Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English & Film Studies

Faculty/School

Faculty of Arts

First Advisor

Dr. Mariam Pirbhai

Advisor Role

Supervisor

Second Advisor

Dr. Eleanor Ty

Advisor Role

First reader

Third Advisor

Dr. Tanis MacDonald

Advisor Role

Second Reader

Abstract

This dissertation, “(Un)Happy Frictions: Mobilising (Un)Happiness Through Subaltern Bodies in South Asian Canadian Women’s Literature,” posits that the unifying narrative of Canadian multiculturalism (Kymlicka; Taylor) is a narrative of happiness (Ahmed). This study interrogates this happy narrative through the affect (Georgis) of the subaltern (Spivak) in South Asian Canadian women’s literature. Making an affective intervention in South Asian Canadian writing, this interdisciplinary project identifies four subaltern bodies—silenced/erased, trans, disabled, Muslim—in the poetry and fiction of South Asian Canadian women. Contextualizing the relationship between the Canadian nation state and its subaltern figures, each chapter explores the debates within its particular theoretical context and analyzes the ways in which the affects of their literary representations challenge and reconfigure Canada’s multicultural narrative of happiness.

Chapter 1 examines the representations of the silenced/erased bodies as subaltern ghosts in two works of poetry, Soraya Peerbaye’s Tell: poems for a girlhood (2015) and Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s children of air india (2013), theorizing the subaltern ghost through haunting (Brogan; Gordon; Derrida). Interrogating two violent events of Reena Virk’s murder in 1997 and 1985 Air India 182 bombing, respectively, these poets create alternate subaltern counter-narratives to challenge official public memories. Chapter 2 examines the politics of trans representations in Shani Mootoo’s Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab (2014) and Vivek Shraya’s She of the Mountains (2014), locating its analyses within transphobia in Canada, and the friction between Queer Studies and Trans Studies (Keegan). These writers reveal that the possibility for trans futurity (Rajat & Waller) lies in a trans character’s radical self-acceptance and self-love. Chapter 3 examines the representations of the disabled body as “absent citizens” (Prince) in Priscila Uppal’s To Whom It May Concern (2008) and Saleema Nawaz’s Bone and Bread (2013) through Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in Canada, the friction between Disability Studies and Postcolonial Theory, and the frameworks of DisCrit (Annamma, Connor, & Ferri) and “crip-of-color critique” (Kim). While Nawaz’s depiction is one without hope, Uppal privileges the power of imagination as a “queer form of resistance” (Georgis). Contextualizing within the War on Terror rhetoric and rising Islamophobia in Canada, Chapter 4 examines Muslim female representations in Farzana Doctor’s Stealing Nasreen (2007) and Six Meters of Pavement (2011), and Yasmin Ladha’s Blue Sunflower Startle (2010). With a focus on queerness (Wahab; Halberstam), these writers represent their Muslim women as creators of their subjectivities, even when positioned within a doubly displaced exilic space (Said; Gopinath; Salgado; Sur).

As long as there is friction between the happy narrative of Canadian multiculturalism and the Canadian state’s “problematic [racialized] Others” (Day), the themes of home and belonging will remain underlying concerns in the works of South Asian Canadian writers. The only way to “queer[ly]… resist” (Georgis) the unifying happy narrative of Canadian multiculturalism is through the imaginations of these writers to use their stories as “emotional resources for political imagination and… political renewal” (Georgis) to reconfigure home.

Convocation Year

2025

Convocation Season

Fall

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