On the international scene scholars interested in democratising the subject of literary studies have begun to examine testimony as one means of enacting cultural memory and culture from below (Yudice, Felman and Laub, Tonkin). This panel invites papers on the uses of testimony in Canada and/or Quebec to construct identities as culture from below. Rather than a strictly class-based notion of culture from below to mean working-class culture, we apply the term to a variety of disenfranchised subjects: youth, the unemployed, domestics, prostitutes, prisoners, the poor, refugees, minority ethnics, the homeless, poor single mothers, and so on. How are genres of literary and popular testimony used to protest disenfranchisement in a wealthy country like Canada? We invite papers about testimonial identities in English or French across various genres: literary testimony, oral histories, film documentary, and so on.

Please submit proposals (email or hard copy) by January 15th, 2004 to: