Heather Smyth

My research interests lie within the field of postcolonial studies, and include the wide variety of literatures, issues, and critical perspectives that preoccupy that field, including gender and sexuality, nationalism, multiculturalism, and racialization. For my Master’s degree I wrote a thesis critiquing the application of object relations psychoanalysis to mother-daughter relationships in Caribbean women’s texts (Paule Marshall and Jamaica Kincaid in particular). My Ph.D. dissertation was an examination of theories of cultural creolization in the Caribbean, and an evaluation of the gender politics of these theories. Within this context I proposed that Caribbean women’s writing and critical work offered an alternative articulation of creolization that took as its starting point a feminist politics and poetics of difference.

I have been with the Department of English Language and Literature since 2003. My undergraduate courses have included English 108E (Women in Literature); English 251B (Criticism), which I teach as an introduction to primarily 20th Century literary theory; English 463 (Postcolonial Literatures), which covers literature from Australia, Africa, and South Asia; and English 322 (Postcolonial Literatures of the Americas), which explores literature from the Caribbean, Canada, and the U.S. My graduate courses focus on topics such as “Creolization and Hybridity in Postcolonial Studies,” “Caribbean Literature: Home, Exile, Diaspora,” and “Gender in Postcolonial Literatures.”

“‘She had made a beginning too’: Beka Lamb and the Caribbean Feminist Bildungsroman.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 44.2 (Summer 2011): 181-204.

“Indigenizing Sexuality and National Citizenship: Shyam Selvadurai’s Cinnamon Gardens.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature40.2-3 (2009): 1-22.

“Mollies Down Under: Crossdressing and Australian Masculinity in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18.2 (May 2009): 185-214.

“‘The Being Together of Strangers’: Dionne Brand’s Politics of Difference and the Limits of Multicultural Discourse.” Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne 33.1 (2008): 272-290.

"'Roots beyond roots': Heteroglossia and feminist creolization in Myal and Crossing the Mangrove." Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism12 (September 2002): 1-24.

"The Mohawk Warrior: Reappropriating the Colonial Stereotype." Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 3 (Spring 2000): 58-80.

"Sexual Citizenship and Caribbean-Canadian Fiction: Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here and Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night." ARIEL 30.2 (1999): 141-160.

"'Lords of the World': Writing Gender and Imperialism on Northern Space in C.C. Vyvyan's Arctic Adventure." Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne 23.1 (1998): 32-52.

"'Imperfect Disclosures': Cross-dressing and Containment in Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond" in Sex and Sexuality in Early America. Ed. Merril D. Smith. New York: NYUP, 1998. 240-261.

• uWaterloo/SSHRC Seed grant 2007
• SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship 2001-03 (York University; OISE)
• Honorary Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship 1997-99
• SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship 1997-99
• Ontario Graduate Scholarship 1992

I am currently working on a book-length project, Outside Multiculturalism, which examines the potential for re-thinking Canadian multiculturalism through cultural and critical race coalition. I am also writing on Wayde Compton, Larissa Lai, and Rita Wong, and am working on a special double issue of the journal MaComere devoted to the work of Dionne Brand.

• Postcolonial literatures and theory
• Caribbean literature
• Feminist theory
• Canadian literature
• Postcolonial queer studies