Review of my book by Nancy Kan (2018)

Moreover, Banco never loses sight of the ways in which violence lies at the heart of the Oppenheimer narrative (10); he often functions rhetorically as a means of trying to impose some order (and humanity) on a story that is fundamentally resistant to either understanding or control. But, ultimately, the scientist’s meaning is hard to pinpoint. Banco recognizes the many paradoxes of both Oppenheimer and the nuclear age. He writes of simultaneous “creation and destruction, heroism and villainy, beauty and horror” and suggests that nothing less than “the twentieth century’s legacy of Enlightenment thinking” is at stake in such dualities (23). Understanding this legacy is, I would argue, perhaps the key challenge for scholars interested in the cultural history of modern American science. Studying Oppenheimer, Banco argues in this impressive book, is one excellent way of gaining insight into that legacy. David K. Hecht Bowdoin College Libe García Zarranz. TransCanadian Feminist Fictions: New Cross-Border Ethics. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017. 180 pp. $85.00. With her choice of title for this timely monograph, namely the kinetic prefix “TransCanadian,” literary scholar Libe García Zarranz sparks questions: will the work detail how transgender fiction writers create space and place in Canada or interrogate how these feminist artists forge imaginative and activist ties within and across the country through migratory fictions? Neither hits the mark. The study does much more: it discusses fiction (namely novels and short-story collections), but also long poems, memoir, and in the final “coda” chapter, a poetry collection in concert with an iconic 1977 sci-fi horror film. All the analyses transpire against a breathtaking medley of cultural theory, particularly drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and a select cadre of thinkers from multiple disciplines and schools (especial material feminist theory) who scrutinize border-crossings and materialities across human, nonhuman, and more-than-human subjects. “TransCanadian” defines the three main, award-winning Canadian feminist writers under consideration: Dionne Brand, Hiromi Goto, and Emma Donoghue. All were born outside of Canada (in Trinidad and Tobago, Japan, and Ireland, respectively) and identify as lesbians. The border-crossings discerned in their work, described as “malleable, porous,  | Hecht and viscous,” far supersede the realm of the national, bringing to light corporeal, biopolitical, and affective concerns “in a time of global crises” (47, 126). Indeed, these three themes comprise the three main sections of the book, with three chapters (devoted to each of the three writers) contained within each section. As suggested above, García Zarranz’s study evocatively discerns “vulnerable subjectivity and embodiment” in a time of “uneasy” and “uneven” globalization (150–2). The post–9/11 era ushered in a prolonged period of fear triggered by “the systematic reconfiguration of corporeal, biopolitical, and affective borders with long-lasting ethical repercussions” (22). Galvanized by that U.S. tragedy and the ensuing implementation of anti-terror regimes and regulating state apparatus, the text interrogates various forms of corporeality in the context of intense historical, technological, biological, and cultural flux. This backdrop is a veritable collage of catalytic experiences: the Syrian civil war and global refugee crisis; contested military action in such locations as Iraq and Afghanistan; economic crises and the worldwide Occupy movement; the Egyptian revolution of 2011, the Arab Spring, and other liberationist uprisings; ongoing territorial disputes in the Middle East and elsewhere; even the destruction of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. This last instance underscores how the ethico-political dimensions of environmental degradation are also within the democratic purview of the text. From start to finish, TransCanadian Feminist Fictions labours to critique the ethical contingencies of global transformation, what the critic cleverly terms a “cross-border ethic.” Whether applied to racialized or gendered bodies, the hegemonic power of (usually European-descended) male authority prompts readers to become acutely sensitive to how “circuits of power, knowledge, and capital” give rise to “an archive of instrumentalization and biocapitalization” for so-called second-class populations, including women (78). Using generically diverse literary texts like Brand’s long poem Ossuaries and memoir A Map to the Door of No Return, Donoghue’s novel Room and short story collection Astray, and Goto’s young adult novels The Water of Possibility, Darkest Light, and Half World, García Zarraz’s slender volume (re)defines relationalities between bodies of so-called “deviant populations—that is, queer, racialized, poor, migrant”—with the goal of delineating dissident forms of agency and resistance (47). By the end of the hard-hitting monograph, the scholar compels readers to journey beyond human borderlands, envisioning the imaginative possibilities of the posthuman world through an “ethic of dissent.” Doing so, she contends, reconstitutes “bodies, materialities, and spaces that [have been] rendered Reviews |  unrepresentable according to patriarchal, racist, and other hegemonic power structures and ideologies” (142). The diverse, sometimes dizzying, arsenal of terms, paradigms, and catchphrases deployed by García Zarranz attests to the highly interdisciplinary nature of her inquiry. TransCanadian Feminist Fictions stands at the nexus of history, cultural studies, literary criticism, political philosophy, and affect theory, among many others. The chapters forward the seminal notion that borders and boundaries—especially corporealities— are porous, malleable, and rife with hermeneutic potential as well as risk. In turn, she defines the ethical imagination as a “cross-border site” which may “activat[e] alternative forms of agency and resistance” (117) against unscrupulous exercises of “biopower” and, following the work of Cameroonian political philosopher Achille Mbembe, “necropower.” In light of the text’s elastic intellectual reach and keen sense of inclusivity, perhaps a better prefix than TransCanadian would be Transglobal, because defining “Canadian-ness,” whether as part of the Global North or as a specific kind of “pathogeography” (107), is not a central component of this journey to the heart of what might also be termed “bio-necro-political” darkness. The text