Contested Spaces, Counter-narratives, and Culture from Below in Canada and Québec

Book excerpt: 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.