; a life where prisons and bars prevail, and therefore disallow the possibility of love. This lack of love exceeds the human world and spills into the natural sphere, which has also severely suffered its effects: the human skin translucent with diesel, the lemon trees’ inadvertent existences, the satellite whales, GP S necklaces of dolphins and turtles what can I say truly about the lungs alveoli of plastic ornaments, erupting, without oxygen (69)

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Notice the trans-corporeal qualities of the scene portrayed here where the technological, human, and animal worlds collide, pointing to the negative consequences of excessive industrialization on both human and nonhuman bodies. In her discussion of what she terms “plastic flesh,” Tuana reminds us that the porosity between human and nonhuman agents can allow us to flourish but it can also kill us (198). Along similar lines, Brand’s poetry depicts a landscape of trans-corporeality where human and more-than-human materialities collapse with multiple political and ethical repercussions. Does Ossuaries therefore suggest that there is no room for shared intimacies nowadays? If this is the case, it could be argued, in turn, that a politically and ethically efficient sense of collective community is yet to come (Derrida and Ferraris). Within this space of possibility, a material feminist approach could provide us with a critical lens from which to examine how contemporary transCanadian feminist writers are beginning to envision new articulations of corporeality in today’s landscape of global crises. Material feminists, together with other feminist theorists of the body, strive for “definitions of human corporeality that can account for how the discursive and the material interact in the constitution of bodies” (Alaimo and Hekman 7). In related ways, Brand’s Ossuaries offers novel possibilities of reconfiguring material-­discursive apparatuses of bodily production by introducing a series of abjected and deviant populations that are granted the possibility to  activate change. The revolutionary figure of Yasmine advocates alternative ways to comprehend human corporeality as a trans-­corporeal site that becomes inextricably linked to other material bodies. Through this interrogation of corporeal borders – where questions about the intertwined relationality between bodily, environmental, and technological processes are raised – Ossuaries posits a feminist anti-racist critique of current issues such as the impact of economic globalization on environmental degradation and the bodies of racialized populations. In this process, the representation of figures like Yasmine help expose crucial ethical concerns about how the lives of certain valuable subjects are sustained, while paradoxically being immune, to the expendable lives of other disposable populations. In the conclusion to The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies, Rachel C. Lee pertinently refers to “the

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fetishizing and continuing materialization of immunity” as “the disobliging of privileged sectors (whether nominated bios, the white property-possessing liberal subject, the colonial settler, or homo sapiens) from the collective, the munis, and the entangled bank of human and non­human lives. Immunity both allows for and puts ‘positive’ valence –  for the good, for better health –  to regarding sectors of world populations as discardable; their biological ­ encroachment must be murderously defended against” (223). In order to comprehend how this vicious immunity works, it is key to envision a new cross-border ethic from where to challenge the supremacy of the liberal subject and the humanist framework, which is sustained by “lethal exclusions and fatal disqualifications” (Braidotti, Posthuman 15). Material feminist approaches, such as the ones described in this chapter, begin to trace, in my view, a posthumanist ethics in their focus on the porosity of boundaries between human and more-than-human materialities, thus shattering the perverse culture versus nature divide. The concept of transcorporeality, for instance, can contribute to the formulation of a  posthumanist environmental ethics, as Alaimo aptly contends (Bodily 142). In these cross-border ecologies, the bounded liberal individual is displaced given that “once enmeshed in a world of more-than-human, trans-corporeal transits, it is impossible to maintain a human exceptionalism on the grounds of agency” (Neimanis and Walker 564). TransCanadian feminist poets further problematize these complex cross-border assemblages by insisting on the centrality of race and processes of racialization in any reconceptualization of the relationality between human and more-than-human corporealities in a moment of rampant neoliberalism. In doing so, their work, as I will further argue in the remainder of this book, begins to shape a new posthumanist cross-border ethic with cultural and sociopolitical repercussions.

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2 Unruly Corporealities Hiromi Goto’s Hopeful Fictions A wet crack! Mr Glueskin, hard as a peach pit, split wide open to reveal the tender centre … He had no entrails or bones; he was solid white all the way through. And in splitting he had exposed a small baby. Hiromi Goto, Half World (174)

Viscous porosity helps us understand an interactionist attention to the processes of becoming in which unity is dynamic and always interactive and agency is diffusely enacted in complex networks of relations. Nancy Tuana, “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina” (188–9)

Twenty-first-century transCanadian feminist writers and poets are ushering in new material representations of corporeality and alternative forms of embodiment in an attempt to develop counter-­ hegemonic ethical and political frameworks. The fictional worlds these authors portray are saturated by a paradoxical mixture of impossibility and hope, devastation and persistence, desperation and desire. It is precisely in the liminal spaces between these binary opposites; in the borders, in the frontiers, where these writers have found the productive potential for creative, political, and ethical intervention in today’s messy world. One of these liminal spaces, or contact zones, as material feminist theorists convincingly put it, can be found in the porosity between human, nonhuman, and morethan-human material bodies, as well as in the transgression of the borders of corporeality.

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In her discussion of trans-corporeality as a posthumanist mode of new materialism, Stacy Alaimo explains how “as the material self cannot be disentangled from networks that are simultaneously economic, political, cultural, scientific, and substantial, what was once the ostensibly bounded human subject finds herself in a swirling landscape of uncertainty where practices and actions that were once not even remotely ethical or political matters suddenly become the very stuff of the crises at hand” (Bodily 20). Seeking to trace the genealogy of this “bounded human subject,” together with certain humanist ideals, I here turn to Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man from the late fifteenth-century where the category of “the Human,” in capital letters, stands for a highly restricted definition of “Man”: male, white, European, citizen, secular, able-bodied. This ideal Renaissance Human has historically functioned as a standard of perfectibility, unavoidably promoting a liberal individualistic view of the subject (Wolfe xiii). As Rosi Braidotti bluntly puts it in The Posthuman, this Human is thus “a normative convention, which does not make it inherently negative, just highly regulatory and hence instrumental to practices of exclusion and discrimination” (26). The multiple exclusions intrinsic to this humanist model become the point of departure for my examination of how corporeal borders are depicted in Hiromi Goto’s Half World. Marketed as a youngadult novel, the narrative introduces readers into a cross-border space where material, bodily, and affective boundaries are portrayed as porous and malleable. The novel mixes human characters that live in the Realm of Flesh  with monstrous beings living in Half World where they are condemned to endlessly experience their most traumatic event. I here argue that by addressing how this porosity affects the bodies of human and nonhuman populations, Goto, in a similar fashion to what she does in the collection Hopeful Monsters, contributes to current material feminist discourses on posthuman corporeality ­ and embodiment. Moreover, these texts question and challenge the treatment of abjected bodies – those who do not conform to normative standards of race, class, gender, age, or sex – as expendable.1 Instead, Goto grants them the ability to activate change through their “unruly materiality,” a concept understood by Alaimo as “a kind of deviance, in the sense that bodies and human substances may depart from norms, standards, and models of prediction” (Bodily 116). These deviant bodies, I argue, offer novel ways to think

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about the inseparability of the material, the bodily, and the affective from the biopolitical terrains with vital ethical implications. The protagonist in Half World, fourteen-year-old Melanie, lives with her single mother on the edges of a polluted North American city, presumably Vancouver. From the beginning of the narrative, Melanie’s mother, Fumiko, is presented as having an unidentified sickness that paralyzes her body: “She couldn’t keep a job for longer than a few months before her body broke and she had to rest in bed for several weeks. For a while Melanie had worried that her mum had leukemia or cancer, maybe AID S , but when she forced her to go to a clinic all the tests turned out negative” (17). The racialized working-class female body is here subjected to the toxicity of the multiple environments that surround it, which brings the threatening presence of disease and contamination over human corporeality to the narrative’s forefront. This overwhelming toxicity extends to the desolate landscape portrayed at the opening of Half World: “Industrial cranes, with their bright orange legs and long necks, looked like mechanical giraffes … the water was filthy with chemicals, tanker sludge and heavy metals” (17). The technological, human, and animal worlds collide in these spaces, pointing to the negative, and often deadly, consequences of excessive industrialization on human and nonhuman bodies. And this is an everyday reality for Melanie’s mother and many other low-income populations subjected to high levels of toxic material in their work places or cities. The novel here begins to offer a posthumanist critique that encourages readers to consider the impact of economic globalization on environmental degradation, material bodies, and other organisms. It is key to draw attention to the fact that these material bodies are often racialized others, together with what Rachel C. Lee calls the “minoritized, not-quite-person” (235) – the “disabled, diseased, or virally positive, impoverished, imprisoned, and otherwise debilitated classes” (57). Both the racialized and sexualized body, Wendy Pearson contends, “exist within variably disjunctive relationships to the metonymic ‘body’ of the nation, i.e. the ‘body politic,’ which is also the body of the iconic citizen” (77). From the publication of the acclaimed novel Chorus of Mushrooms, Goto’s oeuvre has shown an ongoing preoccupation with how queer and racialized bodies embody the potential for becoming productive bodies in spite of being subjected to multiple forms of abjection and invisibility. In

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Half World, Melanie is portrayed as an outsider to the world in which she lives. Systematically called a “retard” and “fat” by her schoolmates, she inhabits the margins of society, finding comfort only when she visits an old bookstore on the outskirts of the city or when she watches the crows that often fly around her. Likewise, the main character in the short story “Stinky Girl” is a thirty-three-year-old woman who lives in a trailer with her mother and spends her time wandering through malls, observing a culture of decay and analyzing the devastating effects of consumerism on the human race. Often subjected to derogatory looks from people, she describes herself as a “fat coloured rat girl” (44). I want to emphasize the relevance of the visual in these passages where the politics of the gaze becomes inseparable from processes of racialization. In the study on the politics of the visible in Asian American and Asian Canadian populations, literary and cultural critic Eleanor Ty discusses how the body of racialized subjects occupies a paradoxical position in society given that its corporeality is often hyper-visible only at the expense of rendering the rest of the qualities invisible. Writing about Canada’s Trudeau era of the 1960s and 1970s, Ty contends: “We have been invisible, yet we have been branded as ‘­visible’ and minor” (4). Self-identified as Stinky Girl, the story’s first-person narrator is judged by her size and race, and yet she is rendered invisible as a result of not sticking to certain normative structures that determine which bodies are normal and which bodies are deviant. I will refer to these bodies as “phantom bodies” in that in spite of their hyper-visible materiality, it is their deviance from the norm that reduces their agency into merely haunting presences. Significantly, Stinky Girl never purchases any material objects, but only analyzes the ethics of the mall culture, with a high level of irony, through the act of walking: My forays there are part of an ongoing study of the plight of human existence in a modern colonized country. A mall is the microcosm, the centrifugal force in a cold country where much of the year is sub-zero in temperature. The mall reveals the dynamics of the surrounding inhabitants. Yes, the habits of the masses can be revealed in the Hudson’s Bay department store and in the vast expanses of a Toys ‘R’ Us where hideously greedy children manipulate T V dinner divorcees into making purchases with the monetary equivalence to feeding a small village for a week. (45)

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Stinky Girl experiences isolation by exposing herself to hordes of people in a mall. In contrast, Melanie enjoys spending time in a park near the train tracks where she is alone, contemplating movement from a removed position of stasis. Often experiencing “pangs of longing” (23), Melanie is also a lonely teenager who deviates from the norm. Even though they are exposed to different public spaces, the effect in both cases is similar: these two female characters long for change in their lives, and crave access to intimacy. In “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” cultural theorist Lauren Berlant begins to tease out one of the many dimensions of intimacy as “an aspiration for a narrative about something shared” (281). This intricate relationality between discourse, storytelling, collectivity, and affect interests me for an analysis of the porosity of boundaries in Goto’s work. The young protagonists in these fictions become hopeful beings with a renewed sense of agency through the development of shared knowledges and affects towards other communities and their own material bodies. Melanie’s only friend is Ms Wei, an old lesbian who owns a bookstore at the Rainbow Market. She is described as someone who would not give hugs and who advises Melanie against the potential toxicity of the human body: “There is a natural acid on hands, on the skin [Ms Wei explains as she carefully opens the folder], if they touch ancient things with their skin they can damage it” (38). Ms Wei used to be an archivist before she immigrated to Canada, presumably the place where sections of the novel take place. And yet, despite the lack of physicality, Ms Wei manages to establish bonds of intimacy with Melanie through the exchange of knowledge and experience. When Melanie finds out that her mother has disappeared, Ms Wei becomes her metaphorical fairy godmother, providing Goto’s heroine with a space of safety and possibility. This encounter echoes traditional tales in which the protagonist, lacking in strength and power, is assisted by outsider figures “who live on the border between wilderness and civilization, between village and woods, between the earthly world and the other sacred world” (Zipes 81). Goto goes a step further in the transgression of the often-­heterosexist ideology of traditional fairy and folk tales by introducing a lesbian immigrant woman as the figure of the helper in Melanie’s journey. The novel then follows Melanie’s endeavours to rescue her missing mother, who has been kidnapped and taken to a different spatiotemporal universe. With a series of magical objects and animals, Melanie begins her journey to save her mother from the claws of

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Mr Glueskin, who has her trapped in Half World – a posthuman ethnoscape outside chrononormative time and space. Entering Half World is from the very first instance an experience about crossing not only spatial frontiers, but also the borders of material bodies. The heroine must literally walk through dead body parts in order to enter this new territory: “Something cracked and snapped beneath her runners. She stared at the ground. And finally saw … She wasn’t standing upon dry branches but upon the brittle finger bones of the people, the creatures who had sought entry into Half World before her” (60). Resembling the Bosch’s paintings that Melanie used to see hanging in her house, crossing the gate means entering a posthuman space populated by monstrous creatures living in despair in a liminal world without colour, condemned to experience their worst traumatic event eternally: “She continued with her descent, anchoring herself with the railing, as she continued to gaze upon the frightening dreamscape. As she neared the ground she could make out people, strangely shaped creatures dressed in human clothing, dogs endlessly chasing their own tails, a woman jumping into the canal, only to reappear on the worn paving stones, to jump again anew” (75). Caught in their Half Lives, these posthuman bodies die and return in an unbreakable pattern, repeating the cycle again and again. Half World is thus portrayed as a space saturated by troubled abject beings whose embodiment and corporeality are experienced in terms of lack, trauma, and fear. The bodies of these populations are often rendered disposable by normative structures of power, while simultaneously being consumed by the neoliberal machine that perpetuates a “global coloniality of being” (Tlostanova). In similar ways to Brand’s Ossuaries, Goto’s novel resists linear articulations of time and history. Instead, the narrative speculates about alternative futurities and territories populated by nonnormative or deviant populations. The monstrous creatures of Half World initially lack the potential to activate change because their bodies have been subjected to systematic trauma. These doomed populations are also terrorized by Mr Glueskin, a monstrous being that radically challenges normative models of corporeality. Nevertheless, the posthuman subjects in Half World, as we shall see, also embody the potential of the collective to transform these very structures through their unruliness, disobedience, and dissent. Writing within the textures of Hurricane Katrina and its brutal impact on New Orleans in 2005, Nancy Tuana elaborates an

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intriguing feminist onto-epistemology to analyze the inseparability of racial, economic, affective, and environmental processes. Tuana refers to the “viscous porosity” that characterized this event, boldly claiming that “the boundaries between our flesh and the flesh of the world we are of and in are porous” (198). This viscous porosity of bodies, Tuana insists, belies any effort to identify a natural divide between nature and culture. The concepts of viscosity and porosity resonate in Half World, particularly in the representation of the villain Mr Glueskin, a creature who has used his corporeal monstrosity as a form of power to control part of the population in his realm. Systematically swallowing other bodies, Mr Glueskin’s physicality is thus constructed through a variety of human and nonhuman materialities, also including skin, plastic, rubber, and glue: “His face was gaunt, but his skin seemed to hang from his bones, as if it were too loose. He wore a plastic raincoat that ended high above his skinny knees, and his stick-like legs were ensconced in large black rubber boots … His tongue extended across several metres” (82). The boundaries of his own corporeality are also loose, since he is described several times as looking pregnant. Mr Glueskin’s posthuman body lives outside national, sexual, and economic borders. And yet, this deviant body “is still saturated with the stories of humanity that circulate around it; it speaks through a language straddling the borders between health/sickness, male/female, real/imaginary” (Rabinowitz 98). As portrayed in Half World, this creature’s corporeality is not only scarred by the traumas that he had experienced for centuries, but also saturated by the multiple other body parts contained within his own materiality, owing to his cannibalistic impulses. Goto’s protagonists transform the construction of their phantom bodies into ones of unruly materiality in their potential for corporeal agency and productive knowledge. Stinky Girl establishes an intriguing connection between material objects and bodies, and the negative effects in the construction of human subjectivity and corporeality: “People generally believe that fatties secrete all sorts of noxious substances from their bodies. But regardless. The one bane of my life, the one cloud of doom which circumscribes my life is the odour of myself” (35). The narrator has internalized the feelings of revulsion and abjection that she has experienced in her own material body through her interactions with society, especially through her walks around the shopping mall: “When people see obesity, they are amazed. Fascinated. Attracted and repulsed

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simultaneously. Now if we could harness all the emotions my scale inspires, who knows how many homes it would heat, how many trains it would move? People always think there is a reason behind being grand. That there must be some sort of glandular problem, or an eating disorder, a symptom of some childhood trauma. All I can say is: not to my knowledge” (37). The very materiality of the woman’s body has the potential to become a productive source of energy and yet capitalist society constructs it as a source of negative affect.2 Being a witness and thus inevitably being part of the “human mall condition” she describes, the narrator, nonetheless, suddenly experiences a moment of hope and joy3 when she realizes that her odour is not smell, but sound: “The sounds that emanate from my skin are so intense that mortal senses recoil, deflect beauty into ugliness as a way of coping. Unable to bear hearing such unearthly sounds they transmute it into stench. And my joy! Such incredible joy. The hairs on my arms stand electric, the static energy and my smell/sound mix such dizzying intensity the plastic surrounding me bursts apart, falls away from my being like an artificial cocoon” (53). This woman’s indomitable corporeality now has the radical potential to affect the environment around her, shattering all those destructive sources that categorized her as an undesirable subject into pieces. Her vitalism allows her to mobilize a set of affective relations and access Life, which in Deleuzian philosophy is understood as an assemblage of intensities, where the forces of bios and zoe shape the social fabric of the world. In contrast to bios, which stands for the organic, political, and discursive portions of life reserved for anthropos, zoe refers to the affirmative power of human and nonhuman life; a vector of transformation, a conveyor or carrier that enacts in-depth transformations (Braidotti, Transpositions 84). Goto’s protagonist now embodies an unruly ­corporeality that opens up unpredictable scenarios and unexpected alliances. As Alaimo aptly contends: “Insisting upon the material agency of the body, as well as its ever-emergent intraactions, is one way to challenge rigid, bounded conceptions of corporeality” (170). Along these lines, Goto’s narrative successfully subverts an essentialist politics of the visible and substitutes it for a posthumanist ethics of resistance based on the malleability of bodily and affective boundaries. Likewise, there is a moment of affirmative desire at the end of Half World that is intricately linked to Melanie’s corporeal

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materiality and the natural world that surrounds her: “The fog squealed and screamed as it tried to pour into her nostrils, her ears and mouth. Melanie refused. She clung to herself and believed. Hope swelled inside her chest and broke free, streaming from her body in bright rays of light” (202). Previously, some of the strategic weapons that Melanie tried to use to rescue her mother also appealed to the power of the physical senses for recognition: “She glared at her mother, willing her to know her. Can’t you feel that it’s me! she begged internally. Can’t you see your own daughter, standing in front of you!” (127). Even though her mother does not seem to remember her, Melanie uses her own material corporeality as a  useful resource to recover memory and intimacy. Her mother, ­however, has been forced to lose hope as a result of Mr Glueskin’s control and manipulation. Trauma has paralyzed her, failing to recognize her own daughter. It is not until the villain is destroyed that the mother/daughter dyad can be restored. Mr Glueskin is finally disabled when Melanie throws buckets of ice onto his body until he loses all elasticity and his tongue breaks off. In an intriguing reversal, life instead of death emerges: “A wet crack! Mr Glueskin, hard as a peach pit, split wide open to reveal the tender centre … They stared, shocked, speechless … His hardened white body had cracked in two. He had no entrails or bones; he was solid white all the way through. And in splitting he had exposed a small baby” (174). His pregnancy transgresses a series of binary oppositions in terms of the nature/culture divide, together with a set of gender expectations. Furthermore, by making a villain posthuman creature bear the possibility of futurity, Goto challenges traditional definitions of the female body as primarily a reproductive body. Futurity in the novel is thus rearticulated through the transgression of several socially constructed boundaries, including those of gendered material bodies. Interestingly, this baby will be raised by a community of non-normative citizens that includes the young Melanie and the old lesbian woman, Ms Wei. In a sense, then, Baby G. embodies the combination of fear and yet hope that characterizes both Goto’s oeuvre and also contemporary times. In her discussion of posthumanist performativity, Karen Barad advocates a shift of attention from representation towards doings and actions. In this context, agency is also “about the possibilities and accountability entailed in reconfiguring material-discursive apparatuses of bodily production, including the boundary articulations

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and exclusions that are marked by those practices in the enactment of a causal structure” (827). As we have seen, Goto’s feminist fictions share this call for action where agency is always “diffusely enacted in complex networks of relations” (Tuana 188) that help shape and transform hegemonic depictions of racialized, queer, and other deviant bodies. This ethico-political struggle is particularly forceful considering that Half World was released as youngadult fiction. There is thus an intended idea of the responsibility towards inviting future generations to consider the importance of sustaining a call for action and for the importance of tracing a feminist genealogy for historical and political purposes. Far from being moralistic, the end of Half World provides an alternative ethical version of the happy ending tradition in the Western canon. Melanie has to get out of Half World, leaving her mother behind. Yet, her feminist influence will remain forever imprinted in her daughter’s life: “It is for you to choose what you will do with your Life … try to live it fully. Live as you are meant to live! Her mother’s Spirit was jubilant. Darling girl! What you have done! Know that the actions of one girl can change everything!” (206). Melanie will live without the physical presence of her parents but she will be surrounded by an alternative family structure that will also provide her with numerous forms of care and attachment. Interestingly, the last few words in the novel are uttered by a cat and a rat, who exchange an ironic conversation in the epilogue: “‘So the girl saves the Realms, loses her parents and ends up living with an old woman while they raise a baby,’ the white cat said snidely. ‘Human lives are so pitifully pedestrian … There is nothing spectacular about them. How awful it must be to be human.’ The rat opened wide her mouth and revealed her long incisors in a great rat grin. ‘Don’t be so certain,’ she said. ‘Sometimes endings are beginnings in the making’” (227–9). By granting the centrality of voice to nonhuman creatures in the last lines of the narrative, Goto further interrogates what it means to be human, the ethical responsibilities being human entails, and the potential for survival of human and nonhuman populations cohabiting under the pressures of an increasingly neoliberal world. This material feminist turn to ethics, with its intrinsic problematization and rearticulation of borders, becomes one of the central tenets in this book. A focus on corporeality – now read as alwaysalready trans-corporeal, unruly, and vitalist – allows me to find

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shared commonalities and unexpected alliances in the fictional worlds of contemporary transCanadian feminist writing. Brand’s cross-border poetics, Goto’s hopeful ethics, and Donoghue’s transhistorical assemblages, as I shall explore next, all attend to a renewed understanding of relationality beyond those lethal binaries that saturate our systems of thought and pervade everyday life with damaging consequences.

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3 Corporeal Citizenship Deviant Bodies in Emma Donoghue’s Room Humans and bees should just wave, no touching. No patting a dog unless its human says O K, no running across roads, no touching private parts except mine in private. Then there’s special cases, like police are allowed shoot guns but only at bad guys. Emma Donoghue, Room (274)

Thinking through deviation as both ideological and material, as both a form of critique and an ideal, may be less contradictory than it seems, if we consider deviation as a form of material/discursive agency of thoroughly embodied beings who are always inseparable from the environment. Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures (139)

In the study Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy, cultural critics Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin discuss the impact of globalization and institutional surveillance in contemporary Ireland, claiming that “the preoccupation with punishment and social control is an essential feature of the disciplining of populations if they are to be made to live with the economic, social and cultural consequences of aggressive neo-­ liberalism” (9). Particularly in the post-9/11 context, this insistence on discipline and punishment has functioned towards the control of populations and bodies through the application of surveillance technologies. A decade after the attacks, Canadian former prime minister Stephen Harper reflects on the impact of 9/11 in the following terms: “The war on terror, can it be won? … The truth of the

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matter is there’s so many different possibilities, manifestations of terrorism I think it is a case that we will have to be perpetually vigilant … and I just think that’s going to be an ongoing reality … that’s just life going forward in the 21st century, unfortunately” (Fitzpatrick). Harper’s cautionary words signal what has become a pervasive globalized agreement to regard systematic surveillance as the unavoidable formula to secure national safety against the threat of terrorism. The promise of security is nonetheless sustained through a politics of fear, as I discussed earlier, where the bodies of deviant populations – that is, queer, racialized, poor, migrant – become the ultimate target of new regulatory biopolitical apparatus. In the influential study Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, gender theorist Jasbir Puar examines what she calls the “convivial” relations “between queernesses and militarism, securitization, war, terrorism, surveillance technologies, empire, torture, nationalism, globalization, fundamentalism, secularism, incarceration, detention, deportation, and neoliberalism: the tactics, strategies, and logistics of our contemporary war machines” (xiv). It is the porosity between these bodily, biopolitical, and affective processes, together with their representation in literary and cultural production, that informs my analysis of corporeal borders – as malleable, porous, and viscous entities – in the work of contemporary transCanadian feminist writers. In particular, I want to focus on how some of the contemporary war machines enumerated by Puar function in paradoxical ways, systematically policing, while simultaneously producing, undesirable subjects and populations. It is against the backdrop of this post-9/11 obsession with deviant corporealities that I want to contextualize my discussion of IrishCanadian author Emma Donoghue and her controversial 2010 novel Room. Translated into thirty-five languages and turned into an Oscarnominated movie (2015), Donoghue’s novel has sold over two million copies since its publication, becoming a bestseller within and beyond Canadian frontiers. Winner of the Canada and Caribbean Regional Commonwealth Prize for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (for best Canadian novel), and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Governor General’s Award, and the Orange Prize, among many other accolades, the publication of Room has radically contributed to Donoghue’s consolidation not only in the Irish and the Canadian literary contexts, but also in the

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global literary panorama. Departing from the Irish-centred focus of her earlier “coming out” novels Stir-Fry (1994) and Hood (1995), and also moving away from the realm of historical or historiographic fiction that characterizes later pieces such as Slammerkin (2000), Life Mask (2004), or The Sealed Letter (2008), Room introduces readers into the mind and world of Jack, a five-year-old boy who has been born and raised in a peculiar place called “Room.” Employing material feminist theory, while simultaneously stepping into the field of critical biopolitical studies via Michel Foucault’s insights on surveillance and disciplinary power, in this chapter I consider the entangled representation of space and the body in Donoghue’s Room. While examining how the female body is terrorized through sexual violence and imprisonment, I focus particularly on how the child’s body – depicted by society as deviant, abject, and debilitated – problematizes normative conceptualizations of corporeality, home, and nation. Following Stacy Alaimo in Bodily Natures, I argue that Jack’s deviant body, however, becomes “a form of material/discursive agency” (139) and a source of unruliness and dissent. His intense vitality and alternative affective system grants him a set of ethical foundations that challenge and rearticulate normative understandings of materiality and embodiment, together with heteronormative structures. I here proffer to develop the concept of “corporeal citizenship”1 in relation to the child’s unruly body and its capacity for offering novel possibilities of kinship and relationality beyond the nation’s claustrophobic boundaries. A focus on corporeal citizenship as an alternative ethico-affective model will also allow us to grant visibility to those undesirable subjects that, particularly after 9/11, are classified as disposable and expendable. Jack has been born and raised in Room, an eleven-by-eleven-foot prison that is not on any map; a hidden space that is located outside known geopolitical boundaries. Normative feelings of attachment, belonging, and national affiliation are hence suspended in this paradoxical locale, and instead, the potential for alternative conceptualizations of affect and citizenship emerge. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault claims that “the body of the child, under surveillance … has constituted, particularly since the eighteenth century, another ‘local center’ of power-knowledge” (98). Jack, however, while being confined to a soundproofed cell with his mother under the total subjection of their kidnapper, nicknamed Old Nick, has remained remarkably free from institutional control

