Negotiating Subjectivities Through Literature: Anticolonial Counternarrative Fiction Book Clubs and Their Possibilities
Year: 2019
Type: dissertation
Abstract: “Tired of reading straight, racist, colonial fiction?... Want to read meaningful anti-colonial fiction that disrupts racism on Turtle Island?” This is the call I put out to engage participants in this anticolonial book club research project. Reading two books together, I asked: How do five racialized women and one Indigenous woman negotiate their subjectivities during processes of reading anticolonial fiction? This research question was the aim of the project, but the anticolonial political commitments are at the foundation of the anticolonial feminist literacy theoretical framework and feminist Deleuzian methodology used. As a queer, white, settler researcher and educator, I created the project with a desire-based lens, in order to focus on the subversion, persistence, and thriving in the feminist anticolonial space. I recruited the six women with two main goals: examine how reading anticolonial fiction can help facilitate the negotiation of subjectivities and examine how reading fiction that is not white settler colonial in nature can create generative spaces for people to thrive. Using the feminist Deleuzian methodological framework through the anticolonial feminist literacy theoretical lens allowed me to focus on the hot spots of the data that arose in the book club conversations, one-on-one meetings, and reading journals. Focusing on these hot spots, or what ‘glowed,’ I explain how reading and language are embodied processes and allowed one participant to continue becoming bilingual-immigrant-racialized-woman in ways that resist molar/static understandings of her subject positions and a more liveable life. Focusing on a second hot spot, I explain how reading anticolonial counternarrative fiction enabled a space for deep self-reflection which helped the participants build trust in their subject positions and experiences of marginalization, which allowed them to create a new consciousness outside of white settler colonial discourses. In the last data chapter, I explain how this anticolonial book club created an anticolonial community of care to walk alongside Indigenous resurgence initiatives through feminist solidarity and horizontal comradeship. Walking alongside Indigenous resurgence is always contextual, but this research project shows one way in which this is possible in a non-reactionary, productive way.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Shawna M. Carroll
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2957162338