Daniel Justice

Professor

Relevant Thesis-Based Degree Programs

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Graduate Student Supervision

Doctoral Student Supervision

Dissertations completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest dissertations.

Stories of lands, bodies and dreams: a Tmixwcentric literary theory (2024)

The full abstract for this thesis is available in the body of the thesis, and will be available when the embargo expires.

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Who hears the listeners : decolonizing the process of dialogue in First Peoples’ literatures (2023)

The full abstract for this thesis is available in the body of the thesis, and will be available when the embargo expires.

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Everyday kin (in the) making: spatial and relational obligations in treaty eight territory (2019)

This project considers the possibility of a relational turn in Indigenous studies, and Indigenous literary studies specifically, toward the study and practice of everyday kinship. This turn does not propose the complete abdication of larger, macro-political projects, but rather suggests we need to be attentive to both macro- and micropolitical projects in tandem, while simultaneously outlining how the micropolitical as a site of analysis in Indigenous communities often receives little sustained interest or engagement from wider academic circles (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous), in comparison to large-scale Indigenous cultural and political issues. Scholars studying forms of Indigenous cultural production (or settler cultural production about/addressing Indigenous peoples) and Indigenous communities have yet to substantively consider how a focus on everyday life and kinship can help outline, navigate, and denaturalize the colonial dimensions and parameters of what is currently called Canada. This dissertation takes Treaty Eight as its immediate intellectual, spatial, and ecological context, and examines three sites of analysis: a small-town archive that makes settler colonial claims to space and in the process erases Indigenous histories; a hazardous waste treatment centre that eradicates Indigenous ways of knowing and being in the world, and in the process damages relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, as well as with other-than-human beings; and the creative and critical writing of Treaty Eight poet Billy-Ray Belcourt, whose poetry outlines the harmful effects of imposed masculinities and the gender binary, and gestures to modes of existing otherwise. Each of these sites contain intimate relationships and complex lived realities that are rarely given sustained attention in Indigenous studies, even as they are arguably the fabric of everyday lives within the shared geography of Treaty Eight territory. Thus, I maintain that a rigorous engagement with the shared geographies we inhabit, as well as the enmeshed and entangled ways we relate to one another other, is not only necessary, but vital if we are going to address not only the intimate, everyday symptoms of colonial injustice, but also the root causes of harm reproduced and maintained by settler colonialism.

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Writing in Brotherhood: Reconstituting Indigenous Citizenship, Nationhood, and Relationship at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (2016)

The current field of Indigenous literary studies remains overwhelmingly focused on individual authors and their use of traditionally Eurowestern literary genres. While analyzing these individuals’ novels, poetry, essays, and other traditionally single-author literary genres, however, scholars often overlook these same individuals’ participation in the collectivist national and co-national writings of their contemporaneous Indigenous nations and networks. This dissertation argues for the need to (re)center collectivist texts within Indigenous literary studies and highlights the fluid Indigenous literary networks of North America and the Pacific at the turn of the twentieth century. By juxtaposing the constitutions, petitions, and newspapers of the Hui Aloha ‘Āina (Hawaiian Patriotic League), the Alaska Native Brotherhood/Sisterhood, and the National Council of American Indians, I trace the hemispheric and trans-Pacific history of collectivist literary genres in order to provide an innovative Indigenous literary history of genre. I argue that when Indigenous peoples write as a collective body, their writings participate within longstanding Indigenous literary traditions—from the Hodinöhsö:ni’ Great Law (ca. 1090–1500) to the Constitution of the White Earth Nation (2009)—that continue to be overlooked in favor of “orature” and contemporary fiction composed by individual authors. By (re)centering collectivism within the study of Indigenous literatures, this dissertation also introduces the theoretical framework of co-nationalism, the process and potential of Indigenous nations working together while maintaining local distinctions and commitments, in order to attest to the ongoing survival of Indigenous literary communities and coalitions, maintain Indigenous lands as central to Indigenous literatures, and disrupt the definitions of literature that continue to marginalize literary expressions of Indigenous solidarity.

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Master's Student Supervision

Theses completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest theses.

Stealing Narnia from C. S. Lewis : using a phenomenology of overflow towards a practice of fantasy reading as salvage (2023)

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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"The old ones that sing to you in your dreams": an examination of trickster methodology in Eden Robinson's trickster trilogy (2022)

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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"I became a woman through my words": The Indigenous Feminist Writing of Lee Maracle and Beth Brant (2017)

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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The Outer Space Future of Blackness and Indigeneity in Midnight Robber and The Moons of Palmares (2015)

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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Current Students & Alumni

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