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for the first five years of his unusual life. His body has never been subjected to any traditional disciplinary mechanisms. He has never been to school or taken to a hospital; he does not know the meaning of nuclear family; and he has not been exposed to any ideas around national affiliation. Moreover, as can be observed in his use of language, Jack has been raised in a world outside normative gender norms, where the boundaries between male and female remain blurred: “Women aren’t real like Ma is, and girls and boys not either. Men aren’t real except Old Nick, and I’m not actually sure if he’s real for real. Maybe half?” (18). Jack also genders the objects in Room and refers to them with capital letters: Bouncy Ball, Plant, and Bed are all feminine, whereas Trash, Toothbrush, Lamp, Spoon, and Door are all masculine. By personifying the objects in Room, Jack grants them a sense of material agency, while simultaneously depicting the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman world as porous. The feminization of key objects such as Wardrobe or Rug, where he was born and where he hides to escape Room, is particularly relevant in the way these entities represent the possibility of life and survival for him. Jack sleeps in Wardrobe every night – an enclosed space in which he remains invisible to his captor, and thus a refuge that grants him comfort and safety away from sexual violence. The metaphor of the closet resonates in the narrative in the central role that this material and symbolic space plays in Jack’s development. In the study Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe, geographer Michael P. Brown traces the metaphorical and material dimensions of the closet as a spatial practice of power/knowledge. Brown argues that the closet “is kept at bay not only from the public sphere, but from the private sphere as well. To be in a closet physically is to stand apart from, but still inside, the room where the closet is located” (128). As Brown contends in relation to lesbian and gay populations, feelings of alienation and uncertainty are often the result of inhabiting this enclosed space. Following these lines of enquiry, I want to consider the closet in Donoghue’s narrative as a border space. While still generating certain feelings of fragmentation and doubt, Jack reimagines the closet as a liminal space of secret knowledge: “Wardrobe is wood, so I have to push the pin an extra lot. I shut her silly doors, they always squeak, even after we put corn oil on the hinges. I look through the slats but it’s too dark. I open her a bit to peek” (6). From this

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gendered space, Jack can observe without being seen, in Hitchcockian fashion, thus privileging his optics over his captor’s. The politics of the gaze are intriguing here. By managing to remain unnoticed in Room, Jack reflects on Old Nick’s lack of sight and ignorance, which briefly empowers him. Often referred to with the neutral “it,” his captor’s attention is most of the times set away from the boy, who is perceived as an undesirable object. Hence, Wardrobe enables Jack not only to develop his imagination, a common trope in children’s fantasy literature, but also to keep his body unmarked by patriarchal violence.2 Disciplinary power, Foucault claims, “is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility” (Discipline 187). Jack momentarily resists this model of disciplinary power by interrogating and reconstructing the spatial realities he inhabits throughout the novel. In his discussion of the body politic, Foucault argues that in order for power relations to develop, human bodies must be subjugated by becoming objects of knowledge (Discipline 28). This obedient and repressed body, however, can also become an enabled and ­useful body, as many of the subjects that populate the fictions of contemporary transCanadian feminist writing illustrate. In Room, Donoghue certainly complicates received bodily constructions by turning binary opposites such as able/disabled, productive/unproductive, or assertive/submissive into porous and malleable categories. Jack’s mother has been abused for the seven years she has been locked in Room after being kidnapped when she was nineteen years old. Enduring systematic sexual violence and imprisonment, her body initially appears to function exclusively as the material target of Old Nick’s sadistic pleasures. Jack’s mother, however, also actively uses her own body to distract her captor from infringing any violence on Jack. In doing so, she successfully challenges a simplistic interpretation of her role as one of strict submission, and instead suggests a potential for unruliness and dissent. In this sense, Donoghue’s female protagonist mirrors the disobedience that characterizes the figures of Yasmine in Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries and Melanie in Hiromi Goto’s Half World, as discussed in the first two chapters. As Brown and other critics in queer studies contend, coming out of the closet entails a performative speech act. Often, it is through speech that queer subjects reveal their sexuality, usually to loved

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ones first, to secure a space of safety. Continuing with the metaphor of the closet in my analysis, the idea of performativity is intrinsic to  the episode in the novel where Jack frees himself. After being locked in Room for seven years, Jack’s mother devises a risky escape plan, which consists of making her son play dead and convincing their captor to take the corpse somewhere outside, wrapped in Rug, to bury it. Once Jack is put in the back of Old Nick’s truck, he is supposed to free himself, jump into the street, and ask for help: Don’t move don’t move don’t move JackerJack stay stiff stiff stiff. I’m squished in Rug, I can’t breathe right, but dead don’t breathe anyway … The beep beep again, then the click, that means Door is open. The ogre’s got me, fee fie foe fum. Hot on my legs, oh no, Penis let some pee out. And also a bit of poo squirted out my bum, Ma never said this would happen. Stinky. Sorry, Rug. A grunt near my ear, Old Nick’s got me tight. I’m so scared I can’t be brave, stop stop stop but I can’t make a sound or he’ll guess the trick and he’ll eat me headfirst, he’ll rip off my legs … I count my teeth but I keep losing count … Are you there, Tooth? I can’t feel you but you must be in my sock, at the side. You’re a bit of Ma, a little bit of Ma’s dead spit riding along with me. I can’t feel my arms. The air’s different. Still the dustiness of Rug but when I lift my nose a tiny bit I get this air that’s … Outside. (137–8) Jack’s experience of coming out into the Outside involves multiple levels of abjection, in Kristevan fashion, having to deal with corporeal fluids, fear, fantasies of dismemberment, and violence. It is in fact the soothing atavistic comfort of chewing Tooth, one of his mother’s rotten teeth, that grants him the courage to “come out” into a different material space. By mastering the movement of his body and remaining silent, Jack manages to survive his own performed iteration of death, and live. Significantly, it is not speech that characterizes Jack’s arrival into this unknown place but a renewed sense of corporeal agency gained through a deep awareness of his own material body. I would then argue that Jack’s brave act favours a corporeal doing over saying (Butler, Bodies). For the child, then, reemerging into this other world is not only an ontological moment, where existence and becoming flourish, but also a moment of acute knowledge of his material body.

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In Donoghue’s novel, the act of leaving Room demands entering a different space of power/knowledge, in this case the society of an  unnamed North American city at the turn of the twenty-first ­century. While confined to Room with his mother, under the total ­subjection of their kidnapper, Jack managed to remain free from institutional control. In an intriguing reversal, it is when Jack and his mother enter the realities of this society that disciplinary mechanisms like media, the hospital, and the police saturate the child’s body by marking it as a source of monstrosity and imperfection. Jack, nonetheless, strategically devises ways to escape society’s multiple closet spaces by developing a new modality of corporeal citizenship that emerges out of his own material body instead of being attached to any national or institutional affiliation. The citizen in this formulation is constructed relationality, always connected to his own corporeal being, which, as such, is always already constituted by a multiplicity of other organisms: “I guess my body is mine and the ideas that happen in my head. But my cells are made out of [Ma’s] cells so I’m kind of hers. Also, when I tell her what I’m thinking and she tells me what she’s thinking, our each ideas jump into our other’s head, like coloring blue crayon on top of yellow that makes green” (10). As illustrated in this revealing passage, Jack’s corporeal citizenship is then indeed trans-corporeal, porous, and malleable – it is intimately attuned to other materialities and ecologies in Room. These include his mother’s body and the objects surrounding them, which together allow him to develop a sensual subjectivity that radically differs from that of normative society’s dictum. According to Foucault, in disciplinary society, social command is regulated and constructed by a network of apparatuses, such as the prison, factory, school, or hospital, that produce customs and habits with the ultimate goal of prescribing normal versus deviant behaviours. In a society of control, the mechanisms of command are ­distributed throughout the brains and bodies of its citizens, contributing to the internalization of dialogic systems of integration and exclusion within subjects themselves. Foucault examines in detail the workings of the panopticon, describing it as “a type of location of bodies in space” (Discipline 205). By extension, any panoptic institution such as the school or factory fulfills a similar role, standing as spatial laboratories of power. Interestingly for the purposes of  this chapter, the domain of panopticism, he argues, involves a region of irregular bodies (208). Describing the world around him

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as “the medical planet” (163), Jack systematically experiences the technologies of power over his own body once he is outside Room: he is measured, given needles, dressed in new clothes, and constantly feels observed and surveilled. Jack’s body is saturated by multiple mechanisms of disciplinary control ranging from doctors and specialists to journalists that systematically depict him in terms of deviance and abjection. Called Bonsai Boy, among many other infantilizing and derogatory terms, Jack is described as suffering some form of retardation and potentially subject to all sorts of deficiencies: “As well as immune issues, [Dr Clay tells Jack’s mother,] there are likely to be challenges in the areas of, let’s see, social adjustment, obviously, sensory modulation – filtering and sorting all the stimuli barraging him – plus difficulties with spatial perception” (182). Jack’s deviance is here understood as something that must be immediately corrected in order for him to become a proper citizen, a subject who is encouraged to follow a process of reorientation away from deviance and into normalization as stipulated by the disciplinary mechanisms that attempt to regulate his life. With alleged benevolence, these institutions will help the child adapt into the new environment and eventually become a naturalized subject of the nation. As Rachel C. Lee boldly puts it: “Immunity both allows for and puts ‘positive’ valence –  for the good, for better health –  to regarding sectors of world populations as discardable; their biological encroachment must be murderously defended against. Such a view depends upon the ‘immune’ subject’s mystified property –  bounded self-possession –  in his/herself and in an array of planetary materials that in actuality remain, biologically speaking, habitats for countless others” (223). Jack’s entry into socialization and institutionalization, which supposedly grants the subject a sense of immunity and safety, is sustained by the disregard of any other bodies that deviate from the norm; the eradication of those “discardable” populations to which R. Lee refers. Ironically, all of these disciplinary mechanisms to which the child is exposed, far from making him feel protected, contribute to his uneasiness with the structures of control that surround him in the new world he inhabits. As Jack himself explains, “In Room I was safe and Outside is the scary” (219). Equipped with an alternative corpo-affective system, Jack’s unruly body, however, resists being disciplined by the mechanisms of control that characterize contemporary North American society. The

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child’s corporeal citizenship hence momentarily manages to denaturalize the body politics of the nuclear family and arguably, by extension, the nation. After his mother tries to commit suicide in the clinic where they are being treated, Jack moves in with his extended family for a few days. His grandparents’ house represents yet another disciplinary space that attempts to train him into a normative subject. In a significant episode in the novel, Jack wants to have a bath with his grandma but she refuses to expose her body to him and insists on wearing a swimsuit, to his amusement. When she explains she would rather not be naked in front of him, he cleverly asks if it makes her scared. When living in Room, Jack and his mother were sometimes dressed and sometimes naked, as he explains, so he does not understand the strange knowledge that adults seem to possess in this new world, where the borders between the private and public spheres seem arbitrarily constructed. His lack of understanding and initial resistance to these rules functions as a critique of the randomness of institutional disciplinary mechanisms that regulate people’s bodies. Perplexed, Jack questions the lack of coherence on the application of rules around the body and physical intimacy: “Humans and bees should just wave, no touching. No patting a dog unless its human says O K, no running across roads, no touching private parts except mine in private. Then there’s special cases, like police are allowed to shoot guns but only at bad guys. There’s too many rules to fit in my head, so we make a list with Dr Clay’s extra-heavy golden pen” (274). Notice the paradoxical nature of this normative politics of touch where physical contact between bodies – as curiosity or desire – is rendered suspicious and risky, whereas bodily touch – as violence – is immediately granted to certain law-enforcing subjects before any potential threat. The ethics at play here are more than questionable. The child’s corporeal citizenship, in its unruliness and deviance, allows him to forge alternative ties of affection towards other bodies with a number of ethical repercussions. In yet another episode in  the novel, Jack’s grandma takes him to the library for the day. ­Spontaneously, he gives a hug to a little boy and accidentally knocks him down. She apologizes for her grandson, explaining how he is still learning about boundaries. After this incident, Jack is reminded of a series of rules around emotional attachment and embodiment: “Remember … we don’t hug strangers. Even nice ones” (288). Confused, Jack insists on asking his grandma why not, to which she

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simply replies: “We just don’t, we save our hugs for people we love” (288). In a simple statement that yet reveals Jack’s dissenting set of rules about the technologies of affection and gender, he defiantly replies: “I love that boy Walker” (288). His grandma, however, quickly dismisses him by saying: “Jack, you never saw him before in your life” (288). The child’s unadulterated love becomes a site of ethical possibilities. The narrative, I argue, advocates not a naïve return to sentimentality or nostalgic love, but a turn to sustainable affects and passions; a call for love as a mode of action that can reorient the system by embracing the potentia of so-called deviant subjects. I here follow the tradition of materialist vitalist philosophy that reads passion as an assemblage of intensities full of paradoxes, tensions, and contradictions (Deleuze; Braidotti, Transpositions). This episode of intense affect in the novel resembles those moments of exulted vitalism in Goto’s fictions, particularly the sense of joyful dissent experienced by the protagonist of “Stinky Girl” and the renewed hope that Melanie feels at the end of Half World. Importantly, this material agency, in its viscous porosity, is riddled with unpredictable forces and unexpected outcomes, as Tuana aptly contends. This ambivalence is clearly illustrated in the portrayal of Yasmine as a trans-corporeal subject, always caught up in circuits of toxicity, in Brand’s Ossuaries. In Donoghue’s Room, these intensities and tensions materialize in Jack’s body. His corporeal citizenship involves forms of sympathy and care towards strangers that can open up spaces for the interrogation of socially constructed borders around bodies. Challenging systemic categories that prescribe normalization over deviance, Jack’s ties of affection and attachment towards strangers momentarily enable the possibility of a reconfiguration of social and ethical relations. In his provocative book One World: The Ethics of Globalization, philosopher Peter Singer encourages nations to take on an ethical perspective on globalization, underscoring the need to design an ethic based not on national boundaries but on the idea of one world. Expanding political geographer Ben Anderson’s influential articulation of the nation as an imagined political community, Singer boldly suggests: “If Anderson is right … then it is also possible for us to imagine ourselves to be part of a different community. That fits well with the suggestion that the complex set of  developments we refer to as globalization should lead us to reconsider the moral significance we currently place on national

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boundaries. We need to ask whether it will, in the long run, be better if we continue to live in the imagined communities we know as nation-states, or if we begin to consider ourselves as members of an imagined community of the world” (171). Singer unravels the concept of national identity by posing several pressing questions: To what extent do we have an obligation to help strangers in distant lands in the same way we have an obligation towards our own neighbours or compatriots? Is geographical proximity in itself of any moral significance? The actuality of these concerns is particularly striking given the current situation in Syria, for instance, which has generated one of the worst refugee crises in history. The creation of novel forms of hospitality and care towards strangers is therefore of uttermost importance today and, in this sense, Singer’s articulation of an imagined community of the world might work as a starting point. One of the problems in this paradigm is the danger of engaging in a utopian universalism at the expense of a careful examination of radical difference in terms of race, gender, and age boundaries, among others. I thus believe that Singer’s ideas need to be complemented by feminist and anti-racist critical stances that would focus particularly on the ethical implications of the porosity of corporeal boundaries – those of the body politic and the physical body. A material feminist approach, together with a critical biopolitical stance, might help us begin to map the bodily and affective contact zones between human and more-than-human materialities and the neoliberal exclusionary regimes that negate these material ecologies. As Alaimo convincingly puts it, “Alternative conceptions which accentuate the lively, active, emergent, agential aspects of nature foster ethical/epistemological stances that generate concern, care, wonder, respect, caution (or precaution), epistemological humility, kinship, difference, and deviance” (Bodily 143). The material agency of Jack’s body, as Donoghue illustrates, certainly activates intriguing ways to think again about the politics and poetics of affect from an ethical stance. As I claim in this chapter, by acquiring knowledge about his own body and developing alternative ties of affection towards strangers, Jack develops an unruly mode of corporeal citizenship that challenges normative borders around corporeality and allows for the reconfiguration of multiple symbolic and material closet-spaces. In this sense, Donoghue’s young protagonist gestures towards novel forms of affect and embodiment that might open up ethical spaces

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for the regeneration of global geopolitical communities. At the same time, Jack’s corporeal citizenship, which I read as deviant and trans-corporeal, enables a renewed understanding of the subject as  collective that challenges dangerous conceptualizations of the bounded liberal subject. As Neimanis and Walker contend, “Once enmeshed in a world of more-than-human, transcorporeal transits, it is impossible to maintain a human exceptionalism on the grounds of agency” (564). Agency here is distributed collectively among bodies, including those such as Jack’s, which have been rendered by society as abject and deviant. As I commented in my introduction, while economic globalization through the power of corporations favours the erasure of borders for the generation of free markets, the war on terror, and its perverse outcomes, has created new boundaries that limit the movement of certain members of the world population based on racial, economic, and religious categories. One cannot help identifying an indirect critique of these processes in a novel like Room. In particular, the narrative proposes a careful consideration of how abject bodies are valued and perceived by different disciplinary mechanisms of power. I have here argued that by relocating the child’s body from a position of abnormality and deviance into one of dissenting knowledge and power, Donoghue raises, in Foucauldian fashion, intriguing ethical questions: How do contemporary technologies of power affect the bodies of sexualized, racialized, and naturalized populations? How can these so-called expendable bodies challenge these forms of control and exercise instead their material agency? I am aware of the fact that my concerns here, far from considering corporeality in isolation, propose instead a crossborder approach where material, biopolitical, and affective processes are always necessarily entangled and disentangled, assembled and disassembled. It is in this vein that I now fully turn to the biopolitical realm in the next three chapters.

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P ART TW O Biopolitical Border-Crossings

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4 Biopower and Practices of Freedom Hiromi Goto’s The Water of Possibility So many ages of peace and life flowed like the mountain stream. Until a troublesome fox was born – out of whose imaginings was he wrought? A fox who seeks to be a master outside of living law. Hiromi Goto, The Water of Possibility (148–9)

In the face of daily necropolitical violence, suffering, and death, the biopolitical will to live plows on, distributed and redistributed in the minutiae of quotidian affairs not only of the capacity of individual subjects but of the capacity of populations. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (33)

When life becomes the object of political power, the borders of freedom and oppression, security and danger become shifting territory. In this crossing of boundaries, the liminal concepts of “biopolitics” and “biopower” emerge.1 I agree with Rachel C. Lee when she comments on the “enigmatic imprecision” (41) that characterizes the formulations biopolitics and biopower in the work of Michel Foucault. In “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76, Foucault refers to a biopolitics of the human race as a “new technology of power” that deals with the population, which is now understood as “a new body, a multiple body, a body

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with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted” (245). As such, biopolitics entails multiple processes of “bioregulation by the State” (250), which involve “the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population … together with a whole series of related economic and political problems” (243). Within the biopolitical realm, power is understood as a set of relations; a network of mechanisms that circulate around bodily and social spaces. As Foucault contends, this mode of biopower now involves “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power” (Security 1). In a Foucauldian vein, social theorist Majia H. Nadesan discusses the emergence of biopower as a major force in controlling populations, linked to the development of liberal and neoliberal forms of government: “Biopower offers the most effective and appealing set of strategies for governing social life under neoliberalism because it finds its telos and legitimacy in its articulated capacity to maximize the energies and capabilities of all: individuals, families, market organizations, and the state” (3). These liberal and neoliberal rationalities privilege some individuals as autonomous self-regulating agents, while subordinating and disciplining other populations as invisible or dangerous. Particularly after 9/11, the strategic intensification of surveillance mechanisms, militarization, and racial profiling – all forms of biopower – has branded certain subjects as undesirable. Discussing the exceptionality of the figure of the detainee held at Guantánamo Bay, Jasbir K. Puar contends that “forms of corporeal practice, more insidious and less overt than torture, groom the detained body. The detainee defies the distinction between life and death, bringing biopolitics and necropolitics into crisis. The detainee is not left to die but mandated to live” (157). The detainee becomes one of those border subjects whose lives and bodies epitomize the suspension of ethics and justice. The ongoing civil war in Syria, which began as a brutal reaction to the Arab Spring, has brought another liminal figure – the refugee – to the forefront of Western media, raising crucial concerns about the political and ethical responsibility of European countries in this crisis. In the essay “Beyond Human Life,” philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues that “the refugee should be considered for what it is, namely, nothing less than a limit-concept that at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of

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the nation-state and clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed” (Means 21–2). Though written at the turn of the twenty-first century, Agamben’s concerns are now of key relevance in that it remains to be seen what this renewal of categories will entail as the Syrian war continues to unfold and, with it, the displacement of over five million refugees who will struggle for political and social rights in the nations in which they relocate.2 The suspension of rights also extends to other subjects who the nation renders risky, especially after the series of post-9/11 terrorist attacks that targeted major European cities: Madrid (2004), London (2005), and Paris (2015). The threat of the so-called Jihadist movement has generated a growing Islamophobic rhetoric in the West where the racialized body, in particular the Muslim body, is now targeted as a terrorist body; a menacing entity that needs to be extirpated from the sociopolitical sphere under the name of security and protection. Here we have fully stepped into the biopolitical, or what R. Lee calls the “biosociality” of race, under which “the creation of a population whose demise and limited lives are required to promote the enhanced, limitless lives of others” (22). This population, nonetheless, is capable of devising strategies of resistance to counteract these perverse modes of biopower. As Foucauldian scholars Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani contend in their discussion of the 1975–76 lectures, in Foucault’s work “power and resistance confront each other, and use multiple, mobile, and changing tactics, in a field of relations of force whose logic is not so much the regulated and codified logic of right and sovereignty, as the strategic and warlike logic of struggle” (Society 281). Vulnerable and minoritized populations can become key actors in these complex fields of relations, since they are also capable, at times, of challenging these biopolitical forms of control through collective action. Recent historical phenomena such as the Arab Spring (2010), the worldwide Occupy movements (2011), the anti-austerity movement 1 5 M Madrid (2011), or the grassroots movement for indigenous rights, Idle No More (2012) are only some instances of the malleable shapes that practices of resistance and freedom may have at the turn of the twenty-first century. An interrelated site of struggle and resistance emerges from the field of feminist, queer, and anti-racist literary and cultural production, to which I now turn. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, a number of theatre and performance scholars in the United States

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gathered in a forum to offer their reactions to this world-changing event. In his response, queer scholar José Esteban Muñoz explains how “in the wake of September 11th, the world had changed, and questions of art in relation to the world were realigned” (122). The realignment of aesthetic expression in relation to the biopolitical dimensions of everyday life is a central tenet in this book. A focus on contemporary transCanadian feminist writing, in particular, can offer illuminating ways to tease out the complex field of relations between current political events and literary production. I argue that poetic and fictional texts may offer some revealing points to further comprehend the ethical repercussions of these phenomena. As I contend in this book, the hidden activist in Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries, the abject child in Emma Donoghue’s Room, the protoqueer teenagers in Hiromi Goto’s Darkest Light, and the racialized cyborg in Larissa Lai’s Automaton Biographies all represent the complex workings of the biopolitical realm at a time of rampant technocapitalism, mounting racism, and feminist backlash. Importantly, these subjects also embody the possibility to activate change through their active dissent and unruliness, both as individuals and as part of larger communities. It is the paradox at the heart of these processes of inclusion and exclusion, together with their complex ethical repercussions, that is one of the departing points in my discussion. In this chapter, I examine the representation of biopolitical borders in Goto’s young-adult novel The Water of Possibility, drawing upon Foucauldian analyses of governance and ethics. In particular, I flesh out the porous relationship between the technologies of biopower and biosovereignty and the practices of freedom and resistance of the “multitude” (Hardt and Negri, Multitude). In contrast to previous forms of sovereignty, political scientist Anne Caldwell articulates the concept of biosovereignty as “a form of ­sovereignty operating according to the logic of the exception rather than law, applied to material life rather than juridical life, and moving within a global terrain now almost exclusively biopolitical” (par. 7). Goto’s novel exposes some of the workings of this current form of biosovereign power, particularly through the construction of the figure of the Patriarch and how he governs the population under his control. The logic of exceptionality that rules in this society, however, is challenged through the collective action of a dissenting population that ultimately resists domination.

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Discussing the material and affective conditions of labour, political philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri proffer some illuminating insights on the subject of the “multitude” in their controversial trilogy Empire, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, and Commonwealth. In general lines, they claim that the poor, together with other neglected groups of people, constitute a productive force that they understand as a potential resisting multitude against the tyrannical global capitalist processes of what they refer to as “Empire.” Hardt and Negri conceptualize the multitude as an  “open and expansive network in which all differences can be expressed freely and equally, a network that provides the means of encounter so that we can work and live in common” (Multitude xiv). They claim that the multitude is rhizomatically composed of countless internal differences that cannot be reduced to a unity; the multitude is thus “a multiplicity of all these singular differences” (xiv). Following these lines of enquiry, I here suggest that by depicting some of the communities in the novel as part of this dissenting multitude, Goto proposes alternative forms of solidarity and justice that are highly relevant in order to comprehend this contemporary age of global crisis. Narrated in the third person, The Water of Possibility introduces Sayuri Katos, a twelve-year-old girl who relocates from Calgary to a small town in the Canadian prairies with her family.3 Her mother, Kimi, writes horror novels, a detail that seems to have impacted the development of Sayuri’s imagination. One evening, Sayuri and her seven-year-old brother, Keiji, are left alone in their new house, and so they decide to explore the basement. In gothic fashion, Goto describes this closed space in terms of imprisonment: “The Root Cell, a penitentiary for imaginative children everywhere! The bars of the jail cell a twisting, choking mess of gnarled roots. Potatoes and withered carrots. Tins of oily fish with no can opener. Turnips long forgotten and gone maggoty. That was what the prisoners ate! A single light bulb and the string for a switch dangling in the centre of the room” (57). The portrayal of the root cellar as a prison for dissenting children inserts readers into the realm of the biopolitical from the narrative’s start. It also sets the tone for a number of adventures that will follow the two protagonists. Once in the basement, Sayuri and Keiji are magically transplanted into a new environment. Initially, both protagonists are overwhelmed with fear of the unknown. Sayuri, nonetheless, recovers fast and challenges this

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mode of affect through philosophical reasoning: “What if we think it’s scary because we think it’s scary? … What if … our fear makes a monster? What if our not-fear made it a friend?” (73). Fear is strategically deployed by biopolitical mechanisms of control as a tactic to manage populations, creating a strict border between desirable and undesirable subjects. As Foucault explains, “sovereignty is always shaped from below, and by those who are afraid” (Society 96). By interrogating the nature of her fear, Sayuri challenges this exclusionary logic and instead reads the figure of the stranger as a potential ally, thus challenging normative constructions of the Other as a source of danger. In Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–79, Foucault discusses the object of power and governmentality in terms of the conduct of human beings. Moving between the borders of the ethical and political, conduct stands, on the one hand, as an act of directing others according to different mechanisms of coercion and, on the other hand, as a way of behaving. As Foucault argues, the exercise of power then always involves conducting conduct. In this regard, I argue that Sayuri conducts herself as an ethico-political subject capable of developing strategies of self-government. One of the first creatures that Sayuri and Keiji come across in this foreign territory is a yamanba, a mountain woman in Japanese folklore. In an exercise of hospitality, the children are taken into her house in Mother Forest. In contrast to conventional fairy tales where the woods represent danger, the forest in Goto’s novel becomes a space of possibility for female liaisons to flourish. In other words, Sayuri’s interaction with this older female figure indirectly shapes her behaviour towards others, thus allowing for alternative coalitions to emerge. In his sociopolitical study on folk tales, renowned scholar Jack Zipes discusses the forest as a space that “allows for enchantment and disenchantment, for it is the place where society’s conventions no longer hold true. It is the source of natural right, thus the starting place where social wrongs can be righted” (45). In The Water of Possibility, the forest becomes a proto-feminist space that initiates a process of self-discovery for the protagonist, enabling self-governance to develop. In Foucauldian fashion, Sayuri’s quest also becomes a journey towards the development of conduct, which will grant her the power to adapt and find alliances in the new spaces and populations she encounters. Early in the narrative, Keiji disappears, which

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prompts the heroine to change the purpose of her journey. Yet, she is not alone in this mission as she meets other nonhuman populations in the foreign lands and territories through which she passes. Her fellow travellers are Echo, a cursed kappa,4 and Machigai, a shape-shifting foxgirl. Echo’s curse means she is unable to voice any words of her own, but can only repeat what someone else has already uttered. Machigai, in turn, has been expatriated from her territory by the old fox Patriarch because of her dissidence: “His idea of mischief borders on cruelty. The Fox Collective doesn’t know what to do with him. He does not die. Only grows more powerful. When he found out I ate no meat, he cast me from my people. I am forbidden to return until I have eaten flesh” (105). The novel depicts a society where pseudo-unionized groups are present but their efficiency is ultimately denied by a sovereign whose power exceeds the rule of law. By controlling what the population eats, the sovereign secures his control over the lives and bodies of his subjects. Caldwell’s notion of biosovereignty applies here, particularly if we consider how the ruler of this territory has adopted a state of exception and suspended citizens’ rights and freedoms. By engaging with how petty sovereigns systematically deviate from the law in their exercise of sovereignty, the narrative critiques those necropolitical impulses that govern twenty-first-century societies. In his examination of the notion “necropolitics,” political theorist Achille Mbembe focuses on “those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” (14). Consequently, the ultimate expression of sovereignty, as Mbembe contends, resides in the power to dictate who may live and who must die. Puar reorients Mbembe’s insights to focus particularly on how queerly racialized terrorist bodies live and die. In order to grasp the complexity of all the processes at play here, Puar insists on the need for “bio-necro collaborations” (Terrorist 35). It is the porosity of boundaries between modalities of biopower and necropower that further informs my analysis in this chapter. During her journey, Sayuri’s body alternatively occupies spaces of oppression and freedom, so the effect is the systematic transgression of biopolitical and necropolitical borders. At one point in the narrative, she is captured and locked in a wooden cage inside a cave by a Blue Oni, a horrifying ogre that, according to Japanese myth, cannot be overpowered. With Machigai’s

