Risk, mortality, and memory: the global imaginaires of Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves, M.G. Vassanji's Nostalgia, and André Alexis's Fifteen Dogs

Abstract

This paper examines three contemporary Canadian novels that depict global risk society through a speculative fictional form that asks the question “What if?” Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017) and M.G Vassanji’s Nostalgia (2016) imagine dystopian worlds ravaged by climate change to critique humanist ideals of Progress. André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs (2015) uses the animal fable to address what it means to be a mortal animal. Each asks what an awareness of risk means for agency and ethics: for Indigenous people in The Marrow Thieves; for Torontonians in the context of a heightened global apartheid in Nostalgia; and for dogs wrestling with a god-granted human intelligence in the contemporary Toronto of Fifteen Dogs. In negotiating risk, each fiction turns to the roles of memory, creativity, and alternative forms of subjectivity and community in ensuring survival. Each novel finds fragile yet necessary steps toward alternative futures in the ability to imagine otherwise.