Free Movie Screening

Timothy Leduc, author of Climate, Culture, Change will be participating in an upcoming screening and discussion of the award-winning documentary Climate Refugees. The documentary takes a look at the people displaced by climatically induced environmental disasters: the products of climate change.

Experts predict that instances of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, cyclones, fires and flooding will increase dramatically in the coming years. As areas are hit with these disasters, people will be forced to leave their homes and seek asylum in other parts of the world. It is thought that border conflicts and potentially even wars will be fought over these issues. For the first time ever, climate change is being considered a national security risk.

To learn more about these issues, please attend the free screening of 'Climate Refugees' which will be held at the University of Toronto Campus in the the JJR Macleod Auditorium on Friday, April 29 at 6:30 PM.

The screening will be following by a panel discussion with Timothy Leduc, author of Climate, Culture, Change; Laura Westra, author of Globalization, Violence and World Governance; and Alfredo Barahona, Program Coordinator, Migrant and Indigenous Rights, KAIROS: Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives, and Member of the World Council of Churches' Global Ecumenical Network on Migration.   

Watch the 'Climate Refugees' trailer here:

Glowing Review in Contemporary Women's Writing

Contemporary Women’s Writing has published a glowing review of Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood by Reingard Nischik. The book, which was recently awarded the 2010 Best Book award by the Margaret Atwood Society, explores the use of gender and genre in Atwood’s writing. 

Nischik is a renowned Atwood scholar who has authored or edited more than 25 books. She is the Chair of North American Literature at the University of Constance, in Germany.

Here is an excerpt from the review:

Nischik offers a genuinely original take on established critical conversations about Atwood's writing. For the first time, Atwood's literary achievements are set alongside less familiar creative modes, providing a fuller picture of the author's creative history and offering fresh insight into her innovations across literary genres. Especially welcome is the reproduction of material from the Margaret Atwood Collection, housed at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, which offers a new picture of the author in progress; Nischik explores how Atwood's cartoons – in particular her Kanadian Kultchur Komix/Survivalwoman series – speak to some of the major concerns in her writing but also provide a glimpse of the author in irreverent, playful form.
                                                           -- Ellen McWilliams, Bath Spa University

If you would like to read the review in its entirety, it is available online at the following link: http://cww.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/03/11/cww.vpq019.full

To find out more about Engendering Genre, visit the UOP website.

Don’t miss out on these great April Fools jokes!

It’s April Fools day and the hunt is on for the day’s best internet prank. Here are a few that we’ve come across so far:

     - Huffington Post erects Paywall for NYTimes employees
     - GMAIL Motion BETA
     - Release of the Appwood
     - Scholarly Kitchen to Erect Pay Wall
     - (Font Nerds only) Google “Helvetica”
     - Hootsuite’s ‘Happy Owls’
     - Rebecca Black mania

And our personal favourite....

     - Harry Potter’s new TV show, The Aurors 

Which is your favourite? Have we missed any? Let us know! 

Celebrating Canadian Poetry

April is National Poetry Month, and what better way to celebrate than by curling up with the UOP’s new volume of poetry, coming out later this month.

Ricochet, by Seymour Mayne, is a collection of word sonnets – fourteen line poems with only one word per line. Though the poems are short and sweet, including a single sentence (sometimes two,) these sonnets create a world of meaning with their depth and complexity. Seymour Mayne is the author, editor or translator of more than fifty books including Les pluies de septembre (Éditions du Noroît, 2008), and Light Industry (Mosaic Press, 2000).

This bilingual edition includes a version of each poem in both French and English, which presented the additional challenge of translating the sonnets. The brave and capable translator is Sabine Huynh, a novelist, short story writer and a poet in her own right.

Here’s a look at the word sonnet Calendar and its translation. Enjoy!

Calendar

She
awoke
Monday,
it
was
April
on
the
calendar,
December
on
the
snowcovered
ground.

Le calendrier

Elle
se
réveilla
lundi,
le calendrier
indiquait
avril,
la
neige
recouvrant
le
sol,
décembre.

If you would like more information on Ricochet, check out the UOP website: http://www.press.uottawa.ca/book/ricochet

Great review in 'Journal of Popular Music Studies'

The Journal of Popular Music Studies has published a great review of Sonjah Stanley Niaah’s recent title DanceHall. The book examines the cultural significance of dancehall, a genre of popular Jamaican music. Stanley Niaah looks at the history of Dancehall music and offers the first in-depth look at the performance spaces, lifestyle and meanings that have come out of this art form.

The review is not available online, but here is some of what Stacy J. Lettman had to say:


Sonjah Stanley Niaah’s DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto offers a new approach to theorizing performance geography and presents a compelling body of research conducted over an eight-year period, from 1999 to 2007. As a theoretical framework, the book fuses together concepts from geography, sociology, and cultural studies as it explores the physical space of the dancehall, the types of events that are staged there, and the rituals that are maintained and that are linked to the experiences and practices of ghetto life—practices that can be traced back to the plantation and to the slave ship. The book offers an ambitious and exhaustive interdisciplinary study of dancehall’s performative spaces in Kingston and the wider Jamaica, spaces which are understood as not only local but also transnational, occupying/inhabiting intersecting spaces within the performative culture of the African diaspora. As the author notes, her work is a necessary intervention in a scholarly discourse that has tended to focus on dancehall’s “excesses and obsessions rather than sociocultural, spatial and historically contextualized readings” (xvi).

-- Stacy J. Lettman, Journal of Popular Music Studies

To find out more about the book, visit the UOP website: http://www.press.uottawa.ca/book/dancehall