Woldemar Neufeld’s Canada

Woldemar Neufeld’s Canada
Author: Hildi Froese Tiessen
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2010
Genre: Art
ISBN:

A record of Neufeld's Canadian paintings and block prints, this book explores influences that shaped Neufeld's career as it developed in Canada in the 1920s and 1920s and came to fruition from the 1940s to 1990s. After studies in Cleveland, he settled in New York and New England, but returned to Canada to document urban and rural landscapes.

Queering Mennonite Literature

Queering Mennonite Literature
Author: Daniel Shank Cruz
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2019-01-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0271084405

Though the terms “queer” and “Mennonite” rarely come into theoretical or cultural contact, over the last several decades writers and scholars in the United States and Canada have built a body of queer Mennonite literature that shifts these identities into conversation. In this volume, Daniel Shank Cruz brings this growing genre into a critical focus, bridging the gaps between queer theory, literary criticism, and Mennonite literature. Cruz focuses his analysis on recent Mennonite-authored literary texts that espouse queer theoretical principles, including Christina Penner’s Widows of Hamilton House, Wes Funk’s Wes Side Story, and Sofia Samatar’s Tender. These works argue for the existence of a “queer Mennonite” identity on the basis of shared values: a commitment to social justice, a rejection of binaries, the importance of creative approaches to conflict resolution, and the practice of mutual aid, especially in resisting oppression. Through his analysis, Cruz encourages those engaging with both Mennonite and queer literary criticism to explore the opportunity for conversation and overlap between the two fields. By arguing for engagement between these two identities and highlighting the aspects of Mennonitism that are inherently “queer,” Cruz gives much-needed attention to an emerging subfield of Mennonite literature. This volume makes a new and important intervention into the fields of queer theory, literary studies, Mennonite studies, and religious studies.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie
Author: Andrea Warner
Publisher: Greystone Books Ltd
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2018-09-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1771643595

"Buffy Sainte-Marie is an icon and inspiration. This book is necessary—an authorized insight into the making of a legend." —Terese Marie Mailhot, author of Heart Berries A powerful, intimate look at the life of a beloved folk icon and activist. Folk hero. Songwriter icon. Living legend. Buffy Sainte-Marie is all of these things and more. In this, Sainte-Marie’s first and only authorized biography, music critic Andrea Warner draws from more than sixty hours of exclusive interviews to offer a powerful, intimate look at the life of the beloved artist and everything that she has accomplished in her seventy-seven years (and counting). Since her groundbreaking debut, 1964’s It’s My Way!, the Cree singer-songwriter has been a trailblazer and a tireless advocate for Indigenous rights and freedoms, an innovative artist, and a disruptor of the status quo. Establishing herself among the ranks of folk greats such as Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, she has released more than twenty albums, survived being blacklisted by two U.S. presidents, and received countless accolades, including the only Academy Award ever to be won by a First Nations artist. But this biography does more than celebrate Sainte-Marie’s unparalleled talent as a songwriter and entertainer; packed with insight and knowledge, it offers an unflinchingly honest, heartbreakingly real portrait of the woman herself, including the challenges she experienced on the periphery of showbiz, her healing from the trauma of childhood and intimate partner violence, her commitment to activism, and her leadership in the protest movement.

The Naked Anabaptist

The Naked Anabaptist
Author: Stuart Murray
Publisher: MennoMedia, Inc.
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2015-10-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0836199847

Click here to read the introduction to The Naked Anabaptist. In churches and kitchens and neighborhood centers across the world, communities of Jesus-followers are crafting a vision of radical service, simple living, and commitment to peace. Many are finding a home in a Christian tradition almost five centuries old: Anabaptism. Who are the Anabaptists? What do they believe? Where did they come from? What makes them different from other Christians? And can you become an Anabaptist without leaving your own church? Follow Stuart Murray as he peels back the layers to reveal the core convictions of Anabaptist Christianity, a way of following Jesus that challenges, disturbs, and inspires. Glimpse an alternative to nationalistic, materialistic, individualistic Christian faith. If you are seeking a community of authentic discipleship, heartfelt worship, sacrificial service, and radical peacemaking, consider this your invitation. This new edition features: Voices and stories from North America and the global church. Updated and expanded definition and discussion of Christendom. Updated resource section. Free downloadable study guide available here.

I Remember Laurier

I Remember Laurier
Author: Harold Remus
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2013-06-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1554584116

I Remember Laurier is the story—actually, thirty-seven stories—of the little university that could, told by some of those who devoted themselves to transforming the school from its modest beginnings into a superb small liberal arts college, and in turn to the university whose growth, diversification, research, and partnerships characterize it today. Although the stories are diverse in content, viewpoint, and tone, readers will note a number of unifying themes, one being nostalgia for a small university where faculty, staff, and students were close and new initiatives were readily approved and easily implemented. Here too are reflections, sometimes bemused and sprinkled with humour, on professors, administrators, and students, the “Laurier Experience,” and significant events such as “WLU” becoming “WLU” (Waterloo Lutheran University was renamed Wilfrid Laurier University in 1973). Evident throughout is the pride of the contributors in the development of the university to its current status and in having played a role. In the photo album at the back of the book readers will find vintage prints of the authors and of many others mentioned in the book. More photos will soon be available on the website of the Wilfrid Laurier Retirees’ Association: http://www.wlu.ca/retirees.

