The Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies Conference

ACLALS public events (all times Eastern)

Link: https://ryerson.zoom.us/j/94129881816

Co-sponsored by Lakehead University, St. Jerome’s University, St. Mary’s University
University of British Columbia, University of New Brunswick, University of Toronto, and Toronto Metropolitan University

Wed. July 13, 2022
9:00am-10:30am keynote by Susie O’Brien (McMaster U), “‘Somehow, a City’”: Unsettling Urban Resilience Narratives” (TRS 1-067)
This paper explores the theme of the ruptured commons as it plays out in the imagination of Toronto as a resilient city. After considering the ways in which Toronto’s First Resilience Strategy (developed in 2019 as part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Project), mobilizes myths of nature, community and diversity towards a vision of settler colonial urban futurity, I will consider the alternate visions of urban futurity presented in David Chariandy’s 2017 novel Brother and Leanna Betasamosake Simpson’s short story, “Big Water.” These stories, I suggest, challenge dominant definitions of both social-ecological and psycho-social resilience, offering in their place modes of collective thriving based on multispecies relationality, decolonial resistance and creative imagination.