A public lecture by Bárbara Simoes and Tania Aguila-Way
27 Mar 2025 - 16:00 / 27 Mar 2025 - 18:00
Nosotros in Canada: Situating LatinX /a /o Writing in Canada
Bárbara Simoes, PhD
Tania Aguila-Way, PhD
“Exile and Memory in Latino-Canadian Writing”
Bárbara Inês Ribeiro Simões Daibert (Bárbara Simões Daibert)
Associate Professor, Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF – Brazil).
Visiting Scholar, Centre of Comparative Literatures, University of Toronto.
Abstract:
This paper investigates Latino/a/x literary voices drawn from Latin American migrations to Canada, reflecting on the different waves of migration, the lack of representation of the field within Canadian Studies, and the dilemma between literary and cultural representation, exile, resistance and assimilation; and political presence and identity formation in Latino/a/x Canadian Writing. Considering the unique challenges faced by Latinx communities in Canada, this paper explores how some key contemporary authors negotiate resistance, empowerment, and ethnicity by finding a new voice in Canada. More specifically, it investigates how cultural identity, migration, transculturation, and memory are articulated through the works of Alejandro Saravia. Like many Latino writers in Canada, Saravia, in Red, Yellow, Green is confronted with his own trauma and displacement in this new “home” and recreates his country while trying to negotiate his subjectivity in this new homeland. This paper focuses on the traumatic experiences of exile found in Saravia’s work, reflecting how Latino-Canadian authors express themselves in their texts, renegotiating the official Anglophone-Canadian narratives of freedom and progress, and bringing uncomfortable and uncanny feelings to a new homeland.
“The uncleanness of my dark skin”: Toxic Burdens, Brown Embodiment, and Latinx-Indigenous Relationality in Rebecca Salazar’s sulphurtongue
Tania Aguila-Way
Assistant Professor – Department of English, University of Toronto
This paper examines the representation of brown Latinx emplacement in Rebecca Salazar’s poetry collection sulphurtongue, which is written from the point of view of a second generation, brown Latinx speaker who grew up amidst the “smoke-stacked” landscapes of Sudbury, Ontario. Thinking through the text’s construction of brown Latinx embodiment as a site of environmental, historical, and geographical “transcorporeality” (Alaimo), I argue that sulphurtongue situates itself within, but also disidentifies with (José Esteban Muñoz), the biopolitics of mestizaje that shapes dominant constructions of Latinidad and which assumes an unencumbered proximity between diasporic Latinx and Indigenous subjects. I contend that, through this work of disidentification, sulphurtongue creates a space for rethinking Latinx and Indigenous relationalities in settler-colonial Canada, gesturing towards an ethics of “co-resistance” (Leanne Betasamosake Simpson) in which Latinx and Indigenous subjects might work in a mutually responsive way to challenge settler colonial extractivism.
