Date and Time: Wednesday, October 15, 12:00 – 1:00 PM
Location: Henderson Hall, Rutherford Library South 1-17, University of Alberta
Tickets: Free event with no registration / tickets required
Close Encounters of the Native Kind explores boundaries between storytelling traditions, material and speculative realities, and what’s said and unsaid in the growing native literary tradition. This talk maps the evolution of this tradition through a framework of waves: from reflection and refraction to diffraction and, now, to a fourth wave of interference. This new wave of Indigenous literature is defined by its transcendence of material realism, in exchange for a more embodied, phenomenological truth. Through a lens that is both critical and personal, and informed by my dual role as a writer and literary agent, the talk examines how this shift challenges the market’s expectations of an “Indigenous Voice.”
CODY CAETANO is the author of Half-Bads in White Regalia (Canada: Hamish Hamilton Canada, 2022), winner of two Indigenous Voices Awards, shortlisted for the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, and longlisted for the Toronto Book Award, the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and Canada Reads. An off-reserve member of Pinaymootang First Nation, his mother’s family is from the Manitoba Interlake and his father’s family emigrated to Canada from the Azores in the 1960s. He works as a literary agent at CookeMcDermid.
This event is presented in partnership with the Centre for Literatures in Canada | Centre de littératures au Canada
