« Parallel containments: Kate Motluk, Containment & COVID-19 in the Settler State: Indigenous Incarceration and Immigration Detention in Canada and Australia, MA dissertation, Wilfrid Laurier University, 2021
The settler country coexists: Michael A. Genovese, Alysa Landry, ‘Introduction: Building an “Empire of Reason” on Stolen Land’, in Michael A. Genovese, Alysa Landry, US Presidents and the Destruction of the Native American Nations, Springer, 2021 »

Unreading the settler: Suzanne Ericson, ‘Reading space for new worlds in Jordan Abel’s Un/inhabited’, Studia Neophilologica, 2021

12Oct21

Abstract: Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel created Un/inhabited by rearranging and deleting large swathes of ninety-one western novels. Unsurprisingly, then, this poem is largely interpreted as an invitation to readers to join Abel in critically examining the colonial mindset underpinning the western genre. While this alone makes the poem a valuable resource in literary studies classrooms, I look beyond what readings Un/inhabited creates the conditions for to ask what reading practices it affords. The poem’s experimental form presents a challenge to readers as it resists attempts to read using conventional strategies. Taking a cue from the book’s title, I ask what happens when readers enter the space of the poem as reader-discoverers, and how they can be helped to engage with it in meaningful ways. Guided by Abel’s decolonial poetics and his play on the metaphor of text as landscape, I draw on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theories of nomadology and smooth, striated, and holey space to suggest that Un/inhabited’s own spaces invite anti-settler, nomadic modes of reading. These render texts porous, undermining their capacity to determine the shape of the worlds they narrate. Approaching texts in this way enables readers to shift from passive recipients of information to world shapers.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
%d bloggers like this: