This special issue, Remembering Barbara Godard, is edited by four of her former colleagues and students – 91��ɫ women's studies Professor Eva C. Karpinski, professors Ray Ellenwood and Ian Sowton of the Department of English, and 91��ɫ alumna Jennifer Henderson, now a professor at Carleton University.

A pillar of the 91��ɫ community, Prof. Godard broadly influenced the fields of Canadian and Quebec studies, translation studies, feminist poetics, semiotics and cultural studies. She was also a founding co-editor of the feminist literary periodical Tessera, a contributing editor of Open Letter and The Semiotic Review of Books, and the book review editor for Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.

She died on May 16, 2010, at Toronto Western Hospital (see YFile, May 19, 2010).

For more information, visit the website.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The next instalment of the series will be delivered by , a professor in 91��ɫ's Faculty of Environmental Studies and . The lecture will take place Monday, March 21, in 001 Vanier College from 6 to 7pm.

Sandilands is the author of numerous publications in environmental literature, history and cultural studies, including writings on national parts, queer and feminist ecologies, ecocriticism and environmental public cultures.

Sandilands' lecture, titled "A State of Nature? National Parks and Canadian National Identity", places a different kind of lens on Canada's national parks. Anyone who has ever visited one and wondered why there are so many rules, trails and signs in the "wilderness" should consider coming to this free public lecture.

Above: Cate Sandilands and the unnatural signage in the Bruce Peninsula National Park

"Canadian national parks are often referred to as 'national treasures', part of a public understanding of heritage that view them as a sort of repository of the essence of Canada. In this view, parks 'preserve' a nature that is the origin of the nation, a key part of our collective identity as Canadians," says Sandilands.

"In fact, national parks are deeply political creations. They 'organize' nature in specific ways, and have served a variety of economic and other agendas since the first Canadian national park – Rocky Mountains Park, now Banff – was established in 1887," she says.

"This presentation will consider the politics of national parks over the last 125 years, with a particular focus on the dynamics of 'national natures' as they are a part of different economic, political and ideological trajectories for Canadian identity," says Sandilands. "Thinking about parks solely as sites of preservation obscures a far more interesting history."

The Canada Like You’ve Never Heard it Before Lecture Series series showcases the breadth and depth of Canadian scholarship and research at 91��ɫ. The series was organized by Jon Sufrin, coordinator of the Canadian Studies Program. This academic year, several senior faculty and two Canada Research Chairs have delivered presentations.

Sponsors of the series include: the Dean's Office, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies; Stong College; Vanier College; Winters College; New College; Calumet College; Founders College; Students for Canadian Studies; and the Canadian Studies Program.

For upcoming lectures and speaker bios, visit the Canada Like You’ve Never Heard it Before Lecture Series website.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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To do this, Mukherjee-Reed, director of South Asian studies at 91��ɫ, became a core member of the Tagore Anniversary Celebrations Committee Toronto (TACCT), which will organize a series of events throughout the year to celebrate Tagore. The first is a tribute to Tagore in conjunction with the ’s (ROM) 3rd annual South Asia Heritage Day tomorrow. Mukherjee-Reed will deliver an introduction to Tagore at the ROM theatre.

“Our primary objective is to bring Tagore's work and his worldview into the mainstream, particularly in North America,” says Mukherjee-Reed. “His brilliant work and his profound philosophical worldviews based on equality, humanism and justice have much to offer to us today.”

Right: A photo of Rabindranath Tagore taken during his visit to Canada. Photo by John Vanderpant, Library and Archives Canada.

In addition to poetry, Tagore wrote novels, short stories, essays and plays, and composed music and became a painter in his late sixties. He was also a leading social philosopher and fought for equality and justice for all, striving to build ties beyond borders of race, class, caste, ethnicity and culture. “He had a profound influence on the making of modern India,” says Mukherjee-Reed. His ideas of de-colonization, local self-reliance and autonomy, and a cooperative way of life deeply inspired India’s anti-colonial struggle. His views have influenced Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela and Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi.

Mukherjee-Reed says as she watches the events in Egypt and Libya, she is reminded of Tagore's words. “No matter how mighty a power is and how much artillery it has at its disposal, if there is a collective will to challenge its illegitimacy, it eventually cannot endure." These thoughts permeate the vast repertoire of poetry and music that became household chants during India’s struggle for independence. "Tagore saw colonialism as one major impediment to equality, but also feared that nationalist, elitist visions of progress would be equally problematic,” she says.

