Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada

Rating:
Summary: Scandalous Bodies: An Engaging and Enlivening Body of Work
Review: That Smaro Kamboureli has produced a scholarly study which shifts seamlessly between such topics as multicultural law, canonicity and minority writers, the body, and cultural hybridity, is impressive; that her meditation on diasporic literature (and film) never deviates from its lazer-like focus, even amid such disparate realms as these, is inspiring. In reading her words, I am as humbly and as willingly her student, as I was when I first sought her advice. Her navigation through the often daunting waters of Adorno, Spivak and (the less opaque) Bhabha, is itself a reading lesson, teaching the role of the critic, as much as the function of good criticism. The breadth of Professor Kamboureli's knowledge of subaltern theory, Canadian politics and literature, and the most recent (though not unchallenged) arguments of her contemporaries, is humbling as she engages with the most dynamic and exciting of literary critics--namely Linda Hutcheon, and Asha Varadharajan--to secure her place among them.