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help, Sayuri manages to free herself and continue to search for her missing brother. She is then welcomed by the Tanuki, a community of women who live underground. Always being careful to be respectful to the foreign populations she meets, Sayuri is aware of her position as a stranger and thus a potential threat: “I am a visitor to your lands, journeying from one place to another. Please forgive me if I have intruded in your forest” (141). We can see in these words how the young protagonist conducts herself towards Others: she never takes for granted their hospitality and resources, and therefore resists the role of the settler or colonizer. Sayuri embodies both restricted and free subjectivities, which allows her to interrogate how biopolitical categories are socially constructed. After spending a few days with the Tanuki, the three travellers decide to continue their search for Keiji. At one point in the narrative, Echo betrays Sayuri. When she wakes up, Machigai is in a cage of metal with a chain bit into her neck, and she is surrounded by kappa soldiers who wear dark clothes and boots and carry artificial flashlights. Subjected to the soldiers’ instructions, the prisoners walk until they reach a desolate piece of land: “Trees had been cut into low stumps and some were uprooted, the roots writhing upward like screams. The girl stared blankly around her … The destruction to the land was the most horrible thing she had seen since coming to this place. Sayuri shook her head. What did she care? This wasn’t her home. And at home, they did this kind of thing every day! She’d lived in a city her whole life!” (175). Sayuri is  confronted with an ethical dilemma that echoes some of the ­concerns raised by Peter Singer in his ethical approach to uneven globalization processes. As discussed in chapter 3, Singer presses readers to consider to what extent we are responsible for the well being of strangers in distant lands. He also questions whether we should care about strangers in the same way we care about our neighbours or fellow citizens. In similar ways to Jack in Donoghue’s Room, Goto’s protagonist needs to face these pressing concerns. Foucault’s demanding care for self-ethos involves, among other things, knowing what you are capable of, knowing the meaning of being a citizen in a city, distinguishing between what to fear and what not to fear, and determining what should be indifferent to you. Initially, Sayuri is skeptical of the idea of care for what is not considered home. The desolation in front of her, nonetheless, activates a  strong affective response of dismay. Then, terror follows at the

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thought of the Patriarch: “She couldn’t think. Panic crumbled her reason and strength. As if the very earth was falling out from beneath her, she would plunge, plummet eternally into a never-­ ending chasm of fear” (177). Sayuri is momentarily paralyzed by the thought of a yet-to-materialize sovereign, a spectral figure that exerts his power behind the masks of those regulatory apparatuses that sustain the efficiency of his government. Discussing the workings of biopower in designing obedient populations, Foucault contends that it is not “the defeat that leads to the brutal and illegal establishment of a society based upon domination, slavery, and servitude; it is what happens during the defeat, or even after the battle, even after the defeat, and in a way, independently of it. It is fear, the renunciation of fear, and the renunciation of the risk of death. It is this that introduces us into the order of sovereignty and into a juridical regime: that of absolute power” (Society 95). It is in fact through fear that the Patriarch rules with absolute power in Goto’s narrative. As any effective military army, the kappa soldiers function as an instrument in the hands of the sovereign to control the population. And yet, when Sayuri realizes that the soldiers also feed from cruelty and pain, she gains control over her own fear in an act of selfgovernment. Wandering through a wasteland as a prisoner, she is taken closer to a city of strange proportions; an unknown territory that resembles the living hell portrayed in Half World. Brightened by an artificial light, this cityscape is bordered by a strange material: “Not a wall. Something else. A shimmering buzz … was it electricity? The surface of the ‘wall’ shimmered slightly. Like liquid. And the girl realized that the ‘wall’ was a rippling dome that surrounded the whole city … The surface of the dome shivered, undulated like fluid. The wall rippled, a slow-motion liquid, and lines formed in  the transparent surface. In the shape of a great eye” (192–3). When the kappa army stops in front of the wall, Sayuri wonders what keeps them from entering their own land. Unexpectedly, one of the soldiers agrees with her and expresses his concern about their safety: “Every time we pass through this wall, we lose more of ourselves. Are we so weakened that we don’t recognize that the final outcome is total nonexistence?” (192). These words exhibit the first moment of awareness in the part of a soldier – an instrument of control – of his own role in the sustenance of biopower, a system that rather paradoxically also puts his body at risk. Following Caldwell, the Patriarch is the ultimate biosovereign in that he not

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only dictates who may live or die, but also rules in such a perverse way that the lives of certain populations are suspended in a kind of living hell. Ruling with fear, he does not allow any acts of disobedience among his subjects; he uses a big amber eye to annihilate dissenters, like the kappa soldiers who complain: “The kappa was tossed into the side of the dome. She was sucked in, absorbed so quickly it was as if she had never existed. Her boots fell heavily to the ground and her clothing fluttered after. One by one, the kappa were pulled in, their forms dissolving like water. Not one of them screamed” (193–4). As the narrative shows, the eye turns into a hole that functions as a doorway into this mysterious city. Sayuri’s care for self grows through her journey in similar fashion to bildungsroman narratives, particularly through the acts of questioning. Once she is free from fear, Sayuri begins to wonder about the causes of her imprisonment: “What did the kappa want with them? Why would the Patriarch imprison them? They hadn’t done anything. Unless he hated humans. What would they do to a human who didn’t belong in this place?” (180). As we shall see, her journey towards learning to care for herself eventually leads her to the practice of freedom for herself and others. When Sayuri awakens, she is taken to meet the Patriarch. Facing him has unexpected results.5 She encounters a slender fox with a melodious voice and human hands on the ends of his animal limbs. Keiji is also in the room but he does not seem to recognize his sister. As the Patriarch explains: “He enjoyed his stay here. But then he began to pine for his kind. He became inconsolable and refused to eat, so I took away his painful memories. He’s been much happier since. Hasn’t he grown under my care?” (200). In contrast to Foucault’s care for self, the Patriarch’s practices of care involve the manipulation of his subjects’ bodies and brains. Examining the new biopolitical and disciplinary apparatuses governing the brain at the turn of the twenty-first century, Nadesan claims that even though innovations such as behavioural genetics, neuropsychiatry, and cognitive neuroscience “promise ‘optimization’ within an economy of hope … they do so within neoliberal, marketized formulations of risk, responsibility, access, and therapeutic remediation predicated upon, and leading to, new strategies of biopolitical control” (140). I contend that the Patriarch in Goto’s narrative follows a neoliberal logic of biopolitical control through the capitalization of the memory and hope of the populations

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subjected to his rule. Sayuri, however, is disconcerted by the lack of violence she has been welcomed with and hence wonders about her status: Is she a prisoner? Is she a slave? To her surprise, she is regarded as a guest; she has a long bath, her clothes are taken care of, and she is invited to a banquet where food is served on golden plates. This fake hospitality, attempting to lure Sayuri into a commodified life, does not prevent her from questioning the Patriarch about how the population is treated in this new world around her: “Where does all the food come from?” “Why, the kitchens,” the fox smiled indulgently. As if he thought her a slightly stupid child. “Yes, but where do you grow the vegetables? Where do the foodstuffs come from?” The great fox frowned slightly … “From afar!” he pointed vaguely at the window. “The kappa farm fields to the south. They are good at that. They enjoy the outdoors.” “Oh,” Sayuri said softly. “The way they enjoy being soldiers too, I suppose.” “You know nothing,” the Patriarch murmured … “I know what I saw … I saw you kill those kappa soldiers who spoke against you.” “And are you so eager to follow?” the Patriarch whispered. (216–17) The Patriarch’s knowledge of his population, particularly the kappa, has allowed him to accumulate power and sustain his privileged existence. In turn, the kappa have been distributed to function as slaves in the farms or as soldiers, and hence stand as a source of labour and an instrument of power simultaneously. Foucault explains how “being free means not being a slave to one’s self and to one’s appetites” (“The Ethic” 6). When Sayuri confronts the Patriarch with her questions, she shows how she has grown a sense of care for how other lives are managed. In this respect, she is able to overcome her own needs and thus begin to achieve freedom not only for herself but also for others. Sayuri’s political consciousness, however, needs to be punished, so she is taken to the dungeons to be locked up along with thousands of other terrorized prisoners. An unexpected ally helps Sayuri escape; yet, she is confronted with an ethical dilemma regarding the other

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prisoners: “All those cells … They were not the only prisoners. She couldn’t leave them behind, could she? But it would take so long. What if they were caught setting the others free? Then her only chance would be wasted. Should she overlook the suffering of others? … They could come back later, she rationalized. After she’d got her brother. What if this chance was lost? And prisoners died? She hadn’t placed them in their cells! But she had the power, now, to  free them … ‘WE M UST FR E E T H E O TH E RS !’ Sayuri hissed” (229–30, my emphasis). Sayuri measures the risks of liberating other prisoners in terms of what they would mean for her own possibility of freedom. Challenging this proto-neoliberal pressure to optimize time management, she decides instead to prioritize freeing others over her own safety. In so doing, Sayuri engages in an act of solidarity towards strangers based on the idea of collective vulnerability. A multitude of nonhuman creatures are liberated: “As each cell was opened, the freed help unlock the other doors, and soon the hallway was filled with warm bodies, whispers, grunts, groans, squeaks, and the pungent odour of fur and flesh long unwashed” (231). It is only through collective action that Sayuri and others are able to practice freedom. In their formulation of the multitude, Hardt and Negri insist on the importance of social differences to remain different. Thus, they claim, the challenge “is for a social multiplicity to manage to communicate and act in common while remaining internally different … Insofar as the multitude is neither an identity (like the people) nor uniform (like the masses), the internal differences of the multitude must discover the common that allows them to communicate and act together” (xiv–xv). Their ­conceptualization of “the common” interests me here. By acting together for the common right to freedom, Sayuri and these nonhuman beings form a resisting multitude that, while internally different, manages to find shared causes of struggle to fight the power of the Patriarch. In Precarious Life, Judith Butler explains how managing a population is “not only a process through which regulatory power produces a set of subjects. It is also the process of their de-subjectivation, one with enormous political and legal consequences” (98). These processes of de-subjectivation are carried out by petty sovereigns who exercise what Butler calls a “lawless and prerogatory power, a ‘rogue power’ par excellence” (56). This is exactly what happens in The Water of Possibility: the prisoners’ rights have been suspended by

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a form of rogue power that forcefully works towards their dehumanization. The creatures that are now liberated have all been blinded, which highlights the impact of biopower on them. The Patriarch has subjected their very bodies to the technologies of power. Strategically, Sayuri suggests using the blindness of the multitude to their advantage. The plan is to find the energy source that lights up the whole city and switch it off so that the kappa and the Patriarch are momentarily blinded, too. Addressing the other fellow creatures as comrades, Sayuri claims: “Where there is power, there must be machinery” (242). Some of the creatures in this city are imprisoned around an amplification machine with a stone at the centre that, in order to function, sucks their life force. The resulting energy powers the whole city. The material that these terrorized creatures are made of is thinning into almost transparency. Sayuri wonders why they remain there if there are no guards holding them, to which they respond with an intriguing paradox loaded with multiple cultural, political, and ethical implications: “‘We are guarded by fear,’ the rat whispered, ‘and imprisoned by hope. The Patriarch promisssed our freedom if we could keep the ssstone fed for five days. Ssso we took turns feeding the monsster and tearing each other away before the ssstone took everything. But every day, we are lesss than we were the day before’” (249). Notice how the use of language in this section brings to light a tradition of fiction initiated by pioneering figures like J.R.R Tolkien and his bestselling works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.6 In this regard, Goto, together with other transCanadian writers such as Lai or Nalo Hopkinson, is tracing and reinventing a genealogy – a multitude – of left-wing fantasy writing. These feminist authors, I would add, not only contribute to this tradition but also rearticulate it by locating the gendered body, ethics, and race at the centre of their narratives. Interestingly, it is often the villains who employ sibilants in their speech in manga and anime. The Water of Possibility, however, resists the moralistic categories of good and evil to focus instead on the precarious lives and disposable bodies of these creatures. In doing so, Goto follows a Foucauldian approach to ethics where issues of care and conduct occupy a key position in the rearticulation of the concept of the multitude. The pernicious effects of biopower are here portrayed at their core, since the technologies of control are literally produced and reproduced through the very lives of these precarious creatures.

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Butler discusses the use of sovereignty as a tactic to ensure its own effectiveness within the context of post-9/11 US politics of terror: “Sovereignty becomes that instrument of power by which law is either used tactically or suspended, populations are monitored, detained, regulated, inspected, interrogated, rendered uniform in their actions, fully ritualized and exposed to control and regulation in their daily lives” (Precarious 97). The creatures that sustain the amplification machine in The Water of Possibility are imprisoned and exposed to the Patriarch’s mechanisms of control through sacrificing not only their material bodies but also life itself. The machine works as a power device that constantly craves power itself, thus standing, in my view, as a sort of machinistic version of Hardt and Negri’s Empire. Then, the only solution Sayuri and the creatures come up with to destroy this device is to make it feed itself with its own appetite and desire: “Hunger was always hungry and wanted food. If you fed the hunger with hunger, it would be a closed circuit instead of a one-way flow … The hunger would get hungrier and try to consume more and more without ever getting full … The stone will be feeding on itself, on its own hunger in a continuous cycle … so much the stone will break down!” (250). It is only through shared vulnerability and subsequent collective action that the machine is overpowered, enabling Sayuri and the creatures to free themselves and recover a lost sovereignty. Returning to Butler’s idea of an injured sovereignty, I argue that this multitude of nonnormative subjects succeeds in healing sovereignty by turning it into an instrument of power for the benefit of the community. As I previously mentioned, Sayuri is able to understand these prisoners’ oppression partly because she has experienced similar vulnerability. Throughout her journeys, Sayuri has been subjected to a variety of forms of violence including imprisonment and the suspension of rights. As a result, she has become aware of the meaning and implications of what it means to become vulnerable to biopower. Paradoxically, this vulnerability has also made Sayuri more exposed to desire and an unconscious longing for power itself. When the Patriarch tries to lure her into joining him so that she might enjoy the pleasures of power, she hesitates: “If she took one step more, she would be lost. Lost in the swirl of desire for desire, her own need above all others, and it would taste so good. Because she wouldn’t ever have to feel guilty” (270). Yet, with her comrades’ intervention, Sayuri regains her agency and strength and cuts the

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Patriarch’s hands, thus breaking his hold over the other creatures. Now the roles are exchanged: the Patriarch, defeated, must see what awaits him. Once again, Sayuri faces an ethical dilemma with biopolitical consequences. How worthy is the Patriarch’s life? Should he be judged and punished for his crimes? Should he receive the same pain he had inflicted on others? According to Sayuri’s knowledge of the world, imprisonment comes to her mind as the ideal solution: prison “might not change him … but it keeps him from doing more harm! He loses his freedom as payment for his crimes” (278). Nonhuman creatures, however, advocate a Levinasian alternative: healing the criminal by making him understand that b ­ earing the responsibility for his own crimes translates into acknowledging the responsibility towards Others. By encouraging Sayuri to follow this alternative ethical path, the narrative proposes novel forms of justice that go beyond traditional forms of punishment. Once rogue power is dismantled, the multitude can reorganize society and reconstitute rights for its fellow citizens. Commenting on the asymmetry between Empire and the multitude, Hardt and Negri contend that “whereas Empire is constantly dependent on the multitude and its social productivity, the multitude is potentially autonomous and has the capacity to create society on its own” (Multitude 225). Goto’s narrative portrays this autonomy and, of course, the responsibility that comes with it, which entails making complex ethical and sociopolitical decisions. Once liberated, all the injured creatures in the novel begin a long process of emotional and physical healing through the care for each other. The Patriarch, now called Haru, after running for weeks over the lands he had ordered destroyed, comes back and asks to become a member of the new society they aim to found: “A great wrong I have done and the tasks facing me will take the remainder of my life. I would welcome an apprentice to pass my lore to and help me in my work” (286).7 His first task will be to restore sight to the blind. Then, he will replant the blasted lands with seeds. Who will be part of this new society? The answer is left open in the narrative. The soldiers leave for their marshy lands, and Sayuri and Keiji, barefoot and dispossessed of any personal belongings, begin their journey home. In an act of reconciliation, Haru gives Sayuri a pair of slippers. The acceptance of this gift initiates a process of forgiveness, which further stresses Goto’s interest in finding alternative forms of cross-border alliances between populations to

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fight abuses of power in an attempt to move towards the ultimate goal of common peace. At the end of part 1 of this book, I raised a few questions that aimed to show the porosity between corporeal and biopolitical borders, particularly in any discussion of the impact of contemporary war machines on the bodies of sexualized, racialized, and naturalized populations. In my view, a turn to ethics is therefore key to unravelling the complexity of these paradoxical processes. Goto’s fictions, as I have demonstrated, pose a number of ethical conundrums in an attempt to creatively and critically examine the impact of biopolitical boundaries on the bodies of vulnerable populations. These power relations, however, are always intertwined with practices of resistance. In the conclusion to the influential essay “Precarious Life,” Butler advocates new systems and regimes of intelligibility in the contemporary world that would allow for voices of dissent to express themselves: “We would have to interrogate the emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, what we can sense. This might prompt us, affectively, to reinvigorate the intellectual projects of critique, of questioning, of coming to understand the difficulties and demands of cultural translation and dissent, and to create a sense of the public in which oppositional voices are not feared, degraded or dismissed, but valued for the instigation to a sensate democracy they occasionally perform” (Precarious 151). I firmly share Butler’s imperative call to generate sustainable modes of critique that would grant a space for viable, and not criminalized, modes of dissent, opposition, and disobedience. It is within this complex node between power relations and practices of freedom that I situate the work of contemporary transCanadian feminist writers and poets; their creative work helps us trace past and present genealogies of dissent, while simultaneously shedding light to further comprehend the complex fields of biopower and necropower at work today.

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5 The Biocapitalization of the Female Body Emma Donoghue’s Historiographic F ­ ictions Biocapital, like any other form of circulation of capital, ­involves the circulation and exchange of money and ­commodities, whose analysis needs to remain central and at the forefront of analysis. But in addition, the circulations of new and particular forms of currency, such as biological material and information, emerge. Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (17)

How many rabbits, sir, could one woman of middling size be supposed to have in her body? Emma Donoghue, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (4)

Writing within the sociopolitical textures of the United States, particularly during the Bush administration, Majia H. Nadesan contends in Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life that the “hysterization of  women’s sexuality and normalization of heterosexuality are elements of government strategies seeking to combat the nation’s alleged descent into moral decay” (113). Echoing today’s paradoxical culture of surveillance and spectacle, Emma Donoghue’s shortstory collections situate the female body as diseased or deviant, posing moral and biological threats to discourses around national vitality, while simultaneously being a profitable commodity to be capitalized. Continuing with my examination of the biopolitical

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realm, in this chapter I explore the representation of the female body as a site of biocapital in Donoghue’s collection The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits. Locating the female body at the crossroads of multiple biopolitical borders, Donoghue’s stories “The Last Rabbit,” “Cured,” and “A Short Story” denounce, in various ways, the historical instrumentalization of women’s bodies in the hands of biopolitical male authorities such as physicians or surgeons who have systematically regulated female sexuality as a source of perversion. By posing a critique of these processes, Donoghue traces a genealogy of biocapitalization that feeds itself with the bodies of women and other non-normative subjects. In his analysis of genomic research and drug development marketplaces in the United States and India, anthropologist Kaushik Sunder Rajan discusses biotechnology as yet another form of enterprise that is inextricably entangled with contemporary capitalism. Employing Foucauldian and Marxist theory, Sunder Rajan contends that “biocapital” stands as a network of exchange, involving systems of production, circulation, and consumption under current processes of technoscientific capitalism. I here argue that Donoghue’s stories locate the materiality of the female body at the center of these circuits of power, knowledge, and capital in an attempt to assemble what I refer to as an archive of instrumentalization and biocapitalization. In its foreword, Donoghue explains how the stories in The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits draw on and are inspired by a mixture of scraps of history consisting of pamphlets, records, and notes from the last seven hundred years of British and Irish life. In an exercise of historiographic metafiction (Hutcheon), she combines historical episodes with fictional traits in the stories in order to make a commentary on present-day capitalist societies by the very exercise of digging up the past. Donoghue explicitly states in the foreword her purpose to engage with the realm of life, thus setting the tone for the collection to be read as a display of biosocial and biopolitical relations. These power relations are always gendered and raced given that biopolitical authorities such as surgeons and physicians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were mostly white men, whereas their objects of study were often bodies that deviated from the norm: those belonging to children, women, racialized individuals, and other ­so-called second-class populations. In her Foucauldian study on governmentality and biopower, Nadesan explains how in the

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nineteenth century, psychiatry, together with other fields of study, was created as a discursive regime of knowledge to constitute and control populations “according to standards of normality and pathology” (25). Consequently, deviant bodies needed to be regulated through a series of disciplinary mechanisms and techniques. There seems to be a correlation between these moments in history and contemporary times, particularly within the context of US neoliberal Christianity, where “sexually amoral, irresponsible, lazy, unpatriotic Americans are constituted as ‘others’ in need of surveillance and intervention” (Nadesan 111). It is crucial then to trace a genealogy of biocapitalization that would include the biopolitics of racial slavery1 and indigenous genocide in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the expansion of biopower throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the development of new modes of biocapitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Importantly, Sunder Rajan insists that biocapital does not signify a  distinct epochal phase of capitalism: “The relationship between ‘capitalism’ (itself not a unitary category) and what I call biocapital is one where the latter is, simultaneously, a continuation of, an evolution of, a subset of, and a form distinct from, the former. Further, biocapital itself takes shape in incongruent fashion across the multiple sites of its global emergence” (10). In this chapter, I attempt to transplant the concept of biocapital into a different socioeconomic and cultural context – that of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – where new forms of capital emerged, particularly in the scientific realm and its multiple ramifications. Published in 2002, the short story “Cured” is set in Britain in the later half of the Victorian era. A young woman, referred to in the text as Miss F., is admitted to the London Surgical Home in 1861 after suffering from a backache for two years. Presumably, her pains could be explained as a result of excessive labour, since she was a cook for a well-off family for a number of years, a job that involved multiple tasks that left traces in her physical body as a worker. Miss F.’s brother, however, insists on bringing her to this new clinic for female health. Interestingly, her brother is a policeman – a disciplinary figure at the service of the state whose presence stresses the idea of subjecting the woman’s body to mechanisms of control in the public and private spheres. By almost forcing his sister to go to this clinic, he polices her body and turns it into a public matter. The London Surgical Home is run by Dr Baker Brown, who positions

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himself as a biopolitical authority from the very beginning: “To speak frankly, Miss F., I see myself – being both a doctor and a gentleman – as a protector of womankind … It appears that destiny has called me to rescue the softer sex from the general ignorance of their friends and advisors” (107). Describing himself as a pioneer, this male figure uses his alleged knowledge strategically to secure a position of power over the female patients who come to his clinic looking for answers to their physical pains. This doctor ultimately manipulates these women and, it is later revealed, systematically performs illegal clitoridectomies on them.2 In doing so, he stands as a biopolitical agent in the radical instrumentalization and further capitalization of women’s bodies. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault explains how the bourgeois, capitalist, and industrial society that emerged in the nineteenth century set out to formulate the uniform truth of sex, since it was inscribed not only in an “economy of pleasure but in an ordered system of knowledge” (69). Sexuality here entails “the set of effects produced in bodies, behaviors, and social relations by a certain deployment deriving from a complex political technology” (History 127). Sex thus became the theme of  political operations, economic intervention, and ideological campaigns for raising standards of morality and responsibility. The hysterization of women’s bodies and sexuality, for instance, was conducted in the name of the responsibility they owed to their children or their families. One of the differences that marked the threshold of our modernity, as Foucault convincingly argues, was that power stopped speaking through blood and instead began to speak through sex, sexuality, and the body. In other words, power – now understood as biopower – transitioned from the aristocracy’s obsession with ancestry to the bourgeoisie’s concern with the sexual body and its promises and its menaces. Discussing the politics of sexual pleasure in nineteenth-century Britain, medical historian Ornella Moscucci explains: “As the new professional experts, medical practitioners in the Victorian period claimed medicine as the cornerstone of public morals. Working in conjunction with clerics and philanthropists, they elaborated a medico-moral discourse that extensively deployed a set of class and danger-related polarities: health/disease, virtue/vice, cleanliness/filth, morality/depravity, civilization/barbarity” (60). Sexuality was therefore endowed with the greatest instrumentality, particularly affecting women’s bodies

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and lives. Being saturated with sexuality, the female body was consequently relegated to family roles and reproduction. The medicine of perversions and the programs of eugenics became some of the innovations in the technology of sex through the second half of the nineteenth century. As Foucault claims, “Sexual irregularity was annexed to mental illness; from childhood to old age, a norm of sexual development was defined and all the possible deviations were carefully described; pedagogical controls and medical treatments were organized; around the least fantasies, moralists, but especially doctors, brandished the whole emphatic vocabulary of abomination” (History 36). Deviation and abomination became common denominators against which normative modes of sexual conduct could be constructed. The juridical and medical control of perversion were developed through a multiplicity of disciplinary mechanisms and normative discourses aiming to ensure reproduction while excluding practices of other forms of sexuality. In this context, as Donoghue’s stories aptly illustrate, female sexual pleasure had to be repressed, punished, or criminalized. The narrative in “Cured” is interrupted by a series of medical writings in italics that reflect Dr Baker’s thoughts as he scrutinizes the woman’s conduct: “The patient becomes restless and excited, or melancholy and retiring; listless and indifferent to the social influences of domestic life” (113). The doctor subjects Miss F. to a variety of intimate questions and examinations that make her blush and, unexpectedly, sexually aroused: “She squeezed her eyes shut and let him part her legs … She thought perhaps it was almost over, and then he touched her somewhere. It was not a part she had a name for, or not one that could be said aloud” (111). Notice the gender imbalance in the act of looking: the male figure remains in charge of the gaze through the examination of the woman’s body, while she, in contrast, keeps her eyes closed, thus not accessing this process. Dr Baker further polices this woman’s life by asking a series of questions about her conduct: “Miss F., do you ever suffer from maniacal fits? … Have you any, ah, pernicious habits? … Unaccountable fits of depression? … Attacks of melancholy without any tangible reason?” (112–13). The doctor’s misleading insinuations and innuendo assume the hysterization of the patient’s body, together with the understanding of female sexuality as a source of perversion.

