The UBC Department of English Language & Literatures is pleased to invite you to a 2025/2026 Postdoctoral Fellow Lecture featuring Dr. Alexa Manuel, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English Language & Literatures, UBC. Dr. Manuel will be in conversation with Dr. Alice Te Punga Somerville.
This lecture can be attended either in-person or online via Zoom. Please be sure to register using the link below. This lecture is open to everyone.
Talk Abstract
Forty years after its first publication, Slash by Jeannette Armstrong (Syilx Okanagan) maintains its relevancy to the Indigenous literary landscape due to its predominant themes of Indigenous activism and historical discourse. First published in 1985, Slash captures the ongoing frustration and anger of Indigenous peoples who fight for basic human rights and recognition, while also encapsulating the beauty in belonging to a community and the joys of knowing one’s connections and responsibilities to the land and to one’s relations.
In this paper I analyze Slash through the Syilx-specific knowledges in which it was written, exploring the aspects of the novel that make it a uniquely Syilx experience, one that is centred in the land and in the relationships of the main character. Since its initial release, scholars have analyzed a variety of topics within Slash, including trauma, assimilation, the colonial gaze, and decolonization, but there has yet to be any literary criticism that has explored the novel as one rooted in Syilx intellect and culture – mainly because it hadn’t yet been approached by a Syilx scholar. This paper is comprised from a chapter of my dissertation on Syilx literatures titled Stories of Lands, Bodies and Dreams: A tmixʷcentric Literary Theory.
About the Speaker
Dr. Alexa Manuel is Syilx and St’at’imc from the Merritt and Lillooet areas. She graduated with her PhD in English in 2024 from the University of British Columbia, where she now resides as a Postdoctoral fellow in the English department. She was raised on the Upper Nicola and Ts’kway’laxw (Pavilion) reservations and has been living in the Vancouver area for a little over ten years. She received her Masters from UBCO in Kelowna, and her Bachelor’s from Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, both in English.
