Laura Moss

My dissertation offers an interdisciplinary analysis of settler-colonial rhetorics of health and illness in English-speaking Canada and the United States, demonstrating how “otherness” and “abnormality” are often amplified or misrepresented in relation to a presumed norm of able-bodied white health. By interrogating specific instances of systemic racism and biases in medical practice and pedagogy from the early twentieth century to present, I illuminate inequalities in North American society that remain significant obstacles to healthcare. Diagnosing these disparities allows me to identify and challenge rhetorics of health and citizenship, while rendering clearer the health privileges associated with whiteness. What bodies are read as normal? How do medical norms create barriers to equitable healthcare? And how can we decouple these medical norms from institutionalized whiteness? My research is both problem- and place-based: I focus on Canada and the US due to their geographical proximity, their settler-colonial legacies, and the white supremacy that has characterized both nations’ public policies. While politics, demographics, and healthcare models vary significantly between Canada and the US, I highlight some of the transnational strategies—involving eugenics, race science, physical education programs for national fitness, and print media propaganda—through which medical and governmental authorities have independently and collectively conflated white supremacist norms with health and citizenship. My dissertation chapters build upon historical, rhetorical, and literary analyses. I deploy multidisciplinary methodologies to explore “normality” and standardization from various vantage points, and I consider the ways in which these ideas move across different discursive contexts. The rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) analyzes the impact of language and persuasion in health communication, medical encounters, and scientific writing. Combining RHM with postcolonial theory allows me to examine power dynamics that impact medical encounters in settler-colonial states. I draw on literary analysis to show how fiction and non-fiction can offer insights into the lives of marginalized people and provide counternarratives that critique the ostensible objectivity of scientific and medical discourses. Historicizing the changing conceptions of health and normality helps me contextualize and problematize contemporary medical practices as I examine the stereotypes and rhetorical subtexts of Standardized Patient Programs (SPPs) in medical schools.

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“Subjects of History: Reading South Africa after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,”asks how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has operated as the infrastructurethrough which the South African nation, its subjects, and its literature have been imagined in the post-apartheid era. I argue that the TRC worked as a nation- and subject-making project that helped embed new forms of subjection and capital accumulation within the idea of the “new” South Africa. The Commission continues to shape the possibilities for engaging with South African literature, and as such it demands a sustained critical re-reading.Chapter 1 begins with an exploration of the contemporary manifestations of the TRC’slogics and limitations. Drawing on poetry and short fiction by young writers published by theindependent presses Chimurenga and Prufrock, I investigate how the 2015-2016 universitystudent protests revealed ongoing systems of racialized subject production that are in conflictwith the hegemonic “non-racial” discourses of the state. These contradictions inform my reading of the South African bildungsroman in Chapter 2. I argue that the genre and the Commission participate in the same project of subject-production; the bildungsroman offers a parallel infrastructure of development which, at times, may threaten to undermine the project of the TRC. Chapter 3 explores the TRC’s historiographic project, one that attempted to write a new national history that entered South Africa into the progressive time of capitalist modernity. I offer a reading of texts that refuse the state’s claim over temporality and recognize the radical other times that these texts create. My final chapter investigates the conditions under which “truth” could be articulated within the structures of the TRC. I ask how the demand for parrhesia was complicated by the aims of the Commission and the legacies of race that shape the post-apartheid subject. I conclude by reflecting on the South African state’s abandonment of the nation-building project and its impacts on reading contemporary South African literature in the future.

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“Red Tiles, White Mosaic” offers a literary and political history analyzing the settler-colonial processes by which the state-driven project of multiculturalism became Canada’s distinctive, even “indigenous” national feature by settling itself on Indigenous lands. I examine multiculturalism as a politics of colonial misrecognition whose strategies of managing diversity have excluded or reframed Indigenous political difference as “cultural” difference, obfuscating Indigenous nationhood and the colonial dispossession at the formation of the multicultural nation-state. In Part 1, “Politics and Public Policy,” I historicize the “mosaic” and the development of Canadian multicultural nationalism in literary and political discourse since the nineteenth century, showing how official multiculturalism materialized as an extension of the colonial project of nation-building. Chapter 1 offers a novel and sustained historical critique of multiculturalism’s federal institutionalization since 1971 through the spheres of public policy, law, and political philosophy, mapping the strategies of Indigenous appropriation, exclusion, and containment in the architecture of liberal multiculturalism. Chapter 2 explores the ambivalent material effects of early ethnicity-oriented multicultural policy on publishing in Indigenous newsletters in the 1970s, examining the poetry in publications of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs as a case study. In Part 2, “Political Economy, Pedagogy, and Representation,” I study how the policy and ideology of multiculturalism and the state’s multicultural patronage of arts has transmuted within the Canadian literary field and inflected the reception and construction of Indigenous writing as “multicultural” literature, focusing primarily on the institution of the literary anthology. In Chapter 3, I historicize and theorize the anthology’s significance to multiculturalism’s growing visibility and institutionalization in Canadian literary studies in the 1970s and 1980s. In Chapters 4 and 5, I offer sustained close readings of the discrepant approaches to representing Indigenous literatures in two formative “multicultural” anthologies of the 1990s—Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions (1990) and Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature (1996)—examining how multicultural recognition obscures the expressive literary politics of Indigenous nationhood. My conclusion brings this literary and political history into the ostensibly “post-multicultural” present, arguing for the ongoing need to decolonize multicultural Canada and Canadian literary multiculturalism.

