When we first began conceptualizing this journal, we sought a title that would signal, and hopefully inspire, the interplays between theory and praxis Rehearsals (and, the array of other literature that inspires us) advocates. Refraction, as the bending of light, energy, and matter, captured what we envision the work of critique to be: broadening perspective to enliven the everyday; translating “the everyday” into something undeniably complex, politically and intellectually bountiful. Refraction, as we understand it, is as much as reflexivity as it is naming, determining, and asserting–a trick of the light or a shift in angle invariably shapes what is there. Refraction, thus, seemingly, denotes a self-reflexive line of inquiry: 

What do you see and how do you see what you see? How do you make sense of what you see? What is the relationship between position and perspective? What do those sightlines entail: What worlds do they support, and what worlds do they sideline? For what, and for whom, are they good? 

We have, thus, in the process of manifesting this journal, necessarily encountered our own ways of seeing, both alike and different: As culture nerds and doctoral candidates in postcolonial literary studies, working on aesthetics and placemaking, and as co-editors of this journal, we have much in common. Yet, this collaboration is also built on our diverging experiences. One of us (Priscilla) grew up in India and now lives in Montreal. One of us (Sadie) is a white settler, who grew up in Canada on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and səlilwətaɬ land, and currently lives in Berlin. For Priscilla, this movement has led to thinking about regimes of belonging, the making of territories, and the narratives that are told in connection to placemaking. In her doctoral work, she engages with the persistence of some of these colonial narratives and their functioning in our everyday. For Sadie, this has led to interest in the relations between colonial geopolitics and national narratives, and the ways in which histories of occupation, dispossession, and resistance become popularly storied. In organizing this inaugural issue, from these places, across the Atlantic via Zoom, we inevitably talk about citizenship, visas, and the different kinds of global mobilities afforded to us. These discussions remind of the fact that we are differently situated within the stakes of our shared discipline, with differently inherited relations to, and ways of seeing and feeling, the matters with which we contend.

What these digital conversations have also affirmed is a shared enchantment with the thematic, imagistic, and political possibilities of light-bending. While this inaugural issue showcases academic essays, book reviews, and interviews, other sections such as Notes from the Field and Perspective Pieces encourage contributors to address their positionality and to experiment (or bend) scholarly forms. The Perspective Piece, particularly, seeks to refract academic cornerstones such as the “thesis” and the occupation of “knowledge gaps” by centralizing the personal and celebrating more meandering forms of reflection. Here, in an effort to respond to some of the ways in which histories of colonial conquest and conflict haunt today’s academic cultures of debate, practices of connection and meditation are privileged over negation. Our two Perspective Pieces enliven these possibilities:

In his “Brief Look at Poetics, Camera Eyes, and the Fight for Identity,” Cornelius Fortune illuminates the “creative interconnections'' manifest in Annemarie Jacir’s film, Salt of the Sea, and Emand Burnat and Guy Davidi’s documentary, 5 Broken Cameras. As Fortune’s perspective on these cinematic perspectives reveals, dwelling in creative interconnection, as method, expands questions of Palestinian identity beyond the frame of current conflict solely, giving way to a “multiverse of identities.'' This kaleidoscopic mode challenges the audience to see through, but also, beyond the dichotomous frames of colonial/anticolonial, occupied/unoccupied, colonized/colonizer. Fortune’s work illuminates interplays between overt political frames, aesthetics and affect, producing, rather than a diagnosis of these films, insight into the complex experiences of receptivity they inspire.

Sonya Ballaytne likewise considers identity, though in relation to the colonizer/Indigenous, settler/Indigenous binaries upholding the Canadian nation’s ways of seeing. As Ballaytne reveals, refracting “identity” through her Swampy Cree perspective reaffirms “existing [to be] a political act.” Ballaytne’s reflection on Indigenous identity within the matrix of popular culture gives expression to today’s broader negotiations of identity, raising important questions about the value of a life and the credentials associated with it–about what lives are deemed valuable or pertinent in certain contexts, and the ways in which culture is occupied and perceived. We are reminded of the multiple scandals about fraudulent claims of Indigeneity in the country, pervading institutions such as our own. Simultaneously, Ballaytne’s assertion of Indigenous identity as inherently political reminds of Leanne Simpson’s arresting assertion that opposition to extractive, capitalist logics–that is, advocacy of life–is as many Indigenous communities “have always done.” 

