Unsettled Remains

"Unsettled Remains problematises notions of Canadian national unity and memory, with the clear intention of challenging dominant hegemonic narratives. In this context, the genre of the postcolonial gothic invokes a dynamic space in which previously repressed or unheard narratives can find voice and expression. Ultimately, the collection considers the ways in which Canada's present is unsettled by its history, and documents Canadians' ambivalent reaction to their uncanny relationship with an estranged and haunted past." - Sharon Selby, University of Edinburgh, British Journal of Canadian Studies, Volume 23 (Number 2), 2010
``Cynthia Sugars' and Gerry Turcotte's Unsettled Remains is an essential read for the student of Canadian postcolonial literature.... Through their engagement with Canada's 'haunted' colonial history, [the contributors] draw attention to the interplay between the uncanny and the unsettling in Canada's settle-invader history. Consequently, the 'settler-invader' perspective is incorporated into a dialogue that includes the voices of indigenous and immigrant communities as well. By opening their readings of literary texts to such a dialogue, these critics challenge traditional representations and interpretations of the landscape and its peoples without denying Canada's turbulent colonial history. Traditional models of 'haunting, monstrosity, trauma, fear' (p. 98) are likewise scrutinised, resulting in a uniquely Canadian re-visioning of gothic convention.'' -- Sharon Selby, University of Edinburgh -- British Journal of Canadian Studies, 23.2, 201012
``The essays in Unsettled Remains focus on how subjective and national identities in Canadian literature have been formed through notions of interiority and unsettlement, and through the haunting necessarily inherent in a postcolonial context: through what Sugars and Turcotte name as Gothic 'experiences of spectrality and the uncanny'. Monsters, ghosts, tricksters, and other supernatural characters figure prominently in all of the volume's essays, therefore, as metaphors of the many repressed histories brought on by our colonial past, and as representations of the ability for 'monstrous' others to 'talk back' to dominant narratives.'' -- Heather Latimer -- Canadian Literature, 208, Spring 2011, 201107
``Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic is a strong anthology.... [I]ts essays...are inherently conversant in the uncanny fashion that is the focus and foundation of their origins. In this anthology Sugars and Turcotte bring together an admirable range of writers, whose various positions allow voice and space to many of the "uncanny reminders of [Canada's] problematic history." -- Erin Wunker, Dalhousie University -- The Dalhousie Review, Spring 2010, 201007
``[Each chapter] `seeks to find ways of knowing, articulating, and memorializing the horrors of the past and to account for their haunting trace in the present in a meaningful and ethical way' (Shelley Kulperger). This consistency gives the volume momentum as it proceeds, as its essays often draw on the same sources although not always to reach the same conclusions. Its admirable goals of disclosure, redress, and healing are sought not just in the novels studied--the novel is the favourite form--but through the perspicacity of critics who untwist the stories' twisted, gothic shapes and put them to therapeutic use, `doing a certain kind of cultural cathartic work, enabling Canadians to speak the crime that has no name' (Cynthia Sugars).... The value of the collection is in exploring [its] assumptions so rigorously, in showing that something truly is at stake in studying gothic forms. The essays are also admirable individually: all are closely argued, earnest, well-documented, and scholarly.'' -- Jon Kertzer, University of Calgary -- English Studies in Canada, 35 #4, 2009, 201003
``Rigorously selected and effectively argued, these essays convincingly demonstrate the eerie presence of a Gothic sensibility in Canadian literature refracted through a postcolonial lens, in many cases drawing attention to little-studied, extremely contemporary texts.... Unsettled Remains provides a broad survey of the postcolonial Gothic in contemporary Canadian literature; while certain themes and theoretical approaches are bound to recur, such as the image of the ghost, haunting, trauma, and Catholicism, with contributors invoking Freud's uncanny, Kristeva's abject, the postcolonial theories of Fanon, Bhabha, Said, and Anderson as well as the writings on trauma of Caruth and La Capra, there is also a great deal of variety in theoretical approaches adn certainly in the range of primary texts analyzed. For too many US readers perhaps, the Canadian itself stands in the position of the uncanny--that which is familiar but different; Unsettled Remains offers a challenging but engaging gateway not only into Canadian literature, but it also provides useful discussions of both Gothic and postcolonial theory. As Andrews asserts about Monkey Beach, '[a]pproaching Robinson's text through the Gothic is especially helpful for drawing readers beyond the Haisla community into an unfamiliar and mysterious world ripe with imaginative possibilities because it is a familiar set of conventions' (223), we might say that Unsettled Remains offers scholars of the fantastic a similar entry into the all-too-often unexplored territory of 'CanLit.''' -- Amy J. Ransom -- Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Vol. 23, No. 1, 2012, 201210
``It is a truism that collections of literary criticism are a mixed bag. The editors put out a call, and then whatever comes in comes in. Thus many such collections are at best inconsistent and at worst useless. I am very glad to say this is not the case with Unsettled Remains.'' -- Terry Goldie -- University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 80, number 2, Spring 2011, 201212