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Nadesan explains how the techniques of cure were for Foucault “expressions of new forms of power, acting both upon the minds and the bodies of its subjects, and eventually transforming the chaotic space of the madhouse into the disciplined and disciplining space of the nineteenth-century psychiatric institution” (142). By entitling the story “Cured,” Donoghue reorients Foucault’s rhetoric in order to refer to how, in this case, a woman is cured not from madness but from experiencing sexual pleasure. After a thorough examination of Miss F.’s body, the doctor gives his diagnosis: “What you are suffering from is a profound disease that affects your whole body and mind, not just your back. You are a victim of a loss of nerve power … You are a respectable young woman who has fallen victim to a terrible, but curable disease” (114). The woman’s body is saturated with sexuality and thus must be regulated by various biopolitical male figures. When the doctor explains to the patient the details of her so-called disease, he guarantees her that, once cured, her body will be again a source of production: “What I can assure you is that under my personal care you will soon become a happy and useful member of society, and the sister your brother deserves” (115). The female body is turned into a docile body, after being analyzed and manipulated without her awareness, while simultaneously being capitalized as a source of production. The reader finds out the truth about why the woman is there, even before she does, through the doctor’s notes: “The patient having been placed completely under the influence of chloroform, the clitoris is freely excised either by scissors or knife – I always prefer the scissors” (115). Anaesthetized, the woman remains unaware of the operation. When she wakes up she bleeds for days, and when she tries to figure out what has happened to her she is tied to the bed where her body is forced into absolute paralysis and docility. It is at this moment that the clinic, which has functioned as a panoptical institution, transforms into a literal prison for the woman. Foucault explains how “the art of punishing, in the regime of disciplinary power, is aimed neither at expiation, nor even precisely at repression … it normalizes” (Discipline 183). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Donoghue’s stories show, disciplinary mechanisms became general formulas of domination. Miss F. is admitted to a clinic where she spends three weeks, only to emerge a different woman, having partially lost the possibility of experiencing sexual pleasure. Through a violent punishment and violation of

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her body, she is ultimately forced to a normative system of conduct that turns her into an obedient subject according to both capitalist and patriarchal standards. Moreover, Dr Brown’s biopolitical authority is strengthened through the imperialist rhetoric of nation building that characterized the Victorian period. In order to secure the British nation, figures like Dr Brown, referred to by the Matron as “a most celebrated surgeon throughout the Empire” (119), had the duty of keeping women away from sexual pleasure: “I swear to you, Miss F., I have seen women who were morally degraded, monsters of sensuality – until my operation transformed them. Women have come to this clinic in a state of desperation, complaining of pain in one organ or limb or another, or even in rage, talking of divorces, and afterwards I send them home restored, to take up their rightful places by their husbands’ sides” (122). The sustenance of the status quo involved the construction of a right kind of  woman of traditional femininity who would stand as the bearer of  the household and as a symbol of national stability. In order to secure the “rightful” place of women, masturbation and other forms of female sexual pleasure had to be suppressed. In this context, practices such as clitoridectomy, as discussed by Moscucci, became a chapter in the history of the social construction of racial and sexual differences.3 Dr Baker refers to the colonies to justify his medical practice: “There are many countries in the Empire, Miss F., where a primitive form of my operation is done on every girl at the age of puberty, to ward off the disease of selfirritation before it has a chance to take hold!” (122). Furthermore, as Miss F. realizes, the so-called medical activity Dr Baker performs is actually understood in terms of a “mission,” a word loaded with both religious connotations and colonialist implications. Discussing the dual meanings of “conversion” as use value to exchange value, but also as transformation in religious belief, Sunder Rajan claims that capitalism is not just a formation that is conditioned by religion, but also a religious phenomenon: “Salvationary discourses, which are often embedded in, and disseminated through, ritual, are paternalistic, cultic, and libidinal. Therefore salvationary discourse and practice are also explicitly gendered in multiple ways” (184). As he further explains, the terms “salvation” and “nation” are meant to function not as binaries but rather as dialectic counterparts. In Donoghue’s narrative, Miss F. explicitly describes the ­doctor’s voice as evangelical, particularly in those moments where

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he more clearly infantilizes her: “I must tell you frankly that I believe I have rendered you more truly feminine – more healthy in your natural instincts – more prepared to discover real happiness in marital intercourse, if marriage is to be your lot in life, and why should it not, now?” (120–1). This passage illustrates how religious and nationalist discourses overlap with gender structures at the entrepreneurial service of biopolitical structures that are sustained by the capitalization of women’s bodies and sexuality. Discussing the potential value of information, Sunder Rajan argues that “in addition to Marxian use value and exchange value, [information has] a third form of value, a ‘moral’ value that operates in the realm of symbolic capital” (56). The lack of information also extends to the lack of access to language, particularly for ­working-class women. In “Cured,” the doctor continues to manipulate his patient by misleadingly claiming that his operations bring him not only material success, but also immaterial value such as the admiration of his colleagues in his profession, together with women’s gratitude. However, this is challenged by his own personal notes, which insist on keeping patients isolated: “The strictest quiet must be enjoined, and the attention of relatives, if possible, avoided, so that the moral influence of medical attendant and nurse may be uninterruptedly maintained” (120). The manipulation of information thus becomes a source of power-knowledge for the biopolitical authorities in the narrative. Once Miss F. realizes that something has gone wrong in her body, she threatens to tell her brother, to which Dr Baker responds condescendingly: “For a woman of your pretensions to modesty and respectability, Miss F., to attempt to convey such intimate information to a young man – her own brother – who would be mortified, I imagine – who would cover his ears at such shamelessness in a sister … what words would you use to make your complaint, may I ask?” (121). There is no feminist discourse available to this woman who, as a result, is exposed to a sense of absolute vulnerability. Her subjection to biopolitical technologies and discourses of power also involves a high exposure to risk. Not only has her body been constructed as unhealthy and thus unproductive, but also her very life has been at risk from the moment she entered the clinic. Once she becomes aware of the truth, risk actually maximizes given that her awareness in simply not enough to challenge those societal norms that dictate the conduct of womanhood. Miss F. is ultimately silenced and relegated to the private sphere.

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Describing the moment as one of “private wonder” (163), Donoghue’s “A Short Story” opens up with the birth of a baby girl of minimal proportions in a household in Cork, Ireland, some time in the early nineteenth century. Kitty never speaks, suffers from bad  health conditions, and gives up growing at the age of three. Ironically, however, her life is taken into the hands of Dr Gilligan, who offers to take Kitty to England with the pretext of exposing her to better weather conditions: “He mentioned, only in passing, the possibility of introducing the child to certain men of science and ladies of quality. A select audience; the highest motives: to further the cause of physiological knowledge” (165). After receiving an amount equivalent to three months’ rent, the Crackhams decide to lend their daughter to the doctor. The young girl’s body, I argue, is from this moment turned into a source of biocapital. What biocapitalization strategies does the doctor employ? First of all, the girl’s extraordinariness is highly profitable, so it is the abnormal and uncommon body that grants a supply of capital: “It struck him that the girl’s tininess would seem even more extraordinary if  she were, say, nine years old instead of three. To explain her speechlessness, he could present her as an exotic foreigner” (164). Transforming the girl into a non-national also becomes profitable, so here we can observe how the rhetoric of empire is again incorporated into the biocapitalization of her life and body. Then, the socalled doctor embarks in a crusade that involves travelling around the country, parading Kitty’s body as a public wonder through multiple exhibitions and fairs. The Victorian era is known for the proliferation and success of the circus, together with other forms of entertainment that involved the circulation of so-called freakish populations as spectacles to feed the crowds. Partially following Marxist philosopher Guy Debord, I here use the term “spectacle” in one of its forms: as direct entertainment consumption. Describing modern industrialized societies, Debord claims that “the spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image” (par. 34). Donoghue’s story shows how images of spectacle and deviance are put at the service of capitalist profit.4 These images are not abstract, but deeply embodied. It is the paradox at play here that interests me for my analysis of the biopolitical realm in this chapter. In similar ways to the protagonist in “Cured,” Kitty’s dehumanization begins with the erasure of her name, together with the biocapitalization of her body in the hands of the male scientific

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community. The audiences in the narrative further contribute to her brutalization in two ways: they pay to be part of a spectacle that centres around the exploitation of deviance, while simultaneously objectifying this abject body through the use of the pronoun “it.” The now-renamed Caroline Crachami is shown to British society as the smallest female on record: “The papers called her the Nation’s Darling, the Wonder of Wonders. The King took her hand between his finger and thumb, and declared himself immensely pleased to make her acquaintance” (166). Notice how nationalist and scientific discourses merge strategically to capitalize on the bodies of young children. Far from being condemned as morally wrong, sovereign power applauds this kind of exploitation, indirectly endorsing children’s labour regardless of its pernicious, and often lethal, consequences.5 On their way back to the doctor’s lodgings, the little girl unexpectedly dies after having received more than two hundred visitors that day. The doctor decides to sell her body to the Royal College of Surgeons and, in preparation, he cuts the body open, chops it, boils it down, and strings the bones back together. In contrast to Dr Baker in “Cured,” the doctor in this story is described as “an articulator; a butcher in the service of science, or even art” (167). In gothic fashion, this Dr Frankenstein figure is invested in a version of biopolitics that involves the biocapitalization of death: “His job was to draw grace and knowledge out of putridity … He was going to raise a little girl from the dead, so the living might understand” (166–7). The spectacular living body then becomes a spectacular corpse – turned into a macabre puppet, Kitty’s bones are now publicly displayed for eternity: “She was a fossil, now; she had her niche in history. Shortly she would be placed on show in the Museum Hall between tanks that held a cock with a leg grafted on to its comb and a foetus with veins cast in red wax … She would stand grinning at her baffled visitors until all those who’d ever known her were dust” (169). “A Short Story” thus closes with a paradox: the girl’s body becomes a corpse, allowing no futurity and, therefore, enabling no potential reproduction. Yet, because the traces of her body are on display in the walls of the public space of the museum, Kitty is granted a presence in nationalistic history, thus participating in what I refer to as an archive of spectacular wonders at the service of capitalist intervention. Donoghue’s collection also portrays female characters that exploit the biocapitalization of their own bodies to their benefit by

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turning them into sources of wonder and spectacle. This strategy allows these women to access the public political life and to disrupt biopower and normative conduct. In other words, the biocapitalization of the female body involves a level of spectacle that is sometimes used by the women in the stories themselves as a strategy of resistance. In “The Last Rabbit” particularly, Donoghue’s female protagonist manages to resist the mechanisms of power-knowledge and the biopolitical structures that render her body as a source of production by performing a spectacular pregnancy. Drawing on anthropologists Joseph Dumit and Robbie Davis-Floyd’s insights in the collection Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots, Nadesan discusses how biotechnological knowledge today is invested in the production of perfect babies: “Amniocentesis, ultrasonography, alpha-feto-protein (A FP ) testing, among other screening devices, apply biopolitical knowledge and technology to facilitate production of perfect beings: the perfect babies who will grow up to be the self-regulating and responsible citizens of the neoliberal state” (131–2). Donoghue challenges contemporary investments on biotechnological knowledge by telling the story of Mary Toft, a woman who claimed to have given birth to over a dozen rabbits. A monstrous body hence becomes a source of profit in the story. In this case though it is the woman, and not the male biopolitical authorities, who benefits from her own spectacular corporeality. “The Last Rabbit” is set at the beginning of the eighteenth century in Georgian England. Mary temporarily manages to convince a series of doctors and midwives that she is capable of giving birth to rabbits out of her own body. Mary’s sister in law encourages her to exploit this business of pregnancy: “If you was the first woman in the world to give birth to a rabbit … would you not soon be famous? Would people not pay to see you?” (2). Through the act of seeing, Mary’s grotesque pregnancy can be biocapitalized as a profitable spectacle. Similarly, Mary’s trick is supported by the local man-midwife, who is in charge of examining her body to decide whether it is actually productive: “Mr Howard said it was all to the good that I still bled, off and on, after miscarrying, and had a drop of milk in my breasts; it would be more lifelike, that way” (3). Far from producing perfect babies, this woman decides to exploit her body instead as an abject and grotesque reproductive machine. Paying special attention to the Foucauldian notion of conduct, social theorist Nikolas Rose discusses contemporary regimes and practices of government in Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political

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Thought, contending that analytics of government are concerned mainly with knowledges, or regimes of truth. Rose explains that in order to rule properly, it is necessary to possess a knowledge of the particular features over which rule is to be exercised: “the characteristics of a land with its peculiar geography, fertility, climate; of a population with its rates of birth, illness, death; of a society with its classes, interests, conflicts; of an economy with its laws of circulation, of supply and demand; of individuals with their passions, interests and propensities to good and evil” (7). As shown in “The Last Rabbit,” it is the male biopolitical figures that have access to science and other medical discourses, and thus the power to decide what counts as truth in the context of eighteenth-century England. These men also control the bodies and concerns of the working classes, together with their affective responses. Because of the clearly questionable veracity of her story, Mary wonders whether an actual audience would ever believe it. Her sister-in-law, nonetheless, insists: “And if who can tell what’s true and what’s not in these times, Mary, why then mayn’t this rabbit story be as true as anything else” (2). Mary manages to transgress these ethico-political regimes by participating, and momentarily profiting, from the very circulation of lies, in this case. I want to suggest that the idea of selling the truth and fabricating lies in this passage resonates with contemporary times, particularly if we consider the capitalist culture of talk shows where any body can be profitable for the audiences as long as it escapes the norm. As Debord would claim, “In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false” (par. 9). In this context, it appears although only those bodies that deviate from what is socially constructed as normal, that is, “freakish” or hyper-perfect bodies, become profitable as a source of spectacle in today’s mediated world. In a way, then, Donoghue’s story suggests a continuum between Georgian times and twenty-first-century societies where spectacular bodies are systematically fabricated and capitalized alongside and beyond discourses of truth with a number of ethical repercussions. As Foucault famously puts it, where there is power, there is resistance or, better say, a plurality of resistances (History 96). Before Mary embarks on a journey to London to sell her story, she is taken to Mr Howard’s chaise in Guildford, where he soon appropriates her body and calls it a “magical womb” (8). In the search of a spectacular wonder, other doctors follow, deciding to visit and examine

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her body: “The visitor was a foreign gentleman, a Mr St Andre, surgeon to the King himself. He felt my belly and remarked that it was barely swollen. Then he reached into my dress and squeezed my nipples to see what would come out” (5). Even though Mary begins to be circulated as a biocapital object of exchange, she is able to retain agency over her own body. Again, as it happens in “Cured,” this is connected to the idea of the gaze: “They watched me like owls. I am not a handsome woman; all my features are bigger than they need be for a body so small. But these gentlemen looked at me as if I was made of gold, and by now I was so brazen I could look right back” (8). The noun “spectacle” derives from the Latin verb specere, which means “to look at” (o e d ). The woman in the story is capable of looking back at these biopolitical authorities, and therefore resists becoming an object of power-knowledge. Mary appropriates the spectacle of her own body and turns it into a source of power and resistance to counteract strategies of biocapitalization. Progressively becoming famous for her spectacular deeds, she shows amusement at human behaviour: “The day I produced my eighteenth rabbit, I suddenly saw what my sister Toft had meant, when she told me how impossibilities might as easily be believed as not” (9). When she is taken to London with Sir Richard Manningham, yet another man-midwife, she is concerned that her lies are finally not going to be bought unless there is some sort of religious intervention: “I would have been so glad to have brought out one last rabbit, to let it fall like a holy miracle into his fine hands” (11). Once again we find the intersection of biocapital with nationalist and religious crusades. Sunder Rajan discusses how drug development is nowadays conceptualized as a miraculous, and profitable, enterprise with a structure founded on the inadequacy of previous therapies. This pattern is followed by some of the medical discourses that appear in Donoghue’s stories, where biopolitical figures are invested in performing a mission for profit gain despite the rhetoric of allegedly fulfilling a common good. Women’s bodies, as discussed earlier, have historically been instrumentalized by disciplinary mechanisms, while simultaneously being capitalized in public venues as a source of wonder and spectacle. Donoghue’s collection The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits portrays this ambivalence, opening up a discussion of the historical impact of biocapitalization on these non-normative bodies. It is at the horrific sight of various knives, a forceps, some scissors, and other

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instruments that Mary feels she has been reduced to “nothing but a body” (12). “The Last Rabbit” locates the female body at the crossing of the boundaries between material and abstract processes of normalization in history. The result is a cross-border genealogy of biocapitalization that can be traced through this archive of spectacular and deviant bodies. Significantly, the narrative is left unfinished and Mary’s fate is left unwritten. In doing so, I argue that Donoghue resists making an explicit moral point. On the one hand, this strategy, which other transCanadian feminist writers discussed in this book also employ, invites readers and critics to envision what the ethico-political outcome of the story could be. Momentarily then we become active agents of cultural and, to an extent, biopolitical intervention. On the other hand, a focus on an ethics of relation that is always in process – what I call a cross-border ethic – instead of a strict and rigid morality, further challenges the idea of history as a source of unquestionable truths. In the epilogue to the second part of Commonwealth, “De Homine 1: Biopolitical Reason,” Hardt and Negri insist on the need to explore the terrain of biopolitical reason in order to experience the common as an issue not of ontology but of production, or what they refer to as “making the common” (123). With regard to resistance, they stress the need to create alternatives beyond opposition: “Epistemology has to be grounded on the terrain of struggle – struggle that not only drives the critique of present reality of domination but also animates the constitution of another reality” (Commonwealth 121). As illustrated in the texts discussed in this book, contemporary transCanadian feminist writing not only poses a critique of the impact of biopower on vulnerable populations, but also envisions novel ethical assemblages that question and rearticulate biopolitical boundaries as sites of struggle and intervention.

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6 Necropower Assemblages Dionne Brand’s Inventory If racialization is understood not as a biological or cultural descriptor but as a conglomerate of sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans, then blackness designates a changing system of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claim to full human status and which humans cannot. Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (3)

the border guards endlessly increase, like those hard-bodied ants she watches, hatching, moving, leaving their radioactive shells strewn on the floor Dionne Brand, Inventory (51)

In the groundbreaking 2014 study Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, critical race scholar Alexander G. Weheliye proposes to decolonize Michel Foucault’s articulation of biopolitics by repositioning race at the centre of any examination of political violence and processes of subjection.1 Relying on Black feminist writers and critics such as Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers, Weheliye develops the intriguing formulation habeas viscus: “The conjoining of flesh and habeas corpus in the compound habeas viscus brings into view an articulated assemblage of the human (viscus/flesh) borne of political violence, while at the same time not losing sight of the different ways the law

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pugnaciously adjudicates who is deserving of personhood and who is not (habeas)” (11). Here he revisits Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theories of assemblage by bringing race, histories of slavery, and colonialism to the forefront of the discussion. These “racializing assemblages,” as Weheliye calls them, construe race “not as a biological or cultural classification but as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans … Racializing assemblages represent, among other things, the visual modalities in which dehumanization is practiced and lived” (4–6). I find Weheliye’s corrective formulations crucial in any analysis that attempts to comprehend the workings of these disciplinary processes of dehumanization in our current historical moment. The pervasive racial profiling intensified by 9/11 and its aftermath, the strong anti-Muslim rhetoric strengthened after the threat of Jihadist terrorism, and the growing anti-refugee sentiment intensified after the massive population displacement as a result of the civil war in Syria are only some instances of how racializing assemblages function today as practices of differentiation, hierarchization, and exclusion. In poems such as Inventory, which is the focus of this chapter, Dionne Brand unravels the workings of these racializing assemblages as a strategy to signal the violent impact of structures of necropower on minoritized populations. I borrow the term “necropower” from Achille Mbembe’s persuasive essay “Necropolitics.” Engaging with anti-colonial psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon’s work on colonial occupation, Mbembe illustrates how, under the workings of necropower, “sovereignty means the capacity to decide who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (27). The contemporary occupation of Palestine, Gaza, or the West Bank are for Mbembe “accomplished form[s] of necropower” where disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical processes are imbricated in pernicious ways. The dispersion, expansion, and segregation of internal borders functions strategically to control populations under strict regimes of surveillance. Mbembe goes even further to explain how, in this context, “colonial occupation is not only akin to control, surveillance, and separation, it is also tantamount to seclusion” (28). This cross-border matrix of forces, violences, intensities, and ruptures intrinsic to bio- and necropower is the focus of this chapter. Brand’s Inventory stands as an excellent rumination of these ­complex “necropower assemblages.” With this formulation, which

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is further informed by Deleuzian-inflected queer studies, I seek to stress the porosity of biopolitical and necropolitical forces in any discussion about modern politics that attempts to comprehend the workings of current modes of exclusion and its multiple ramifications. Furthermore, drawing on decolonial approaches to biopolitics, I also investigate how processes of racialization are integral to the composition and functioning of necropower with important ethical consequences. Ultimately, I attempt to analyze the tensions and ruptures, as well as the potential alliances and coalitions, that may erupt within these assemblages as illustrated in Brand’s poetic intervention. Inventory exposes how “war machines” – which Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize as “diffuse and polymorphous” (354) – are currently appropriated and metamorphosed by the state into processes of racial profiling and surveillance technologies that sustain and reify biopolitical and necropolitical boundaries: lines of visitors are fingerprinted, eye-scanned, grow murderous, then there’s the business of thoughts who can glean with any certainty, the guards, blued and leathered, multiply to stop them, palimpsests of old borders, the sea’s graph on the skin, the dead giveaway of tongues, soon, soon, the implants to discern lies from the way a body moves (16) In these lines, Brand signals a number of racializing assemblages, such as the designation of certain bodies as deviant or terrorist, which are already embedded in contemporary border experiences. Paradoxically, however, the target of these forms of necropower has become more diffuse than ever: who are these bodies that “grow murderous”? As Deleuze and Guattari contend, one of the terrifying aspects of this appropriated war machine is precisely the fact that it “no longer needs a qualified enemy but, in conformity with the requirements of an axiomatic, operates against the ‘unspecified enemy,’ domestic or foreign (an individual, group, class, people, event, world)” (467). The surveillance mechanisms that Brand describes allegedly function to ensure safety through the systematic

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classification and categorization of desirable versus undesirable bodies. And yet, these modes of necropower also perpetuate ongoing unpredictable terror that is continuously deterritorialized and reterritorialized. In his theorization of assemblage, social theorist Manuel De Landa begins with the following thesis: assemblages are the product of historically specific processes. Drawing on Deleuze’s insights, De Landa discusses assemblages in terms of the material and expressive variables that form them, together with the processes of territorialization and deterritorialization in which these components are involved. Even though territorialization can directly affect actual spatial boundaries, De Landa claims that it “also refers to non-spatial processes which increase the internal homogeneity of an assemblage, such as the sorting processes which exclude a certain category of people from membership of an organization, or the segregation processes which increase the ethnic or racial homogeneity of a neighbourhood. Any process which either destabilizes spatial boundaries or increases internal heterogeneity is considered deterritorializing” (13). Following De Landa, I claim that Brand’s necropower assemblages remap material and affective territories through the simultaneous usage and interrogation of language. At the same time, as discussed earlier in my analysis of Ossuaries, Brand proposes a deterritorialized politics of location that destabilizes the nation’s boundaries. The narrative in Inventory bounces between spatial and temporal frameworks: from Miami to Cairo, from a living room in unspecified North America to Milan, the poem contains the ruptures generated by a variety of historical episodes across myriad geo-temporal landscapes. And the female body is often depicted as a toxic space where political, ethical, and ecological failures assemble: machine and body, shield and tissue, the highway worked itself into her shoulders and neck, now she was trembling, tasting all the materials the city stuffs in its belly now she was concrete and car, asphalt and oil, head whirring like any engine, becoming what they were all becoming (Inventory 45–6) Composed of material and affective components, both the body represented in the text and also the poem itself stand as assemblages

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that contain an inventory of toxic genealogies, from nuclear catastrophes to the ongoing global war on terror: you find yourself, any one, anyone you say it’s all bullshit, it all doesn’t matter, U.S. engagement in Afghanistan ribbons its way along TV screens, you wonder, was this the same telecast so many years ago, uranium enriching in your stomach, delicate postules (68) With the exception of Vietnam, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are so far the longest wars in the history of the United States. Brand’s poem, however, refuses to address these conflicts in isolation by instead pushing readers to find interconnections with other forms of war machinery in the form of border control, surveillance strategies, political passivity, and public conformity. As a result, Inventory portrays necropower as a collection of complex racializing assemblages where politics, ethics, and poetics meet. In Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir Puar favours assemblage over intersectionality as a methodology, claiming that “as opposed to an intersectional model of identity, which presumes that components – race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, religion – are separable analytics and can thus be disassembled, an assemblage is more attuned to interwoven forces that merge and dissipate time, space, and body against linearity, coherency, and permanency” (212). Following Puar, I argue that Brand’s poetics resists linear and coherent accounts of history, temporality, and spatiality by interrogating and reassembling a number of corporeal, biopolitical, and affective boundaries. The result is what I call a cross-border ethic that interrogates how bodies shape and are shaped by other bodies, while simultaneously being involved, and often complicit, in the circulation of affective economies of oppression and dominance. Inventory offers a grim portrayal of human existence where an entrenching culture of decay and hyper-artificiality reigns: “the wealth multiplies in the garbage dumps,/and the quiet is the quiet of thieves/there are cellphones calling no one,/no messages burn on the planet’s withered lungs” (40–1). The poem, in this sense, depicts a wasted land that resembles the notion of the “desert of the

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real” evoked by pioneering films such as The Matrix (1999), directed by the Wachowski sisters, and then developed by Slavoj Žižek in Welcome to the Desert of the Real. The narrative introduces a woman who sits in front of her television, every day and night, to contemplate the chaos and destruction that characterizes our contemporary globalized world. Though tied to the act of looking, this woman resists the binary opposition between the real and the virtual by constantly questioning the limitations of bearing witness and the veracity of the media. While waiting, she writes a list that begins with the war in Iraq, where suicide bombers, shootings, and car bombings accumulate: “the numbers so random,/so shapeless, apart from their shape, their seduction of infinity/the ganglia and meninges, the grey matter/of the cerebrum, the viscous peritoneal cavity” (26). These lines approach these innumerable deaths through the very material realities of the corpses, the body parts, and the organs that compose these “death-worlds” (Mbembe 40). Brand’s inventory of the world signals a saturation of negative feelings – fear, shame, pain – that appear to block desire, hope, and pleasure as potential activators of social change and political transformation. And yet, there is a space that separates “us” from “them,” a constructed ethical line that constantly reassures and comforts us: what foundations, what animus calms, we’re doing the best we can with these people, what undeniable hatred fuels them, what else can we do, nothing but maim them, we do not deserve it, it’s out of the blue, the sleeplessness at borders, the poor sunlight, the paralyzed cars, they hate our freedom, they want the abominable food from our mouths (27) By locating guilt and hatred elsewhere, the realities of genocides such as the one taking place in Iraq remain outside normative ethico-political frameworks, thus safeguarding our affective comfort zones. As Žižek argues, coverage of disasters happening in the socalled Third World often incorporates actual footage of the event, in theory, to mobilize audiences in the Global North. These images, however, are only ephemerally consumed, thus turning these

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moments of bearing witness into ones of utter passivity (13). Inventory relocates shame and fear within the geopolitical borders of the Global North by underscoring our systematic depiction of death as spectacle. As the narrative voice ironically puts it: the broken fingers, pricked and bruised, misformed ribs and the famished babies for the world’s most famous photos … let us forget all that, let us not act surprised, or make coy distinctions among mass murderers, why ration nuclear weapons, let us all celebrate death (6, 35) These stanzas make privileged populations directly responsible for sustaining this form of necropolitics through the capitalization of spectacle. As discussed earlier, Mbembe explains how the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides in the power to dictate who may live and who must die. This pervasive necropolitics takes shape through malleable forms of necropower – systematic global instances of state violence, torture, and capital punishment – that devalue populations, stripping them of their right to live. Inventory suggests that these deadly assemblages have shattered the possibility of maintaining a sustainable ethics at this historical juncture. This is not surprising in that, as Deleuze and Guattari contend, “the capitalist axiomatic continually produces and reproduces what the war machine tries to exterminate” (471). In other words, far from producing a sense of security among the population, necropower assemblages such as surveillance technologies and border controls produce those very bodies they try to eliminate. In this bleak scenario, the opportunities for dissent seem more and more limited. And yet, the possibility for the population to reappropriate these war machines and turn them into assemblages of resistance is  always-already integral to their constitution. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, “each time there is an operation against the State – insubordination, rioting, guerrilla warfare, or revolution as act – it can be said that a war machine has revived, that a new nomadic potential has appeared” (386). Following their argument, I argue that Brand’s long poem occasionally provides glimpses of what this dissent could look like. Half way, the narrative voice suddenly shifts

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into the first person in an exercise of letter writing: “take this letter, put it on your tongue,/sleep while I keep watch,/know that I am your spy here, your terrorist,/find me” (37). With irreverence, this woman directly challenges readers to face the terrorist body, a threatening figure that, particularly after 9/11, has come to represent and embody many of the evils of contemporary times. In her articulation of a new form of homonationalism, Puar contends that some queer subjects become complicit with US nationalist projects through their involvement on the war on terror, and their construction of Muslim sexuality through Orientalist discourses. This form of homonationalism builds up from a combination of biopolitical, affective, and corporeal forces that target certain racialized queer populations as a threat to the nation. Puar consequently urges critics to rethink queer theory by “conceptualising the ways life and death are regulated simultaneously through race and sexuality” (7). I would argue that the porosity characterizing this pernicious biopolitics of race, which is sustained by various modes of necropower, is precisely what Brand is trying to signal in her work. As I discussed in chapter 1, Yasmine, the main character in Ossuaries, is an activist who lives underground, bearing witness to a variety of sociopolitical revolutions across temporal and spatial frameworks. Historical violences materialize in the body of this racialized woman who is then forced to live a life of confinement, away from community. Targeted as a potential terrorist, this activist remains hidden until the right time to act emerges. Yasmine poses a threat to nationalist discourses not necessarily because of her sexuality but of her race and political associations. In the portrayal of both Yasmine as well as the unnamed narrator in Inventory as potential terrorists, Brand indirectly exposes the pitfalls of US exceptionalism that builds on the narrative of victimization of the non-Western woman as in need of rescue. In doing so, Brand further poses the question of our complicity in the sustenance and reification of these discourses and structures of power. Brand’s poetry suggests that human beings as such form a paradoxical community where no clear boundaries between victims and perpetrators are delineated.2 As implied in Inventory, we are systematically exposed to violence while simultaneously complicit in it: and the forests we destroyed, as far as

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the Amazonas’ forehead, the Congo’s gut, the trees we peeled of rough butter, full knowing, there’s something wrong with this … we did all this and more (7) The insistence on the verb “to know” signals how systems of knowledge are fully integrated into power structures, thus underscoring the ethical implications of this collective sense of historical violence. The poetic “we” here implies that current forms of collectivity have failed in their very nature as forces of resistance against structures of power. Instead, collective alliances have been co-opted by a perverse form of passive politics that pervades the public and private spheres with several implications: there were roads of viscera and supine alphabets, and well, fields of prostration, buildings mechanized with flesh and acreages of tender automobiles heavy with our tiredness, solid with our devotion after work we succumbed headlong in effusive rooms to the science-fiction tales of democracy (7–8) The sterility of the private realm is emphasized through the continuous reference to the passivity that signposts everyday life. Thus, those “fields of prostration” are no longer exclusively positioned within the public sphere but now occupy a borderline position that traverses public and private experience. In her discussion of affective citizenship, Diana Brydon explains how “Brand redefines the role of emotion and affect in political life, in part by refunctioning how they have been manipulated through the media” (1002). As a result, the disaffection that characterizes society at large has turned intimacy into an almost impossible realization. Brand’s poem exposes how social and political exhaustion affects and shapes spatial and biopolitical boundaries, together with material bodies, with paradoxical effects. It is in this space of material

