49th Parallel Psalm


Book Description

Wayde Compton's first poetry book: a stunning set of poems documenting the migration of Blacks to Canada, specifically when the first Black settlers-facing an increasingly hostile racist government-left San Francisco and travelled north to British Columbia beginning in 1858. With recurring themes of the unknowable, the crossroads, the trickster, and entropy, 49th Parallel Psalm jumbles history, time, and the Canadian black literary canon. Shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize




Performance Bond


Book Description

A new collection of hip-hop-inspired poetry that fuses history and contemporary black politics; includes a CD of a turntable performance.




The Outer Harbour


Book Description

Wayde Compton's debut story collection is imbued with the color of speculative fiction; one strand of stories follows the emergence of a volcanic island, which alternatively becomes the site of a radical Native peoples' occupation, a real-estate development, and finally a detention center for illegal immigrants. Moving from 2001 through to 2025, The Outer Harbour is at once a history book and a cautionary tale of the future, condensing and confounding our preconceived ideas around race, migration, gentrification, and home. Wayde Compton is the author of three poetry collections. He is director of the Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser University. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.




The Parallel Psalms


Book Description




After Canaan


Book Description

The ever-more-complex culture of race in the 21st century, according to essayist and poet Wayde Compton.




The Blue Road


Book Description

In this stunning graphic novel, Lacuna is a girl without a family, a past, or a proper home. She lives alone in a swamp made of ink, but with the help of Polaris, a will-o’-the-wisp, she embarks for the fabled Northern Kingdom, where she might find people like her. The only way to get there, though, is to travel the strange and dangerous Blue Road that stretches to the horizon like a mark upon a page. Along the way, Lacuna must overcome trials such as the twisted briars of the Thicket of Tickets and the intractable guard at the Rainbow Border. At the end of her treacherous journey, she reaches a city where memory and vision can be turned against you, in a world of dazzling beauty, divisive magic, and unlikely deliverance. Finally, Lacuna learns that leaving, arriving, returning -- they’re all just different words for the same thing: starting all over again. The Blue Road -- the first graphic novel by acclaimed poet and prose writer Wayde Compton and illustrator April dela Noche Milne -- explores the world from a migrant’s perspective with dreamlike wonder. Ages 14 and up. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A book with many images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.




Across Currents: Connections Between Atlantic and (Trans)Pacific Studies


Book Description

This book explores connections between Atlantic studies and (trans)Pacific studies, including the potential discursive, topical, and historical overlaps of the two fields. It carves out mutual concerns and theoretical affinities, but also divergent approaches and differences. While acknowledging the fundamental differences that characterize the individual fields, the essays in this volume examine how both Atlantic and (trans)Pacific studies are part of global currents of political, activist, artistic, economic, and academic exchange. This volume brings together voices from Europe, North America, and the Pacific with disciplinary backgrounds in history, culture, and literature. Directed at scholars with a background in (trans)Pacific and/or Atlantic studies, this collection is an attempt to stimulate exchange between the two fields, to intensify their impact within the current transnational focus of literary and cultural studies, to encourage the questioning of well-mapped paths of inquiry, and to outline new theoretical approaches to both fields. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Atlantic Studies.




Crosstalk


Book Description

What are the fictions that shape Canadian engagements with the global? What frictions emerge from these encounters? In negotiating aesthetic and political approaches to Canadian cultural production within contexts of global circulation, this collection argues for the value of attending to narratorial, lyric, and theatrical conventions in dialogue with questions of epistemological and social justice. Using the twinned framing devices of crosstalk and cross-sighting, the contributing authors attend to how the interplay of the verbal and the visual maps public spheres of creative engagement today. Individual chapters present a range of methodological approaches to understanding national culture and creative labour in global contexts. Through their collective enactment of methodological crosstalk, they demonstrate the productivity of scholarly debate across differences of outlook, culture, and training. In highlighting convergences and disagreements, the book sharpens our understanding of how literary and critical conventions and theories operate within and across cultures.




Discrepant Parallels


Book Description

The 49th parallel has long held a symbolic importance to Canadian cultural nationalists as a strong, though permeable, border. But in contemporary Canadian culture, the border has multiple meanings, and imbalances of cultural power occur both across the Canada-US border as well as within Canada. Discrepant Parallels examines divergent relationships to, and investments in, the Canada-US border in a variety of media, such as travel writing, fiction, poetry, drama, and television. Tracing cultural production in Canada since the 1980s through the periods of FTA and NAFTA negotiations, and into the current, post-9/11 context, Gillian Roberts grapples with the border's changing relevance to Canadian nationalist, Indigenous, African Canadian, and Latin American perspectives. Drawing on Kant and Derrida, she theorizes the 49th parallel to account for the imbalance of cultural, political, and economic power between the two countries, as well as the current challenges to dominant definitions of Canadianness. Focusing on a border that is often overshadowed by the contentious US-Mexico divide, Discrepant Parallels analyzes the desire to establish Canadian-American sameness and difference from a multitude of perspectives, as well as its implications for how Canada is represented within and outside its national borders.




Improvisation and Social Aesthetics


Book Description

Addressing a wide range of improvised art and music forms—from jazz and cinema to dance and literature—this volume's contributors locate improvisation as a key site of mediation between the social and the aesthetic. As a catalyst for social experiment and political practice, improvisation aids in the creation, contestation, and codification of social realities and identities. Among other topics, the contributors discuss the social aesthetics of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the Feminist Improvising Group, and contemporary Malian music, as well as the virtual sociality of interactive computer music, the significance of "uncreative" improvisation, responses to French New Wave cinema, and the work of figures ranging from bell hooks and Billy Strayhorn to Kenneth Goldsmith. Across its diverse chapters, Improvisation and Social Aesthetics argues that ensemble improvisation is not inherently egalitarian or emancipatory, but offers a potential site for the cultivation of new forms of social relations. It sets out a new conceptualization of the aesthetic as immanently social and political, proposing a new paradigm of improvisation studies that will have reverberations throughout the humanities. Contributors. Lisa Barg, Georgina Born, David Brackett, Nicholas Cook, Marion Froger, Susan Kozel, Eric Lewis, George E. Lewis, Ingrid Monson, Tracey Nicholls, Winfried Siemerling, Will Straw, Zoë Svendsen, Darren Wershler