Diana Brydon

It could not be told: Making Meaning in Timothy Findley' s The Wars:

Canadian Timothy Findley’s novel The Wars is unusually concerned with how human beings make meaning through the shaping conventions of language and visual perception, and with those dimensions of experience our ruling conventions seem incapable of controlling. The novel’s opening scene introduces this interest through its fascination with what &dquo;could not be told&dquo;.’ While war novels traditionally stress the unspeakable horrors of war, Findley’s novel moves beyond this now familiar rhetoric to focus less on the disjunctions between war and peace and more on their continuities. The problem is not to find a language which can articulate the experience of war but rather how to circum-

Competing Autonomy Claims and the Changing Grammar of Global Politics

This article argues that contending ideas about autonomy lie behind current discourses of human rights, claims to nation-state and cultural autonomy, and democracy promotion. Globalizing processes are bringing these contested understandings of autonomy, and their often silent framing within assumptions about sovereignty, into a new prominence. Locating itself within agonistic views of autonomy and politics, the article argues that it is necessary to pay closer attention to the perspectives that feminist and postcolonial analyses bring to understanding how autonomy, community, culture, and nation are co-constructed within imaginaries, such as liberal multiculturalism, that are no longer adequate to current demands for justice. To succeed, this renewed attention needs to locate itself within an effort to rethink academic community and the research protocols and collaborative practices this community permits and legitimizes. Este artículo sostiene que las ideas contendientes sobre la autonomía yacen detrás de las disertaciones actuales sobre los derechos humanos, las declaraciones de nación-estado y autonomía cultural y la promoción de la democracia. Los procesos de globalización están conduciendo estos entendimientos contradictorios de autonomía y sus encuadramientos generalmente silenciosos, dentro de las suposiciones sobre la soberanía, a un nuevo nivel de importancia. Este artículo que se ubica a sí mismo bajo una perspectiva ardua de autonomía y política, argumenta que es necesario poner mayor atención a las perspectivas que traen los análisis feministas y postcoloniales para entender cómo la autonomía, la comunidad, la cultura y la nación se han co-construído de manera imaginaria, tales como el multiculturalismo liberal que ya no son adecuadas para las demandas actuales de justicia. Para lograr el éxito, esta atención renovada debe situarse dentro de un esfuerzo para replantear a la comunidad académica, los protocolos de investigación y las prácticas colaborativas que esta comunidad permite y legaliza.

Experimental Writing and Reading across Borders in Decolonizing Contexts

Reading across epistemic borders in a globalizing world requires a revised understanding of how experimentation functions in decolonizing contexts by intervening to trouble the prevailing paradigms through which readers understand how meanings are made. Experimental fictions free the imagination to envision cognitive and social justice, which take different forms within different settings. By examining several texts written out of contexts of incomplete decolonization and ongoing imperialism in Canada, Australia, and the Caribbean, this paper shows how their various innovations navigate the problems of scale and generate new forms for representing cognitive justice in its many different potential manifestations, thus revealing the vitality of nonscalable worlds and the links between the scalable and the nonscalable. Wilson Harris’ music of living landscapes is set in dialogue with Alexis Wright’s fictions; Patrick White’s artist as vivisector with Christian Bök’s The Xenotext; Dionne Brand’s quest for a cognitive schema beyond captivity with Wright’s and Tomson Highway’s turns to the space/time imaginaries of their people; and Shani Mootoo’s small island world with Jamaica Kincaid’s small place.

Globalization and Autonomy: An Overview

This article introduces the Globalization and Autonomy research project, dedicated to understanding globalizing processes through the lens of autonomy, and the special issue to which it has led. It describes the initial impetus for the project, the changing contexts in which the research took place, its interdisciplinary practices, and its key findings. Finally, the article introduces the remaining contributions in this special issue, which have arisen out of work on the project. Este artículo presenta el proyecto de investigación de la Globalización y la Autonomía, dedicado al entendimiento del proceso de la globalización a través del lente de la autonomía y la edición especial a la cual lo ha conducido. Describe el ímpetu inicial hacia el proyecto, los cambios en los contextos de los cuales tomó lugar la investigación, sus prácticas interdisciplinarias y sus resultados claves. Finalmente, el artículo presenta las contribuciones restantes en esta edición especial que surgieron como parte del trabajo en el proyecto.

Concurrent Imaginaries, Postcolonial Worlds : Toward Revised Histories

Brydon, Forsgren, and Fur’s edited collection, Concurrent Imaginaries, Postcolonial Worlds, demonstrates the productivity of reading for concurrences in studying archives, voices, and history in colonial and postcolonial contexts. This multidisciplinary volume situates Nordic colonial practices within transworld contexts.