Tag Archives: regionalism

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Putting the Punk Back in Steampunk

Putting the Punk Back in Steampunk
A review of Clockwork Canada: Steampunk Fiction Edited by Dominik Parisien (Exile Editions, 2016)
By Derek Newman-Stille

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Steampunk has often struck me as a genre that has tended toward overly rosey views of the Edwardian and Victorian Eras. The steampunk tales I have read have often uncritically represented colonialism as adventure, portrayed technology divorced from the horrible conditions of the factories, ignored massive wealth disparity and troubling social conditions. It is a genre that is ripe with neo-futurist possibilities to invite critical engagements with ideas of historicity and presentness, but often forgets the “punk” aspect of itself, the part that invites critical questions and instead pulls down the goggles of nostalgia.

Clockwork Canada: Steampunk Fiction does that critical questioning, inviting a history filled with possibility. The stories in this collection invite critical questions about the way that we view history and the relationship we have to the past. While inspiring an interest in local histories and tales, it also reminds the reader of all of those stories that get stuck in the cogs of the machines of nation-building and invites us to oil the machines and seek out new stories and new ways of viewing the past.

The regionalism of Clockwork Canada, its setting within a national boundary, invites readers to question canonical tales of history and our founding origin myths by asking who benefits from the history that we tell ourselves and what erasures have been part of the construction of this thing we call “Canada”. These tales question the stories we tell ourselves by providing alternative stories, stories that highlight people and groups that are under-represented in our national myths.

Rather than representing the historical tales that we see in Heritage Minutes or CBC specials, the stories in Clockwork Canada highlight the oppression of indigenous peoples in Canada, border conflicts, representations of disabled people, labour conflicts, the exploitation of Chinese labourers on the railroad, Canada’s head-taxes and borders closed to immigration … all of the narratives we erase in constructing ourselves as a Just Nation. These are tales that speak back to erasures and the editing of Canadian history to include only canonical narratives that focus on Canada as a place of tolerance, acceptance, and openness.

Clockwork Canada reminds readers that the idea of “nation” is itself a story that we tell ourselves to hold us together and that that story, that history, can be divisive, damaging, and harmful. The multiplicity of stories in Clockwork Canada invite readers to think of our nation as a storied space, filled with a multiplicity of voices. These steampunk stories punk canonical narratives and invite readers to question the history they encounter. This isn’t nostalgia fiction, these stories are all about gearing up for a critical take on history.

To read reviews of individual stories in Clockwork Canada, explore the links below:

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2016/05/06/putting-monsters-on-the-map/

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2016/04/28/signing-the-electric/

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2016/04/26/disability-and-immigration/

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2016/04/24/working-in-the-industrial-revolution/

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2016/04/21/steampunk-multiculturalism/

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2016/04/20/of-maps-andmonsters/

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2016/05/04/a-seance-evoking-future-horrors/

https://speculatingcanada.ca/2016/05/02/frozen-wooden-with-steampunk-horror/

To find out more about Clockwork Canada, visit https://dominikparisien.wordpress.com/clockwork-canada-anthology/
OR http://www.exileeditions.com/singleorders2016/clockwork.html

To discover more about Dominik Parisien, visit his website at: https://dominikparisien.wordpress.com

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SUPERficial Government Superhero Programmes

SUPERficial Government Superhero Programmes
A review of Mary Pletsch and Dylan Blacquiere’s “The Island Way” in Tesseracts Nineteen: Superhero Universe. Edited by Mark Shainblum and Claude Lalumierer (Edge, 2016).

By Derek Newman-Stille

In “The Island Way”, Mary Pletsch and Dylan Blacquiere use the superhero format to explore island culture and the interactions between PEI and mainland Canada. The Federal Government creates a new group of superheroes that are meant to embody Canadianness, having representatives from each of Canada’s provinces as a way of illustrating diversity. Quickly, the government discovers that only showcasing geographical diversity is a problem and realises that they need to include aboriginal superheroes and people from other under-represented groups.This superhero group, as many governmental diversity initiatives tend to be, ends up being largely superFICIAL, only portraying diversity without having substance. The superheroes selected for each region tend to embody regional stereotypes, embodying ideas about a province that the rest of Canada tends to project onto them. 

Price Edward Island is treated as many islands who neighbour mainlands are. PEI has all of the decisions about their superhero made by the mainland governments and projected onto the island. The government ignores any viable Islanders and instead decides to relocate a superhero to live part time on PEI in order to fulfill the requirement of regional diversity. They choose a candidate, that, not surprisingly, has a look of Anne of Green Gables about her and therefore continue to create marketable superheroes rather than effective ones. 

Pletsch and Blacquiere play with ideas of tokenistic inclusion, control from a mainland government, and the idea that many Prince Edward Islanders have that one is either a true Islander who has lived in the are their whole life (and come from Island stock) or that they are a “come from away” who will never really belong or fit in. The government in their world uses a transplanted superhero while ignoring the work of the protagonist of the story, Maggie, a woman who has to survive by working in a restaurant and spends her time saving the Island by piloting a ghost ship that keeps islanders safe. By being under-represented and out of the spotlight, Maggie has to examine her relationship to ideas of glory and the representation of government ideals versus the notion of supporting a local community and keeping her neighbours safe. 

To discover more about Tesseracts Nineteen: Superhero Universe, visit Edge’s website at http://edgewebsite.com/books/tess19/t19-catalog