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In my dissertation, I argue for a relationship of influence between the authors of what I define as the Raj novel genre, or works by British writers who lived in India between 1858 and 1947 and produced novels set in that country, and authors of the so-called “Raj Revival” in 1970s and 1980s Great Britain. The latter encompasses bestselling, award-winning novels (M.M. Kaye’s The Far Pavilions, Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet; J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust) and films (David Lean’s A Passage to India) that nostalgically revisit the Raj experience. Both movements claim ideal British character is manifested by Anglo-Indians, British persons living and working in India, who develop a series of exemplary character traits through the rigors of daily service in the subcontinent. In the Raj novel genre, this model of Anglo-Indian character—and the concurrent denigration of Indian character—is used as a strategy by which to elevate the nascent Anglo-Indian community. In the Raj Revival, the Raj novel genre’s ideals are deployed in support of the conservative shift that occurred during Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s tenure (1979-1990). Where the Raj novel genre’s image of Anglo-Indian ideality is prescriptive, the Raj Revival renders it nostalgic and comforting, a means of asserting lost national prominence through familiar markers of British imperial identity. The specificity and scope of the Raj texts’ influence necessitates, I argue, ongoing attention to the constitutive power of the Raj model of ideal British character in analyses of British literature and rhetoric in the wake of empire.

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During the nineteenth century, women in Britain and Canada read about natural history, wrote about it, drew it, and collected it alongside their male counterparts. Produced during a time when it was widely accepted that, as Charles Darwin succinctly stated in The Descent of Man (1871), “Man is more powerful in mind and body than woman” (597), women’s contributions to the natural sciences were often overshadowed or ignored. However, women in the nineteenth century in Canada contributed greatly to the development of knowledge of meteorology, botany, zoology, and ornithology. Indeed, their work sometimes anticipated the modern ecological critique of a preoccupation with cultivating and controlling nature in the names of science and capitalism.This dissertation examines the intellectual, literary, and scientific experiences of nature for women in nineteenth-century Canada, namely the geographical region known as Upper Canada (1791-1841), Canada West (1841-1867), or Ontario (1867-present), and investigates the language and scientific systems that were available to women to describe those experiences. Instead of struggling amateurs restricted to domestic pursuits, nineteenth-century women writers were sometimes pioneering naturalists, popularizers of science, and innovators of a hybrid approach to the language of natural history. Naturalist observations and the negotiation of how to understand nature, seeing nature as hostile, neutral, or divine, were central elements in the creation of the nineteenth-century woman’s identity. The writers examined in this study— Anna Jameson, Anne Langton, Susanna Moodie, Mary Ann Shadd, Harriet Sheppard, Frances Stewart, and Catharine Parr Traill— read scientific and literary texts and used the information to shape their understandings of the natural world, the weather, flora, and fauna. As educated, reflective thinkers, they use their letters, journals, emigration pamphlets, and autobiographical narratives to respond to systems of Linnaean classification as well as to participate in discussions which anticipated the shift later in the century to ecological perspectives inspired by Darwinism. This study examines the ways in which women writers were actively exploring shifting conceptions of the natural world as it developed alongside settlement and seeks to offer new ways of approaching the work of Jameson, Langton, Moodie, Shadd, Sheppard, Stewart, and Traill. In chapters devoted to meteorology, botany, zoology, and ornithology, this thesis rethinks both nature writing and women’s writing in Canada.

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Paying Attention to Public Readers of Canadian Literature examines contemporary moments when Canadian literature has been canonized in the context of popular readingprograms. I investigate the canonical agency of public readers who participate in these programs: readers acting in a non-professional capacity who speak and write publiclyabout their reading experiences. I argue that contemporary popular canons are discursive spaces whose constitution depends upon public readers. My work resists the commoncritique that these reading programs and their canons produce a mass of readers who read the same work at the same time in the same way.To demonstrate that public readers are canon-makers, I offer a genre approach to contemporary canons that draws upon literary and new rhetorical genre theory. I contendin Chapter One that canons are discursive spaces comprised of public literary texts and public texts about literature, including those produced by readers. I study the intertextual dynamics of canons through Michael Warner’s theory of publics and Anne Freadman’sconcept of “uptake.” Canons arise from genre systems that are constituted to respond to exigencies readily recognized by many readers, motivating some to participate. I argue that public readers’ agency lies in the contingent ways they select and interpret a literarywork while taking up and instantiating a canonizing genre.Subsequent chapters examine the genre systems of three reading programs: One Book, One Vancouver, a public book club; Canada Reads, a celebrity “book brawl”; and The Complete Booker, an online reading challenge. Chapter Two explores how a reading public and canon are called forth by organizers and participants of the One Book, One Vancouver genre system. Chapter Three analyzes public readers’ collective literary selection within the canonizing genre of the Canada Reads brawl. Chapter Fourinvestigates how participants in The Complete Booker genre system instantiate the canon of the Man Booker Prize in ways that construct distinct subject positions of public readers who can evaluate the Canadian Booker winners in meaningful ways for their imagined public. My conclusion proposes that paying attention to public readers offers us new insights into reading as shared practice and Canadian literature.

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No abstract available.