This thesis examines the ways in which "threatening others" (Natives, visible minorities, women) have been represented in Canadian literature. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of psychoanalysis (Kristeva), gender (Grosz, Massey), and urban studies (Sibley, Sennett), this dissertation argues that in the construction of Canada as a national space whose roots lie in its colonial past, Native and other visible minorities have been represented as a defiling threat to the purity of "white" space. Similarly, women have been represented as threat; in colonial discourse, their bodies have been equated with a "natural" landscape to be tamed, controlled, and ultimately exploited, while their visibility and mobility in urban spaces have been seen as a threat to male spatial predominance.; The first chapter provides a historical background to urban studies in literature, moving from the European tradition of the modernist flaneur walking the "storied streets" of Paris and London, to American representations of New York as a reflection of the nation's bullish and unfettered entrance into modernity. If "landscape" has been a central, recurring concern in Canadian literary criticism (Frye, Moss, Atwood), urban perspectives on Canadian literature have been few and far between. This dissertation proposes to explore the Canadian metropolis with an eye to the various strategies of spatial exclusion and "containment" of those individuals and communities which have been deemed a threat to the pervading national mythologies.; The second chapter discusses how Chinese immigrants to Vancouver have been spatially excluded through restrictive immigration policies and urban policing strategies. The novels of Sky Lee and Wayson Choy show how urban panic and racial violence result from an Orientalizing gaze which constructs Chinese immigrants as criminal, as secretive, and as deviant sexual predators. Chapter three examines the representation of Montreal in the novels of Leonard Cohen, Robert Majzels, and Regine Robin. Native, female, and Jewish bodies are presented as abject "remainders" broken by the various religious, political, and gender discourses which operate in urban spaces. Chapter four examines the "place" of the urban Indian in the plays of Tompson Highway, George Ryga, and Daniel David Moses. Situated at the symbolic interstice between city and reserve, the Native body's penetration by racial and sexual violence comes to symbolize the long and disavowed history of Native exclusion in Canada. Chapter five examines the "absent" black body in urban space through a close reading of a number of African-Canadian writers, including Austin Clarke, Makeda Silvera, and George Elliott Clarke. Constructed as abject through a language of pollution, defilement, and criminality, the black urban body in both Africville and Toronto has been consistently represented as a "stain" upon a predominantly white, middle-class Canadian social space.
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