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- Title
"A Ghostly Twin Struggling for Its Own Place": Biological Twinship, Homes and Hauntings in Canadian (Sub)Urban Spaces.
- Authors
VOGT-WILLIAM, CHRISTINE
- Abstract
Kristen Den Hartog's The Perpetual Ending (1998) and Susannah Smith's How the Blessed Live (2002) consider how biological twins negotiate the urban, rural and suburban spaces that form the contexts in which they relate to each other and their parents. The conceptual boundaries between city spaces as well as the rural and suburban spaces in these novels are envisioned through family dynamics and the concept of home which, according to Rosemary George, bears some scrutiny: "The politics of location come into play in the attempt to weave together a subject-status that is sustained by the experience of the place one knows as Home or by resistance to places that are patently 'not home'. Locations are positions from which distance and difference are formulated and homes are made snug" (George, 1999: 2). With such scrutiny in mind, this paper deploys intersectional readings of whiteness, gender and racialised bodies to chart the twins' relationships to the spaces they travel to, in order to deal with traumas of violence and loss that have contributed to fragmented senses of selves, by reconstructing homes for themselves which may or may not have room for their twinship. At the same time, the Asian Canadian positions evoked in the twins' stories in both novels function as 'ghostly twins' of white Canadianness, struggling to take up their spaces in Canadian cultural and national imaginaries. Thus postcolonial textual hauntings of exclusionary white Canadian politics regarding 'not quite white' and non-white presences require equal attention.
- Subjects
CANADA; CANADIAN fiction; PERPETUAL Ending, The (Book); HOW the Blessed Live (Book); INTERNAL migration; TWINS in literature; INTERSECTIONALITY; DEN Hartog, Kristen; SMITH, Susannah; CANADIAN literature; LITERARY criticism
- Publication
Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien, 2018, Vol 38, Issue 2, p65
- ISSN
0944-7008
- Publication type
Literary Criticism