Rethinking Community in Dionne Brand's 'What We All Long For', Ahdaf Soueif's 'The Map of Love', Michael Ondaatje's 'Anil's Ghost' and Joseph Boyden's 'Three Day Road' and 'Through Black Spruce'

摘要

This dissertation studies alternatives to communities in crisis proposed in Dionne Brand's What We All Long For, Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love, Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost and Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce. Using a number of keywords (longing, subversive (cultural) translation, healing, touch and self-determination), I examine each novel's contestation of a normative, oppressive configuration of community as well as the alternative community it proposes.;Juxtaposing three diasporic novels and two Indigenous (Canadian) texts, I establish a dialogue between different worldviews and the ways they read and respond to communal crises. Unlike the alternative conceptions of community presented in the diasporic novels under consideration, the alternative conception proposed in Boyden's novels stresses the importance of strong families to the building of an alternative postcolonial society. The diasporic texts, however, do not align their alternative communities with the traditional family as a unit of social organization and trope. These alternative communities evolve around affiliation rather than filiation. They build solidarities with the other beyond national, cultural, religious and ethnic lines of division.;The first chapter studies an alternative to Canadian multiculturalism in Brand's What We All Long For. The second chapter examines the alternative community and the mezzaterra from which it emerges in Soueif's The Map of Love. The third chapter explores the tightly-knit relation between healing, touch and the emergence of an alternative community in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost. The last chapter studies the contribution of legal autonomy and storytelling to discovering the vision that guides the Cree community portrayed in Boyden's novels in its attempt to build an alternative postcolonial community.;Keywords: Alternative communities, subversive (cultural) translation, affect, normative communities in crisis, multiculturalism and healing.