S. Macpherson
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From Spectator to Citizen: Urban Walking in Canadian Literature, Performance Art and Culture Sandra MacPherson Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctorate in Philosophy degree in English Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Sandra MacPherson, Ottawa, Canada, 2018 ii Abstract This dissertation examines urban walking in Canada as it deviates from a largely male peripatetic tradition associated with the flâneur. This new incarnation of the walker— differentiated by gender, race, class, and/or sexual orientation—reshapes the urban imaginary and shifts the act of walking from what is generally theorized as an individualistic or simply transgressive act to a relational and transformative practice. While the walkers in this study are diverse, the majority of them are women: writers Dionne Brand, Daphne Marlatt, Régine Robin, Gail Scott, and Lisa Robertson and performance artists Kinga Araya, Stephanie Marshall, and Camille Turner all challenge the dualism inscribed by the dominant (masculine) gaze under the project of modernity that abstracts and objectifies the other. Yet, although sexual difference is often the first step toward rethinking identities and relationships to others and the city, it is not the last. I argue that poet Bud Osborn, the play The Postman, the projects Ogimaa Mikana, [murmur] and Walking With Our Sisters, and community initiatives such as Jane’s Walk, also invite all readers and pedestrians to question the equality, official history and inhabitability of Canadian cities. As these peripatetic works emphasize, how, where and why we choose to walk is a significant commentary on the nature of public space and democracy in contemporary urban Canada. This interdisciplinary study focuses on Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, cities where there has been not only some of the greatest social and economic change in Canada under neoliberalism but also the greatest concentration of affective, peripatetic practices that react to these changes. The nineteenth-century flâneur’s pursuit of knowledge is no longer adequate to approach the everyday reality of the local and contingent effects of global capitalism. As these walkers reject an oversimplified and romanticized notion of belonging to a city or nation based on normative iii identity categories, they recognize the vulnerability of others and demand that cities be more than locations of precarity and economic growth. This dissertation critically engages diverse Canadian peripatetic perspectives notably absent in theories of urban walking and extends them in new directions. Although the topic of walking suggests an anthropocentrism that contradicts the turn to posthumanism in literary and cultural studies, the walkers in this study open the peripatetic up to non-anthropocentric notions as the autonomous subject of liberal individualism often associated with the male urban walking tradition is displaced by a new focus on the interdependent, affective relation of self and city and on attending to others, to the care of and responsibility for others and the city. iv Acknowledgements ! Thank you to my supervisor, Dr. Robert Stacey, for supporting my interdisciplinary project, for your critical insight and for always challenging me to be a better writer. Thank you to my examiners Dr. Jody Mason, Dr. Thomas Allen, Dr. Jennifer Blair, and Dr. Andrew Taylor for engaging thoughtfully and critically with my work and for your invaluable feedback that will continue to shape my research on this topic. Thank you to Dr. Andre Furlani at Concordia University for offering a course on walking, which gave me the opportunity to explore my topic at an early stage of research. Thank you to everyone at the University of Ottawa’s Department of English, administration and faculty, for guidance throughout the process. For financial support, thank you to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program and the University of Ottawa. Thank you to Kinga Araya, François Morelli and David Ferry for generously sharing your time and work with me. David Ferry trusted me with the working script and video footage of The Postman, without which a critical section of chapter three would not have been possible. Thank you to everyone at Jane’s Walk Ottawa with whom I not only have had the great pleasure of working but also share my love of walking, the city and community engagement. Thank you to my friends near and far for making the long journey lighter. Thank you Erin Kean, with whom I have been lucky to share this experience, for your intelligence, humour and unwavering support for my work. A special thank you to Gabby for always being there for me, for listening and believing in me. Finally, I must express my deepest gratitude to my partner Jeff and my daughter Hannah for their infinite patience and encouragement. Thank you for sharing a love of literature and especially a love of walking—for walking with me all over Lisbon and beyond these last few years. I can think of nothing better than sharing the road with you both. v Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iv Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... v Introduction - What Does It Mean to Walk? ............................................................................... 1 Walking from Country to City: Class ...................................................................................................... 10 From the Nineteenth-Century Flâneur to Psychogeography: Modernity, Capitalism and Globalization ............................................................................................................................................ 12 The Body and Space: Walking as an Everyday Practice ......................................................................... 18 Different Bodies, Different Cities ............................................................................................................ 21 Our Cities, Ourselves: Walking In and Out of Place ............................................................................... 25 Affect and Walking in the City ................................................................................................................ 28 Chapter Summaries .................................................................................................................................. 30 Chapter One – Visible Bodies: Feeling Out of Place in the Body, City and Nation ............... 34 The Modern Flâneur: The Critical Reader of the City ............................................................................. 37 Hybrid Identity: Kinga Araya’s Prosthetic Walking Performances ......................................................... 43 Challenging the Dominant Reading of the Body, City and Nation: Stefanie Marshall’s “where do I go from here?” and Camille Turner’s Miss Canadiana ....................................................... 51 Ogimaa Mikana Project: Reading the City .............................................................................................. 61 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 65 Chapter Two - Precarious Encounters: Reading the City Differently .................................... 66 Reading Differently .................................................................................................................................. 69 Ordinary Affects: Reading Precarity and Gentrification in Daphne Marlatt’s Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now ............................................................................................................ 71 Drifting in the Impasse: Bud Osborn’s “when I was 15,” “propaganda” and “drifting” ......................... 78 Routes/Roots: Drifting as a Diasporic Practice in Dionne Brand’s Thirsty ............................................. 83 An Allophone in Montreal: Wandering Between the Strange and Familiar in Régine Robin’s The Wanderer ........................................................................................................................................... 98 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 108 Chapter Three – Affective Mapping: Walking as Memory Work ........................................ 110 Prosthetic Memory: [murmur] and Daphne Marlatt’s Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now ........................................................................................................................................ 114 Walking With Ghosts: The Wanderer, The Postman and Walking With Our Sisters ............................ 126 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 146 Chapter Four - Transforming the City-as-Text: Aesthetics and Politics of Walking .......... 149 Walking the City, Writing the City-as-Text: Gail Scott’s My Paris