THE SPACE OF TRANSCULTURATION IN THOMAS KING’S GREEN GRASS, RUNNING WATER

This paper uses Thomas King’s novel Green Grass, Running Water (1994) to examine the contact between two cultures in Canada; the culture of the Indigenous people and the culture of the white settlers. Taking postcolonial studies as its framework, this paper relies on works written by critics such as Stephen Slemon, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and others, in its analysis of the transcultural space which Thomas King creates in his novel. The four mythical stories in the novel offer a fruitful ground upon which contact between the two cultural, social and political spaces can be analyzed. We hope that the research conducted in this paper can serve as an explanation of the nature of transculturation, and in the words of Bhabha (1994, 25), offer a textual “space of hybridity”.

Mad Insight

This poem is informed by the relationships between gender, race, chronic pain, hysteria, and the role of dominant discourses in shaping interpretations of bodily and psychic pain. Drawing on my lived experience as a non-binary person with chronic vulvar pain, or vulvodynia, I challenge the psychiatrization of chronic pain and propose hysteria as a potential state of resistance and refusal (Dumaresque, 2019). I weave fog throughout this poem as a metaphor that captures pain, madness, and perception. Fog symbolizes disruption and disorientation; yet, fog also gestures to the potentiality of being displaced from normative insight (Bruce, 2017). I engage William Connolly’s (2010) reading of perception as formed through discipline to think through the silent but subversive waves of knowledge and power that carve the lenses through which we story ourselves and others (Erickson, 2016). As Thomas King (2003) writes, “the truth about stories is that’s all we are” (p. 32). This poem is situated in a reading of madness and hysteria as sites of affective protest (Dumaresque, 2019). I ask, what can be resourced from our becoming un-hinged? This poem contributes to mad knowledge that is intersectional and in-service to disrupting medical and psychiatric violence, whiteness, hetero/cis-governance, and “compulsory able-bodymindedness” (Sheppard, 2018, p. 59).

Neo-classicism and the other Revivals in 1840 New Zealand: British Domestic Design in Indigenous Materials

In the first decades of the nineteenth century there was an insatiable enthusiasm for the fashions of previous eras. New research has established that designs for domestic furnishings in America, Australia and New Zealand were concurrent with the latest London and Paris fashions. It may be hard to imagine, with the priorities of convict and missionary life in the Australasian colonies, that influence of some of the greatest English designers was of any importance.Furniture designs by George Hepplewhite (1788), Thomas Sheraton (1794) and Thomas Hope (1807) can be found in New South Wales, while George Smith (1826), Thomas King (1829-35) and John Loudon (1833) can be identified in New Zealand. Elements of current British style trends from thereon can be seen in colonial-made furniture as mainstream fashion. By the 1840s the rare surviving examples made of native timbers are typical of those that could be found in any English home. Evidence does survive and, with interpretation, reveals a consistent influx of modern styles into the new colonies.