ISBN Contested Spaces, Counter-narratives, and Culture from Below in Canada and Québec book English 360 pages

Contested Spaces, Counter-narratives, and Culture from Below in Canada and Québec explores strategies for reading space and conflict in Canadian and Québécois literature and cultural performances, positing questions such as: how do these texts and performances produce and contest spatial practices? What are the roles of the nation, city, community, and individual subject in reproducing space, particularly in times of global hegemony and neocolonialism? And in what ways do marginalized individuals and communities represent, contest, or appropriate spaces through counter-narratives and expressions of culture from below?Focusing on discord rather than harmony and consensus, this collection disturbs the idealized space of Canadian multicultural pluralism to carry literary analysis and cultural studies into spaces often undetected and unforeseen – including flophouses and "slums," shantytowns and urban alleyways, underground spaces and peep shows, and inner-city urban parks as they are experienced by minorities and other marginalized groups. These essays are the products of sustained, high-level collaboration across French and English academic communities in Canada to facilitate theoretical exchange on the topic of space and contestation, uncover geographies of exclusion, and generate new spaces of hope in the spirit of pioneering works by Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Doreen Massey, David Harvey, and other prominent theorists of space.

Roxanne Rimstead is a professor in the Département Lettres et communications, Université de Sherbrooke.Domenico A. Beneventi is an associate professor in the Département Lettres et communications, Université de Sherbrooke.

"Contested Spaces showcases editors and authors at the top of their game, with a clear sense of the field of Canadian literary studies and the capacity to interest some of its most interesting practitioners."Will Straw, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University"Contested Spaces, Counter-narratives, and Culture from Below in Canada and Québec is an important and compelling edited collection that will add complexity and nuance to Canadian and Québécois literary and cultural studies. Deploying new materialist approaches to analyse present and historical contested spaces/spaces of contestation, including those that are embodied, the essays attend to processes of spatialization that are rarely noticed."Jody Mason, Department of English Language and Literature, Carleton University