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interconnectivity where an alternative cross-border ethic can be formulated. In Dialogues II, Deleuze and Parnet define assemblage as “a multiplicity which is made up of heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures. Thus the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy.’ It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind” (69). Thinking through their words, what matter in assemblage formations are alliances and these are understood as “contagions” and “epidemics” (69). It is no coincidence that Brand addresses the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina in one of the final sections in Inventory: the surface of the earth, how it keeps springing back, for now, and the irregular weather of hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, sunlight on any given day, anywhere, however disastrous at least magnificent and moments when you rise to what you might be (89–90) As paradigmatic instances of ecological agency, hurricanes and similar disasters belong to the unexpected realm of the world. As discussed earlier, material feminist theorists like Nancy Tuana remind us that bodies affect and are affected by other bodies; human materialities affect and are affected by nonhuman and more-thanhuman materialities. As a result, toxicity, viscosity, and contagion circulate between bodies in unpredictable ways. This porosity can allow us to thrive, but it can also destroy us. Consequently, when different bodies act and interact in unexpected ways, the result can be lethal. Inventory subtly implies that it is the waiting that paradoxically condemns us, while simultaneously enabling unexpected outcomes. The question then remains: are we willing to take the risk and consider what the unexpected may bring? In her discussion of Brand’s Inventory, Cheryl Lousley claims that “the poem is an exercise in taking an account or inventory of the accumulating losses of the twenty-first century” (37). While I agree with Lousley’s take in terms of the poem’s depiction of a world doomed by forces of necropower, I do think there is a sense of possibility ingrained in Brand’s poetry, particularly in the very rare references to the realm of the utopian: “I wish I had beautiful legs/to

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get me to another planet,/to run in the lustrous substances of all that’s left out,/all that may have” (Inventory 70). Even though these lines signal an ephemeral moment of hope, I am more intrigued by the subtle references to the realm of the unexpected here. Allusions to popular culture pervade the long poem, often used as vehicles to indicate the limitations of countercultural movements in the 1960s. And yet, some of the names of these artists remain untainted by failure but instead point towards a moment of possibility and potential change. In one of the lines, the narrative voice mentions American poet and musician Cecil Taylor, who is considered one of the pioneers of free jazz. Well-known for his experimentalism and his energized tunes, Taylor proposes a musical style that involves an embodied approach, together with a high degree of improvisation. This moment of improvised creativity that Brand subtly references interests me in that it can be taken as an opportunity for the unforeseen, unplanned, and unexpected to arrive. And yet, Brand refuses to provide an easy way out of our failures: “I have nothing soothing to tell you,/that’s not my job,/my job is to revise and revise this bristling list,/hourly” (100). Hence her work carefully avoids ascribing hope as a comforting permanent solution, leaving readers in a complicated position. So is there an alternative? Can literature offer an effective politico-ethical scenario that goes beyond social critique? As a literary and cultural scholar, I systematically struggle to overcome the limitations of representation by focusing, more attentively, on how materiality crosses over and cuts across the private and the public spheres. I find Brand’s poetry particularly useful for this task in that her work systematically pushes readers to question the reliability of language structures. As she claims, “whatever language we might have spoken/is so thick with corrupt intentions,/it persuades no one” (43). And yet, I find Brand’s poetic language highly affective, particularly in the ways her literary assemblages problematize the crossing of multiple boundaries, often allowing for the interrogation of the ethical roles of societies and individuals in shaping power structures. In this chapter, I have started to hint at the inextricability of bodily, biopolitical, and affective borders in any discussion of how necropower works at this historical juncture. Political and cultural theorists such as Patricia T. Clough, Puar, Mbembe, and Ben Anderson, among many others, have focused particularly on the

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complex role that affect plays in any discussion of the biopolitical realm. In “Future Matters,” Clough argues that “the production of normalization is not only, or even primarily, a matter of socializing the subject; increasingly, it is a matter of directly bringing bodies and bodily affective capacities under an expanded grid of control, especially through the marketization of affective capacity” (14–15). In a similar vein, Anderson explores the entangled relationship between affect and biopower, aptly contending that “the affective life of individuals and collectives is an ‘object-target of’ and ‘condition for’ contemporary forms of biopower” (“Affect” 28–9). Under neoliberalism, the pernicious capitalization of bodies, together with their labour and their affective relations, becomes an integral part of the workings of contemporary modes of biopower. Not surprisingly, Deleuze and Guattari already anticipated in the 1980s that the regime of the war machine is that “of affects, which relate only to the moving body in itself, to speeds and compositions of speed among elements” (400). Affect, they continue, “is the active discharge of emotion, the counterattack, whereas feeling is an always displaced, retarded, resisting emotion. Affects are projectiles just like weapons; feelings are introceptive like tools” (400). It is to the contested terrain of affect – with its multiple trajectories and ramifications – that I now turn in the last part of this book.

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P ART TH RE E Cross-Border Affects

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7 Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return Cross-Border Pathogeographies It is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the “I” and the “we” are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (10)

What language would describe that loss of bearings or the sudden awful liability of one’s own body? The hitting or the whipping or the driving, which was shocking, the dragging and the bruising it involved, the epidemic sickness with life which would become hereditary? And the antipathy which would shadow all subsequent events. Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return (21)

Affect is everywhere. Affect is nowhere. In other words, forms of affect not only leave traces in human bodies and other materialities but also impregnate the incorporeal. Affect thus occupies a slippery terrain that spreads across the ethical, sociopolitical, economic, and cultural realms. Deleuzian-inflected philosophers have exploited what I refer to as the “translocationality” of affect as a site  of potential and possibility (Deleuze and Guattari; Braidotti, Transpositions). Ben Anderson aptly contends: “Affects are understood as impersonal intensities that do not belong to a subject or an object, nor do they reside in the mediating space between a subject and an object. So the key political and ethical task for a cultural politics of affect is to disclose and thereafter open up points of potential on the ‘very edge of semantic availability’ (Williams 1977,

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134) by comprehending the genealogies, conditionalities, performativities, and potentialities of different affects” (“Modulating” 161). Affects, then, are not property; they are not owned by subjects. Rather, as Sara Ahmed brilliantly argues in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, they are relational; they circulate between bodies constantly generating new encounters through spatial processes of “approximation,” “disorientation,” and “reorientation.” Affects are also simultaneously located and deterritorialized, and, as such, flow between the individual and the collective; the personal and the public. In the words of anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, “Ordinary affects are public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they’re also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of … They are a kind of contact zone where the overdeterminations of circulations, events, conditions, technologies, and flows of power literally take place” (2–3). Following Stewart’s articulation of public feelings as contact zones, I want to delve into affect as a cross-­ border concept that allows for the emergence of different forms of social relations and ethical intervention. These cross-boundary moves, I would add, are always embedded in economic processes with a number of implications for the gendered and the racialized body. Thus, it is crucial to incorporate feminist and decolonial approaches into any considerations of affect. In their introduction to the special issue “Affecting Feminism: Questions of Feeling in Feminist Theory,” scholars Carolyn Pedwell and Anne Whitehead insist on this issue and argue: “While affect theory provides a valuable resource to interrogate long-held assumptions and think social and political life differently, such openings are not framed productively (or accountably) through an elision of the critical and diverse contributions of feminist, postcolonial and queer analysis” (118). In a similar vein, Sneja Gunew underscores the need to think about emotions and feelings beyond European structures and traditions in an attempt to begin to decolonize affect theory (“Subaltern Empathy” 15). Sharing the urge expressed by some of the above mentioned theorists, contemporary transCanadian feminist writers are contributing to the transformation of the poetics and politics of affect, particularly by  problematizing the multiple directions in which it circulates, impregnating the ethical, economic, and sociocultural realms. In her fictional and poetic figurations, Dionne Brand has interrogated and often contested the naturalized orientation of bodies towards

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hegemonic structures of power and dominance. Works such as What We All Long For, Inventory, and Ossuaries challenge these “failed orientations,” to borrow Ahmed’s phrase (Queer 37), by depicting a variety of bodies that refuse to be pulled by economic neoliberalism, compulsory heterosexuality, or racial imperialism. Deploying feminist, queer, and anti-racist interventions in affect studies, in this chapter I examine the circulation of affect in Brand’s memoir A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. In my analysis, I employ the concept of “pathogeography” as developed by a group of artists and activists from Feel Tank Chicago who seek “to reveal hidden political histories as [they] map the affective expressions of the body politic.” As they note on their website, the project rearticulates the term “psychogeography,” as developed by the Situationists, by substituting psyche (the soul) for pathos (feeling) to emphasize “the emotional investments, temperatures, traumas, pleasures, and ephemeral experiences circulating throughout the political and cultural landscape.”1 I here borrow the notion of pathogeography to look at how spaces such as the Black Atlantic are depicted in the text as cross-border geographies where affect circulates in ambiguous ways. These spaces, as Brand’s memoir illustrates, enable the circulation of longing and desire, while simultaneously disabling the complete realization of such emotional needs. A Map, nonetheless, suggests that these affective geographies can be remade through the exercise of writing and reading as embodied practices, together with the reformulation of affective alliances across borders. My analysis thus suggests a departure from psychoanalytical interpretations of affect as pathology, via Freud, in that the experience of object loss in Brand’s memoir does not cripple the subject’s identity but instead indirectly enables the formulation of collective embodied subjectivities.2 An archive of ordinary affects, in Stewart’s understanding of the term, Brand’s A Map is constructed out of scratches from history, personal recollections of the author’s childhood in Trinidad, memories of Grenada and its failures, political commentary, cartography, and poetry. The memoir thus assembles an affective archive that extends and crosses a variety of temporal and spatial boundaries with political and ethical repercussions. In one of the first sections in the text, the narrator describes the Black diasporic subject as inhabiting a cross-border space that exceeds ontological constructions of the self, while simultaneously being trapped by its

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boundaries: “To live in the Black Diaspora is I think to live as a fiction – a creation of empires, and also self-creation. It is to be a being living inside and outside of herself. It is to apprehend the sign one makes yet to be unable to escape it except in radiant moments of ordinariness made like art” (19). I want to turn our attention to these “radiant moments of ordinariness” where alternative poetic and ethical affects emerge. In one of her recollections, Brand comments on how she came across the ordinariness of suffering through the encounter with books like The Black Napoleon that trace the historical struggle of Black slaves: “What led me to this book, then, were my senses, my sweet tooth, my hunger, my curiosity … This book filled me with sadness and courage. It burned my skin … I did not yet know how the world took people like me. I did not know history. The book was a mirror and an ocean” (185–7). Notice how affect circulates in this passage, not only impregnating the body of the narrator, but also enabling connections between artistic creation, geography, and history. As she explains, reading such books turned out to be formative moments that shaped her subjectivity, together with her affective responses to knowledge and injustice. This mixture of sad awareness and “sensual knowledge” (188) becomes the ethico-political basis for the adult Brand to interrogate received versions of history. To Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s famous lines, “I’m nostalgic for a country which doesn’t yet exist on a map,” Brand responds: “Dear Eduardo, I am not nostalgic. Belonging does not interest me” (85). By resisting nostalgia, she manages instead to convey a kind of counter-melancholy that pushes readers to consider the socially constructed concepts of origins and belonging differently.3 This redefinition, I would add, involves a rearticulation of the variety of ways in which affect shapes social and bodily spaces and relations. In her discussion of affective economies, Ahmed contends that hate does not reside in a given subject or object; it is economic, in that “it circulates between signifiers in relationships of difference and displacement” (Cultural 44). Brand positions the transmission of hate and fear at the centre of the memoir’s narrative. Looking back at her childhood memories on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, the narrator expresses a lack of knowledge and, yet, a  sense of shared pain and unhappiness that circulates within the community:

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I knew that everyone here was unhappy and haunted in some way. Life spoke in the blunt language of brutality, even beauty was brutal. I did not know what we were haunted by at the time. Or why it would be imperfect to have a smooth face, or why a moment of hatred would take hold so easily as if the sun had simply come out. But I had a visceral understanding of a wound much deeper than the physical, a wound which somehow erupted in profound self-disappointment, self-hatred, and ­disaffection. (11) Loaded with negative affect, Black subjectivity is described as an embodied spectrality; a yet-to-be-defined wound that not only haunts the social realm but also is felt on the skin; a scar that impregnates both the subject and the body. As the narrator in A Map explains, hate circulates among different generations of Black subjects who share histories of geopolitical erasure and affective precariousness. The affective impulse to know and trace a past of impossible origins is ingrained in language structures. A Map opens with the narrator attempting to have her grandfather remember where their ancestors come from; she needs a name, a linguistic structure to make sense of the world around her: “Having no name to call on was having no past; having no past pointed to the fissure between the past and the present. That fissure is represented in the Door of No Return: that place where our ancestors departed one world for another; the Old World for the New” (5). With no success, the name remains inaccessible to this young girl who craves to be part of a collective history. Her grandfather cannot bear to remember, which emotionally impacts his granddaughter: “a rupture in history, a rupture in the quality of being,” as Brand puts it, but “also a physical rupture, a rupture of geography” (5). Note how the ontological break the narrator experiences is felt in her material body – a dislocated body that longs for location; a political body that bears the traces of history; a social body that shares stories of collective trauma. In this moment of affective rupture, the concept of pathogeography emerges. In a fascinating article on Black Atlantic oceanographies, scholar Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley boldly claims that the Black Atlantic has always been the queer Atlantic. Describing this affective space as a borderland, Tinsley explains how in this pathogeography,

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“elements or currents of historical, conceptual, and embodied maritime experience come together to transform racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized selves” (192). Brand describes this contested, and potentially queer, space in similar lines. Recalling another moment in her childhood at the beach in Guaya, the narrative voice in A Map describes the waters of the Atlantic Ocean as an affective space of both pleasure and longing. From the ocean, described as the centre of the world, she would imagine potential future destinations: “Venezuela was to the southeast, Brazil to the southwest, Britain to the northeast, America to the northwest. A road map, compressed to fit the six-inch scroll of a grape leaf; these were my possible directions and my desires” (74). Brand’s affective encounter with the ocean not only leaves an impression on her younger self but also forces the temporary disorientation of her body. Affects are relational, Ahmed contends, always involving “(re) actions or relations of ‘towardness’ or ‘awayness’” in relation to the objects of emotions (Cultural 8). This relationality, she explains, can enable the subject to engage in a variety of alternative reorientations. Brand’s disorientation thus becomes a moment of possibility where the Black body resists invisibility by envisioning instead the potential of translocationality. In the afterword to her shortstory collection Astray, Emma Donoghue reflects on the implications of being a “twice migrant”4 and what it seems to her like the arbitrariness of destinations: “Straying has always had a moral meaning as well as a geographical one, and the two are connected. If your ethical compass is formed by the place you grow up, which way will its needle swing when you’re far from home?” (262). Besides being a basic tool to help people orient themselves, the image of the compass is a loaded one, as Brand’s memoir aptly illustrates. Traditionally associated with white masculinist histories of expansion and exploration, the compass occupies a problematic position within the imaginary of colonized populations, refugees, and other displaced peoples. Brand’s narrator, however, embraces the ocean as an alternative compass that reactivates the circulation of affect, both disorienting and reorienting her young body towards alternative imagined lives. The Atlantic Ocean hence becomes a complex pathogeography – an archive of affects that generates contradictory feelings in the narrator, who is at once pulled by its power and overwhelmed by its

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vast magnitude. As a result, this affective space both orients Black diasporic peoples into a melancholic return to Africa as an impossible origin, and also pushes them away into the search for alternative ties of affiliation and belonging. Tinsley claims that Brand plumbs “the archival ocean materially, as space that churns with physical remnants, dis(re)membered bodies of the Middle Passage, and [she plumbs] it metaphorically, as opaque space to convey the drowned, disremembered, ebbing and flowing histories of violence and healing in the African diaspora” (194). Through repeated exposure to this affective space, however, the narrator in A Map also manages to imagine alternative destinations. The ocean therefore becomes a paradigmatic pathogeography – a paradoxical space that enables the transmission of affects such as longing and desire, but simultaneously disallows the full realization of such emotional needs. Brand’s A Map takes both the author and the reader into an affective journey across myriad temporal and spatial frameworks, tracing a web of historical interconnectedness and ruptures. It is within these pathogeographies that the affective subject comes into surface in the memoir; often astray between past and present routes. In Ordinary Affects, Stewart reflects on the affective dimensions of everyday life, contending that “the affective subject is a collection of trajectories and circuits. You can recognize it through fragments of past moments glimpsed unsteadily in the light of the present like the flickering light of a candle. Or project it onto some kind of track to follow. Or inhabit is as a pattern you find yourself already caught up in (again) and there’s nothing you can do about it now” (59). Inhabiting and narrating the “residues of past dreaming practices” (Stewart 21), Brand reflects on the precarious affective routes of history: “I think Blacks in the Diaspora carry the Door of No Return in our senses … We arrive with its coat of arms, its love knot, its streamers, its bugle, its emblem attesting to our impossible origins” (A Map 48). Notice how sight is often one of the privileged senses in the memoir, particularly in the references to the Atlantic Ocean: “The word gaze only applies to water. To look into this water was to look into the world, or what I thought was the world, because the sea gave one an immediate sense of how large the world was, how magnificent and how terrifying” (7). Again, the act of seeing is contradictorily caught up in circuits of fear and desire. And so is the Middle Passage described by Brand: “Why consider the Door of No Return? Because it exists without prompting. It exists despite all

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efforts to obscure it or change it or reinterpret it by its carpenters or its passengers. The Door of No Return is ocular. It is propitious. From it one may reflect, grasp” (72). As a cross-border pathogeography, this metaphorical door occupies an impossible space, while paradoxically being felt everywhere; it allows and disallows; it is haunted by the past, while it propels subjects into an uncertain future, always bearing the impressions of multiple historical ruptures on the skin: The door casts a haunting spell on personal and collective consciousness in the Diaspora. Black experience in any modern city or town in the Americas is haunting. One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives. Where one stands in a society seems always related to this historical experience. Where one can be observed is relative to that ­history … How do I know this? Only by self-observation, only by looking. Only by feeling. Only by being a part, sitting in the room with history. (25) Through an affective way of seeing, vulnerable subjects can access a  past of shared precariousness and distorted histories. And this archive of negative affect initially emerges when looking back; when tracing the routes of one’s diasporic histories, often through melancholia and nostalgia. Arguably, however, A Map suggests that the occupation of this affective space may grant a sensual knowledge, as Brand puts it, that would otherwise be negated to Black diasporic populations. In this sense, then, the circulation of negative feelings such as pain or loss might be potentially deployed to activate aesthetic creation, ethical responsibility, and political action. Fear saturates the section in A Map that looks back at Grenada in 1999, where Brand witnessed the failure of revolution: “I had come here in search of a thought, how to be human, how to live without historical pain. It seemed to me then that a revolution would do it” (157). Instead, she describes the horrific spectacle of death in a variety of forms: people being killed and people killing themselves by throwing their bodies down a cliff trying to get away. Witnessing extreme forms of negative affect creates bodily disorientation: “I did not feel as if I  was in my body” (165). Interestingly, following a woman who is running away forces the narrator to turn towards another direction,

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and thus reorient her body into a different space. In a perverse turn of events, the woman is eventually killed, whereas Brand ends up saving her own life. Far from experiencing liberation, this experience scars the narrator’s body and mind: “I wanted to be free. I wanted to feel as if history was not destiny. I wanted some relief from the enclosure of the Door of No Return. That’s all. But no, it had hit me in the chest and all the wind was gone out of me” (168). Her embodied subject position is dramatically shaken by these precarious encounters in Grenada, ultimately turning this space into yet another instance of a cross-border pathogeography. In “The Contingency of Pain,” Ahmed claims that to “break the seal of the past, in order to move away from attachments that are hurtful, we must first bring them into the realm of political action. Bringing pain into politics requires we give up the fetish of the wound through different kinds of remembrance. The past is living rather than dead; the past lives in the very wounds that remain open in the present” (Cultural 33). Brand’s memoir, particularly her discussion of the inadequacy of so-called processes of reconciliation, shares Ahmed’s impulse to revisit the past, together with other temporal frameworks, in order to transform pain into an effective political strategy. The narrator in A Map looks at how strategies of reconciliation fix and as a result, erase, past injustices in historical processes of crime such as the Stolen Generation in Australia, the Apartheid in South Africa, or the Holocaust in Germany and other territories, and, I would add, the genocide of indigenous peoples in Canada. By traversing geopolitical and temporal frameworks, Brand traces a genealogy of precarious encounters, questioning the many attempts at failed reconciliations. Calling for action, Ahmed advocates “a politics based not on the possibility that we might be reconciled, but on learning to live with the impossibility of reconciliation” (Cultural 39). Brand shares Ahmed’s idea of impossible reconciliations, in that the spectres of history are still very much part of the present lives of destitute populations across the globe. Challenging the common argument of the people who refuse to accept responsibility as a result of “not being there,” Brand explains how there is no escape from such injustices: “It never occurs to them that they live on the cumulative hurt of others. They want to start the clock of social justice only when they arrived. But one is born into history; one isn’t born into a void” (82). This accumulation of negative affect not only determines how individual subjectivities and collective

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consciousness are formed in the past and the present, but also how they project into a future yet to come. As discussed earlier in this book, Elizabeth Freeman proposes some intriguing strategies to consider temporality in ways that would challenge chrononormativity. As Freeman explains, “I try to think against the dominant arrangement of time and history … Instead, I track the ways that nonsequential forms of time … can also fold subjects into structures of belonging and duration that may be invisible to the historicist eye” (xi). Certain artists, Freeman contends, manage to resist chrononormative structures by creating aesthetic and ethical spaces that resist understanding the past through nostalgia or forgetting mechanisms. Brand’s use of what I would call a politicized counter-melancholia5 in A Map enables those ruptures in history to emerge into the unstable present we currently live under, while simultaneously pointing towards the possibility of reorienting a future for Black bodies and Black histories. Affect, cultural theorist Gregory J. Seigworth explains, “always points to a future that is not quite in view from the present, a future that scrambles any map in advance of its arrival, if indeed the moment (as a demand of the social) ever fully arrives” (21). In a similar vein, Brand concludes her memoir with a reflection on mapping: “A map, then, is only a life of conversations about a forgotten list of irretrievable selves” (224). This affective mapping signals the interconnectivity of subjectivity, language, and memory in the creation of shared cross-border pathogeographies for minoritized populations. Brand’s exercise allows her to envision “possible collective futures” (Joseph 76) populated by affective encounters and pathogeographies. “The idea of return,” she concludes, “presumes the certainty of love and healing, redemption and comfort. But this is not return. I am not going anywhere I’ve been, except in the collective imagination. Yes, the imagination is itself a pliant place, lithe, supple, susceptible to pathos, sympathetic to horror” (90). Brand’s geographical and affective turns push readers into rethinking our emotional and physical scars as a way to distribute just emotions understood by Ahmed as those “that work with and on rather than over the wounds that surface as traces of past injuries in the present” (Cultural 202). In doing so, A Map traces an alternative archive of feelings6 that rethinks, re-feels, and resists historical ruptures and normative genealogies of affect with crucial ethical and sociopolitical repercussions.

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8 Affecting the Ethical Imagination Emma Donoghue’s Astray Always becoming, will never be Always arriving, must never land. Shani Mootoo, The Predicament of Or (81)

The ethical imagination becomes a means to explore the historical refiguring of technologies of the self and of self-other relations, with their constitutive engagements with thought, fantasy and affect. Henrietta L. Moore, Still Life: Hopes, Desires and Satisfactions (18)

As illustrated in the work of the transCanadian feminist writers ­discussed in this book, namely Dionne Brand, Emma Donoghue, Hiromi Goto, and Larissa Lai, the first decade of the twenty-first century has proven to be a troubled one, with crises of all sorts spilling out and cutting across the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural realms. In the midst of economic collapse and ecological degradation, it seems that part of the world, as we knew it, has gone astray. In these uncertain times, old epistemologies seem to no longer hold, and thus social critique strives against its limitations. According to the o e d , “to go astray” means to become lost or mislaid. Apart from the geographical signification, the adverb “astray” also means falling “into error or morally questionable behaviour” (o e d ). One of the many outcomes of 9/11 and the unethical war on terror targeting places such as Iraq or Afghanistan has involved the displacement of civil populations, leaving growing numbers of refugees to wander every day through roads of poverty and, in

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many cases, death. A particular day in recent history comes to mind: 19 April 2015, when around 900 refugees drowned in the Mediterranean as a result of criminal European Union and British policies that do not support planned search and rescue operations in order to avoid an unintended pull factor. As I mentioned in earlier chapters, the ongoing civil war in Syria has made the figure of the refugee utterly critical in the restructuring of both internal and external geopolitical frontiers. The final outcome of this catastrophe is at this time unpredictable. Similarly, it seems that reason has gone astray in other border zones in the world such as  Gaza or Lebanon where human rights are systematically suspended. Intriguingly, the etymology of “astray” originates with the verb estraier, based on Latin extra (out of bounds) and vagari (wander) (o e d ). The populations described in the previous examples have gone astray in that their bodies – read as debilitated, diseased, disposable – remain out of normative bounds in terms of race, nation, or economic position. These expendable bodies deterritorialize and reterritorialize the spaces they occupy, but their ability to activate change is ultimately limited. In Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, Alexander G. Weheliye poses two methodological questions that are relevant here: “Why are formations of the oppressed deemed liberatory only if they resist hegemony and/ or exhibit the full agency of the oppressed? What deformations of freedom become possible in the absence of resistance and agency?” (2). I want to think carefully about these concerns, especially when we consider aesthetic representations of the figure of the refugee or the migrant, in order to avoid a depoliticized analysis. Out of this responsibility, I want to engage and expand Weheliye’s second question and think about which practices of freedom might be available to destitute populations whose agency has been negated. Also, importantly, is it possible to find sustainable ways to activate resistance even in cases when doing so might seem impossible? Of course this entails a reconsideration of what we understand by “agency” and it is here where the roles of affect and corporeality become crucial. We can think about entangled modes of corporeal agency, as material feminist theories do. We could also consider the ways in which the circulation of affect may counteract biopower. And we can also examine how fantasy and the imagination can activate modes of resistance that might affect and transform self-other relations.

