Bookkeeping: Discourses of Debt in Caribbean Canadian Literature By
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Bookkeeping: Discourses of Debt in Caribbean Canadian Literature by Lisa Camille van der Marel A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English and Film Studies University of Alberta © Lisa Camille van der Marel, 2018 ABSTRACT This thesis examines representations of debt and obligation in works of Caribbean Canadian literature published between 1997 and 2007. It uses these representations to discuss the relationship between postcolonial, global, and diasporic approaches to cultural studies. These disciplinary distinctions draw explicit and implicit divisions between the colonial, the postcolonial, and the transnational as discrete historical moments in a teleologic progression. Against such divisions, literary works by David Chariandy, Ramabai Espinet, Dionne Brand, and Nalo Hopkinson suggest that colonial pasts do not remain in the past but continue to overdetermine the ‘transnational’ present. Intriguingly, each of these authors uses the language of debt and obligation to describe these temporal and geographical entanglements. This thesis draws on new economic criticism, memory studies, theories of recognition, treaty citizenship, and Afro-pessimism to argue firstly that Caribbean Canadian literature’s representations of debt refute emerging neo-Marxist theories of debt’s governmentality offered in response to the 2008 global financial crisis, and secondly, that they expose diaspora studies’ underlying valuation of individual autonomy and possessive individualism. By representing colonial pasts as outstanding and unpayable debts, fictional and nonfictional works dispute the seemingly clean breaks contemporary scholarship and political debates can draw between colonial pasts and transnational futures. Debt, at its simplest, is any exchange not brought to completion; Canada’s present is a space of incomplete—and incompletable—cultural, economic, and intellectual exchanges. Bookkeeping: Discourses of Debt in Caribbean Canadian Literature offers an anti-colonial critique of the transnational present and asks what it means to live ethically amid the colonial aftermath’s systemic debts as they entangle past and future, nations and diasporas, bodies and archives, as well as political emancipation and consumer agency. ii PREFACE An edited version of this thesis’s first chapter, “Amortizing Memory: Debt as a Mnemonic Device in Diaspora,” is published in Small Axe, vol. 21, no. 3, 2017. The published article’s title is “Amortizing Memory: Debt as a Mnemonic Device in Caribbean Canadian Literature.” iii DEDICATION The student is not home, out of time, out of place, without credit, in bad debt. The student is a bad debtor threatened with credit. The student runs from credit. Credit pursues the student, offering to match credit for debt, until enough debts and enough credits have piled up. But the student has a habit, a bad habit. She studies. She studies but she does not learn. If she learned they could measure her progress, establish her attributes, give her credit. But the student keeps studying, keeps planning to study, keeps running to study, keeps studying a plan, keeps elaborating a debt. The student does not intend to pay. ---Stefano Harney and Fred Moten iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have accumulated a lot of debts while writing this dissertation, some of which are financial and some of which are much more complex and interesting. For reasons I trust will become clear to this thesis’s readers, I have come to think of these second debts as defining my community. They cannot be paid back, cleared, or settled, but they can be acknowledged, engaged with, and passed forward. This includes my debt to Turtle Island’s First Nations, particularly the Treaty 6 and Métis peoples on whose traditional territory, !"#$%&#'()'* (Amiskwacîwâskahikan), I have lived the past 7 years. May my obligations to this land and its communities guide actions and scholarship going forward. +,-#."/* (kinanâskomitin)! I also have an incalculable debt to the Caribbean Canadian writers who make this research possible and who share their stories despite profound barriers. Any critical conscious I have results from reading these authors. My obligations to this literature have made my scholarship possible. My next debts are to my supervisor and mentor, Stephen Slemon, who gives us some sense of what Anansi would be like as an Emeritus professor, and my committee members, Teresa Zackodnik and Heather Zwicker, whose engagement has refined my research and polished who I am as a colleague. Their collective guidance has honed this dissertation’s strengths and helped minimize its weaknesses. Special thanks to Laura Beard from the University of Alberta’s department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies and David Chariandy from Simon Fraser University, my external examiners: I am so grateful for your time, your consideration, your insights. Thank you for pushing me to be better. Thank you for serving not just as my committee, but as a community to whom I am accountable as well. I want to express my gratitude to Katherine Binhammer, Marie Carrière, Cecily Devereux, Corrinne Harol, Eddy Kent, Sarah Krotz, Ian MacLaren, Keavy Martin, Julie Rak, Peter Sinnema, and Terri Tomsky: each of you have spent your time with me, guided me, laughed with me, and made these years in the Department of English and Film Studies meaningful. I am so glad I chose to come here. I am so glad to have worked with each of you. Big thanks also to Kim Brown and Mary Marshall Durrell, the pillars our department rests on. Support from my friends have kept me going throughout these studies. Neale Barnholden, Brent Bellamy, Rob Chabassol, Trevor Chow-Fraser, Thomas Dessein, Ashley Dryburgh, Anna Dow, Carmyn Effa, Alex Elise, Theo Finigan, Helen Frost, Libe García Zarranz, Dominique Hetú, Brandon Kerfoot, Rob Jackson, Marcelle Kosman, Derritt Mason, Hannah McGregor, Katherine v Meloche, Todd Merkley, Clare Mulcahy, Lisa Ann Robertson, Natasha Rombough, Anna Sajecki, Laura Schechter, Michelle Sims, Jana Smith Elford, Melissa Stephens, Stephen Tchir, Kaitlin Trimble, and Nick van Orden: you made Edmonton my home. I cherish our conversations, dinners, impromptu dance parties, schemes, dog walks, gif threads, coffee dates, clothing swaps, bar nights, office time, and every book you’ve lent me. To my SCT friends, including Phil Dickenson, Lisa Haynes, and Thomas West III: thank you for sharing what was both the most intellectually rigorous and ridiculously fun summer of my studies. I want to extend special thanks to Michaela Henry, Gylnnis Morgan, and Orly Lael Netzer: in reading my work, writing with me for hours on end, and travelling the world with me, you three have helped me in incalculable ways. I plan on doing everything I can to continue these exchanges of mutual support for years to come. This thesis was completed with financial assistance from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the University of Alberta, and the Department of English and Film Studies. I also want to thank the Canadian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, the Mikinaakominis/TransCanadas Conference, and the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English for showcasing my research on graduate student plenaries and prize panels: these opportunities have fuelled this thesis from its tentative beginnings to its final revisions. It is an honour to have so much support from across CanLit’s scholarly community. I dedicate this thesis to my families: to my mum, Karen McLean, and my sister, Emma van der Marel; to Ter, Trish, and Clea Young as well as Cole and Jude Campbell; and to Liam Young. You are my dearest friend, my most generous editor, my symbiopoetic life partner. How wonderful to have found each other. Elbowing you in the chest at that Virginia Woolves’ soccer practice was the best foul I’ve ever committed. Last of all, to Fozzie Bear, a wee dog who has surely earned a literature degree by osmosis while spending the last three years wedged between me and my laptop. vi CONTENTS Abstract......................................................................................................................................................................................................II Preface ..................................................................................................................................................................................................... III Dedication ............................................................................................................................................................................................... IV Acknowledgements.................................................................................................................................................................................. V Contents ................................................................................................................................................................................................ VII Going Into Debt: An Introduction .......................................................................................................................................................1 ---Why Debt? Why Now? Why Caribbean Canadian Literature? ....................................................................................................4 ---Diaspora’s Debts, Debt’s Diasporas: A History .........................................................................................................................