Tagore had great faith in the power of youth and those who would challenge established norms. “One of our aims is to engage the young with Tagore’s ideas,” says Mukherjee-Reed. “Unleashing the creativity inherent in people, particularly the young, was something Tagore strongly advocated.”

Left: Ananya Mukherjee-Reed

His strong belief in the power of education saw him establish two universities in India. “We have a lot to learn from Tagore’s ideas of education,” says Mukherjee-Reed. The first, he named Visva-Bharati, a Sanskrit name meaning "where the whole world forms its one single nest". It brought scholars, artists and students from every part of the world together to create a community, and even touched the lives of ordinary people.

“Tagore’s objective was to break with the traditional model of the university where the elite pursued knowledge for its own sake. It was no accident that Visva-Bharati was located in a village and not in a city, not amidst the urban, British-schooled affluent classes,” says Mukherjee-Reed.

“Very close to Visva-Bharati, Tagore established the Institute of Rural Reconstruction, yet another university designed specifically to serve the rural economy. The predicament of rural India was at the heart of Tagore’s work. His views on this remain very salient in today’s India where the benefits of ‘development’ still elude millions of its citizens.”

For more information or to hear Mukherjee-Reed’s discussion about Tagore on CBC Radio’s Fresh Air and CHRY Radio, visit the website.

For more information about the performances, live music, children’s activities and poetry readings during South Asia Heritage Day tomorrow at the ROM, visit the ’s website.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The launch of Berliner Chic will take place Wednesday, Feb. 2, from 4 to 6pm in the Senior Common Room, 010 Vanier College, Keele campus. Everyone is welcome to attend. Light refreshments will be served.

Ingram, who is affiliated with the (CCGES) and the Research Group on Translation & Transcultural Contact, co-authored the book with alumna (MA ’06), who also earned a Canadian Centre for German & European Studies graduate diploma at 91��ɫ.

Since becoming the capital of reunited Germany, Berlin has had a dose of global money and international style added to its already impressive cultural veneer. It is now a fashion showplace that attracts the young and hip.

Left: Susan Ingram

The book looks at fashion as it developed through a series of historical eras and events, including the confusion surrounding the split and reunification of East and West Germany, an unsuccessful effort to launch a fashion museum and the debut of Berlin Fashion Week in 2007. It explores the line between fashion and photography, its presence on the silver screen, the flux of corporate luxe and the state of fashion today.

Prior to 91��ɫ, Ingram lectured in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong and has taught in Germany and Poland. She is the author of (University of Toronto Press, 2003). She also co-edited a series of volumes on the mutually constitutive cross-cultural constructions of Central Europe and North America.

The launch is presented by CCGES and the Office of the Master of Vanier College.

For more information, visit the website. Attendees are asked to register in advance at ccges@yorku.ca.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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If you are lucky enough, you might get a chance to see the dynamic circle dance that the (UNESCO) has called "a masterpiece of oral and intangible heritage" – the samba de roda. It is here in Salvador and its surrounding countryside that 91��ɫ dance Professor Danielle Robinson (right) engages with the music, dance and culture of samba de roda, the history of which is rooted in rural Brazil and its plantation past. Robinson is drawn to the improvisational character of samba de roda "as a way of moving, thinking, adapting and living."

In this practice, "the music and dance are held together by shared syncopated rhythms, a collective history of colonization and an overall ethos of joy," said Robinson. "People switch between dancing, playing, singing and clapping as the spirit moves them. No one can just watch, everyone eventually ends up in the circle, which is a powerful, inclusive community space."

��Dz����Բ��Dz�’s -funded research aims to emphasize samba de roda’s improvisational character and the consequent diversity of movements. Throughout her research, Robinson seeks to understand how participants imagine and embody their relationships with the "roots" of samba, how they distinguish themselves from other movement and dance practitioners and how increasing cultural tourism is changing the practice profoundly, thanks to the recognition from UNESCO.

All of the original materials, including music recordings, music scores, interview transcriptions and translations, video documentation and still images, will eventually be held in the Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections in order to promote further research. A parallel collection will also be placed at the Federal University of Bahia in the new Brazilian Popular Culture Research Centre (Centro de Estudos das Tradições Orais Brasileiras) that is currently being planned.

Robinson adds that the people she is working with in Salvador da Bahia want to collaborate and contribute, not be treated as passive research subjects. For this reason, the culminating book, with its numerous forms of writing by lifelong sambadores, includes interviews, song lyrics and essays, as well as writings by local Brazilian researchers.