Alongside our “Perspectives” section, our ‘Notes from the Field’ invokes light bending by addressing the practitioner-theorist dichotomy. This section encourages submissions bridging (or bending) the gap between the notion of a practitioner who inhabits the everyday and a critic who comments on the everyday from a distance. Contributions to this section intertwine “theorizing” and “doing” (or, making), personal with impersonal modes of scholarship. The contributions to this section, and their situating in questions of practice and community, particularly, have also inspired us to think about citational practices as refraction: Who we cite, whether within the academic community or outside of it, determines the social gathering inherent to research. Through the act of choosing material that is (1) considered to be scholarship and (2) aligns with the perspective being advanced in a text, citational practices provoke, and refract, questions of value. In other words, citation refracts a crucial line of questioning: what is considered valuable enough to be considered scholarship and what is deemed valuable enough to cite? As Sara Ahmed and Eve Tuck assert, actively thinking about citation as a politics invokes the agency vested in “bending” citation towards other, more diverse, representative, and thus, accurate modes of scholarship.

For Erin Konsmo, reflecting on their practice of Fish Scale Art necessitates acknowledgement of its surrounding ecological, social, and cultural relations. As their Notes-From-the-Field reflection asserts, to make“fish scale art” is to produce aesthetic objects, but also, importantly, to dwell in the system of relations through which fish circulates and gives life to. The fish is an object of nourishment and a member of community; fish scales are aesthetic, but also, as aesthetic objects, refusals of the practices of waste and discard underlying settler-colonial extractive logics. One of the many “gifts from the fish,” Konsmo reveals, is its capacity to  refract, and magnify, the environmental, social, and aesthetic relations binding us in various ways.

The relation between theory and practice is likewise articulated by Antiracist Educator Feisal Kirumira. Kirumira’s meditation on the relations between ‘planned curriculum’ and ‘lived curriculum’ obscures (and advocates the obscuring of) the distinctions between theorizing and doing. Establishing parallels between pedagogical theory and anti-racism work, Kirumira shows how a dismantling of racialised codes and systems demands an “innovative and transformative recalibration” of norms such as “public peace, public order and public dignity.”

The merging of theory and practice too undergirds artist Kaia’tanó:ron Dumoulin Bush’s artistic reflection on her installation, “Welcome to Canada.” Featuring a Canadian bill, Bush’s piece, and ensuing meditation on it, sidelines the bill’s innate, monetary worth, to rather consider its shifting social, cultural, and symbolic worth. Moving from an object of transaction to an art-object, the bill comes to bespeak shifting economies and perceptions of value, and in Tkaronto, specifically. The bill, in Bush’s reading, indexes its surrounding relations: A gesture of appreciation across cultural difference, a symbol of the city’s increasingly gentrified spaces, an object enacting Canada’s colonial legacy of property and possession, and an art object. The bill, more than a symbol of innate value hence becomes a symbol of contextual value, affirming that it is “more important than ever to acknowledge and honour our relationship to land and place.”

The authors comprising our “Perspectives” and “Notes from the Field” sections thus express a diversity of approaches to our theme. Simultaneously, they affirm that refracting the academic genre, away from its affinities for, or tendencies toward, paranoid reading and the impersonal, open generative paths of inquiry. The Essays section of this journal, while alternatively rooted in the “academic essay” form, likewise enliven new horizons. While adhering to the form’s conventions, these scholars nonetheless demonstrate how refraction might function as a theoretical frame, a literary method, and a hermeneutic model. Across these contributions is a shared unsettling, or, bending of, dominant narratives–-from the exegetics of the canon, to state-sanctioned Reconciliatory gestures, to interpretations of the historical archive, to alternative ways of hearing and reading texts. 

