Difficult Coalitions: Place-Based Solidarity in Canadian Literary Studies

Abstract

"Difficult Coalitions" examines the growing engagement with the concept of solidarity as it figures in Indigenous, Canadian, and diasporic texts from the early 1990s to the contemporary period. This thesis argues that since the 1990 standoff at Kanehsatake, literary representations and practices of solidarity are expressed in place-based, land-based, and water-based terms to address the material and ethical difficulties of coalition-building in settler colonial culture. "Difficult Coalitions" advances a literary and conceptual analysis of solidarity as a difficult relation in terms of understandings of place and temporality - conceptual and ontological categories that have been used to aid and resist settler colonial culture.

My critical consideration of solidarity underscores difficulty as a central condition for analyzing solidarity as a decolonial aesthetic, imaginary, and critical practice. I argue that the ethical difficulty of place-based solidarity is a response to temporal dislocations of colonial history and the pervasive structure of colonial expropriation. I engage difficulty as a critical approach by considering various conceptual difficulties surrounding solidarity: difficulties due to fraught histories of coexistence; material difficulties of colonial harm and extraction; interpretative and critical difficulties in terms of how texts imagine political solidarity; and (neo)liberal difficulties where solidarity is divested of its ethical and political meanings, thus becoming a transactive and ahistorical expression.

I begin my consideration of place-based solidarity with Lee Maracle's novel Sundogs (1992), a text that reflects a crisis of solidarity between Indigenous and settler communities during the 1990 standoff at Kanehsatake. My reading of Sundogs establishes how Maracle's engagement with solidarity reorients it toward land as a site of redress and accountability in contrast to an emergent politics of reconciliation that is linked to the Oka crisis. I then turn to water-based alliances in Rita Wong and Fred Wah's beholden: a poem as long as the river (2018) as an example of poetic coalition. I argue that the collaborative poetics of beholden bolsters "environmental community" and I consider poetry as a material response to environmental harm (Chen 275). The third and fourth chapters consider solidarity as a temporal relation and discuss colonial notions of temporality as another difficulty for solidarity. I examine Gord Hill's comics, The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book (2010) and The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book (2021) as an evolving project. I discuss solidarity as an anticolonial continuity against settler colonial frameworks of time to recontextualize the problem of ephemeral solidarity. I end my analysis with a cultural reading of the Idle No More movement along with Shane Rhodes's found poetry in X: Poems and Anti-Poems (2014), which comments on Idle No More and other Indigenous protest movements by rethinking the idea of duration as a marker of sustained solidarities through time.