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This digital document is an article from Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal, published by Canadian Ethnic Studies Association on June 22, 1999. The length of the article is 977 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Mothertalk: Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka. (Book Reviews/Recensions). (book review)
Author: Nicole Markotic
Publication: Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal (Refereed)
Date: June 22, 1999
Publisher: Canadian Ethnic Studies Association
Volume: 31Issue: 2Page: 159(2)

Article Type: Book Review

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This study investigates the connections between nineteenth-century pioneer women in Canada and their putative twentieth-century biographers in Anglo-Canadian women's fiction by Carol Shields (Small Ceremonies, 1976), Daphne Marlatt (Ana Historic, 1988), and Susan Swan (The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, 1983). These three texts reveal definite problems in the formation of Canadian female identities, but they also revalorise the traditionally underprivileged halves of binary structures such as: female/male, other/self, body/intellect, subjectivity/objectivity, and Canada/imperial centres. ... Read more

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Engaging current debates within the studies of life writing and of the nation-state, Writing the Roaming Subject focuses on a group of Canadian writers who pose questions about cultural difference and national identity while writing about their own lives and their own experiences of displacement. Joanne Saul uses the term ‘biotext’ to describe the unique form of writing that challenges critical practices regarding both life writing and immigrant and ethnic minority writing by blurring the borders of biography, autobiography, history, fiction and theory, as well as poetry, prose, and visual representation.

In her readings of selected contemporary Canadian biotexts – including Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, Daphne Marlatt’s Ghost Works, Roy Kiyooka’s Mothertalk, and Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill – Saul suggests that by crossing generic boundaries, these works illuminate the complex relationships between language, place, and self as they are manifested in textual form.Writing the Roaming Subject explores issues of identity formation, representation, and resistance in Canada and suggests that these are particularly crucial questions during a period of Canadian literary history when so many writers are insisting on new, more diverse cultural performances that resist the pull of the national imaginary.