1The book under review contains thirteen studies organized within four major groupings and strikes me as a thematically and structurally close-knit unity of critical inquiry. This is decidedly not always the case with similar books on inter- and cross-disciplinary material by contributors employing very different perspectives—, ‘epistemological, historicist, biofictional, socio-semiological or poetic.’ The theme of ‘passage’ is at the very core of this interdisciplinary examination by various scholars from such fields as diverse as literary studies, film, history, or women’s studies. As the editor points out in her comprehensive introduction, ‘passage’ really works as a metaphor for various kinds of cultural/literary encounters and negotiations that are typical of both Australia and Canada. Ethnicity, gender and race/indigeneity seem to be key-concepts in this study with an essentially literary-critical focus, for both settler countries do share many historical coordinates and are today, with all of their, sometimes very different, sometimes very similar, colonial baggage, keen on achieving a much needed cultural reconciliation and redressing. The essays of high scholarly quality included in this timely book demonstrate this undeniable social fact.. Moreover, ‘passage’ as a trope of cultural anxiety helps address the questions of Canadian and Australian self-representation and identity-construction through literature and film. The interweaving of post-colonial and gender theory, the questions of literary celebrity as a construct, literary production as a market commodity and poetic hybridity break new ground, as they sensibly focus on the hitherto underresearched gendered and indigenous aspects of such literary/film auto-representations of the nation, with a particular emphasis on the literary production of the second half of the 20th century and of the past six years.

2In the first section of the volume entitled ‘Contact Zones: History, Rights, and Literary Rites of Passage,’ Françoise Le Jeune analyzes pioneer travel writing in Canada by two famous nineteenth-century women immigrants, Catherine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie. Her final remarks point to the fact that ‘Canada was constructed by English women, by the early settlers or by the visitors that came in the second part of the century, as a great textual site for the exploration of “otherness” which they projected as the reverse of their constrained English female self.’ If the second grouping of texts discusses indigenous and ethnic culture and its aesthetics of cross-cultural representation (Tomson Highway, Thomas King, Larissa Lai), the third section of the volume interrogates, at times provocatively (as in David Coad’s contribution), gender as self-(re)construction in the precarious Australian context of Oz-masculinity, as well as femininity, as in in Doris Brett’s memoir as survival narrative. The final section ‘Place and Displacement’ is quite short in comparison with the preceding sections, which somewhat disrupts the balance of the book. Two concepts as they appear in the works of the Canadian Robert Kroetsch and the Australian David Malouf are discussed here; Kroetsch shows ‘Canada’s coming to terms with its increasingly multicultural status’ and Malouf sees the seemingly deconstructed Queensland house on Edmondstone Street in Brisbane as a metaphorical space with a ‘hidden agenda of establishing boundaries and warning against transgression.’

3The perspective of cultural politics and narrative poetics, on which this collection of essays rests provides a wide forum for the exploration of a crisis (‘the crisis of (il)legitimacy’) relating to Canada’s and Australia’s colonial appropriation and consequential dis-appropriation today. The book comes close to finding a common denominator in these processes of national self-representation, from which other countries today are clearly not immune. Finding a way of describing it is, as always, half solving the issue itself. In the editor’s concluding words, ‘society “writes” its values (in terms of representation), and the failure or ambivalence of those values, on the body. In postcolonial cultures in particular, the ways in which gender or race are perceived represent a powerful means of investigation into the ways in which the nation constructs, and maintains its self-image.’ Ethnicized/racialized/gendered Canadian and Australian cultural and literary bodies thus point to a work-in-progress, a process currently under way, and this in itself represents a welcome sign of social transformation in the two countries.