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Introduction

Vol. 49 No. 2 (2024): Special Issue: (Re)Reading Race and Colonialism in the Québécois Canon / (Re)lire la race et le colonialisme dans le canon Québécois

Critical Territories: Race, Colonialism, and the Québécois Imaginary/ Territoires critiques : race, colonialisme et imaginaire québécois

Submitted
February 24, 2026
Published
2026-03-06

Abstract

While literature and art are heterogeneous, and we can and should read and feel influenced by art across cultures, it is equally true that our readings are relative to our knowledge of those cultures, and our personal proximity to them. My argument is not to keep  lineages rigid, but rather to appraise them honestly where they exist. It is to say they should not be overtaken or disappeared by forms  that a dominant society masks as universal. . . . [T]his model offers a permission to step back, to learn, to hold back on an adjudicative impulse in favour of making space for that which is not well understood. Evaluation might give way to an education in form, an expansion in genres, and may eventually do away with camps in favour of a constellation of positions in relationship.
— Wayde Compton (48-49)

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