Welcome to this seminar entitled "Performing the Urban: Québec City as the Centre of a Canadian Waste Land"! The seminar is both an English Research seminar and a Literature Studies seminar.
Abstract
Based on personal experience complemented by available media reports, Canadian writer Janice Kulyk Keefer has presented her poetic version of the dramatic events during the Third Summit of the Americas in Québec, on April 20-22, 2001. The negotiations concerned the creation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas, but are better known for the controversial security arrangements and massive demonstrations. Keefer’s “The Waste Zone”, which has elsewhere been analysed as a paraphrase or parody of T.S.Eliot’s modernist poem The Waste Land, will here be explored for aspects of “performing the urban”, the theme of the conference. In this particular situation it is about “the cityscape of Québec, poisoned by the clouds of chemicals used to separate witnesses and protestors from the 34 Heads of State, their aids, and members of the corporate elite participating in the summit,” as Keefer explains in her notes to the poem (Keefer 2006, 154). The city of Québec is seen as an urban centre in its materiality of streets and buildings, with its history and the comparison to other cities exposed to political and economic unrest; not least is it charcterised by the crowds filling the streets and the language issue. All this is discussed in its satirical postcolonial relation to Eliot’s poem and against the background of some ideas concerning the urban in contrast to the countryside.
Keywords: urban, demonstrations, language, history, postcolonial, satire