In her reading of Elizabeth Gaskill’s Cranford, Lisu Wang harnesses refraction as a method of unearthing the text’s quieter, more subtle, and backgrounded elements. Wang’s study turns to an oft ignored aspect of Gaskill’s text–a sea green turban–to not only refract ordinary objects as primary objects of study, but as crucial indicators of the novel’s broader, colonial atmosphere. Through the turban’s circulation, fetishization, and signification, Wang asserts, we might read how Britain’s colonial and imperial projects ostensibly elsewhere shape domestic economies of taste. Through the “social work” of the turban, matters of aesthetic preference and signification merge with the “distressing realities of British imperialism in the Victorian era,” demonstrating how questions of colonil foreign policy haunt “domestic” matters of sociality (2).

If Wang’s article turns to the valuing of everyday objects to refract colonial-imperial policy, the refraction of  value, likewise, informs Lorenz Hindrichsen’s reading of medieval archives. Rather than reading these images through their religious depictions, Hindrichsen reads them palimpsestically, tending to the residues, smudges, and haptic traces left on their surfaces over time. As Hindrichsen proposes, refracting the archive’s content through its material wear—and specifically, the sites where it was touched—reveals its socio-cultural meaning. Often clustered around Black deities and deities of colour, these imprints, Hindrichsen asserts, tell us about haptic codes of racialization, and acts of racial encoding, undergirding the scenes’ religious overt veneration. Alongside the archive’s value as a religious document, thus, Hindrichsen suggests, is its significance as a social document, performing ongoing processes of racial hypervisibility and othering, necessitating inquiry into how to read historical practices of erasure, today

While Hindrichsen advocates a rereading of historical archives over time, Walter Lucken IV advocates a rereading of apology in the era of Reconciliation. Like Hendrickson, who refracts the archive through its paratextual dimensions, Lucken IV unsettles the presumed function of state-sanctioned apology by emphasizing its power-laden dynamics. Focussing on Germany’s recent apology for genocidal action in Namibia, Lucken IV deconstructs the reconciliatory gesture, considering the “coloniality of apology” haunting its form. Such reveals the “larger social-historical and rhetorical purposes of these official apologies by powerful Western states, alongside the impossibility of reconciliation and repair within the frameworks that enable the apologies themselves.” As Lucken IV persuades, this dynamic is not limited to Germany, but broadly pertinent to global Reconciliation agendas, manifest in sites such as the US, Canada, South Africa, and Australia. Tracing the coloniality of apology in the German context, Lucken IV suggests, affirms the necessity of more rigorous, dynamic, and committed decolonial processes globally. 

Lindsey Palmer also reflects on the relations between global power and policy, though through literary inquiry into governmental bureaucracy and refugee status. In her close reading of  Souvankham Thammavongsa’s short story collection, How to Pronounce Knife, Palmer traces acts of refusal in refugee experience. Considering refusal’s various manifestations and valances--from speech tactics, to negotiations of silence, to denying the western male gaze and the “gifts” of the nation–Palmer outlines how reading “refusal” necessitates new kinds of reading and listening practices—practices that align with and listening for, the “radical potential for the oppressed in its denial of … oppressive terms of engagement.”

While Palmer’s exploration of refusal, through the frame of refugee experiences, elucidates various state-sanctioned stratifications and incorporations of the human in times of global conflict, Olivia Abram turns to the nonhuman to consider similar lines of inquiry. Through a close reading of Eden Robinson’s Trickster Drift, Abram brings into focus the more-than-human-contact zone. Reflecting on the intersections between indigenous scholarship and ecocriticism, Abram makes a case for how Indigenous people and the more-than-human refract and scatter the colonial frameworks that persist in our world. Through Abram’s configuring, the “contact-zone” is a site of simultaneous scattering and ordering, where kaleidoscopic networks emerge alongside systems of ethics and care.

The theme of refraction extends to our reviews and interviews, where contributors have traced the significance of refraction in contemporary texts and objects. Fortune’s review of C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp’s Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value notes the merits of refraction in conceiving of how theories of race, aesthetic experience, and economies of value co-constitute one another. Lzz Johnson’s review of Zakiyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, emphasizes Jackon’s use of  African diasporic literature and visual art to refract eminent philosophical and ontological queries into the “the Human.” In Sadie’s interview with Daisy Couture and Sadie Couture, on the subject of their book, On This Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land, the capacity for land–and, specifically, park space–to refract questions of colonial history and dispossession, emerges.