Humanities scholar tackles writing, editing projects on diaspora, nationalism
BY RACHELLE COOPER
She's a book series editor, a tireless scholarly writer, an editor of anthologies for Oxford Canada and a new faculty member in the School of English and Theatre Studies. So it's not surprising to learn that Prof. Smaro Kamboureli excels under pressure.
“In many ways, I thrive when I'm in panic mode,” she says. “I have to find the discipline to give myself some leisure time.”
Having just moved to Guelph from the University of Victoria, where she was a professor of Canadian literature, associate dean for research in humanities and a grants facilitator, Kamboureli says that other than visiting her brother and his three children in Milton and occasionally going to Toronto, she still hasn't had a chance to explore the area. She's new to Ontario, having lived in British Columbia, Alberta and Manitoba since completing her master's and PhD degrees at the University of Manitoba.
In between unpacking boxes full of hundreds of books in her MacKinnon Building office and her new Guelph home, Kamboureli has been planning a huge national conference called “TransCanada: Literature, Institutions, Citizenship” with a team of colleagues from Simon Fraser University. The two-part conference, which will be held in Vancouver next summer and in Guelph a year later, aims to question structures and institutional models that influence the production, study and teaching of Canadian literature.
“We'll look at how the field of Canadian literature is shaped by examining, among other things, the impact institutional structures have on the kind of research people produce,” says Kamboureli. “We're thinking of ‘TransCanada' as an event whose momentum will not dissipate soon after it is over. We're interested in seeing scholars who will continue to pursue research in relation to the main concerns of the conference.”
She is also writing a book on diasporic nationalism and just signed a contract with Oxford Canada to compile an anthology on multicultural writing in Canada. Her book Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada, which won the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian criticism, was also published by Oxford Canada.
Although her first book was a book of poems titled In the Second Person, Kamboureli says she finds it hard to be an academic and pursue creative writing.
“I think scholarly writing can be extremely creative and imaginative, but you have to be willing to take risks and venture beyond the traditional style of academic discourse.”
She's certainly had to be creative in doing the research work for her book on diasporic nationalism. In it, she's focusing on Greek Australian writers and makes connections between diaspora (a people who have dispersed away from their homeland) as a concept and nationalism, specifically the Greek diaspora in contemporary times in Australia.
“Traditionally, when we examine diaspora, it's in relation to the host country,” she says. “I wanted to reverse this critical paradigm. I focus on how the diaspora imagines a nation that does not yet exist as an independent state, which was the case with the Greek diaspora of the Enlightenment period, a time when Greece was still part of the Ottoman Empire. I'm also looking at how nationalism, as it survives and is practised in the diaspora, becomes reconfigured as a result of the differences between a diasporic community and its host country.”
Even though Kamboureli was born and raised in Greece, she says she's far from an expert in Greek studies.
“I had to re-educate myself, which took a lot of time because I had to feel comfortable enough with the material before I could make my own pronouncements.”
She expects to finish the book in about a year.
Since she compiled the widely used anthology Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature in 1996, the cultural and political situation in Canada has changed substantially, she says, so instead of printing a new edition, she thought a new anthology was justified.
“There will be a 10-year hiatus between the first one and the second one, and a lot has changed in that time. There's now a different sense of what constitutes multiculturalism and diaspora in Canada. We can't afford to think of multiculturalism only as a relationship between individual ethnic groups and Canada. I feel more comfortable with the notion of diaspora than with that of multiculturalism. I want the anthology to question how we can still think in terms of a national literature now that we live in global times.”
Of her many accomplishments, Kamboureli says she gets a lot of satisfaction out of being the general editor of The Writer as Critic book series by NeWest Press. The series publishes books by Canadian poets and novelists that don't fit into the writers' usual genre.
“I think of myself as an editor as well as a critic,” she says. “Editing for me is very creative. I don't just sit back expecting people to send me books; I go and seek them out. If I know they have an idea, I will encourage them to create a book out of that idea.”
Kamboureli has published nine titles to date and is now editing Roy Kiyooka's Pacific Rim Letters.
