Papers by Jennifer Henderson
Land/Relations: Possibilities of Justice in Canadian Literatures, 2023
This essay argues that attention to the settler-colonial social relations structured by state and... more This essay argues that attention to the settler-colonial social relations structured by state and capital needs to be maintained as one front of decolonization, alongside the (re)construction of ethical relationalities as another front. In the present conjuncture in 21st century "Canada," neoliberal anti-statism can all too easily absorb and recode critiques of the paternalist colonial state as well as affirmations of relations of care that are seen to exist in a realm 'beyond the state.' The essay points to the generic Gothic narrativization of Indian Residential Schools in settler-public discourse as an example of neoliberal discursive absorption and recoding. The genocidal violence of the schools was not widely admitted until that violence had been framed according to Gothic conventions, which classically tell a story about the dangerous hold of a past despotic order on an emerging market society. Filtered through the genre of neoliberal Gothic, a limited reckoning with the settler-colonial foundations of "Canada" in the shape of the schools is today turned to the legitimation of unfettered capital with the state as its servant. The second half of the essay turns to the space conceptualized as 'beyond the state,' the neoliberal responsibilization of individuals, families, and communities, and the attendant delegitimation of all projects of collectivization and redistribution, in order to argue for wariness with regard to the uses of the master signifier, "resilience."
The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies, 2020
A term originating in the natural sciences, resilience refers to the capacity of a system or an o... more A term originating in the natural sciences, resilience refers to the capacity of a system or an organism to bounce back from stress and maintain normal functioning. The concept of resilience has been particularly influential in the fields of developmental psychopathology and human development, although it is also used today by economists, defense strategists, and emergency planners. This entry defines resilience, offers an overview of resilience knowledge-production in the context of childhood studies, and explores critiques of this research.
American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 2018
The Listuguj Mi’kmaq filmmaker, Jeff Barnaby, has described his 2013 feature, Rhymes for Young Gh... more The Listuguj Mi’kmaq filmmaker, Jeff Barnaby, has described his 2013 feature, Rhymes for Young Ghouls, as a “residential school revenge” story and a “heist” movie (Barnaby 2014). Heist and revenge plots are rare enough within the body of narrative representations of Canada’s Indian residential schools, but in so far as Rhymes for Young Ghouls is a contribution to that growing corpus, more unusual still is the film’s extreme aesthetic and generic self-consciousness, its visual and aural hyper-stylization, which seem to refuse any promise of transparency and immediacy. The reference to sonic echo in the film’s title is an indication of its densely citational, intertextual construction—its commitment to repetition, echo, and reinscription as modes of creation.
Here I read the film’s rhyming in terms of its work with genre, its repetition and displacement, and I situate the stakes of this work in relation to genres of public discourse in neoliberal, settler-colonial Canada. Genre as a historical and formal residue, a trace, mediates the entry of residential schools into public memory, providing a ready-made set of tropes which stand in, catachrestically, for that which does not have a proper name in Canada. In my reading, Rhymes for Young Ghouls suggests that a particular, historical version of the Gothic, equipped to provide the liberal critique of tyrannical power, organizes the 21st century settler-public knowledge of residential schools. The temporality of this Gothic plays on the division between remote, feudal, Latinate past and enlightened present while its spatial organization affirms the division between ‘inside’ space of entrapment and ‘outside’ space of freedom.
Biosocieties http://www.palgrave-journals.com/biosoc/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/biosoc201524a.html
Resilience is the popular term for a capacity to ‘bounce back’ from adversity. It is also a scien... more Resilience is the popular term for a capacity to ‘bounce back’ from adversity. It is also a scientific concept informing an influential bio-psychological approach to contemporary inequality. This article recalls the origins of the term in developmental psychopathology and suggests that the project of cultivating resilient selves is an aspect of the broader depoliticization characterizing “postdemocracies” today. The scientific object of resilience is produced through the study of the interplay of risky and protective variables in the individual life course. Resilience is present when developmental resources in and around the self help to combat threats to ‘adaptation.’ The project of resilience is to know how to cultivate individual robustness in the face of immutable threats, including poverty, grasped as a developmental risk factor. In this way of knowing the world, structured inequality is seen to be relatively unchangeable compared to the powers of resilience. Resilience has been taken up by neoliberal governments as the model of evidence-based ‘actionable knowledge’ for population interventions. But its influence extends further, to institutions of global governance, where resilience’s central object of inquiry and intervention̞̞̞̞--the child--has been projected onto humanity as a whole. The appeal of resilience as a practical and optimistic science is undeniable but we suggest that it is time to take account of its implications for political contestation. Resilience provides positive psychology’s contribution to the narrowing of justice- and equity-seeking projects in the current moment, reducing their horizons to the care for ‘human capital’ under conditions of socio-economic precarity.
