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Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki, eds.: Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature.

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Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki, eds. Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007. 233 pp. Notes. Index. Works cited. $36.95 sc.

Those not in the habit of reading book titles carefully might be attracted to this one because the phrase "Canadian literature" seems to offer, if not the pleasures of a good story, at least those of an illuminating critical analysis of some favourite Canadian poetry and/or prose. Such readers may well be disappointed by this collection of largely abstract and earnestly political academic articles presented here as the most tangible product of an ambitious project the two editors conceived in the Spring of 2004; they will certainly find in this collection both less and more than they bargained for: virtually no literary criticism, but lots of theorizing about the literary enterprise.

Poets as well as academics, Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki are well known within CanLit circles for their literary critical work in the field variously referred to as "ethnic minority," "multicultural," and "diasporic" literatures in Canada. Kamboureli has produced groundbreaking analyses of diasporic literatures, and edited the important anthology Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature (1996), now in its second edition (2006), and Miki has written widely and insightfully about Asian Canadian literature. As Kamboureli explains in her thought-provoking "Preface" to the...

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