Foto: Matti&Keti, CC BY-SA 4.0 Wikmedia North_Pole,Arctic

Dichotomies, dualisms, binaries have received considerable attention in  scholarship over the past decades. Bruno Latour’s seminal work We Have  Never Been Modern (1993) explores the origins of the dichotomy between nature and society and shows that the divide was never completely successful, as “hybrids” have been proliferating despite the modern philosophical stance. To further question a dualism that is deeply embedded in the intellectual tradition of the sciences and humanities, Donna Haraway coined the term “natureculture” (2003), which recognizes the inseparability of nature and culture in ecological relationships that are both biophysically and socially formed. Building on the philosophical implications of Niels Bohr’s work in physics, Karen Barad (2007) offers a new epistemological framework that calls into question the dualisms of object/subject, knower/known, nature/culture, and word/world. Their agential realist theory posits that discrete entities do not precede but come to be through intra-actions in phenomena produced by apparatuses, which are “material-discursive”: they produce determinate meanings and material beings while simultaneously excluding the production of others. Since everything is entangled with everything else means, it is the act of observation that makes a “cut” between what is included and excluded from what is being considered. Queer theory has also challenged binaries by questioning gender and heteronormative model that dominates our society. For example, Monique Wittig’s work has focused on gender difference and exposes heterosexual thought as a political regime that essentializes the sexual difference between men and women. A recent feminist reading of Roland Barthes’s concept of “neutral” (2023) has reminded how it is a valuable way to escape or undo the paradigmatic binary oppositions that structure and produce meaning in Western thought and discourse (Braunschweig 2021). 

This multidisciplinary conference examines how the  deconstruction of the dualisms that have dominated in Western thought since the 17th century takes shape in Canadian studies. Building on the Canadian landscape and scholarship on its nordicity (Chartier 2018), we hypothesize a move from polarity to circumpolarity in Canadian studies conducted in Europe. Canada has been built on numerous structural dichotomies: native/settler, French/English, North/South, white/colored, etc. Yet, as a country, it claims to overcome these dichotomies, notably through its multicultural policy. Canadian studies, like  other area studies, have been established by distinguishing between Canada and the rest of the world, in a comparative and contrastive approach. Yet, thanks to the development of cultural studies in the past decades, they present a more nuanced perspective on this distinction. How do they go beyond binaries in their examination of Canada? Could the idea of the circumpolar fruitfully describe a movement that goes beyond the polarities of the modern thought in Canada? How do these polarities  express themselves in Canada? How does the notion of circumpolarity contribute to deconstructing of an essentialist vision of the world? How does moving beyond dualisms present itself in the Canadian cultural production? How does it infuse discourses in/about Canada? How does the alternation between entanglement and distinction present itself in the Canadian context?

This multidisciplinary conference welcomes proposals from all fields of research, in the hope of bringing together complementary perspectives on the (circum) polarities in Canadian studies.

Works cited

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Barthes, Roland. 2023. Le Neutre: Cours au Collège de France (1978). Paris: Seuil.

Braunschweig, Lila. 2021. Neutriser: Émancipation(s) par le neutre. Paris: Les liens qui libèrent.

Chartier, Daniel. 2018. Qu’est-ce que l’imaginaire du Nord? Principes éthiques. Montréal: PUQ.

Haraway, Donna J. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Latour, Bruno. 1991. Nous n'avons jamais été modernes: Essai d'anthropologie symétrique. Paris: La Découverte.

Wittig, Monique. 2008. La pensée straight. Paris: Amsterdam [1992].