Last updated by kprzemek on 2020-02-27. Originally submitted by tomski on 2020-02-25.
WA Distinguished Professors' Lectures Series features internationally renowned scholars visiting the Faculty of English to share their research and professional expertise with the faculty and students. This time we have the honour to host Prof. Katja Sarkowsky (Augsburg University) who will deliver a lecture: "The Reason You Walk": Indigenous Life Writing and Differentiated Citizenship that will take place on February 28 (Friday), 2020, at 1:15 p.m. in Sala Górna, Collegium Heliodori.
"The Reason You Walk":
Indigenous Life Writing and Differentiated Citizenship
by
Prof. Dr. Katja Sarkowsky
Friday, February 28, 13:15
Sala Górna, Collegium Heliodori
In the study of Anglophone Canadian literatures, the past fifteen years have seen a surge of interest in the concept of citizenship. In this debate, Indigenous literatures – and Indigenous life writing in particular – serve as a particularly poignant reminder of what Iris Marion Young has called “differentiated citizenship” – citizenship that takes group-specific positionality into account. Indigenous peoples in the US and Canada are often structurally positioned as both citizens of the nation-sate and citizens of tribal nations, and many writers make this complex constellation an explicit concern. In this talk, I will briefly outline the complexities and complication of reading Indigenous life writing as negations of citizenship before I set out to look at two autobiographical texts by Indigenous politicians and activists as stories of citizenship, Wab Kinew’s The Reason You Walk (2015) and Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s The Right to Be Cold (2015). Neither exclusively personal not a mere political tool, it enables both authors, in very different ways, to scrutinize hegemonic understandings of membership and belonging, the tensions of competing allegiances in a multicultural and multinational nation state, and thus to critically negotiate notions of community and political agency between local, national, and even global concerns.