endorses a view of human and non-human bodies as “complex cross-border assemblages” that are steeped in a global matrix of systemic oppression and traumatic memory (131). Whether applying the work of material feminists like Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, synthesizing the paradoxes highlighted by queer theorists like Judith Butler and Jasbir K. Puar, or reconstituting material by oft-cited Western thinkers like Foucault, Marx, Deleuze, and Guattari, the monograph rarely—if ever—loses sight of the need to define counter-hegemonic strategies and frameworks for political, intellectual, and moral resistance. The material boundaries between the empowered and disempowered are inherently liminal, and the literary works under analysis illustrate that idea in manifold ways (35). Because García Zarranz’s primary reading of borders is not the typical geopolitical one, the reader must be willing to understand them along a spectrum of applicabilities: corporeal, material, biological, sociopolitical, temporal, spatial, economic, cultural, ideological, and, perhaps most important, affective. The study makes up in discursive density for what it lacks in conventional chapter length, with the shortest chapter being slightly under ten pages and the longest a mere sixteen. Nonetheless the author’s knack for making theoretically dense prose very readable (despite phrases like “posthuman ethnoscape outside chrononormative time and space,” “trans-corporeal materiality,” and “ethico-affective assemblage”) ensures  | Kang that readers are in the constant process of acquiring and honing a more nuanced lexicon to “critically address the porous entanglements of human, nonhuman, and more-than-human ecologies and materialities” (40, 29, 128, 126). Parallelism is key to this work: part 1 (“Crossing the Borders of Corporeality”), part 2 (“Biopolitical Border Crossings”), and part 3 (“CrossBorder Affects”) each feature three chapters on Brand, Goto, and Donoghue, although not in one set order. In light of this general symmetry, the coda (a chapter on Chinese Canadian writer-intellectual Larissa Lai) is somewhat disjunctive even though the subject matter—Lai’s visionary work Automaton Biographies in intertextual dialogue with Ridley Scott’s cult classic Alien—resonates well with the preceding nine chapters. While the author subtly and conscientiously signposts the relevance of Lai’s work throughout the monograph, the comparative lack of space devoted to this writer vis-à-vis Brand, Goto, and Donoghue makes equal footing a hard sell despite the critic’s best efforts. Perhaps Lai’s literary contributions merit either in-depth treatment in each section like the aforementioned trio or their own separate volume altogether. Broadly, the chapters driven by detailed close readings of the literary works are most effective, especially those explicating Goto’s young adult fiction. These sections testify strongly to García Zarranz’s keen analytical abilities given the need to explain the often fantastic landscapes and mythic characters that the Japanese Canadian writer characteristically weaves into her oeuvre. The chapters that privilege complex theoretical interventions over traditional textual analysis, while impressively crafted, sometimes detract from the centrality of the literature as hermeneutic anchor to the overall project. García Zarranz’s critical voice also becomes obscured amid a chorus (sometimes cacophonous) of other scholars’ perspectives. Finally, the author clearly invokes the importance of race in an age of post–9/11 paranoia, policing, and profiling. She emphasizes how “racializing assemblages function today as practices of differentiation, hierarchization, and exclusion,” offering a rigorous discussion, for instance, of Afro-diasporic identity alongside Brand’s memoir in chapter 6 (92). Sadly, there are no comparable interventions into Asian Canadian or Asian diaspora identity, which would be complementary to the discussion of Islamophobia and black dehumanization given that people of Asian descent have long been subject to racist surveillance and abuse (including wholesale incarceration) in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere. With Goto and Lai both being Asian Canadians, a greater concern for this assemblage of outrages would Reviews |  have been welcome, even though these authors may not directly address the history of anti-Asian racism in the works at hand. The question remains: Where exactly does Canada and Canadian cultural production fit into the increasing need for “novel forms of affect and embodiment that might open up ethical spaces for the regeneration of global geopolitical communities” (57)? Literature by TransCanadian writers—that is, contemporary feminist and queer anti-racist artists and activists—stands as one means of entering the far-reaching, arduous, yet urgent conversation. Libe García Zarranz’s contribution is passionately optimistic and richly informed. The lively discussions contained in this monograph equip readers with discursive tools to excavate their own conclusions about the simultaneously expansive and constraining borderlands of their own and others’ experiences. Nancy Kang University of Manitoba Benjamin Authers. A Culture of Rights: Law, Literature, and Canada. University of Toronto Press, 2016. 192 pp. $27.95. The word “rights” is a semantic swamp. It designates a range of social sanctions from the universal (human rights), to the inspirational (right to life, liberty, and security), to the practical (adult residents’ right to vote in a municipal election). Rights have limits and compete for priority. Some exist by being exercised (right to vote), others may be forfeited if used irresponsibly (right to drive a car), and the word is used metaphorically to extend the scope of responsibility (animals have rights only when people respect them). Benjamin Authers stays afloat in this swamp by focusing on how English-Canadian novels written in light of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) stage a series of contests between forensic and fictional needs: 1. Law is conservative (respecting precedent, tradition, “original” intention), whereas unprecedented literary forms may serve a transgressive poetic. 2. Artistic licence flouts the competing authorities of legality and morality. Vicious laws (apartheid) are not only legitimate  | Kang Copyright of English Studies in Canada is the property of English Studies in Canada and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. 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