Welcome to the website of the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (CACLALS). Founded in 1973, the Asociation brings together critics, scholars, teachers, students, and writers who share an interest in Commonwealth and postcolonial literatures and oratures as well as the versions of the English language they employ. Through its affiliation with ACLALS and its framings of the critical act, the Association provides members with an international context for studying Canadian literature, fostering a deeper understanding of Canada's multicultural tradition and of cultures in other parts of the world.

CACLALS' electronic newsjournal, Chimo, is published twice a year. Chimo

CAUT has launched a campaign in support of Library and Archives Canada (LAC). This institution is foundational to much research in our discipline, but it is being seriously undermined by changes in policy and starvation funding. If you believe the national archives should not be fragmented; that acquisitions need to be at least as comprehensive as they have been in the past, not seriously curtailed as they have been in recent years; that hours of access need to be at least as long as a regular work day; and/or that specialist professional archivists are crucial to the work LAC does, please visit http://www.savelibraryarchives.ca/ and take action.

Warmest congratulations to Sophie McCall for being short-listed for the 2012 Gabrielle Roy Prize for her first monograph, First Person Plural: Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship.

The conference program has now been posted at CROSSROADS: SCHOLARSHIP and TEACHING for an UNCERTAIN WORLD

CACLALS welcomes Dr. Leela Gandhi, Department of English, University of Chicago, as the 2012 keynote speaker and a participant in the special Roundtable at the CACLALS 2012 conference. Co-editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies and member of the editorial board of Postcolonial Text, Dr. Gandhi works at the intersection of multiple disciplines in her investigation of the intricated legacies of colonial encounter, with special reference to India. A poet (Measures of Home, 2000), she has also co-authored England through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth-Century Fiction (2001) and followed her first monograph, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (1998), with Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-De-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (2006). This study explores the anti-colonial networks in colony and metropolitan centre of anti-imperialist leaders such as her great-grandfather, Mohandas K. Gandhi. Her current work “examines a series of historical conjunctures, events, phenomena, largely shaped by the events of the first two world wars, that [she] believe[s] to have been especially congenial to the distillation of a postcolonial askesis.” CACLALS gratefully acknowledges the support of the Trudeau Foundation through Trudeau scholar and CACLALS member Libe Garcia Zarranz in funding and arranging, with Melissa Stephens and Camille Van der Marel, Dr. Gandhi's participation.

We also welcome Dr. Alice Te Punga Somerville of the School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies at the Victoria University of Wellington, Aoteoroa/New Zealand as the 2012 plenary speaker at the CACLALS conference. The editor with Witi Ihimaera, A. Calder, and C. Allen of a special issue of the Journal of New Zealand Literature on comparative Indigenous literary studies, and the author of many book chapters, journal articles, and conference presentations on Maori writing, as well as Once Were Pacific: Maori Connections to Oceania, forthcoming in May 2012 from U of Minnesota P, Dr. Te Punga Somerville is currently co-President of SPACLALS, the South Pacific Branch of ACLALS.

Tania Aguila-Way (Ottawa) “Uncertain Landscapes: Trauma, Risk and Scientific Knowledge in Madeleine Thien’s Fiction”

Jennifer Hardwick (Queen’s) ”'A Space of Not Knowing': Settler Ignorance and the Study of Indigenous Literatures”

Kasim Husain (McMaster) “At What Price Home? Queer Liberalism and the Gentrification of London in Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette

L. Camille van der Marel (Alberta), “Why Did the Postcolonial Scholar Cross the Road? The Transnational Turn in Canadian Literary Studies”

The judges for the CACLALS Graduate Student Presentation Prize 2012 are Professors Chelva Kanaganayakanam, Philip Mingay, Jill Didur, and Susan Gingell.

For a description, criteria for judging, and other information about the prize, see Graduate Student Conference Presentation Prize

CACLALS gratefully acknowledges the support of the Commonwealth Foundation for helping to fund our core administrative and conference activity costs, and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for helping to fund travel costs of graduate students, un(der)employed, and, where possible, retired members of the Association, to our annual conference.