Unmarked, Undocumented and Un-Canadian: Examining Space in Souvankham Thammavongsa's FOUND

Abstract

Although Laotian Canadian poet Souvankham Thammavongsa has published three collections of poetry to critical acclaim (her 2013 collection LIGHT, for example, won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry), her work has received relatively little scholarly attention to date. With a view to Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, I analyse Thammavongsa’s 2008 collection FOUND as a text that positions language as a site of dissent and resistance to static representations of territory, sovereignty, citizenship and identity. Drawing on Foucault’s theory of space as fundamentally hierarchical and inextricable from distributions of power, privilege and authority, I argue that the articulation and performance of a nation is inextricable from the articulation and performance of space, and that FOUND works to critique the policies and practices that exclude and/or dehumanize the “nation-less” subject from Canadian space by denying him/her access to citizenship, healthcare, gainful employment, legal and political redress, and human rights.