Tag Archives: TRC
“the road to reconciliation is paved with g—dintentions”: Lack as Resistance in Joshua Whitehead’s Full-Metal Indigiqueer
Joshua Whitehead’s inaugural book of poetry, Full-Metal Indigiqueer is a series of poems told through Zoa, a trickster figure rendered through the lens of technology. Whitehead combines the figures of the singularity, virus, and hacker into a narrator that inhabits and deconstructs the Western literary cannon and popular media culture by infiltrating and re-writing the […]
Indigenous Digital Poetics: Joshua Whitehead’s Full-Metal Indigiqueer
Joshua Whitehead’s inaugural book of poetry, Full-Metal Indigiqueer is a series of poems told through Zoa, a trickster figure rendered through the lens of technology. Whitehead combines the figures of the singularity, virus, and hacker into a narrator that inhabits and deconstructs the Western literary cannon and popular media culture by infiltrating and re-writing the […]
The Theatre of Regret: Establishing the Politics of Reconciliation after World War II
An immense wave of anti-colonial and anti-imperial activity, thought, and revision has overtaken the massive edifice of Western empire, challenging it, to use Gramsci’s vivid metaphor, in a mutual siege. For the first time Westerners have been required to confront themselves not simply as the Raj but as representatives of a culture and even a […]
The Deconstructed Sorry: Post-Structural Ethics of Apology in the Wake of World War II
At this present moment it must be recognized that “apology” has been reformulated in Canada’s political discourse as a means to control narrative and protect the interests of the status quo. In this post, I would like to offer a brief critique of what might be called the “deconstructive” or “postmodern” approach to apology, which […]
Reconciliation Does Not Equal Transitional Justice (and other truths)
In tracing the legacy of reconciliation across Nuremberg, Yugoslavia, South Africa, Australia and Canada, there is at least one major difference in the latter two examples that demands explicit attention. Specifically, Nuremberg principles have traditionally been used to enforce measures of transitional justice for states beset by violence–the primary examples being El Salvador, Argentina, Chile […]
The Unseemly Underbelly of Reconciliation
For more reading on reconciliation and residential schools see 20 Books that Will Change How You Think About Canada. According to Roy L. Brooks, “we have clearly entered what can be called the ‘Age of Apology’” (3). Now more than ever, governments are embracing models of justice that forgo retribution and work towards facilitating peaceful […]
Apology’s Worth It: How Canada Profits from Apology
Cathy Busby. We Are Sorry, detail; fabric panel, 610 cm x 1402 cm; Sorry (Stephen Harper), Sorry (Kevin Rudd), Sorry series inkjet prints, each 112 x 163 cm, Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2010 —— We live in an “Age of Apology“. In a way that was unimaginable during the Cold War, “sorry” is now a primary element […]
Novel Alliances 