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Prioritizing the ethical and the affective, Henrietta L. Moore stresses the need to “envisage and theorize what links human agency and human subjectivity to forms of the possible, to ways of living that open up new ways of being” (13). Writing within the context of social anthropology in global and transnational processes, Moore rearticulates fantasy, pleasure, desire, and hope as sites of possibility for the regeneration of interconnections between and across human and nonhuman bodies. Moore deploys the concept of the “ethical imagination,” as Michel Foucault proposes in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, as a way to approach social transformation given that it is “one of the primary sites of cultural invention” (16) and, also, “as a way of taking us beyond the limitations of current theories of globalization, culture and agency” (206). Importantly, Moore combines strategies from both the epistemological and ontological realms, thus stressing the need to be attentive to bodily and affective processes. In line with many recent theories of affect and material feminisms, human subjectivity is here understood as embodied and relational; reconnected to the vitality of the material world as an activator of change. Following Moore, I consider the ethical imagination as a crossborder site where affect circulates in multidirectional ways, sometimes activating alternative forms of agency and resistance. As a case study, I look at Donoghue’s short-story collection Astray. My analysis focuses on how pain, desire, shame, and hope circulate in these stories in ways that shape and transform bodies and spaces across different historical temporalities with important ethical repercussions. Donoghue dislodges the term “stray” from normative ideologies that have been historically used to both target suspicious groups and control deviant populations. In contrast, the stories portray a  variety of bodies that not only go astray, but also become and feel astray, thus complicating normative modes of being and affect. The collection thus advocates an affective politics of resistance and rethinks ethical relations beyond exclusionary epistemologies and necropolitical impulses. Traversing the boundaries of time and space, Astray cuts across several centuries and continents to provide readers with an assemblage of cross-border stories. Taking up again the genre of historiographic metafiction, Donoghue blurs the boundaries between history and fantasy as she does in The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits. The back cover explains how Astray offers readers a “history

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for restless times,” and in fact it is through the act of looking back to previous historical moments that Donoghue’s stories provide a critical commentary on contemporary times. At a first glance, the collection appears structured in a linear way with each section ordered by “departures,” “in transit,” and “arrivals and aftermaths.” The stories themselves, however, resist temporal and spatial causality by offering instead an archive of timely matters populated by an assemblage of bodies gone astray in myriad ways. With the phrase “archive of timely matters,” I seek to emphasize how the collection traces a historical genealogy characterized by crisis, change, and population mobility. The stories traverse the American Civil War, colonial England, the Great Famine in Ireland, the New York exchange crash in 1893, and the subsequent strikes across the United States. Interestingly, it is easy to find many connections between these moments in history and contemporary episodes, such as the ongoing disputes across the US-Mexican border, the recent revolutions in several Arab countries, the 2008 economic crisis, and the multitude of strikes and demonstrations that followed across the world. On the one hand, Astray traces a genealogy of crises that goes accompanied by a critique of literal and symbolic systems of confinement and their repercussions on the body of vulnerable populations. On the other hand, it traces the struggles of human and nonhuman actors that constantly fight for the Aristotelian ideal of the “good life,” understood, in my view, as the right to agency and critical citizenship.1 When a body goes astray, a spatial shift occurs. As a result, borders are unsettled. This moment of boundary-crossing, however, involves not only geopolitical territories but also affective landscapes. Interestingly for the purposes of this chapter, the noun “emotion” comes from the Latin verb ēmovēre meaning “to remove, to shift, to displace” (o e d ). In Astray, affect circulates in ways that shape, shift, and displace the bodies of vulnerable populations across different historical temporalities and spatialities. In this matrix of intensities, subjectivities are constructed relationally and, as such, immediately immersed in the realm of ethics. Moore deploys the concept of the ethical imagination as a way to approach social transformation precisely because “it deals with the self in its relations with others, both proximate and distant, and as such provides for historical possibilities” (16). The ethical imagination, Moore continues, has scalar dimensions that simultaneously enhance the

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connections to those most proximate and those more distant. In this context, the boundaries between the private and public domains remain porous. As I discussed in chapter 2, Donoghue subverts the borders between the private and public realms in novels like Room by providing her characters with a kind of corporeal citizenship that allows for the transformation of social and affective relations in a society characterized by surveillance and control. The short story “Man and Boy” follows these lines of enquiry, but the author now centres on animal rights in the context of late nineteenth-century Britain. The narrative is inspired by the reports that circulated at the time about an elephant called Jumbo who, after having been held captive for many years at the London Zoo, is sold and moved to the United States to tour in diverse spectacles and circuses. Donoghue fictionalizes the account by focusing on the intimacy that develops between this creature, as he is called, and his keeper, Scott. Told in the first person, the narrative is partly structured as a monologue addressed to the creature in confessional mode. After he hears the news about the elephant being transferred because of his demented rampages, as they are called, Scott approaches him in the following way: “You don’t care for confinement, that’s all, and who can blame you?” (6). The narrative insists on providing the creature with human features, affective responses, and agency. For seventeen years, Scott has taken care of Jumbo: feeding him, talking to him, consoling him, and thus creating a shared intimacy between the two. Echoing the mother/son dyad in Room, the relationship between a human and a nonhuman in captivity now becomes the centre of attention: “you may be the most magnificent elephant the world has ever seen, due to falling so fortuitously young into my hands as a crusty little stray, to be nursed back from the edge of the grave and fed up proper” (9). The unusual intimacy between keeper and animal raises the suspicions of the owner at the zoo and the potential buyer: “‘Made half pet, half human,’ says the American, ‘by all these treats and pattings and chit-chat. Is it true what the other fellows say, Scott, that you share a bottle of whiskey with the beast every night, and caterwaul like sweethearts, curled up together in his stall?’” (12). The affective relationship between Jumbo and his keeper is rendered deviant and perverse by external sources of authority that fail to see other kinds of relationality between humans and animals as healthy or productive.

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Scott’s care for the elephant goes beyond the daily tasks proper of a keeper in that he also educates and tries to give the creature advice on conduct: “Oh, Jumbo. You might just settle down. Your feelings do you credit and all that, but there’s no good in such displays. You must be a brave boy” (10). It seems like the elephant is now governed by uncontrollable passions that have turned him into an undesirable being. Accused of terrorizing some people and destroying property, this abject creature is no longer valuable and thus needs to be sold. The excess in his affective responses causes the owner to adopt an ethically dubious resolution, which might potentially endanger his very life. Under the promise of spectacle and fame, Jumbo will be part of a touring show across the United States where he will be contemplated by the hordes as a source of consumption. In this case, mobility is not welcomed but instead criticized, in that it is sustained by the instrumentalization of the creature’s body for commercial purposes. Furthermore, the narrative stresses that Jumbo is being transferred against his will: he disobeys, refuses to move, and expresses dissent against all the rules imposed to him by regulatory figures of control. Shifts in subjectification activate agency and the ethical imagination in favour of the sustenance of the “good life” (Moore 140). “Man and Boy” advocates the right to a good life to extend beyond human beings. By focusing on how affect circulates across bodies, blurring a number of biopolitical boundaries, the narrative raises concerns about the agency of nonhuman beings and the dubious ethics involved in such examples of trade. At the same time, it addresses the difficulties ingrained in this process. Here I would like to turn Lauren Berlant’s argument in Cruel Optimism into a complex question that hovers in Donoghue’s stories: “What happens to fantasies of the good life when the ordinary becomes a landfill for overwhelming and impending crises of life-building and expectation?” (3). “Man and Boy” ends with Scott promising to take care of Jumbo and watch for his safety across the Atlantic Ocean. The narrative is left open-ended, loaded with great expectations (and perhaps cruel optimism?), signalling nonetheless the possibility of a potential future for their companionship. In a similar vein to Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, the ocean becomes an affective space of both uncertainty and possibility in Astray. I would then like to take up again the concept of pathogeography that I discussed in the previous chapter in order to

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continue my analysis of the Atlantic Ocean as a contested space that has historically been saturated by the circulation of multiple affects. The ocean is haunted by the ghostly presences of numerous historical episodes of dispossession and opportunity, such as indentureship, slavery, displacement, and immigration, as Brand’s memoir illustrates. The role that fantasy plays in the conceptualization of this affective space brings the concept of the ethical imagination to the forefront. Donoghue’s stories “Onward” and “Counting the Days,” both set in the mid-nineteenth century, imagine the crossing of the Atlantic as a pathway to escape prostitution and starvation respectively. Consumed by rage, Caroline, the main character in “Onward,” endures a precarious life in London sustained by sex work in order to take care of her baby daughter and brother. She strives to move forwards despite feeling that she lives in the “crack” between two worlds, as she puts it. Propelled by a sense of survival, Caroline has always oriented her body towards the future, no matter how uncertain it might be: “The road never seemed to fork. She’s put one foot in front of another, and this is where they have led her, this moment … Onward, onward, because backward is impossible” (29). Her mobility does not involve the sense of waste and lack of productivity inspired by masculinist figures such as the flâneur2 but instead is caught up in circuits of capital that have prevented her from moving away from that situation. Through the act of prostitution, her body has become entangled with the production of affective economies – circulating “between signifiers in relationships of difference and displacement” (Ahmed, Cultural 119). Notwithstanding uncertainty and risk, Caroline decides to reorient her life towards the possibility of a better future by moving to somewhere else like Canada. As she explains, this potential Atlantic crossing is an opportunity towards the fulfillment of a good life: “Her throat locks on the syllable. To really live. Not walled up” (36). Notice how her words also reflect her embodied response towards a possibility of life without being imprisoned. The toll that Caroline needs to pay in order to have access to this journey, as her brother explains, is that of storytelling, in that she will have to narrate the reasons why she needs to leave to a potential fellow philanthropist: “Sell her story, instead of her body? … Caroline’s pulse is in her ears, as fast as the wheels of a train, as loud as a ship’s engine. Not on and on, but out and away. To let out the truth, and then sink it

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under the waves” (38).3 As the passage illustrates, affect not only circulates within bodies but also spills “out and away” into other bodies, objects, and, in this case, geographical, sociopolitical, and ethical spaces. Writing is here depicted as an embodied act that activates affective responses propelled by the image of the ocean as a space of the ethical imagination; a pathogeography of secret longings and renewed possibilities. The Atlantic is similarly portrayed as an ethico-affective site in “Counting the Days.” In this case, however, the narrative accumulates a variety of negative emotions leading to an unhappy outcome. Jane leaves Northern Ireland, escaping from one of the most devastating episodes of famine, to reunite at last with her husband, Henry, in Canada after some years of separation. With her two children, she embarks on the Riverdale to cross the Atlantic, which is the last frontier that stands between her and Henry. The story, on the one hand, portrays her musings and expectations while in transit. The narrative, on the other hand, simultaneously shows how Henry is dying of cholera. His body is slowly deteriorating, thus forcing him into paralysis: “Such weakness is slackening his limbs today. His stomach churns; he leans against the wall. Its timber frame bears the claw marks of last winter’s ice. A carriage clatters by; the crack of the whip rings in Henry’s ears. His nerves are spiders’ webs beneath his skin. Have the months of vagabonding and working hand to mouth taken such a toll?” (78–9). Once again, the narrative disassociates mobility with privilege; instead, it can potentially be conducive to death through contagion as a result of the circulation of disease. Desperate, Henry’s thoughts are filled with rage: “anger serves Henry, devours whatever stands in his way: tiredness, inertia, despair, and loneliness. Plowing through six-foot snowdrifts, anger has burned in his gut and kept him warm, or warm enough to keep walking anyway” (80). Anger has occupied his body and mind as a result of the feelings of dislocation and isolation that he has experienced as an emigrant. Thinking through what she calls “ugly feelings,” literary and cultural theorist Sianne Ngai rethinks minor affects such as irritation, paranoia, or anxiety as potential sites of “critical productivity” (3). Circuits of emotional negativity, Ngai contends, are ambivalent in that they are “mobilized as easily by the political right as by the left” (5). As such, these ugly feelings are more likely to produce aesthetic and political ambiguities. Jane’s observations while she is crossing

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the Atlantic gesture towards this moment of critical productivity. Initially, Jane is overwhelmed by fear, in this case generated by the actual moment of border-crossing: “What kind of a woman would be more loath to go than to part, more afraid of the crossing than the separation?” (80). And yet, she is able to begin the journey carrying with her an assemblage of negative feelings: “Sometimes she hates Henry for going on ahead, for being able and willing to do without her in a strange land. But this is how Jane knows her kin, by an occasional flash of a resentment so intimate that she never feels it for outsiders: the maddening itch of the ties that bind” (82). Far from enhancing the separation from her husband, Jane’s ugly feelings actually allow for a different kind of imagined intimate relationship. And again, fantasy plays a crucial role in these moments of possibility as Jane and Henry repeatedly visualize and imagine a future together. Donoghue’s story, however, resists the imperative of the happy ending. Instead, “Counting the Days” closes with Henry’s death as Jane disembarks on Canadian shores: “His skin is cold and wet like a fish; the only water left in his body is on the outside. Henry licks his shoulder. He is sinking down below all human things. He is sliding into the ocean” (88). The narrative here signals those affective gaps and dysphoric feelings (Ngai 1) implicitly associated with the crossing of a pathogeography such as the Atlantic. Going astray, this story suggests, also involves a risk in that these bodies are often trapped in literal and symbolic spaces where access to agency and sociopolitical intervention is ultimately negated. In other words, bodies that become astray often inhabit contested spaces where the ethical imagination might be temporarily suspended. In turn, some of these spaces of the imagination are at times portrayed in Astray as sites of possibility from which to counteract moments of crisis. Fantasy, for instance, plays a crucial rule in the conceptualization of territories like the Yukon, which became idealized in the late-nineteenth century with the so-called gold rush. As the narrative voice in “Snowblind” puts it, “the Yukon was the place to be” (95), particularly after the United States had been struck with a strong economic crash and the wave of strikes that followed. These spaces, however, seem to resist the presence of these gold diggers through the strong agency of natural forces. Trapped in a cabin due to the extreme low temperatures, the two protagonists in  the story fight against gangrene and other difficulties in this

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enclosed space. Echoing Room, the Outside is now capitalized, which points at the clear separation of spatial borders in that particular time. It is well known that gold rushes helped shape North American frontiers at the turn of the nineteenth century, so it seems that Donoghue is adding her fictional account to this historical episode of border making. Instead of focusing on the positive outcome of some of these foundational histories, the narrative instead focuses on the body by underscoring how confinement and physical deterioration are crucial components in this type of bordercrossing in a settler-colonial setting. Donoghue’s stories in Astray illustrate how vulnerable populations have historically been subjected to biopolitical structures of power that have systematically instrumentalized their bodies as products of exchange. Within these circuits of biopower, affect plays a crucial role, particularly in the ways it shapes bodily and social spaces and relations and, perhaps more importantly, in the ways it can become an activator of resistance, often enabling the possibility of change and social transformation. In Donoghue’s words: “Uneasy. Wonder. Melancholy. Irritation. Relief. Shame. Absentmindedness. Nostalgia. Self-righteousness. Guilt. Travelers know all the confusion of the human condition in concentrated form. Migration is mortality by another name, the itch we can’t scratch. Perhaps because moving far away to some arbitrary spot simply highlights the arbitrariness of getting born into this particular body in the first place” (Astray, “Afterword” 271). As shown in this closing passage, Astray assembles a cross-border archive that traces a genealogy of bodies gone astray, often propelling a reorientation away from contested territories, such as the human, the family, or the national, and into novel forms of relationality and affect. Echoing other contemporary trans­ Canadian feminist writers, Donoghue’s productive disorientations invite readers to reconsider the ruptures and the pleasures of thinking, feeling, and becoming astray as moments of ethical possibility. Resisting queer theorist Lee Edelman’s rejection of futurity as a productive site, Jasbir Puar proposes instead rethinking the future in terms of an affective politics: “Opening up to the fantastical wonders of futurity, therefore, is the most powerful of political and critical strategies, whether it is through assemblage or to something as yet unknown, perhaps even forever unknowable” (222). As mentioned earlier, Donoghue’s stories interrogate problematic figures like the wanderer or flâneur, which have become equivalent to

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cosmopolitan privilege and, I would add, to a very normative way of seeing subjects as always embodying “able” bodies that move. Far from favouring only those bodies that are allowed to move in imaginary versions of a borderless world, Donoghue underscores the ordinariness of being astray and feeling out of bounds as spaces of possibility for the so-called 99% to find alternative pathways that not only shape the present but also introduce the future as a site of renewed possibility.

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9 Hiromi Goto’s Darkest Light Assembling a New Cross-Border Ethic As time, as space, seemed to stretch, elastic and ungoverned, uncertainty gnawed inside Gee’s chest … A shift … perception slipping, between physical and emotional. Hiromi Goto, Darkest Light (215)

This foregrounding of assemblage enables attention to ­ontology in tandem with epistemology, affect in conjunction with representational economies, within which bodies interpenetrate, swirl together, and transmit affects and effects to each other. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (205)

We live in paradoxical times. As Jasbir K. Puar convincingly puts it, today’s world is immersed in an “array of enduring modernist paradigms (civilizing technologies, Orientalisms, xenophobia, militarization, border anxieties) and postmodernist eruptions (suicide bombers, biometric surveillance strategies, emergent corporealities, counterterrorism in overdrive)” (204). These necropower assemblages, as I claimed in chapter 6, have shattered traditional conceptualizations of subjectivity, corporeality, time, space, and affect, and have raised a number of ethical conundrums of difficult solution. In this panorama of global crisis, it is perhaps more important than ever to creatively envision feminist and anti-racist modes of relationality that critically address the porous entanglements of human, nonhuman, and more-than-human ecologies and materialities. As I argue in this book, material feminists, critical race scholars, and

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affect theorists of different backgrounds and trajectories are contributing to regenerating these discussions in vital ways. Contemporary transCanadian feminist writers are also participating in current discussions around the roles of affect and ethics as vehicles to comprehend the world at this historical juncture. I contend that one of the common strategies they follow consists of assembling an alternative literary archive where corporeal, biopolitical, and affective borders are problematized and reconfigured in novel ways. In a similar vein to Dionne Brand, Hiromi Goto’s oeuvre imaginatively engages with how necropower operates on the bodies of minoritized populations through both explicit and veiled modes of institutional racism, surveillance technologies, and racial profiling. Goto’s speculative worlds, on the one hand, invite readers to think critically about the ethical implications behind those necropolitical impulses described above. Her feminist and queer fictions, on the other hand, creatively envision alternative modes of relationality and affect. It is the complex entanglement of necropower and affect in Goto’s novel Darkest Light that becomes my focus in this chapter. Depicted as deviant and monstrous, the human and nonhuman beings portrayed in the novel are often deprived of political rights and thus forced to live and die in the social, economic, and cultural borderlands of our public world. The dispersion of temporal, spatial, and affective borders in Darkest Light, however, signals how these vulnerable populations, despite being stripped of biopolitical currency, are capable of activating change. Goto’s novel hence proposes a cross-border ethic as a strategy to counteract those necropower assemblages that govern contemporary societies, while simultaneously advocating alternative logics of embodiment, affect, and ethical intervention. Also marketed as a young-adult novel, Darkest Light sets off with a similar premise to that posed in its companion Half World. For a long time, there were three realms that functioned in equilibrium, sustaining balance for all living beings: the Realm of Flesh, Half World, and the Realm of Spirit. After death, creatures would awaken in Half World only to relive their greatest trauma. Once fear and pain were transcended, beings would be ready to become Spirit, untroubled by material cares, until, once again, they would have to return to the Realm of Flesh. But this wholeness was interrupted and the three realms were severed from each other. As a result of being endlessly forced to experience extreme forms of physical and

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emotional suffering, the creatures that were trapped in Half World became monstrous. Half World is therefore an affective space where the boundaries between life and death blur, giving way to deviant bodies that are intriguingly capable of both philanthropic actions and condemnable acts, such as cannibalism and mutilation. Terror, fear, and pain circulate in this necropolitical space, shaping the public and personal relations between its inhabitants. When the three realms were united, the wholeness was sustained by the interconnections between different parts of the system. As such, the three realms worked as an ethico-affective assemblage. In his new approach to social ontology, Manuel De Landa explains how the main theoretical alternative to organic totalities is what Gilles Deleuze calls “assemblages” understood as historically specific “wholes characterized by relations of exteriority” (10). These assemblages, as discussed earlier in this book, have material and expressive components, together with territorializing and deterritorializing axes. As De Landa insists, assemblages are characterized by a mixed heterogeneity that allows the parts that contain them to be autonomous: “Relations of exteriority also imply that the properties of the component parts can never explain the relations which constitute a whole” (11). And yet, the autonomy of the parts does not exclude the multiple interactions or “intra-actions” with the whole. In other words, wholes are more than the sum of their parts. Significantly, when the three separate realms in the novel became radically independent, they immediately lost connection with the whole. In this moment of broken connectivity, the assemblage of Half World collapses. De Landa explains how “the postulation of a world as a seamless web of reciprocal action, or as an integrated totality of functional interdependencies, or as a block of unlimited universal interconnections, has traditionally been made in opposition to linear causality as the glue holding together a mechanical world” (19). In this world characterized by assemblages of reciprocity, chance and risk play a crucial role. Darkest Light cogently illustrates how Goto engages with the need to explore the unpredictability of world systems today, particularly in the characterization of the main (anti)hero and the portrayal of non-normative bodies, affects, and temporalities. Goto’s earlier novel, Half World, portrays a teenage girl called Melanie who goes through a series of tribulations to save her mother’s life and reunite the three realms. Melanie fights the despotic

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tyrant Mr Glueskin, a monstrous creature who rules Half World and who, unexpectedly, has a body that is able to reproduce. Taking Mr Glueskin’s baby with her, “a Half World infant born to Life” (4), Melanie succeeds in her task and returns to the Realm of Flesh alive. Darkest Light is set some years later. The baby is now a difficult sixteen-year-old called Gee, who lives with Ms Wei, the old ­lesbian librarian who has a crucial role in Half World. Reserved and  odd, Gee was unofficially adopted by Melanie and Ms Wei, now referred as Big Sister and popo (grandmother) respectively. Echoing Miranda in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl,1 Gee’s body repulses people as if it gave off “a kind of smell” (19) that keeps him isolated from the community, crippling his identity and initially preventing him from establishing any sustainable affective relationship: “With his irises as dark as his pupils, almost everyone’s reaction to them lingered somewhere between fear and disgust. What with his pale, pale skin and his dark eyes, he knew he repelled people somehow. And this knowledge had formed him, too” (18). Not only does his body become a source of abjection, but also his very existence seems to be saturated by the circulation of negative affect: “A wave of guilt lapped at Gee’s consciousness. Was it his fault that they were so isolated? Was it his fault that his popo didn’t have a girlfriend? That Older Sister never came home?” (31). These “darker feelings,” as he calls them, are located at the core of his subjective and bodily experience, while simultaneously affecting his encounters with others. Gee develops a relationship with Cracker, a troublesome selfidentified queer neo goth teenage girl who suffers from a heart problem, which brings the representation of disability into the narrative. Cracker’s potential vulnerability further links her with Gee in that their bodies are depicted as non-normative in related ways. A defender of queer justice, as she explains, Cracker feels some familiarity with Gee that prompts her to help and accompany him in his quest back to the necropolitical space of Half World. In his journey, Gee also encounters an enormous cat that has loyally been popo’s guardian and life companion. The cat now aids Gee in his search by leading him into the truth of his origins in Half World: “The past will always try to catch up with you, no matter how far you flee. You cannot run away from yourself … The past is inside you already” (105). Gee will then need to come to terms with the fact that trauma, pain, and suffering are not only feelings that reside

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inside him, but also forms of affect that circulate and shape the spaces he occupies. The portrayal of Half World as a wasteland of death and destruction brings the notion “necropower assemblage” to the forefront of the analysis. As Deleuze and Guattari claim: “On a first, horizontal axis, an assemblage comprises two segments, one of content, the other of expression. On the one hand it is a machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, and intermingling of bodies reacting to one another; on the other hand it is a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies. Then, on a vertical axis, the assemblage has both territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away” (88). Constantly immersed in the sound of bombing, the space depicted in Darkest Light is constantly deterritorialized and reterritorialized by the reiteration of death and the repetition of negative affects such as suffering and trauma: “Sometimes explosions shook the air … The air was heavy with the reek of raw sewage, decaying meat and smoky fires, a distant droning and roaring like an enormous factory … As time, as space, seemed to stretch, elastic and ungoverned, uncertainty gnawed inside Gee’s chest” (214–15). The portrayal of Half World as a death-world, to borrow Mbembe’s phrase, evokes images of current war zones across the globe, where chaos prevails and humanity is scarce. Significantly, matter, space, and time become elastic parts of this assemblage of necropolitical flows that lack government, resulting in multiple forms of disorientation in the novel. Maps are useless in this “illogical” and “irrational” space, as Gee calls it, given that none of them offer the same directions. Each creature has designed its own map according to its experiences and, as a result, all maps are different. Consequently, this unknown territorial assemblage cannot be mapped, since it is constantly subjected to processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. One of the first things that Gee and Cracker notice when they enter this new world is that normative spatial structures are systematically resisted: “He took one more step down to join her, yet when the ball of his foot touched the rock surface, he had the oddest sensation that he’d just climbed upward. He wobbled with confusion” (139). Echoing graphic artist M.C. Escher’s work Relativity, normal laws of gravity do not seem to apply in this landscape, which exacerbates Gee’s and Cracker’s bodily and spatial disorientation. Known

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for his depiction of impossible objects such as the Penrose triangle, Escher’s work offers some intriguing connections with Goto’s portrayal of impossible subjects and impossible materialities. Beyond mathematics and scientific interpretations, what an impossible object creates, at a basic level, are feelings of ambiguity and incredulity in the eyes of the beholder. When the impossible becomes visible, disorientation follows, affecting systems of knowledge and values. Cracker and Gee are systematically perplexed at the population inhabiting Half World: impossible creatures with monstrous bodies and human behaviours. Following De Landa’s insights, assemblages have an expressive segment impregnated by bodies, actions, and affects that are intertwined in constant relation and reaction to one another. Goto addresses the ethical implications of this porosity and malleability of corporeal and affective boundaries, particularly in her depiction of human and nonhuman bodies as complex cross-border assemblages. After an initial prologue, Darkest Light introduces two inhabitants of Half World: Ilanna, half human female and half eel, and Karu, half human male and half bird. Hungry, these monstrous characters wander the dark streets of this destroyed territory, searching for food and engaging in conversation about the troubles of their times: “The edges of her Half World wavered. A flicker between solid and immaterial. Ilanna shuddered. Clenched her will, seized it, and her world held solid once more. Her cycle was calling her back” (7). Feeling desperate without her mentor and lover, the gruesome Mr Glueskin, Ilanna senses change in the horizon; she feels the arrival of her beloved messiah. This kind of intuitive knowledge subtly associates her with Gee, which complicates the classification of Goto’s novel in Manichean terms, thus blurring the boundaries between good and evil. Interestingly, the complex embodiment of these creatures also problematizes the borders of corporeality with a number of ethical repercussions. In the collection of essays Thinking through the Skin, contributors from different disciplinary backgrounds look at how skin is lived as both a boundary and a point of connection. As editors Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey write in the introductory chapter, “These diverse approaches to thinking about the skin as a boundary – object, and as the site of exposure or connectedness, invite the reader to consider how the borders between bodies are unstable and how such borders are already crossed by differences that refuse to be

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contained on the “inside” or the “outside” of bodies” (2). Reading the skin as “bodyscape” certainly resonates in Darkest Light, particularly in the portrayal of Ilanna’s corporeality as a body that leaks: “The wet fabric of her dress clung to her icy flesh, seawater streaming down her body, leaving a wet trail behind her. Perpetually” (7). The materiality of the clothes fuses with her half-animal half-human skin, systematically dissolving body boundaries. As a result, Karu seems to be hesitant about Ilanna’s physical body and behaviour; he remains close to her and yet his body reacts to the stickiness of the eels: “Karu shuddered. Ilanna could see the human skin on his arms pimpling with revulsion and longing” (9). In line with Ahmed and Stacey’s insights, Karu’s simultaneous abjection and desire points to the paradoxical ways in which affect circulates between human and nonhuman subjects. By stressing the porosity of the boundaries of corporeality and affect, Darkest Light formulates a cross-border ethic that interrogates how bodies shape and are shaped by other bodies, while simultaneously being involved, and at times complicit, in the circulation of affective economies of oppression and dominance. The eels in Ilanna’s body, for instance, threaten not only Karu but Ilanna herself; if they do not get fed regularly, she risks being consumed by them. At the same time, Ilanna engages in cannibalism, to Karu’s disgust, not just to satiate her needs but to feed her eels and, more importantly, because she was told by Mr Glueskin that eating other Half World creatures extended your own cycle: “What does it matter anyway, bird, beast or human. Once eaten, they all return to the start of their Half World trauma once more” (14). Her justification is based on the fact that these beings are already dead so, in a way, she is not actually killing them. Here, the narrative indirectly asks readers to think carefully about the ethical implications of our actions, while it avoids an anthropocentric view of the affective relations between human and nonhuman populations. Moreover, the novel resists offering a simplistic moral lesson by further complicating Ilanna’s characterization: she is not just a perpetrator but also a victim, in this case, of the actions of a man. In a horrific act of betrayal, her lover had murdered her by throwing her into the sea, where other creatures feasted on her body: “The eels reached her first, to tear the flesh from her arms, to eat her tongue … She had woken in the Half World sea, even the stripped bones of her arms gone, and in their place two large eels attached to her shoulders.

