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EDITORS" FOREWORD
Tuteks "Cultural Appropriation in Two Short Stories by Alice Munro: "Five
Points’ and the ‘Albanian Virgin’ — Echoes of the Balkans” seeks to assess how
cultural information shifts travelling from one culture to another and when
it is given a fictional dimension. The paper also examines how the resulting
cultural constructs about Croatians and Albanians surface in two stories by
Alice Munro. Supported by both Canadian and Hungarian archival evidence,
in his paper entitled ““The New Mecca of Immigrants’: Hungarian Emigration
to Canada and the Role of Immigration Propaganda”, Balazs Venkovits
juxtaposes the Canadian early 20" century and post-W WI “Last Best West”
campaign directed at Eastern and Central European immigrants to settle
the Prairies and the Hungarian efforts to prevent emigration as reflected by
in the Light of a European Immigrant] and other contemporary sources.
Moving from Europe to the Asian continent, Maria Palla explores the
three female protagonists’ loyalties to their homeland and hostland in her
paper entitled “The South Asian Canadian Diaspora: A Transnational
Community and its Literary Representation in Anita Rau Badami’s Can You
Hear the Nightbird Call?” Through the context of Badami’s novel, the effects
of the Komagata Maru incident of 1914, the Partition of India in 1947, and
the bombing of Air India flight 182 in 1985 on the diasporic community are
also examined. Adopting Bhabha’s notion of ‘third space’ for the mass media,
Anushray Singh’s “Third Space: An Intercultural Negotiation of South Asian
Diaspora in Canada” investigates ‘intercultural belongings’ and conflicts
resulting from cultural encounters in the context of the biggest visible
minority group, the South Asian diaspora in Canada. Last in this block, in
the Korean- Canadian context, Judit Nagy reflects on the intercultural aspects
of courtship, marriage and romance in her paper “Male-female Relationships
Across Cultures in Ann Y. K. Choi’s Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety (2016)”. In her
analysis of Ann Y. K. Choi’s novel, she applies Min-sun Kim’s cultural
communication theory to account for the behaviour of Choi’s protagonists.
The next two papers focus on issues related to Quebec. In particular, Dervila
Cooke’s “Growing Together or Apart? Minorities in Québec Documentary on
Immigration and School” focuses on the issue of immigrant schoolchildren
in Québec as reflected in Claude Godbout’s documentary, La Génération 101
and other similar cinematographic examples such as Aloisio’s Les Enfants de
la Loi 101, Groulx’s La Classe de Madame Lise, or Bertucelli’s La Cour de
Babel. The paper is illustrative of the differing perspectives immigrants have
on Québec society and its values. In “Maitres chez qui? The Parti Québécois’
Cultural Geography and its Impact on the Idea of Indigenous Territorial
Sovereignty Following the Quiet Revolution”, Marie-Claude Gill-Lacroix
highlights how the cultural geography created by the Quiet Revolution
impacted the self-determination of Québec’s Indigenous inbabitants.
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