Although ��Dz����Բ��Dz�’s research aims to speak to ethnographers, especially those working in dance and music of the African diaspora, Robinson also hopes "to offer another model of decolonizing research to other scholars working cross-culturally."

Throughout her academic career, Robinson has focused on experiences of identity, industry and appropriation as lived by participants in popular African diasporic dance practices like samba de roda. In particular, she is interested in "community-based dancing and its ability to construct, navigate and contest social divides and stereotypes." Growing up in the southern United States just after segregation ended, she is especially invested in understanding race relations and their manifestations in expressive culture.

Before joining 91��ɫ’s Dance Department in 2005, Robinson taught at the Federal University of Bahia  in Salvador, Brazil, as well as at the University of California, Riverside and the University of Texas, Austin. Her articles have been published in Dance Theatre Journal, Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle and Dance Research. At 91��ɫ, she is cross-appointed to the 91��ɫ & Ryerson Joint Graduate Program in Communication & Culture. She is a Fellow of 91��ɫ’s Centre for Research on Latin America & the Caribbean, the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples and Winters College. Her varied research and teaching experiences have led to what she considers one of the high points of her career so far. In 2009, she received the Faculty of Fine Arts Dean’s Junior Teaching Award.

By Jacquelin Chatterpaul, Faculty of Fine Arts research officer aide

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The award is given annually by the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures (ACQL) in honour of the best work of Canadian literary criticism published in English. Wider Boundaries of Daring (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009) was chosen by a jury from among the 13 books submitted this year, for its outstanding contribution to scholarship on Canadian literature. This is the second time it was awarded to Godard, the first being in 1988. mentioned the award at the funeral service for Godard on Friday, May 21 (see YFile, May 19).

“The essay collection is a productive, revealing critique of the masculinism of Canadian Modernism. One of the great strengths of the book is its detailed archaeology of the lives of Modernist women writers in relation to their works; the biographical scholarship contributes substantially to an understanding of the writers in question,” writes the ACQL. “The essays, on a remarkably wide range of authors and texts, collectively draw attention to the ways in which women writers work against, resent, and countermand Canadian Modernism.”

Left: Barbara Godard

Wider Boundaries of Daring looks at the exemplary contribution to Canadian modernism of women poets, critics, cultural activists and experimental prose writers. The contributors argue that these writers are the real founders of Canadian modernism for their innovative esthetic and literary experiments and for their extensive cultural activism. They founded literary magazines and writers’ groups, wrote newspaper columns, and created a new forum for intellectual debate on public radio. At the same time, they led busy lives as wives and mothers, social workers and teachers, editors and critics, and competed successfully with their male contemporaries in the public arena in an era when women were not generally encouraged to hold professional positions or pursue public careers.

A professor in the Department of English in the former Faculty of Arts and in the graduate programs of social & political thought, women’s studies and French, Godard began teaching at 91��ɫ in 1971. She published widely on Canadian and Quebec cultures and on feminist and literary theory and translated the works of several Quebec writers, including Nicole Brossard, Yolande Villemarie and Louky Bersiani. In 2002, she received teaching awards from 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Graduate Studies and the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. Godard served as 91��ɫ’s first Avie Bennett Historica Chair in Canadian Literature, was a founding co-editor of the feminist journal Tessera and the author and editor of several books.

For more information on the Gabrielle Roy Prize, visit the Web site.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Here, 91��ɫ humanities Professor , English Professor and PhD student Elena Basile offer an appreciation of Prof. Godard and her tireless work:

It is with great sadness that the Department of English at 91��ɫ announces the death of Professor Emerita Barbara Godard, a professor of English, French, social & political thought and women’s studies. A pillar of the 91��ɫ community and one of Canada’s pre-eminent literary scholars, Prof. Godard broadly influenced the fields of Canadian and Quebec studies, translation studies, feminist poetics, semiotics and cultural studies.

Right: Prof. Barbara Godard

She was a generous supervisor and mentor who trained and influenced a contemporary generation of cultural workers, including academics, writers and artists. The scope of her mentorship was fully recognized in 2002 when she became the recipient of teaching awards from 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Graduate Studies and the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. Prof. Godard retired from full-time teaching in 2008, but continued a full intellectual and pedagogical life until her sudden passing.

Prof. Godard was a prolific and influential intellectual. An extraordinarily sharp and encyclopedic thinker, Prof. Godard’s interests encompassed semiotics, translation, gender, textuality and the body, as well as archives, memorials, and the history and changing politics of cultural production. With a keen eye for detail and a unique capacity for breadth of vision, she catalyzed interdisciplinary connections among culture, language, gender, politics, poetics and meaning.

After completing her doctorate at the University of Bordeaux, Prof. Godard began teaching at 91��ɫ in 1971 as a visiting assistant professor and was hired into a tenure-track position in 1976. She published eight books, 80 book chapters and 115 articles and catalogue entries. She translated the major writers of Quebec feminism, including Nicole Brossard, Yolande Villemarie and Louky Bersianik. She also served as editor or on the editorial board of no less than 22 journals. She was a founding co-editor of the feminist literary periodical , a contributing editor of and , and the book review editor for Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. She also made long-standing contributions to , s and ECW among others.

Prof. Godard was committed to and passionate about her graduate students across the Departments of English, French Studies, Film and Visual Arts, the School of Women’s Studies and the Program in Social & Political Thought, supervising over 35 PhD candidates. She built bridges between people and modes of inquiry because of her genuine enthusiasm for ideas. She worked between and across languages which so often divide. Prof. Godard inspired her colleagues and students through her critical creativity and her unwavering commitment to interrogating and producing the conditions for full civic engagement in the University and in the public sphere. We will miss her greatly.

Funeral arrangements

A funeral service will take place at 11am on Friday, May 21, at St. James-the-Less, 635 Parliament St., Toronto. A reception for friends and family will follow at Prof. Godard’s house at 217 Major St.,Toronto.

Prof. Godard’s family has requested no flowers; in light of her earlier struggles, donations to the Canadian Cancer Society would be greatly appreciated.

As there may be other causes to which you might wish to make a memorial donation, the agency can inform Prof. Godard’s sister Elizabeth Cox at ecox27@sympatico.ca and her son Alexis at lex_o_matic@yahoo.com.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Professor Jody Berland takes a fresh look at what it means to be Canadian in her new book North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space, published by Duke University Press. Launched last month and already labelled by critics as a major contribution to the fields of communication, cultural studies and geography, Berland’s book is a group of essays about how technology creates and transforms our sense of space.

Right: Jody Berland

“Technology has become the focus of our hopes and dreams; my book explores how this has come about and what it means,” says Berland. “I try to make vivid the various connections between technology and the spaces we make, live in, tell stories about, defend or seek to transform. In doing so, I explore the meanings and effects of some of the most powerful themes of the 20th century, including nation, progress, convenience, entertainment and technology itself.”

Focusing on the importance of space to understanding culture, Berland investigates how media technologies have given shape to things we often take for granted, such as territory, landscape, the local, the border, nature, music and time. Her essays concentrate largely on Canada and the United States and centre on the connections and disconnections between how space is traversed, how it is narrated and how it is used.

This theme is traced throughout the essays on topics ranging from free trade and the discourse of entertainment, to the history of player pianos in the context of a growing consumer society animated by the desire for convenience, to the emergence of satellite image technologies in relation to television forecasts and the exploration of space.

“We live in spaces that are shaped in part by technology – technological tools like railways, radio, musical instruments, optical devices – and by cultural technologies of social and institutional change, including nation building, storytelling, mapping, broadcasting, converging and instructing,” notes Berland. “At the same time, these technologies are constantly changing, which contributes to deeply felt tensions about who we are and where we belong.”

Berland chose the essay structure for her book since it allowed her to explore specific historical developments that illuminate her central questions: How has technological change affected the way we relate to musical instruments? In what ways has satellite photography changed the way we think about the planet? How has the television forecast altered the way we think about weather?

It is her hope that readers will pay close attention to particular political or narrative histories that have been made both real and imaginary through the emergence of technologies such as the radio and the Internet. Berland also hopes that they will understand the urgency of exploring these narratives and the ways in which they reinforce and contest one another in personal, cultural and political spheres.

Berland is program coordinator for the Canadian Studies Program in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. She was recently awarded the Association for Canadian Studies 2009 Award of Merit, which acknowledged her contributions to the development and dissemination of knowledge about Canada. Specifically, the award honoured three different activities: the role she’s played as editor of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (from 1998 to present); the publication of a significant body of work exploring Canadian history, themes and scholars; and lastly, the cultivation of a new generation of scholars through graduate teaching.

Though the nomination for the Award of Merit was made before her book came out, some of the publications that inspired her win can be found in the new book.

For more information on North of Empire or Berland’s research, e-mail her at jberland@yorku.ca. Copies of her book can be purchased through the .

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