Daniel Justice

A widely-discussed experience of encountering C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia is one of betrayal: a sense that his conservative framework contradicts a genuinely liberatory potential the books themselves offer. The prevalence of this contradictory experience suggests that the world of Lewis’ fantasies exists in a state of overflow: Narnia is uncontainable by the conscious system-building of its author or the systems defining its broader conditions of production. Dominant radical frameworks for reading fantasy, rooted in materialist traditions, have difficulty accounting for the significance of this overflow; they tend to locate the conservatism of mainstream fantasy in its religious thought-mode, which is understood as clouding the cognitive relationship between thought and action that radical action requires.This thesis articulates a complementary engagement with fantasy’s extra-rational impulses, re-considering the relationship between the and the political life that emerges from it: one in which the experience of reading fantasy is understood less as one of being directed by the political framework of a secondary world than of salvaging from the possibilities that encounters with magic open up. Employing a primarily phenomenological method, and drawing on anarchist critiques of Marxist conceptions of subjective transformation, it traces how a central phenomenon of “overflow” is produced, closed down, and followed in four fantasy texts, concluding that genuine enchantment “bears” the anarchic salvage work of the potentially-radical reader. The first chapter considers how C. S. Lewis’ The Last Battle cultivates a quality of attention that produces a surplus of meanings, and makes an apocalyptic attempt to channel that overflow. The second, using Philip Pullman’s anti-Lewisian The Amber Spyglass, introduces a theoretical framework for overflow as the experience of paradoxical indeterminate future commitment contained in an absolute presence. A third considers more closely power and narrative coercion, arguing that Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore, following the overflow it produces, invites the “work” of being “taken in,” or taking seriously one’s attachments. A final chapter uses N. K. Jemisin’s The Shadowed Sun to examine how enchantment’s overflow, illuminating otherwise-irreducible “units” of political transformation, the detachment that makes it possible to salvage what is necessary for transformation.

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This thesis examines Eden Robinson’s Trickster Trilogy series through theoretical trickster discourse as opposed to a comparison to the Canadian Gothic. Part of this focus will consider the complications with subsuming distinct Indigenous storytelling practices into Canadian literary categories. One consequence of relying on this form of critique is that it omits the specific and unique histories and ideologies of the Indigenous Nations from which these trickster stories originate. It becomes especially problematic when comparing modern Indigenous stories to the Canadian Gothic due to how Indigenous peoples frequently appear within the Gothic tradition as historical, ghostly, or only from the past.Robinson bases this story on Heiltsuk and Haisla trickster stories to put this story in conversation with the experiences of Indigenous youth in modern-day society. These methodologies are not historical; they necessitate ongoing modernization and comprehension. This ensures these stories function as an activation point for contemporary Indigenous listeners and readers to reflect and reconnect their locality with their distinct cultural values. This thesis will explore how the Trickster Trilogy reinforces Indigenous lifeways, dialogue, and resilience by centering on trickster story methodologies.

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This thesis examines the short story collections and auto/biographical, self-reflexive works of Lee Maracle (Stó:lō) and Beth Brant (Mohawk), arguing that the multi-generic nature of both writers’ work constitutes it as Indigenous feminist theory. Although Indigenous women’s writing continues to be marginalized in (white) academic contexts, their writing is not necessarily undertheorized in their own literary communities—indeed, this thesis understands Indigenous women’s writing as inherently theoretical because it analyzes the interdependent systems of racist and sexist oppression brought to bear on Indigenous women. Put differently, Indigenous women writing about their lived experiences constitutes theory. Both Maracle and Brant intervene in form and content as a refusal to be fixed by the heteropatriarchal, colonial gaze. On a formal level, Maracle draws on her conceptualization of “oratory,” a Stó:lō methodology for holistically engaging with written texts, to create hybrid, multi-generic written forms. Brant, on the other hand, writes across genres as a gesture of inclusivity to the multiple, marginalized communities she writes to and for; even more, her multi-generic writing mimics her intersectional Indigenous feminist praxis. On the level of content, both writers demonstrate that a firm division between their writing and their political concerns does not exist: Maracle’s writing on violence against Indigenous women, other-than-human beings, and the earth coincide with her political advocacy off the page, and the centrality of queer Indigenous and Two Spirit characters and desire in Brant’s writing speaks to its political necessity in larger heteronormative contexts. Reading these two authors alongside each other thus enables a fuller conceptualization of the theoretical power of Indigenous feminist writing as a decolonial methodology.

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This thesis explores ways in which Afrofuturist and Indigenous Futurist works complicate and trouble what constitutes Indigeneity in the Americas and specifically how that Indigeneity is posed in relation to Blackness and the Black diaspora. Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber and Zainab Amadahy’s The Moons of Palmares are two texts that represent Blackness and Indigeneity in outer space settings creatively constructed from earthly histories of settler colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. By demonstrating the complex ways in which these violent processes have created the material, social and political reality of the Americas, both texts represent peoples’ attempts to create belonging far from their ancestral lands and/or in tension with other peoples. I pose sovereignty and labour as two of the modalities through which these attempts at belonging are made, noting the limitations of both these discourses and how they have been mobilized. Overall, this thesis contributes to a discussion between and across the disciplines of Black and Indigenous studies in order to better understand global systems of oppression and imagine future space-times free from the constricting categorizations imposed under settler colonialism and slavery.

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