Advance online publication in Biosocieties:
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/biosoc/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/biosoc201524a.html
Journal of Canadian Studies 49.1 (2015) 5-43
In this article I track the ways in which mainstream newspaper commentary on residential schools ... more In this article I track the ways in which mainstream newspaper commentary on residential schools lawsuits accentuated private law’s already constrained understanding of the agency, duration, and effects of the harm of the schools. Civil litigation was more than an attempt to obtain compensation for individuals: it was part of a strategy for seeking the broader accountability of churches and government, beyond that of individual perpetrators. Arguments in the mainstream media, however, repeatedly asserted that the wrong of residential schooling was limited to specific crimes of sexual and physical assault. Beyond the parameters imposed by tort law, these arguments were aided by inter-animating elements in popular culture, namely, the discourse of trauma and a neoliberal discourse delegitimizing claims on state resources. Trauma’s biographical scale and focus on the catastrophic event reinforced the emphasis on specific crimes; likewise, the neoliberal taxpayer-citizen could empathize with the individual traumatized by acts of violence, whilst dismissing broader claims about residential schooling. In the opinion-making activity of newspaper commentary, residential schools became discursively dis-embedded from the broader framework of colonial policy. The claim of a collective experience of cultural loss was a key instrument in the struggle to re-situate the schools in this framework; however, the form of recognition ultimately won still bears the imprint of a common sense that constrains what the recovery of culture can mean.
English Studies in Canada "Childhood and Its Discontents" issue, 2012
Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress, 2013
Canadian Literature, 2012
Esc: English Studies in Canada, 2009
Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic, 2009
Double-Takes: Intersections Between Canadian Literature and Film, 2013
Atlantis: A Women's Studies Journal, 2007
Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature, 2004
AN THE FIRST DECADE of the twentieth century, two texts that were to become classics of Canadian ... more AN THE FIRST DECADE of the twentieth century, two texts that were to become classics of Canadian children's literature were published just five years apart: Ernest Thompson Seton s Two Little Savages: Being the Adventures of Two Boys and What They Learned, in 1903, and L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, in 1908. The story of the education of Anne, the imaginative orphan, is better known today than the story of Seton's Yan, a pale and sickly boy who achieves courage and selfrespect through independent play in the woods. But in their historical moment, both of these narratives resonated with a new, emancipatory view of the child as a creature with independent desires, interests, and imagination. This was the moment when, in the discourse of European and North American philanthropists and progressive educators, the child was being liberated from the repressions and constraints of nineteenth-century models of discipline. The institutionalization of orphaned and dependent children was condemned as an unnatural and disabling form of care; ! the Humane Society campaigns of the nineteenth century-at first organized to combat cruelty to animals-were consolidated in the powers of newly formed provincial departments of neglected and dependent children and their local children's aid societies; 2 the mastery of traditional school subjects was rejected as the primary pedagogical goal by progressive educators, in favour of a more holistic, moral, and practical education of the "whole child."
American Literary History, 2001
... studies seems to be that of staking a claim to border negotiation or interrogation as the ver... more ... studies seems to be that of staking a claim to border negotiation or interrogation as the very ... An ethics of the border must include an oppositional relation to ... These writers all concern themselves with the characteristic paradoxes of Canadian culture, but Kertzer locates these ...
Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2000
Tessera: Feminist Interventions in Writing and Culture, 1997
In this moment in which Anglo-American culture is obsessed with the self as a form of capital and... more In this moment in which Anglo-American culture is obsessed with the self as a form of capital and governments and corporations undergo neoliberal restructuring processes, this article inquires into the connections between what I call recovery feminism and a new managerial discourse. What is the call for a "revolution from within" doing in the workplace?
Books by Jennifer Henderson
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Papers by Jennifer Henderson
Here I read the film’s rhyming in terms of its work with genre, its repetition and displacement, and I situate the stakes of this work in relation to genres of public discourse in neoliberal, settler-colonial Canada. Genre as a historical and formal residue, a trace, mediates the entry of residential schools into public memory, providing a ready-made set of tropes which stand in, catachrestically, for that which does not have a proper name in Canada. In my reading, Rhymes for Young Ghouls suggests that a particular, historical version of the Gothic, equipped to provide the liberal critique of tyrannical power, organizes the 21st century settler-public knowledge of residential schools. The temporality of this Gothic plays on the division between remote, feudal, Latinate past and enlightened present while its spatial organization affirms the division between ‘inside’ space of entrapment and ‘outside’ space of freedom.
Advance online publication in Biosocieties:
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/biosoc/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/biosoc201524a.html
Books by Jennifer Henderson
Here I read the film’s rhyming in terms of its work with genre, its repetition and displacement, and I situate the stakes of this work in relation to genres of public discourse in neoliberal, settler-colonial Canada. Genre as a historical and formal residue, a trace, mediates the entry of residential schools into public memory, providing a ready-made set of tropes which stand in, catachrestically, for that which does not have a proper name in Canada. In my reading, Rhymes for Young Ghouls suggests that a particular, historical version of the Gothic, equipped to provide the liberal critique of tyrannical power, organizes the 21st century settler-public knowledge of residential schools. The temporality of this Gothic plays on the division between remote, feudal, Latinate past and enlightened present while its spatial organization affirms the division between ‘inside’ space of entrapment and ‘outside’ space of freedom.
Advance online publication in Biosocieties:
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/biosoc/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/biosoc201524a.html