Creating Together

Creating Together
Author: Diane Conrad
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2015-04-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1771120258

Creating Together explores an emerging approach to research that combines arts practices and scholarship in participatory, community-based, and collaborative contexts in Canada across multiple disciplines. Looking at a variety of art forms, from photography and mural painting to performance art and poetry, the contributors explore how the process of creating together generates and disseminates collective knowledge. The artistic processes and works in an arts-based approach to scholarship make use of aesthetic, experiential, embodied, and emotional ways of knowing and creating knowledge in addition to traditional intellectual ways. The anthology also addresses the growing trend in arts-based research that takes a participatory, community-based, or collaborative focus, and encourages scholars to work together, with other professionals, and with community groups to explore questions, create knowledge, and express shared understandings. The collection highlights three forms of research: participatory arts-based research that engages participants in all stages of the inquiry and aims to produce practical knowing to benefit the community; community-based arts research that has community/public space at the heart of practice; and collaborative arts approaches involving multi-levelled, multi-layered, and interdisciplinary collaboration from diverse perspectives. To illustrate how such innovative work is being accomplished in Canada, the collection includes examples from British Columbia to Newfoundland and across disciplines, including the fine arts, education, the health sciences, and social work.

Zaagi'idiwin

Zaagi'idiwin
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-09-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780994036124

Through the making and documentation of jingle dresses, Marshall explores the deeply personal stories that have shaped her perception of the complexities of her family history in the context of Canadian history.

Arts of Engagement

Arts of Engagement
Author: Dylan Robinson
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 548
Release: 2016-07-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1771121718

Arts of Engagement focuses on the role that music, film, visual art, and Indigenous cultural practices play in and beyond Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. Contributors here examine the impact of aesthetic and sensory experience in residential school history, at TRC national and community events, and in artwork and exhibitions not affiliated with the TRC. Using the framework of “aesthetic action,” the essays expand the frame of aesthetics to include visual, aural, and kinetic sensory experience, and question the ways in which key components of reconciliation such as apology and witnessing have social and political effects for residential school survivors, intergenerational survivors, and settler publics. This volume makes an important contribution to the discourse on reconciliation in Canada by examining how aesthetic and sensory interventions offer alternative forms of political action and healing. These forms of aesthetic action encompass both sensory appeals to empathize and invitations to join together in alliance and new relationships as well as refusals to follow the normative scripts of reconciliation. Such refusals are important in their assertion of new terms for conciliation, terms that resist the imperatives of reconciliation as a form of resolution. This collection charts new ground by detailing the aesthetic grammars of reconciliation and conciliation. The authors document the efficacies of the TRC for the various Indigenous and settler publics it has addressed, and consider the future aesthetic actions that must be taken in order to move beyond what many have identified as the TRC’s political limitations.

DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect

DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect
Author: R. Bruce Elder
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 777
Release: 2015-10-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1554586410

This book deals with the early intellectual reception of the cinema and the manner in which art theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and especially artists of the first decades of the twentieth century responded to its advent. While the idea persists that early writers on film were troubled by the cinema’s lowly form, this work proposes that there was another, largely unrecognized, strain in the reception of it. Far from anxious about film’s provenance in popular entertainment, some writers and artists proclaimed that the cinema was the most important art for the moderns, as it exemplified the vibrancy of contemporary life. This view of the cinema was especially common among those whose commitments were to advanced artistic practices. Their notions about how to recast the art media (or the forms forged from those media’s materials) and the urgency of doing so formed the principal part of the conceptual core of the artistic programs advanced by the vanguard art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. This book, a companion to the author’s previous, Harmony & Dissent, examines the Dada and Surrealist movements as responses to the advent of the cinema.

A Complicated Kindness

A Complicated Kindness
Author: Miriam Toews
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2019-01-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1582438897

Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award In this stunning coming-of-age novel, the award-winning author of Women Talking balances grief and hope in the voice of a witty, beleaguered teenager whose family is shattered by fundamentalist Christianity "Half of our family, the better–looking half, is missing," Nomi Nickel tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her sad, peculiar father, her days are spent piecing together why her mother and sister have disappeared and contemplating her inevitable career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken slaughterhouse on the outskirts of East Village. Not the East Village in New York City where Nomi would prefer to live, but an oppressive town founded by Mennonites on the cold, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada. This darkly funny novel is the world according to the unforgettable Nomi, a bewildered and wry sixteen–year–old trapped in a town governed by fundamentalist religion and in the shattered remains of a family it destroyed. In Nomi's droll, refreshing voice, we're told the story of an eccentric, loving family that falls apart as each member lands on a collision course with the only community any of them have ever known. A work of fierce humor and tragedy by a writer who has taken the American market by storm, this searing, tender, comic testament to family love will break your heart. “Brilliant.” —New York Times Book Review “A darkly funny and provocative novel.” —O, the Oprah Magazine