Jennifer Henderson

Cross-appointed with the School of Canadian Studies

Research Interests

• Canadian literary and cultural studies
• Settler colonialism
• Neoliberalism
• Feminism and gender studies
• Critical media and policy studies

Current research

I am interested in the relationship between literature and liberal government in the settler colonial context, a conjuncture I first examined in Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada (2003). That book describes the contours and contradictions of 19^th century liberal feminisms projected onto colonial space. It is also a kind of genealogy of a late 20^th-century genre, the woman’s survivor story.

I continue to move between the 19^th and 20^th/21^st centuries, but I have turned to the child as a figure through which settler-colonial futures and pasts are imagined and normative programs of liberal selfhood configured. This line of research has taken me from turn-of-the-century pedagogies of freedom through play (‘playing Indian’), to residential schools, to historical reckoning through the lens of childhood trauma, to the current narratives of ‘human development’ and ‘resilience.’ Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress (2013), a collection I co-edited, is about the broader discourses and languages of justice-seeking organized around historical injury today.

In another line of research I am zeroing in on the specificities of neoliberalism in settler-colonial contexts, where the logic of ‘privatization’ is inseparable from colonial histories of imposing the private household, and the overlapping questions of how to govern the poor and the Indigenous.

Recent Publications

Books

Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada. University of Toronto Press, 2003.

Edited collections

(co-edited with Pauline Wakeham) Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress. University of Toronto Press, 2013.

(co-edited with Eva C. Karpinski, Ray Ellenwood, and Ian Sowton) Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory: Essays in Honour of Barbara Godard. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013.

Translations

Dalie Giroux, The Eye of the Master: Figures of the Québécois Colonial Imaginary. Carleton Library Series/McGill Queen’s UP, 2023 — translation of Dalie Giroux, L’oeil du maître. Mémoire d’encrier, 2021.

Chapters in books

“Neoliberal Gothic, Settler Social Imaginaries, and the Case for Decolonization on Two Fronts,” in Land/Relations: Possibilities of Justice in Canadian Literatures. Eds. Larissa Lai and Smaro Kamboureli. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2023.

“Resilience.”  Sage Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies, Sage Publications (Oakland, CA: 2020)

Journal articles

“Residential School Gothic and Red Power: Genre Friction in Rhymes for Young Ghouls,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 42.4 (2018) 43-66.

“Residential Schools and Opinion-Making in the Era of Traumatized Subjects and Taxpayer-Citizens.” Journal of Canadian Studies 49.1 (2015), 5-43.

(co-authored with Keith Denny) “The Resilient Child, Human Development, and the ‘Post-democracy,’” Biosocieties, 10.3 (September 2015), 352-378.

Recent Presentations

” ‘Upgrade Life!’: Rupture, Development, and Constellation on the ‘Oblates Lands’ ,” Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies Triennial Conference: Ruptured Commons, Toronto Metropolitan University, July 11, 2022.

“Feeling Gothic, Feeling Resilient: Dilemmas of Recursivity and Recuperation in Post-Statist Imaginaries,” Gothic in a Time of Contagion, Populism and Racial Injustice: Gothic-Without-Borders Conference of the International Gothic Association, Simon Fraser University, March 11, 2021.

“Resilience, Indigeneity, and Human Capital as a Nexus of Neoliberal Governmentality,” Canadian Political Science Association, “Resilience, Recognition, Vulnerability, Apology: Logics and Politics of Care in Neoliberal Canada” panel, Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of British Columbia, May 2019.

Current PhD supervisions:

Breanna Kubat, Doctoral Candidate in Canadian Studies, “Student Organizing and Institutional Change”