Quéma on M. Nourbese Philip's Zong! and Gregson v. Gilbert

Anne Quéma, Acadia University, has published M. Nourbese Philip's Zong!: Metaphors, Laws, and Fugues of Justice at 43 Journal of Law and Society 85 (2016). Here is the abstract.

Focusing on Gregson v. Gilbert, the article considers colonialism as a historical chain of events with the Middle Passage as a major locus of association among humans, things, the sea, trade, transportation, maritime law, and finance speculation. Out of this assemblage emerged slavery as a racist socius through which the metaphor of the human‐thing circulated. In citing Gregson v. Gilbert, M.N. Philip's poem Zong! seeks to bear responsibility to the reified bodies of the murdered Africans by generating a poetics of relationality that disassembles and reassembles the legal words as sign‐objects on the page. Her gendered address to the law exposes the rape that Africa endured. Bearing witness to this trauma, her poem speaks to and with the dead, recognizing the singularity of the Africans' languages, of which as human‐things they were deprived. Gathering readers and listeners, the poem creates an event through which an ethics of justice might materialize.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

A Novel of Cree Poetics, Love, and Heritage

Law professor Tracey Lindberg (University of Ottawa, Common Law section) has published her first novel, Birdie, a book that explores the relationships between Cree heritage and law, with HarperCollins Canada.  Read Emily Keeler's discussion of the work here in the National Post.


Tip of the beret to Kate Sutherland (Twitter).

A Database of Canadian Crime Fiction

If you like crime fiction, check out this lovely site devoted to Canadian crime fiction: Crime Fiction Canada, created and maintained by Professor Marilyn Rose, Department of English, Professor Jeannette Sloniowski, Department of Communications, Popular Culture, and Film, both of Brock University, and Professor Philippa Gates, of Wilfred Laurier University, assisted by students and colleagues. The site includes citations to primary works, secondary works, and book reviews.  There is also a links page to other sources of information.