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Where she once had a tongue, a small eel was fixed on the root. She had still been tied to the anchor. There Ilanna remained, eaten half alive, eternally, by flounders, skates, eels and octopi … She cycled through betrayal and death, betrayal and death, until she knew nothing else” (8). The brutal dismemberment of Ilanna’s body, and her subsequent suffering, place her in a position of vulnerability and precariousness, which further prompts readers to consider the porosity of bodily and affective borders, together with the sociopolitical and ethical implications of this permeability for human and nonhuman populations. Gee subtly shares Ilanna’s ethical ambivalence. Initially depicted as a reserved teenager who loves and helps his grandmother in their little store, he nonetheless hides an unidentified emotion that breeds inside him: “When he was very little he didn’t know what the feeling was called, but he always knew it was there, and sometimes it would flare up with the darkest light, so much so that he’d be filled with trembling. He never knew if this trembling was fear or excitement. He did not want to look at it so very closely” (17). Note that trembling seems to be a physical reaction to the affective responses of fear and excitement. And yet, the boundaries between the bodily and affective reactions blur with regards to the impossible causality between them, as affect theorists claim. Brian Massumi, for instance, explains how “fear is the anticipatory reality in the present of a threatening future. It is the felt reality of the nonexistent, loomingly present as the affective fact of the matter” (54). Significantly, Gee’s body anticipates a future threat that does not come from elsewhere but from within. His narrative journey then, similar to Sayuri’s in The Water of Possibility, not only involves the crossing of a series of geographical boundaries, but also the interrogation of several corporeal, ethical, and affective borders. Gee’s body challenges normative conceptualizations of embodiment in that it is composed of both organic and other materials. Craving to be normal, he initially resists the unknown possibilities that his own body seems to offer. In an early episode in the novel, his body begins to act with an extreme form of agency that is stronger than his will. Instead of avoiding trouble, as his popo always advises him, Gee’s body takes over: “Minute cracks, spreading outward, finally weakening, a howling rage bursting through the seams. Roiling, swelling with sickening stench, sour, mildewed and noxious” (68). His bodily response is also an affective one, where rage

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materializes through the very porosity of his corporeality. Suddenly, his body radically transforms: “The skin from Gee’s palm had spread, webbed, stretching thin between his fingers, white and elastic. Fingers, palm, elongated and pliant, his hand covered the boy’s entire face, wrapping around half his skull to tenderly cover both ears. Gee could feel the loose skin flap in and out of the boy’s open mouth as he desperately sucked for air” (69). With grotesque spectacle, the materiality of his body acquires an extreme form of power that can potentially kill him. As described earlier with regards to Ilanna’s body, Goto depicts certain unruly corporealities that threaten to destroy their own material bodies. The monstrous bodies depicted in Darkest Light spread, expand, and contort in unexpected ways and, as such, they cannot be contained, controlled, or managed. In this way, they become assemblages of trans-corporeality, borrowing Stacy Alaimo’s formulation. Intriguingly, when Ilanna crosses the gate into the Realm of Flesh to search for Gee, one of her eels betrays the other by offering it as a toll. Ilanna’s mutilated body still functions despite now missing one of its pseudo prosthetic-organic limbs. Trying to escape, Gee and Cracker then have to pay the toll to enter Half World. To their surprise, Gee does not hesitate and bites off his own finger: “His teeth should have met the resistance of bone. But they did not. They cut through his finger as if it were made of Plasticine. His mouth dropped open. The digit fell to his feet. Gee stared at his hand. No blood. No pain. His flesh was white all the way through – as though his matter was not flesh, was not human” (126–7). Seconds later, his skin begins to stretch, and a new pinkie grows. Gee’s body not only cuts across the human versus nonhuman divide, but also crosses material and affective borders. Feeling no pain or physical suffering grants his body a resistance beyond the human. This uncontrollable force may create social good, but it can also potentially destroy the social and material fabric of the world. In one instance, Gee uses the flexibility of his flesh to save Cracker’s life. And yet, that same flexibility is more suspicious later when Gee decides to attach the eel that used to be part of Ilanna’s body to his own arm. This transfer of bodily parts is only possible because of their individual agency. In other words, as an assemblage, the whole does not determine the nature of the parts. The eel, however, cannot be trusted, so this new part of the assemblage introduces an element of risk. Since its previous owner is Gee’s enemy, the eel’s

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motives remain unclear. It is possible that the eel might have attached itself to Gee’s body as a “surveillance assemblage” (Hier 400), keeping his body under control and thus potentially jeopardizing his safety. In Foucauldian fashion, Gee is reminded by figures like Cracker or the White Cat of the intricate relationship between power and knowledge, and the central position of the body in this intra-active nexus. Acquiring knowledge about his own body will help Gee choose between alternative ethical possibilities. Initially, Gee shows a utilitarian approach to friendship: “He needed people who would help him, not hold him back. What was the point of having a friend if she served no purpose?” (134). His loyalty towards Cracker, for instance, oscillates throughout the narrative. At times he sees her as a friend, but as his body and desires change he begins to perceive her as an object of consumption. Part of the transformation that Gee undergoes in his journey involves not only changes in his personality and ethical dilemmas, which are common traits in these kinds of rites of passage, but also an extreme alteration of his affective responses, relationality, and temporal frameworks. In similar ways to bodies, chronological temporality is also dismantled in Half World: “[Gee] glanced at the walls for a clock. He had no idea how much time had passed … Time seemed odd, stretching and contracting” (168–9). Time is here perceived as elastic, malleable, and porous, in contrast to the way it works in the Realm of Flesh. A preliminary idea of the past begins to vanish only to be replaced by a new memory of an alternative past time yet to know. In other words, the unknown becomes the familiar when Gee slowly begins to remember a different life, a former body, and a past identity as Mr Glueskin. Tempted by the possibility of ownership, Gee now feels the need to search for the past in the hope of achieving social status and material gain. When they reach the decadent Mirages Hotel, where Mr Glueskin used to reside, Gee is received as the prodigal son returning to his homeland. Served with reverence and fear by the staff, he feels a renewed sense of authority that he wants to savour. Interestingly, this appetite for power is accompanied by a growth in desire and a craving for pleasure. Ilanna celebrates Gee’s new identity as Mr Glueskin, so she addresses him as a saviour and a liberator: “You were the one who first woke from your Half World trance. When everyone else was still stuck in their stupor of suffering, you tore free from yours. You discovered that

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eating other sufferers extended your Half Life … You set me free from my suffering. And that’s why I’ll love you forever” (162). Ilanna’s affection for Gee is highly sexualized and tied to the idea of eating other bodies. The boundaries between consumption and sex thus here blur; it is in fact through this affective economy that these characters are drawn together. Ilanna’s trans-corporeality both attracts and repels Gee: “Something sharp stabbed through his jeans, abrading his skin. Gee glanced down. Ilanna’s toenails were covered with barnacles. Was that a small oyster? He shuddered with revulsion. Longing” (164). Once again in the narrative, her medusa-like body stands as a source not only of abjection but also of pleasure and desire. Gee’s very human materiality is questioned and transformed until he ultimately metamorphoses into a new corporeal being. What he  describes as sick feelings begin to saturate his body from the moment he enters Half World. Oppressed by a combination of fear, anxiety, impatience, and anger, Gee struggles with his own subject position, with the kind of alliances he should make, and with the corporeal and affective materiality of his body. Entering the space of impossibility that is Half World also provokes dramatic changes in Gee’s sensorial system, as he is suddenly being overwhelmed by an insatiable appetite; an urge to eat other beings. Vampire-like, he is drawn first to Cracker’s blood. Though he ultimately resists his craving for human flesh, he succumbs to eating live rats as a source of strength: “A surge of energy rippled from his belly outward to all his extremities. Delicious shivers of power shot through his nerves, faster than electrons, finer than light. His very cells vibrated with the sensation, a harmonics beyond sound” (241). This ethically questionable act grants Gee only ephemeral satisfaction, followed by utter guilt, shame, and the self-questioning of his humanity. Echoing the moral dilemmas posed by post-apocalyptic narratives such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Gee is torn between restraining himself from engaging in cannibalism or, instead, succumbing to this predatory drive that would enhance his power. Cracker explains that to be conflicted is at the core of “the human condition” (213), so I contend that Gee’s hesitation is paradoxically what makes him human. What is most interesting, from the perspective of an analysis of corporeality and embodiment in the novel, is the fact that Gee finds a strategy to help other creatures survive that involves a different kind of cannibalism. By feeding one of the

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creatures in Half World parts of his own body, Gee subverts the idea of consumption, pointing to alternative ways of sustainability: “White chunks on the floor. His flesh. His glueflesh … He snatched up a small chunk. It felt like firm tofu … His skin crawled. Yet Gee held the flesh in front of Lila’s mouth, and prayed that she would eat” (237). The narrative thus suggests that one person’s waste can mean another person’s possibility of life, so it is in our own hands to decide how to shape the world we inhabit. The conclusion of Darkest Light supports my analysis of the novel in terms of assemblage theory in that, as previously argued, each part needs to have sufficient independence to precisely secure the equilibrium of the whole. We learn that Ilanna aims to dissolve the barriers between the realms in order to secure the power of the creatures in Half World. This approach to territorial borderlessness is contested in the narrative in that Gee ultimately has the capacity to secure the stability of the three realms precisely by ensuring that the boundaries between them are clear. As the cynic White Cat, who also accompanies Gee in his journey, puts it, “The universe does not place value upon the workings of individual components. The universe only seeks balance” (198). Ilanna’s idea, however, is to let Half World flood the boundaries to the other realms so that all becomes subject to its dominance and power. In this sense, the novel offers a creative alternative to the glamour of easy globality and its fantasies of a borderless world by engaging instead with the imperative to attend to the ethical and affective contingencies of border-crossing. Goto is in a way fighting old struggles by using fantasy as a vehicle to ethically rethink the unequal distribution of resources under processes of late capitalism, which jeopardizes the sustenance of egalitarian social and political realms. And yet, Darkest Light tackles these familiar battles with new strategies, such as dismantling and rearticulating a variety of literal and symbolic boundaries that cut across corporeal, biopolitical, and affective structures. In doing so, Goto assembles a new cross-border ethic that suggests novel forms of relationality and creates unexpected alliances between material bodies, often reshaping the cultural and the sociopolitical fabric of our contemporary world. The ethical, as Henrietta L. Moore explains via Michel Foucault, must remain distinguishable from mere obedience and transgression (15). This is a lesson that the (anti)hero certainly learns in his journey: “In the cycling of the Realms, where everyone passed

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through Half World, there was no reward for being a good person. Mr Glueskin had seen the truth of that in his passage through this Realm. There was no angelic chorus for behaving well. No reward for not inflicting hurt upon others” (271). Challenging religious value systems and indoctrination, the novel avoids a moralistic purpose. At the end, Gee realizes that he must remain in Half World to maintain the equilibrium between the realms. Through his ethical actions, Darkest Light manages to challenge received conceptualizations of home and belonging in that these past sites of comfort are sacrificed for the possibility of change in an uncertain future yet to come. Also, it relocates materiality within and across corporeal and affective borders, thus raising intricate questions about the interconnections between fantasy, power, and ethics. In this process, the narrative reorients readers’ attention away from normative temporal frameworks, hegemonic systems of value, and uneven circuits of  economic exchange, and instead offers alternative logics of embodiment, affect, and the ethical imagination.

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Co da

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10 “I Dream an Ethic” Larissa Lai’s Posthuman Borderlands A posthuman ethics for a non-unitary subject proposes an enlarged sense of interconnection between self and others, including the non-human or “earth” others, by removing the obstacle of self-centred individualism. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (49–50)

i dream an ethic Larissa Lai, Automaton Biographies (13)

The first decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed the slow death of several manifestations of humanism and the human and its replacement by novel configurations of the posthuman.1 Out of a mixture of deception and anger towards the conduct of human beings as active contributors to the systemic violences that dominate today’s world, the posthuman framework has been welcomed, by some, as an alternative paradigm where the ethical, material, and social meet. In contrast to theories of “transhumanism,”2 which celebrate a technologically enhanced human in his quest over nature, the posthuman condition, as articulated by Rosi Braidotti, assumes the “vital, self-organizing and yet non-­naturalistic structure of living matter itself” (Posthuman 2). Importantly, in these approaches to critical posthumanism, subjectivity is always already relational, fully embodied, and firmly situated. In this regard, posthumanism, as Cary Wolfe convincingly puts it, “isn’t posthuman at all – in the sense of being ‘after’ our embodiment has been transcended – but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself” (xv).

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At the core of the posthuman predicament, then, we find an affirmative theory of subjectivity beyond restricted definitions of identity as propagated by Enlightenment ideologies, liberal projects, and Eurocentric discourses. Moreover, and crucially to my analysis, at the roots of this critical posthumanism we also find theorizations of difference and agency from feminist, queer, decolonial, and indigenous traditions and epistemologies that seek to correct imperialistic constructions of colonized and subaltern populations as infrahuman.3 My own contribution to the articulation of a posthumanist ethics is further informed by Michel Foucault’s anti-humanist work and formulation of “counter-conduct” ethics and politics. In his Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–79, Foucault claims that in order to become other than what we are requires an ethics and politics of counter-conduct understood as the moment when “breaking all the bonds of obedience, the population will really have the right, not in juridical terms, but in terms of essential and fundamental rights, to break any bonds of obedience it has with the state … rising up against it” (356). This form of counterconduct, which I understand as an ethic of dissent, is precisely what contemporary transCanadian feminist writers strive to portray in their work by saturating the text with bodies, materialities, and spaces that are rendered unrepresentable according to patriarchal, racist, and other hegemonic power structures and ideologies.4 At the core of this ethic of dissent, I claim, is a radical critique of the limits of the category of the human, together with the humanist framework, understood as a normative civilizational model sustained by exclusion and discriminatory practices. To begin with some questions: Which bodies, materialities, populations remain outside the boundaries of this liberal conceptualization of humanism? How do recent articulations of the posthuman condition, in their critique of exclusionary policies and systemic violence, allow for a reconfiguration of ethical paradigms? How do contemporary transCanadian feminist writers contribute to the creation of a posthumanist aesthetic and ethic alongside and beyond traditional humanist ideologies? Since the publication of When Fox Is a Thousand in 1995, Larissa Lai has suggested post-­anthropocentric ways of understanding humanism beyond traditional Enlighten­ ment ideologies. Resisting the exclusionary and often colonial concept of the bounded individual, Lai’s queer speculative fictions

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such as Salt Fish Girl question the notion of a universalized Western subject as a way to engage with the multiple ruptures that racialized and other minoritized populations have experienced, particularly after 9/11. In related ways to Hiromi Goto, Lai’s work also offers alternative possibilities of reconfiguring material-discursive apparatuses of bodily production by portraying abjected populations that are yet granted the possibility to activate change. Lai’s poetry collection Automaton Biographies, as I contend in this chapter, interrogates the limits of “the human” by introducing “rachel,” a racialized automaton, as a subject capable of embodying alternative ethico-political paradigms. In doing so, I argue that the collection delineates a posthumanist cross-border ethic that creatively questions the limits of humanism and the normative ideologies associated with it, and simultaneously proposes alternative sets of relationality and affect. In my analysis, I put Lai’s long poem, “rachel,” in conversation with Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner (1982) to see how fear circulates among devalued populations in ways that contribute to the interrogation of received conceptualizations of subjectivity, time, and history with important ethical repercussions. The collection dislodges affect from an exclusively human dimension to propose instead a feminist, anti-racist, and post-anthropocentric approach to ethics. Engaging in a dialogue with a variety of cultural references from cyborg feminist theory and writing, Automaton Biographies traces a genealogy that begins in the roaring 1960s, and simultaneously refers to current debates on biotechnology. The collection’s first long poem, “rachel,” opens with two epigraphs. The first draws on feminist scholar Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” which not only marked the beginning of cyborg theory in the 1980s in the United States, but also became a foundational text in the emerging field of new materialisms across Europe and North America.5 The second introduces Rachael, a replicant from Blade Runner, who states: “Look, it’s me with my mother” (11). Who is Rachael? Is she capable of affective engagement? The use of the imperative tense displays an affective response towards her alleged mother figure. This ordinary statement therefore challenges biological determinism and suggests an alternative ontological framework. By using Rachael’s words as an epigraph to the first long poem in the book, Lai is already allowing nonhuman populations to engage

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in affective practices, consequently breaking down the nature/culture divide and challenging traditional forms of humanism. In the epilogue to An Archive of Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich raises a question that becomes crucial in my discussion: “Whose Feelings Count?” (278). As an automaton, Rachael is both a subject and an object who experiences, in her words, “ugly feelings” (18). We then progressively witness how a machine, an object, might look at us. As Roy, another replicant, unforgettably puts it in Blade Runner, “if only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes.” Simply by changing the possessive pronoun into the second-person singular, Roy raises key ontological issues about corporeality and the body, and simultaneously points at complex systems of economic property and exchange. The lack of affect usually attached to the machine is also subverted by Lai’s automaton who not only feels but also comments critically on the injustices that take place in the world. The long poem “rachel” opens up with an ironic comment about the contemporary climate of global crisis: “2019 and all’s well” (13). The collection was written in 2009, so Lai is suggesting that the future is not all that far away. In a sense, the future is already here in that some of the traits in biotechnology and nanotechnology proposed by sci-fi artefacts in the 1980s are now part of our everyday life, particularly in a Western context. Writing within the textures of 9/11, Brian Massumi claims that “we live in times when what has not happened qualifies as frontpage news” (52). This threat from the future, Massumi continues, is never over: “There is always a reminder of uncertainty, an unconsummated surplus of danger” (53). As human beings, we seem haunted by a fading future marked by the fear of destruction and extinction as a result of ecological degradation, viral pandemics, nuclear forces, and global terrorism. Neoliberal conservative forces often disseminate and capitalize this feeling of constant fear as a strategic way to subject populations to strict regimes of biopower, as illustrated in Blade Runner. The replicants’ expiry date is built in by their creator at the Tyrell Corporation. These nonhuman figures are used in the Off-World as slave labour in the exploration and colonization of other planets.6 As advanced robots, replicants are manufactured to be almost virtually identical to humans except for the ability to express emotion. The Tyrell Corporation, however, has made an experiment in the case of Rachael by implanting fake memories in her organism. This bioengineered

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replicant experiences fear, sadness, and other affective responses, thus challenging normative ontological conceptualizations of what it means to be human. Lai’s rachel, nonetheless, goes a step further in two ways. On the one hand, she is overtly raced, which helps providing a critical commentary on the contested role that race plays in Blade Runner.7 On the other hand, she has been granted further perspective with regards to time: she is able to revisit the past and to offer an alternative ethic for the future. Automaton Biographies proposes a posthumanist ethics that reorients Massumi’s concept of a threatening future into a space of possibility, particularly though rachel’s characterization as an embodied being capable of formulating alternative ethico-affective paradigms. rachel challenges essentialist versions of the human by displaying nostalgia towards the moment of her birth, which is in itself a construction; a nonevent in biological terms: “i tower my mythic birth” (13). The poem here questions modes of passive social behaviour, in that rachel’s act of looking back contains critical enquiry: “i search my memory’s lineage/for signs of suture/…/this melancholy pisses me off” (20–30). In more active ways than Scott’s Rachael, Lai’s automaton rejects modes of depoliticized nostalgia; instead, she traces the past by looking for those gaps, those untold stories that break with teleological conceptualizations of history and the human. Going beyond individualistic historical accounts, the sutures that rachel describes signal her attempt to track a collective genealogy. rachel writes her automaton biography as a posthumanist memoir that radically troubles the notions of origin and belonging, as does Brand in A Map to the Door of No Return: “Too much has been made of origins, [Brand complains]. All origins are arbitrary” (64–9). Also rejecting the myth of origins, the replicant Pris in Blade Runner cleverly states: “I think … therefore I am.” In this way, she brings forth the concept of emotions as “embodied thoughts” (Rosaldo 143). From the perspective of affect theory, Massumi also resists the idea of interpreting contemporary events such as 9/11 as points of origin. Instead, as earlier mentioned, he considers this moment in history as a cross-border event; a threshold that captures a variety of ruptures and relations of power, old and new. What if this liminal moment were used instead by people living under the subjection of the power mechanisms that Massumi addresses? What if the pull towards the future were stronger than the pull towards the past?

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The figure of the android is inextricably linked to the figure of its master, often functioning as a doppelgänger that mirrors its creator’s psychological state (Wilson 5). My analysis, however, distances itself from this line of argumentation, which prevails in the literature, and instead suggests reading the figures of the automaton and its creator as separate subjects with independent systems of knowledge and mattering bodies. In a sequence full of potential for a queer reading, the prodigal son Roy gives the kiss of death to his creator in an extreme close-up, as he desperately yearns for a future that will never arrive: “I want more life, Father” (Blade Runner). rachel resists becoming a projection of her master and, instead, insists on her independence to the point that she playfully writes her own acknowledgements at the end of the book.8 Importantly, rachel’s agency is always relational. The change from the first person singular into the first person plural in the third stanza of the poem directly pushes readers to engage with the idea of the collective. No longer an isolated being, rachel feels that she belongs to a community, which in itself implies an affective response towards the world around her. The reader and the critic then wonder about who the members of this collective are. There is a reference to the “wisdom of inward sisters” (13), so there is suggestion of this being a feminist community. In Queer Phenomenology, as discussed earlier, Sara Ahmed explains how emotions involve affective forms of orientation towards other bodies and spaces. These entanglements systematically shape bodily, spatial, and social boundaries (181). Lai’s racialized post-cyborgian figure displays affective responses that propose alternative orientations towards the world: “i dream an ethic/pure as lieder/pale as north/moth before industrialization” (13). Despite embodying the machine itself, rachel’s ethic paradoxically develops by looking back at a past before industrialization. And it is not just tracing the past but “dreaming” and hence indirectly participating in a form of affective mapping. Ahmed discusses the sociality of emotions in terms of the concept of affective economies. The circulation of affect, Ahmed explains, is always intertwined with processes of economic exchange and thus related to the notions of productivity and time efficiency (Cultural 45). As such, it involves a clearly marked power dynamics in the dialectic human versus machine. From its very conception, rachel’s life is determined as an “enterprise” that needs to be perfect in order to be useful and productive as a social good:

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a chilly mortal but mortal still i’m all business here to demonstrate perfection my father’s enterprise rations my emotional response time pupil is the empty space through which light passes (14) Nevertheless, rachel’s father figure, the master, becomes a failed pygmalion in that he does not meet the expected morality attributed to human beings. Overwhelmed by shame and cowardice, this paternal body is the locus of negative affect: “he hides what he can’t bear/i well against him/emotional calfskins/his killing jar” (15). And yet, the one who cannot reproduce is rachel, given that she is unable to bear futurity: “my body ticks out/its even rhythm too flawless/for birth” (16). Even though reproduction is not allowed in strictly biological terms, rachel’s posthumanist ethic promises an alternative future in which she will be capable of choosing the ways to orient herself: “our father’s lawful/monsters to turn or not to turn” (39). Lai here not only challenges masculinist ontologies, but also advocates a turn to a feminist posthumanist ethics of inclusivity characterized by a redistribution of affect. In other words, Lai’s portrayal of rachel as a racialized embodied automaton allows for alternative conceptualizations of how a cross-border ethics of affect would look like in contemporary times. With regards to the discussion of affective temporality, a term that recurs in the literature is “anticipation.” Ahmed, for instance, discusses how fear involves an anticipation of hurt: “Fear’s relation to the object has an important temporal dimension: we fear an object that approaches us. Fear, like pain, is felt as an unpleasant form of intensity. But while the lived experience of fear may be unpleasant in the present, the unpleasantness of fear also relates to  the future” (Cultural 65). In Blade Runner, it is the replicant who teaches the human the implications of enduring an existence ultimately determined by fear for extinction: “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it?” Roy explains. Similarly, rachel’s body in Automaton Biographies has been scarred by the negative affect that characterizes contemporary social relations: “this sensitive surface/

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scarred by light” (32). rachel, nonetheless, resists victimization by showing awareness of her own embodiment: “i marvel my limbs’ articulation/warmth my heart makes from nothing/for no one but the hand/that winds me” (17). Notice how there is an affective response that establishes a connection between the movement of her body and her origins. Her knowledge of bodily space then expands into awareness of the social terrain: this rage i told you i toy my own mind quick computation brings ugly feelings terror the old man is not my father is god in his heaven and what’s right with the world? (18, my emphasis) The last line in this stanza confirms the ironic opening of the collection where the world today is far from being well.9 Which populations are allowed to bear witness today? Are these subjects mere spectators, indulged in voyeuristic pleasure? Are they instead alternative populations capable of introducing novel ways of engaging with today’s troubled present? In similar fashion to Brand’s long poems Inventory and Ossuaries, Lai’s Automaton Biographies introduces a racialized female figure as witness to the contemporary world: i see double roy told him if only you could see what i’ve seen with your eyes mine slant half-bred i foe my love law fascinates its big guns grieve (28) By portraying a racialized posthumanist subject that bears witness at this historical juncture, Lai proposes alternative orientations of the subject, thus mobilizing sociopolitical, affective, and ethical landscapes.

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In today’s panorama of global crisis, transCanadian feminist writers such as Lai problematize the poetics and politics of mourning in various ways. In Automaton Biographies, rachel explains: “my heart exudes a kind of love/a kind of mourning” (16). There is a passage in Brand’s Ossuaries that echoes Lai’s poetry in that it poses certain questions about the limitations of mourning and the need for new calls for action. Whereas Brand’s text challenges Judith Butler’s insights on the affective responses to loss and its potential for new reconfigurations of the social and the political, Lai’s poem instead opens up to this idea. Likewise, though set in the sociopolitical context of the 1980s, Blade Runner seems to suggest alternative affective landscapes, particularly in the figure of Roy and his memorable last lines in the movie: “All these moments will be lost in time … like tears … in rain. Time to die.” Roy’s struggle for survival and his subsequent feeling of loss at accepting his doomed future does not prevent him from saving the life of his opponent, the blade runner Deckard. In the article “Embodying Strangers,” Ahmed refers to “strange encounters” as bodily encounters, which suggests that “the marking out of the boundary lines between bodies, through the assumption of a bodily image, involves social practices and techniques of differentiation” (90). Following Ahmed’s insights, I read this scene in Blade Runner as a strange encounter between two wounded male figures, which indirectly suggests a reorientation of affect away from conflict and rupture and towards a reconfiguration of new alliances across gender and social boundaries. Brand writes about life as a collection of both aesthetic and practical experiences which “if we are lucky we make a sense of. Making sense may be what desire is. Or, putting the senses back together” (A Map 195). The replicants in Blade Runner and the automaton in Lai’s collection seek to make sense of the world, and pose crucial ethical questions about the implications of affecting and being affected by the pathogeographies that surround them. It is this turn to affect that interests me for the purposes of this conclusion. As discussed in previous chapters, we live in strange times. Human beings are haunted by a fading future marked by the fear of destruction and extinction. Yet, the human race has also become populated by hopeful beings that can envision the possibility of enjoying greater comfort, together with longer lives, through advances in technology and alternative forms of reproduction. Both positions unavoidably sustain anthropocentric impulses that strive to

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maintain the centrality of the human at all costs. Posthumanist methodologies and approaches, however, decentre the normative position of the human, and focus on the materiality and agency of more-than-human worlds. As Braidotti convincingly puts it, the posthuman predicament can be taken as “an opportunity to empower the pursuit of alternative schemes of thought, knowledge and self-representation. The posthuman condition urges us to think critically and creatively about who and what we are actually in the process of becoming” (Posthuman 12). In myriad ways, transCanadian feminist writers and poets share Braidotti’s call for alternative conceptualizations of the subject alongside and beyond liberal renderings of the human. Their work, as I have demonstrated in this book, begins to offer creative and critical responses to the complicated concerns posed by Braidotti regarding the possibilities for becoming in today’s messy world.

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Conclusion

The Borderlands of the Possible To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras be a crossroads. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (217)

In his groundbreaking theorization of alternative border epistemologies, semiotician and cultural theorist Walter D. Mignolo urges the articulation of new ways of knowledge to counteract colonial legacies and neocolonial interventions in today’s unequally globalized world. Mignolo calls for “border-thinking” or “border gnosis,” which he conceptualizes not as a new form of hybridity but as “an intense battlefield in the long history of colonial subalternization of  knowledge and legitimation of the colonial differences” (12). While acknowledging Mignolo’s invaluable contribution to the field of border studies, particularly his analysis of the creative potential of subalternized knowledges, I humbly insist on the need to combine epistemological and ontological efforts in order to formulate a  new cross-border ethic, as illustrated in contemporary trans­ Canadian feminist writing. In particular, as I have attempted to demonstrate, I am intrigued about the ways in which Dionne Brand, Hiromi Goto, Emma Donoghue, and Larissa Lai, particularly their twenty-first-century work, engage with the unexpected, (un)timely, and paradoxical nature of borders. Hence in this book I am heavily invested in unravelling the multidirectional trajectories, circuits, and ruptures involved in the contact zones; in the borders between bodies, spaces, and affective terrains as portrayed in a number of contemporary feminist and anti-racist texts. These border flows mobilize and transform normative conceptualizations of gender, time, and space, creating unexpected alliances between material

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152  TransCanadian Feminist Fictions

bodies and thus potentially reshaping sociopolitical, affective, and ethical realms. By assembling heterogeneous figurations from the critic, writer, and theorist, TransCanadian Feminist Fictions advocates the articulation of novel cross-border alliances as an essential strategy for a renewed examination of the role of the humanities, more generally, and the responsibility of the literary and cultural intellectual, more specifically, in the twenty-first century. The porosity of the borders between academic disciplines, across and beyond the humanities and social sciences, is now a growing reality, and we see proof of this process in conferences, centres of research, and other institutions that integrate transdisciplinarity as a core component.1 Similarly, the ­theoretical approaches that I employ in my methodology, particularly recent developments in material feminist theory, affect studies, and assemblage theory, all share a commitment to the productive possibilities of cross-border alliances between disciplinary affiliations. TransCanadian feminist writers such as Brand, Donoghue, Goto, and Lai address and question how literal and symbolic boundaries affect the everyday lives of multiple communities across the world. Racialized, sexualized, and naturalized populations, in particular, are systematically subjected to necropolitical structures of power that turn their bodies into paradigmatic examples of vulnerable subjectivity and embodiment. The hidden activist in Ossuaries, the crossborder migrants in Astray, the proto-queer teenagers in Darkest Light, or the racialized cyborg in Automaton Biographies are all instances of the paradoxical workings of contemporary processes of uneven globalization. The bodies of these populations are rendered disposable by normative structures of power, while simultaneously being consumed and capitalized by the neoliberal machine. Significantly, however, these very bodies also represent the potential of the multitude, as I argue in this book, to transform these very structures through their counter-conduct, understood by Michel Foucault as a moment of disobedience and dissent against hegemonic structures of power. Brand’s cross-border material poetics, Donoghue’s transhistorical assemblages, Goto’s hopeful fictions, and Lai’s posthumanist ethics all attend, in different ways, to a renewed understanding of  relationality, affect, and ethics beyond those “lethal binaries” (Braidotti, Posthuman 37) that saturate our systems of thought and pervade our everyday lives with damaging consequences. In her articulation of posthumanist performativity, Karen Barad aptly claims that “particular possibilities for acting exist at every

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Conclusion 153

moment, and these changing possibilities entail a responsibility to intervene in the world’s becoming, to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded from mattering” (827). Following these lines of enquiry, I have strived to investigate the creative ways in which the work of these transCanadian feminist writers maps an onto-epistemological approach to agency and difference, where the body occupies a central position. All the literary and cultural artefacts examined here actively contribute to formulating counter-hegemonic ethical and political positions through alternative accounts of human, nonhuman, and more-than-human materialities. As I contend in part one, Brand’s long poem Ossuaries, Hiromi Goto’s novel Half World and short story “Stinky Girl,” and Donoghue’s novel Room question and rearticulate the boundaries of materiality, embodiment, and corporeality in myriad ways. In doing so, these writers and poets posit a feminist and anti-capitalist critique of current issues such as the impact of economic globalization on both environmental degradation and the bodies of non-normative populations. In Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri aptly contend that every reference to economic production and reproduction cannot forget the centrality of bodies. Corporeal resistance, as  they claim, produces subjectivity in a complex dynamic with the  resistances of other bodies: “This production of subjectivity through resistance and struggle will prove central … not only to the subversion of the existing forms of power but also to the constitution of alternative institutions of liberation” (31). They call for a political anthropology of resistance where revolutionary action has to be conceived on the biopolitical horizon. History is, in fact, determined by the antagonisms and resistances to biopower and necropower. To claim that the writers discussed in this book are on the road to building a revolutionary biopolitics might seem farfetched. Their work, however, as I contend in part two, critically engages with technologies of biopower and biopolitical strategies of resistance in ways that enable the possibility of envisioning a genealogy of dissent against hegemonic structures. Together with other twenty-first-century transCanadian feminist writers, Goto, Donoghue, Brand, and Lai fiercely call for a radical reconfiguration of social and biopolitical relations in an age of increasing inequality, growing racism, and feminist backlash. What I refer to as the poetics and politics of affect also play a key role in this transformation of sociopolitical and ethical relations.

