Sandra MacPherson
This dissertation examines urban walking in Canada as it deviates from a largely male peripatetic tradition associated with the flâneur. This new incarnation of the walker — differentiated by gender, race, class, and/or sexual orientation — reshapes the urban imaginary and shifts the act of walking from what is generally theorized as an individualistic or simply transgressive act to a relational and transformative practice.
While the walkers in this study are diverse, the majority of them are women: writers Dionne Brand, Daphne Marlatt, Régine Robin, Gail Scott, and Lisa Robertson and performance artists Kinga Araya, Stephanie Marshall, and Camille Turner all challenge the dualism inscribed by the dominant (masculine) gaze under the project of modernity that abstracts and objectifies the other. Yet, although sexual difference is often the first step toward rethinking identities and relationships to others and the city, it is not the last. I argue that poet Bud Osborn, the play The Postman, the projects Ogimaa Mikana, [murmur] and Walking With Our Sisters, and community initiatives such as Jane’s Walk, also invite all readers and pedestrians to question the equality, official history and inhabitability of Canadian cities.
As these peripatetic works emphasize, how, where and why we choose to walk is a significant commentary on the nature of public space and democracy in contemporary urban Canada. This interdisciplinary study focuses on Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, cities where there has been not only some of the greatest social and economic change in Canada under neoliberalism but also the greatest concentration of affective, peripatetic practices that react to these changes. The nineteenth-century flâneur’s pursuit of knowledge is no longer adequate to approach the everyday reality of the local and contingent effects of global capitalism. As these walkers reject an oversimplified and romanticized notion of belonging to a city or nation based on normative identity categories, they recognize the vulnerability of others and demand that cities be more than locations of precarity and economic growth.
This dissertation critically engages diverse Canadian peripatetic perspectives notably absent in theories of urban walking and extends them in new directions. Although the topic of walking suggests an anthropocentrism that contradicts the turn to posthumanism in literary and cultural studies, the walkers in this study open the peripatetic up to non-anthropocentric notions as the autonomous subject of liberal individualism often associated with the male urban walking tradition is displaced by a new focus on the interdependent, affective relation of self and city and on attending to others, to the care of and responsibility for others and the city.
Thank you to my supervisor, Dr. Robert Stacey, for supporting my interdisciplinary project, for your critical insight and for always challenging me to be a better writer. Thank you to my examiners Dr. Jody Mason, Dr. Thomas Allen, Dr. Jennifer Blair, and Dr. Andrew Taylor for engaging thoughtfully and critically with my work and for your invaluable feedback that will continue to shape my research on this topic. Thank you to Dr. Andre Furlani at Concordia University for offering a course on walking, which gave me the opportunity to explore my topic at an early stage of research. Thank you to everyone at the University of Ottawa’s Department of English, administration and faculty, for guidance throughout the process. For financial support, thank you to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program and the University of Ottawa.
Thank you to Kinga Araya, François Morelli and David Ferry for generously sharing your time and work with me. David Ferry trusted me with the working script and video footage of The Postman, without which a critical section of chapter three would not have been possible. Thank you to everyone at Jane’s Walk Ottawa with whom I not only have had the great pleasure of working but also share my love of walking, the city and community engagement.
Thank you to my friends near and far for making the long journey lighter. Thank you Erin Kean, with whom I have been lucky to share this experience, for your intelligence, humour and unwavering support for my work. A special thank you to Gabby for always being there for me, for listening and believing in me. Finally, I must express my deepest gratitude to my partner Jeff and my daughter Hannah for their infinite patience and encouragement. Thank you for sharing a love of literature and especially a love of walking—for walking with me all over Lisbon and beyond these last few years. I can think of nothing better than sharing the road with you both.