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Following concepts such as “orientation” and “disorientation,” as Sara Ahmed proposes in Queer Phenomenology, in part 3 I unravel the multiple ways in which transCanadian feminist writing mobilizes feelings and emotions, contributing to the reconfiguration of aesthetic and ethical practices. Brand’s memoir A Map to the Door of No Return, Donoghue’s collection Astray, and Goto’s novel Darkest Light all work with and across affects such as fear, hope, and loss as a way to propose alternative orientations of the subject through the interrogation and redefinition of sociopolitical, affective, and ethical boundaries. In doing so, the authors that I analyze in this book are assembling a new cross-border ethic that suggests novel forms of relationality and creates unexpected alliances between material bodies, often revisioning the cultural and the sociopolitical textures of our chaotic world. As I contend in the introduction, it is therefore of uttermost priority for the literary and the cultural critic, regardless of her disciplinary affiliation, to question and to think again about how the border becomes a contested site where the corporeal, the biopolitical, and the affective realms of everyday life gather.2 When a C I A drone enters occupied space in the Middle East, bombarding the population and destroying the territory, a new form of perverse border-crossing occurs. As unmanned aerial vehicles, these posthuman machines become, Rosi Braidotti claims, the very materialization of necropower at work (Posthuman 122). These objects are employed for the surveillance and control of material bodies and populations, often in contested border territories. The impact of these new forms of posthuman machinery is unpredictable. Simultaneously, the last few years have seen the unexpected alliances between the bodies of oppressed populations fighting against the corruption of governments in places such as Turkey, Brazil, or Spain. These novel forms of resistance, in their heterogeneity across the axes of gender, race, sexuality, class, and age, are composed of newly formed multitudes with the potential to activate change in our troubled times. I thus conclude this book with an examination of Lai’s poetry collection Automaton Biographies, which interrogates the limits of affect in relation to “the human” understood as a category of exclusion and Eurocentrism. Lai’s work further problematizes the myriad ways in which transCanadian feminist writing attends to the paradoxical and transgressive potential of posthumanist alliances in the way we understand current social movements.

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Conclusion 155

The porosity of borders, with all its dangers and potentialities, occupies a central position in the formation of these entanglements between human, nonhuman, and more-than-human materialities, bodies, and ecologies. I hence want to stress that this book emerges out of a sense of urgency about the imperative to turn to contemporary feminist and queer anti-racist writing to find alternative bodily and affective circuits in a paradoxical moment of sociopolitical, economic, and ethical turmoil. I am critically aware of the fact that some might consider this project an exercise in cruel optimism, to borrow Lauren Berlant’s phrase. And yet, I cannot but believe that critics and public intellectuals today must be willing to try to find creative ways to activate change, desire, and transformation. In the words of political theorist Wendy Brown, we live in a time that features “capacities for destruction historically unparalleled in their combined potency, miniaturization, and mobility, from bodies wired for explosion to nearly invisible biochemical toxins” (20). These necropolitical impulses, as the work of the writers discussed in this book illustrates, can be questioned, and at times dismantled, through poetic, aesthetic, and cultural practice. I here propose an affirmative turn to ethics that necessarily requires the “transformation of negative into positive passions” (Braidotti, Posthuman 134). I often wonder about how many of these positive passions are yet to be formulated in our everyday lives as twenty-first-century academics. In this book, I thus ultimately invite readers and critics to embark in a risky but pleasurable journey where the realms of the unexpected and the unpredictable await; a crossing, if you wish, into the borderlands of the possible.

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Notes

I nt r oduc t i on 1 See Agathangelou and Ling (“Power”) for a discussion of the post-9/11 intensification of border security and the complex entanglements between issues of wealth, borders, and power under processes of neoliberal globalization. See Kuntsman and Miyake (Out of Place) for a discussion of the intricate relationship between queerness and raciality in the context of the pernicious war on terror, which brands certain bodies as undesirable and thus expendable. 2 See Naomi Klein’s acclaimed The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism for a discussion of how neoliberal forces maximize moments of uncertainty to push their own agendas. 3 In response to a questionnaire on the future of criticism and theory proposed by Critical Inquiry to their board in 2004, feminist theorist Teresa de Lauretis claims: “It is a time to break the piggy bank of saved conceptual schemata and reinstall uncertainty in all theoretical applications, starting with the primacy of the cultural and its many ‘turns’: linguistic, discursive, performative, therapeutic, ethical, you name it” (368). Other contemporary feminist scholars and Deleuzian philosophers such as Stacy Alaimo (Bodily Natures), Claire Colebrook (Deleuze), and Braidotti (Posthuman) have explored the concepts of uncertainty and unpredictability as generative sites from which to challenge normative conceptualizations of time in relation to subjectivity. 4 See Belén Martín-Lucas (“Dystopic Urbanites”) for a feminist analysis of contemporary transCanadian speculative fictions. 5 See the collection Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature for an examination of indigenous-centred

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158  Notes to pages 12–42

approaches to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and Two-Spirit writing and activism. 6 See Lai’s critical study Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s for a detailed analysis of the deep impact of cultural and artistic events such as the Writing Thru Race Conference (1997–98) in the process of making visible racialized subjects in Canada. 7 See the 2004 special issue of the journal West Coast Line 38.2, guest edited by Wong and Glenn Lowry, for a critical approximation to Lai’s work.

C h a p t e r One 1 Brand’s long poems are punctuated by commas, but she systematically resists the use of full stops in order to avoid a sense of closure. Thus, I have not included any additional punctuation marks in the quotations I use for my analysis of Ossuaries and Inventory in this book. 2 See García Zarranz (“Whole”), Goldman (“Mapping”), and Johansen (“Streets”) for a discussion of the ongoing deterritorialization and reterritorialization of space in Brand’s oeuvre.

C h a p t e r T wo 1 For an analysis of abjection and monstrosity in Goto’s work, see Latimer (“Eating”) and Almeida (“Strangers”). 2 See Lauren Berlant’s “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)” for an in-depth analysis of how the bodies of certain marginalized populations deteriorate as a result of structural inequalities and violences. 3 In the third part of the Ethics, “Of the Origin and Nature of the Affects,” Spinoza discusses “joy” (laetitia) as one of the primary affects; “that passion by which the mind passes to a greater perfection” (77). This affect of joy, which in Spinoza is always related to mind and body at once, is connected to pleasure or cheerfulness. However, these are only species of joy as they are chiefly related to the body. There is also a political dimension of the affect of joy in Spinoza through the connection he makes between passion and action: “Joy and sadness are passions by which each one’s power … is increased or diminished, aided or restrained” (101). As Deleuze explains, this power of acting, through joy, is “what opens the capacity for being affected to the greatest number of things” (Spinoza 71). See García Zarranz (“Joyful”) for an examination of the affect of joy as an ethics of dissent in relation to feminist practice.

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Notes to pages 48–70  159

Chapter Three 1 The concept of corporeal citizenship has been previously used within the context of environmental justice in T. Gabrielson and K. Parady (“Corporeal”). 2 Examples of magic wardrobes as spaces of the imagination include C.S. Lewis’s seven-volume series The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56). I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for this reference.

C h a p t e r Four 1 In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben discusses the state of exception in terms of “the limit concept of the doctrine of law and the state, in which sovereignty borders (since every limit concept is always the limit between two concepts) on the sphere of life and becomes indistinguishable from it” (11). Agamben thus articulates sovereignty and homo sacer as borderline concepts. In Caldwell’s words, “Like sovereignty, homo sacer is a creature of the limit” (par. 20). 2 According to the U N High Commissioner for Refugees, there are as of 17 February 2016 4,718,230 registered Syrian refugees in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and North Africa. The number of unregistered refugees, together with those already residing in Europe and North America, would significantly boost this figure. 3 Goto’s The Water of Possibility was published by Coteau Books as part of its In the Same Boat series. As stated in the preface, this series tries to fill in the gap of stories about Canadian children who are not descendants from either of the country’s so-called founding nations. The other four titles – Cheryl Foggo’s I Have Been in Danger, Ruby Slipperjack’s Little Voice, Sherie Posesorski’s Escape Plans, and Diana Vazquez’s Lost in Sierra – introduce stories of young Canadians of African, Ojibway, Polish, and Spanish backgrounds respectively. 4 Goto introduces the mythological water kappa in many of her narratives. Often depicted as a mischievous character in Japanese folklore, the kappa has reptilian features and a gap on the top of its head to hold the water, which is a source of power. See Goto’s novel The Kappa Child for further reference. 5 For a philosophical account on the implications of facing the Other see Emmanuel Levinas’s essay “Responsibility for the Other” in Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Levinas understands responsibility as “responsibility for the Other, thus as responsibility for what is not my

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160  Notes to pages 73–85

deed, or for what does not even matter to me; or which precisely does matter to me, is met by me as face … since the Other looks at me, I am responsible for him, without even having taken on responsibilities in his regard; his responsibility is incumbent on me” (95–6). 6 Gollum, one of the most fascinating characters in Tolkien’s work, is known to speak a version of non-standard English in which sibilants are prominent. See George Clark and Daniel Timmons’s J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances for further reference. 7 These creatures want to establish a School of Higher Arts and Healing as part of their new society, which signals the importance that Goto places on learning and education. This initiative, nonetheless, is problematic in that it opens up the possibility of creating renewed hierarchies and structures of power within this newly formed population, which could ultimately lead not only to institutional discipline but also to the recreation of rogue forms of biopolitical governance.

C h a p t e r Fi v e 1 In Habeus Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, critical race theorist Alexander G. Weheliye explains how slavery’s purpose “was not to physically annihilate, at least not primarily, as much as to physiologically subdue and exploit, erasing the bios of those subjects that were subject to its workings” (37). In this biopolitical context, he further contends that “extreme brutality and directed killing frequently and peacefully coexist with other forms of coercion and noncoercion within the scope of the normal juridico-political order” (37). 2 Moscucci contends that clitoridectomies were occasionally performed during the 1850s as a cure for masturbation though they were never established in Britain as an acceptable medical practice. In contrast to the Renaissance, the capacity of the clitoris for homo- and autoeroticism was perceived as a threat to the social order by the end of the eighteenth century. 3 As Donoghue explains in a note at the end of “Cured,” clitoridectomies were performed in America until the early twentieth century. Nowadays other types of surgery, such as the “correction” of clitorimegaly, are performed in the United States on a regular basis. For further insights on female genital mutilation, see Walker (Warrior), James and Robertson (Genital Cutting), and Hernlund and Shell-Duncan (Transcultural Bodies). 4 Writing in the context of American film, feminist film scholar Yvonne Tasker refers to Hollywood’s production of action “as display” through

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Notes to pages 86–110  161

the spectacular bodies of their stars. For a full discussion of how this spectacle is gendered and entwined with economic processes, see Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Movie. 5 Through the first decades of the nineteenth century, there was a high demand for women and children’s labour, especially in the textile industry. It was not until 1867, right in the Victorian era, that the Factory Act stated that women and children could only work for a maximum of ten hours a day in factories. See Sacks (Victorian) and also Frost (Victorian) for further reference on child labour in Britain at the time.

C h a p t e r Si x 1 See Ann Laura Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things for an in-depth analysis of the intricate relationship between biopolitics and colonialism. 2 In the 2005 interview “Sites of Articulation,” Larissa Lai discusses her interest in the figure of the traitor claiming that “our hands are always dirty” (Morris 23). In similar lines to Brand, Lai’s work recurrently explores the complicities of human communities in systems of control and exploitation.

C h a p t e r Se v e n 1 For further information about this fascinating project, see www.pathogeographies.net. 2 For a discussion of melancholia as symptomatic of a depressive state leading to passive prostration and lack of meaning, see Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. For a psychoanalytical take on melancholia, via Lacan, see Judith Butler’s Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. 3 There is important work being done within the field of queer diaspora studies that dismantles essentialized conceptualizations of national and diasporic identity. For further reference, see Gayatri Gopinath’s “Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora: South Asian Sexualities in Motion” in Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV’s collection Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, and Anne Marie Fortier’s “Making Home: Queer Migrations and Motions of Attachment.” 4 The term, coined by Vöigt-Graf, is also used by Tomsky to describe the genealogy of queer transCanadian writer Shani Mootoo. As Tomsky contends, the term “helps extend the meaning of diaspora by gesturing towards the complex affiliations to Home(s) – the parenthetical s could

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162  Notes to pages 114–18

here supplement the fetishized H – created by multiple displacements and migrations, rather than describing the singular act of direct migration at one point in time to a particular place” (195). See other related concepts such as “twice diasporized” and “triply diasporized” as articulated by Hall (“Cultural Identity”) and Boyce Davies (“Triply Diasporized”) respectively. 5 In Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism, cultural critic Jonathan Flatley positions history at the centre of his analysis in order to conceptualize melancholia as an affective energy that can enable social transformation. In a line of argument similar to Butler’s insights on mourning, Flatley proposes to look at melancholia as a site of resistance to hegemonic structures, such as white supremacy, that have historically shaped the lives of subjugated populations. His concept of collective melancholia hence traces the historicity of such affective routes. Ahmed also discusses figures such as the feminist killjoy, the melancholic subject, the unhappy queer, and the angry Black woman as instances of “affect aliens” (“Happy Objects” 39). Ahmed contends that these affect aliens become blockage points to the naturalized orientation of bodies towards hegemonic structures of power. See David L. Eng and David Kazanjian’s collection Loss: The Politics of Mourning and Anne Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race: Assimilation, Psychoanalysis and Hidden Grief for further examinations of melancholia in relation to racialization processes. 6 See Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings for a discussion of trauma and cultural memory from the perspective of lesbian culture. I am indebted to Cvetkovich’s notion “archive of feelings” in my articulation of Brand’s cross-border pathogeographies in A Map to the Door of No Return.

C h a p t e r E i ght 1 Happiness constitutes an integral part of Aristotle’s conceptualization of the good life in his Nichomachean Ethics. Recent social and cultural theorists convincingly argue that happiness is becoming “an object of knowledge, a performance indicator and a form of governance” (Moore 25). From the fields of queer and affect studies, see Ahmed (Promise) and Berlant (Cruel) for a critique of today’s imperative to be happy. 2 I am referring to poets, such as Charles Baudelaire in nineteenth-century France or T.S. Eliot in the modernist tradition, whose work is populated by normative white male bodies that become privileged observers of the world through the act of wandering. See Benjamin for an approximation of the flâneur as the product of modernity and industrialization.

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Notes to pages 122–48  163

3 As Donoghue explains in an appendix to the story, Caroline Thompson was helped by philanthropists Charles Dickens and Angela Burdett-Coutts to migrate to Canada with her brother, Frederick Maynard, and her baby daughter around 1857.

C h a p t e r Ni ne 1 For an intriguing analysis of the role of smell in Lai’s work, see Stephanie Oliver’s “Diffuse Connections: Smell and Diasporic Subjectivity in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl.”

Chapter Ten 1 In How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, literary critic N. Katherine Hayles contends that the posthuman does not signal the end of humanity but “the end of a certain conception of the human” instead (101). 2 In What Is Posthumanism?, Cary Wolfe refers to transhumanism as the “intensification of humanism” (xv). Critical posthumanism is thus conceptualized in contrast to theories of the transhuman. 3 Chela Sandoval (“New Sciences”) and Gloria Anzaldúa (Borderlands) offer a feminist and queer decolonial critique to imperial constructions of the liberal subject from a perspective that could be rendered posthumanist. 4 Discussing the work of Nalo Hopkinson, Belén Martín-Lucas aptly claims that Black speculative fiction and Afro-futurist fiction has also done much “to deepen the interrogation of the human and the posthuman, and to describe forms of affective relation that are more enabling and empowering for the currently oppressed” (“Posthumanist”). 5 Other theorists in the field of new materialisms include Rosi Braidotti, Iris van der Tuin, Manuel De Landa, and Karen Barad. For further reference see Dolphijn and van der Tuin (New Materialism) and Coole and Frost (New Materialisms). 6 Interestingly, the term “robot” comes from the Czech terms rab (slave) and robota (work) (Wilson 9). 7 For an analysis of the representation of race in Blade Runner, see Shohat and Stam (Unthinking). 8 In order to acknowledge her embodied agency, I deliberately use the feminine singular pronoun to refer to rachel in Lai’s collection. 9 Lai may also be referencing Robert Browning’s Pippa Passes, a dramatic piece where a young and innocent woman sings “All’s right with the

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164  Notes to pages 152–4

world!” as she wanders through Italian lands. I am indebted to Diana Brydon for this intertextual echo.

C onc l usi on 1 The Somatechnics Research Network, composed of over 500 scholars, researchers, and activists from diverse fields such as biology, law, philosophy, cultural studies, bioethics, and gender studies, is a fitting example of the current move towards transdisciplinarity in academia. For further information, see www.lgbt.arizona.edu/somatechnics. 2 For an intriguing examination of the representation of the Canada-US border in contemporary indigenous, African Canadian, and Latin American literary and cultural texts, see Gillian Roberts’s Discrepant Parallels: Cultural Implications of the Canada-US Border.

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Index

9/11, 3–4, 15, 46, 62–3, 74, 92, 98, 115, 157n; in Brand, 21–2, 28–9; in Goto, 12, 143; and Massumi, 3, 144–5; in Room, 47–8 99%, 31, 125 abject, 15, 33, 37, 40–1, 120, 129; bodies, 16, 36, 86–7; child, 48, 53, 57, 64; in Kristeva, 51 Ahmed, Sara: The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 14, 16, 105–6, 108, 110, 113–14, 121, 146–7; “Embodying Strangers,” 149; on the feminist killjoy, 162n5; The Promise of Happiness, 162n1; Queer Phenomenology, 10, 14, 16, 107, 146, 154; on Thinking through the Skin, 131–2 Alaimo, Stacy, 7, 14–15, 23, 26, 42, 157n3. See also deviance; trans-corporeal anthrax-culture, 22 anthropos, 42; anthropocentric, 132, 149; post-, 142–3 anti-capitalist, 12, 153

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anti-racist, 12, 63, 107, 126, 143; analysis, 16; critique, 33, 56; texts, 151, 155 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 151, 163n3 assemblage, 8, 45, 117–18, 123, 134; cross-border, 5, 18, 34, 101; in De Landa, 94, 128, 131; in Deleuze and Guattari, 18, 27, 42, 55, 97; in Deleuze and Parnet, 100; ethical, 90; necro­ political, 17, 130; in Puar, 47, 61, 95, 124, 126–7; racializing, 91–3, 95, 116, 160n1; surveillance, 4, 135; theory, 137, 152 Barad, Karen, 14–15, 23, 29–30, 43, 152, 163n5 Berlant, Lauren, 14, 16, 39, 120, 155, 158n2, 162n1 biocapital, 16, 77–9, 85, 89; biocapitalization, 16, 77–9, 85–7, 89–90 biopolitics, 3, 79, 86, 153; in Astray, 120, 124; biopolitical, 15–16, 22, 25, 37, 47–8, 59–102, 153–4, 160n1, 160n7; and colonialism,

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176 Index

161n1; in Darkest Light, 127, 137; of race, 4, 17, 98. See also Foucault, Michel; Lee, Rachel C.; Weheliye, Alexander G. biopower, 16, 73–4, 87, 90, 144; and affect, 102, 116, 124; in Foucault, 61–4, 69; in Nadesan, 77–80; and necropower, 67, 76, 153 bios, 34, 42, 160n1 biosociality. See Lee, Rachel C. biosovereignty, 64, 67 Black, 108–9; Atlantic, 17, 107, 109; bodies, 110, 114; diaspora, 107–8, 111–12; feminist theory, 91, 116, 160n1 Blade Runner, 143–7, 149, 163n7 border-crossing, 4, 14, 123, 137, 154; biopolitical, 16, 59; geopolitical, 9; studies, 6, 14, 151 Braidotti, Rosi, 42, 55, 105, 150, 163n5; The Posthuman, 14, 17, 34, 36, 141, 150, 152, 154–5, 157n3 Brand, Dionne, 7, 9–12, 15–18, 45, 115, 127, 148, 151–4, 158n2, 161n2; Inventory, 91–101, 158n1; A Map to the Door of No Return, 105–14, 120–1, 145, 149; Ossuaries, 21–34, 40, 50, 55, 64, 149 Brydon, Diana, 8, 99, 164n9 Butler, Judith, 30, 51, 72, 74, 76, 149, 161n2, 162n5 Canadian literature, 8, 9, 11–12, 47 capitalism, 78–9, 83, 137, 157n2; techno-, 24, 64 care for self, 68, 70–1

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chrononormative, 40, 114 clitoridectomy, 80, 83, 160n2, 160n3 colonialism, 92, 161n1 Commonwealth, 6, 65, 90, 153 corporeality, 14, 30, 40–3, 44, 48, 87, 116, 126, 136, 144; and borders, 15, 19, 24, 56–7, 131–2, 134, 153; corpo-affective, 53; new, 33, 35; posthuman, 36; and race, 38; unruly, 42. See also trans-corporeal counter-conduct, 142, 152 counter-hegemonic, 12, 26, 35, 153 cross-border, 32, 45, 92, 117; affects, 16, 103, 105–6; alliances, 14, 75, 152; archive, 11, 17–18, 124; assemblages, 5, 18, 34, 131; ethic, 4, 13–15, 17, 34, 90, 95, 100, 127, 132, 137, 143, 147, 151; event, 3, 145; methodology, 14; pathogeographies, 112–14, 162n6; space, 10, 36, 107 De Landa, Manuel, 14, 94, 128, 131, 163n5 de-subjectivation, 72 deterritorialization, 27, 94, 130, 158n2 deviance, 36, 38, 53–7, 85–6 diasporic, 8–9, 107, 111–12, 161n3, 163n1 Donoghue, Emma, 7, 9–10, 13, 15–18, 45, 151–4; Astray, 110, 115–25, 163n3; Room, 26, 46–57, 64, 68; The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, 77–90, 160n3

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ethical imagination, 118, 120–3, 138 ethico-affective, 48, 122, 128, 145 ethico-political, 15–16, 44, 66, 88, 90, 96, 108, 143 ethics, 11, 14, 21, 38, 45, 54, 55, 62, 64, 73, 95, 97, 120, 127–8; Aristotle, 162n1; Foucault, 117, 142; in Levinas, 159n5; in Moore, 118; posthumanist, 34, 42, 141–3, 145, 147, 152; of relation, 90; in Spinoza, 158n3; turn to, 7, 44, 76, 155 ethnoscape, 21, 40 flâneur, 121, 124, 162n2 Foucault, Michel, 14–16, 48, 50, 52, 61–3, 66, 68–71, 80–2, 88, 91, 117, 142, 152 Global North, 5, 96–7 globalization, 5–6, 10–11, 152–3, 157n1 Goto, Hiromi, 7, 9–10, 12–13, 15–18, 26; as critic, 12; Darkest Light, 126–38; Half World, 35–45; Hopeful Monsters, 12, 36; The Water of Possibility, 61–76 historiographic, 48, 77–8, 117 humanism, 141–4. See also non­ human; posthuman hysterization, 77, 80–1 indigenous, 10, 63, 79, 142, 157n5, 164n2 joy, 42, 55, 158n3; feminist killjoy, 10, 162n5; laetitia, 158n3

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Index 177

Kamboureli, Smaro, 8. See also TransCanada Kiyooka, Roy, 8 knowledges, 39, 88, 151 Lai, Larissa, 7, 9, 12–13, 18, 73, 115, 151–3; Automaton Biographies, 17, 22, 31, 64, 141– 50, 154, 163n8; as critic, 8, 10–12, 24, 158n6, 161n2; Salt Fish Girl, 129, 163n1 Lee, Rachel C., 17, 33, 61 material feminism, 7, 23, 117 Mbembe, Achille, 16, 67, 92, 96–7, 101, 130 minoritized, 25, 37, 63, 92, 114, 127, 143 Moore, Henrietta L., 4, 6–7, 115, 117–18, 120, 137, 162n1 Mootoo, Shani, 115, 161n4 Multitude, 64–5, 72–5 Nadesan, Majia H., 16, 62, 70, 77–9, 82, 87 nation-state, 8, 56, 63 necropolitics. See Mbembe, Achille; Puar, Jasbir K. necropower, 16, 67, 76, 93–5, 97–8, 100–1, 126–7, 130, 153–4. See also Mbembe, Achille neocolonial, 151 neoliberal, 4, 40, 44, 56, 62, 70, 72, 79, 157n1; neoliberalism, 6, 10, 34, 47, 62; forces, 144, 157n2; state, 87 nonhuman, 14, 24–5, 28–9, 34, 42, 49, 72, 75, 91–2, 127, 134; bodies, 6, 12, 15, 23, 33–5, 37, 117, 131; materialities, 16, 41, 100,

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178 Index

onto-epistemology, 6–7, 18, 41, 153

September 11. See 9/11 spectacle, 77, 85–9, 97, 119–20, 134, 151n4 surveillance, 4, 6, 15–16, 26, 28, 46–8, 62, 77, 79, 92–3, 95, 97, 119, 126–7, 135, 154

pathogeographies, 17, 105, 107, 109–14, 120, 122–3, 149, 161n1, 162n6 posthuman, 36, 43, 154, 155, 157n3, 163n1, 163n4; condition, 141–2, 150 posthumanist, 14–15, 17, 36–7, 141, 148, 150, 154, 163n3, 163n4; ethics, 34, 42, 142–3, 145, 147, 152; performativity, 23, 152 proto-feminist, 66 Puar, Jasbir K., 14, 16, 47, 61–2, 67, 95, 98, 101, 124, 126

Third World, so-called, 21, 96 toxicity, 5, 15, 24–5, 37, 39, 55, 100 TransCanada, 8–9. See also Kamboureli, Smaro; Kiyooka, Roy trans-corporeal, 21, 23–31, 33–4, 36, 44, 52, 55, 57, 134, 136 transhistorical, 45, 152 transnational, 6–14, 18, 24, 27, 117 Tuana, Nancy, 7, 24, 33, 35, 40–1, 44, 55, 100 Two-Spirit, 158n5

queerness, 9, 47, 157n1

unruly, 35, 42, 44, 56, 134; body, 48, 53; materiality, 36, 41

126, 153, 155; populations, 11, 36, 44, 67, 118–20, 132–3, 143–4

racialized, 15, 17, 26, 29, 36–8, 44, 63–4, 67, 106, 110; populations, 4, 12, 22, 24–5, 33, 47, 57, 76, 78, 98, 143, 146–8, 152, 158n6 refugees, 3, 11, 22, 56, 62–3, 92, 100, 115–16, 159n2 relationality, 33–4, 39, 45, 52, 100, 119, 126, 137, 154; and affect, 7, 110, 124, 127, 135, 143, 152; and kinship, 48 resistance, 13, 31, 42, 76, 88–90, 97–9, 124; and agency, 116–17; corporeal, 153; as strategy, 16, 63–4, 87, 153–4, 162n5 reterritorialization, 27, 130, 158n2

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viscous porosity, 24, 35, 41, 55, 96. See also Tuana, Nancy vitalist, 44; philosophy, 55 Vitruvian Man, 36 war machine, 47, 76, 95; in Deleuze and Guattari, 93, 97, 102 war on terror, 3, 15, 22, 46, 57, 95, 98, 115, 157n1 Weheliye, Alexander G., 91–2, 116, 160n1 young adult, 12, 15, 30, 64 zoe, 42

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