18.07.2025 Bericht zum Canada Day 2025

The Marburg Center for Canadian Studies hosted its annual Canada Day event on July 11, 2025.

    The 2025 Canada Day at the Marburg Center for Canadian Studies

 This year’s conference discussed the intersections of archives and migration, emphasizing the role of memory which shapes archives and is preserved by and in archives, whether they are material, digital, or mental in character. Forms of archives are manifold, such as museums for the education of the public and the preservation of history, and can also be films and TV, literature, videos and video games, any form of press products as well as Social Media, or paintings. Archives, however, can also be vulnerable and unstable because they are subject to the political culture in which they emerge; they can be censored; support – financial or spiritual – can be given, withheld, or withdrawn. 

The conference speakers dedicated their contributions to various types of archives and forms of (im)migration. Dr. Sylvia Langwald, academic librarian at the Marburg University Library, focused on the development of its Canadian Studies Collection, which was initiated with donations of almost 40,000 books and quite a number of journals and magazines by Canadian businessman Alan Coatsworth in 1951 and later expanded by Noreeen Taylor in the early twenty-first century. Dr. Langwald examined the history of the Marburg Canadian Studies collection as a migrated knowledge space with the help of AI but also came to the conclusion that AI cannot yet replace librarians in the curation of literature. 

Dorothea Schuller, a member of the Fachinformationsdienst (FID) Anglo-American Culture (AAC) at the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, also started with a historical overview of the library’s acquisition of books from Britain and its colonies. Her presentation showcased highlights from the library’s wide-ranging collection and traced its history from its eighteenth-century beginnings to the current services for researchers and students of Canadian Studies, funded by the DFG. 

Prof. Dr. Linda Morra, Chair of Canadian Studies, Professor of English at Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada, and award-winning author of many publications, among them her podcast series Getting Lit with Linda: The Canadian Literature Podcast, Unarrested Archives (2020), and Moving Archives (2015), zoomed in on the question of agency of migrants and societies’ perceptions of them, which decide about whose stories get to be preserved in archives as they function as  a stronghold of power in Jacques Derrida’s sense. Using Madeleine Thien’s novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), Morra explored in her keynote how this novel facilitates our understanding about migrants and the kinds of records or traces left behind for future understanding that may counteract the power by which institutions safeguard their authority and legitimacy. 

Dr. Matthias Dickert, a former high-school teacher at Grimmelshausen Gymnasium Gelnhausen, focused on the 120,000 British-born orphans who were sent to work and live there from 1869 to 1932 as another form of migration. These migrants were also called “home children” or “little immigrants,” and one assumes today that more than four million Canadians originate from these children. The promise of a better life in Canada, for most, however, never became true. They were often abused and seemed to have paved the way for “The Duplessis Orphans” and the residential schools for Native children. Dickert’s colleague, Benjamin Battenberg, presented the high-school project “Archiving Migration: Policies, Identities and Representations,” undertaken with twelfth-graders in a self-organized learning process. He presented the posters the students had prepared, which emphasized Canada’s changing immigration policies in (archival) records and the impact of migration on (British and Canadian) national identity. The posters show the complex interplay between practices of writing about immigration, migration policies, identity formation, and public discourse. 

Albert Rau, who taught English-Canadian Drama and literature at the University of Cologne and English at a Catholic high school in Brühl, Germany, is a founding member of the Association for Canadian Studies in the German speaking Countries and has coordinated its Teachers Forum for more than thirty years, discussed the play Controlled Damage (2020) by African Canadian playwright and actor Andrea Scott. The play dramatizes the story of Viola Desmond, who, as early as 1946 refused to leave the whites-only section in a Nova Scotian theatre and was subsequently arrested to spend the night in jail. Desmond has, therefore, also been called the “Canadian Rosa Parks,” but she has never become as famous, and the parallels seem to have largely remained unexplored. Rau emphasized that the play asks questions about memory as well as the potentially limited access to archives for the creation of a historically inspired biographical play and about which archives can be drawn upon. 

Dr. Angela Weber, cultural anthropologist with a Ph.D. on Aboriginal Canadian culture from the University of Bonn, showcased the tobacco factory owner Wilhelm Gail (1854-1925), who donated, around 1910, 70 artifacts of Native American origin to the Oberhessische Museum Gießen. About 40 of them came from the northern Pacific Coast, attributed to the Tlinkit nation. These migrated artifacts not only raised later questions of appropriation and relationality but also shaped the perception of Hessian travelers and migrants to and in that area. Furthermore, Marie Zarda, a Ph.D. candidate in North American Studies at the Philipps-Universität Marburg, thematized in her talk narratives of migration as emotionally charged and, therefore, resonating with many people. She made a strong case for the analysis of video games since they allow the players to embody simulated experiences of migration, hypothesizing and fictionalizing about how migration and border crossing could affect an individual and their life story. As she argued, through games and gaming, players can tackle transformations of cultural identities, documents and documentations of border crossing, and rituals of migration. Her examples were South Park: The Stick of Truth (2014), which humorously shows Canadians as not fitting in in the United States, Venba (2023), which is the story of an Indian family (im)migrating to Canada and reconstructing a family cookbook as a form of archive of their own history, and Road 96 (2021) as an example of how a teenager, who tries to leave a totalitarian state, makes decisions that impact the “lives” of future generations. Each new game is based on the knowledge or archive of the previous game, which means that players enter each new game with an altered mindset. 

The final talk, and second keynote, was given by Prof. Dr. Jason Blake, a Canadian teaching at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. He devoted his talk to recent Canadian short stories in English by David Bezmogis (“Immigrant City” [2019]), Zalita Reid-Benta (“Pig Head” [2019]), and André Alexis (“Contrition: An Isekai” [2025]), discussing their representation of immigration and its consequences as well as the immigrants’ struggle with the English language and the pitfalls of translation. He approached the topic from his own perspective as a Canadian but also looked at the potential expectations and assumptions non-Canadian readers might have. 

This Canada Day offered a lively exchange of ideas on the intersections of archives and migration and revealed the multiplicity of ways in which this relationship is manifested and can be approached. Many people in the audience were so intrigued that they stayed on until the very end, contributed critical questions, and were full of praise for the enlightening presentations. Such a day can only be successful through the collaboration of many. We are grateful for the support of the Marburger Universitätsbund e.V., Ursula-Kuhlmann-Fonds. I would like to extend warms thanks to Andrea Wolff-Wölk and Sylvia Langwald for making the main library a place of our celebration; to Marie Zarda for indefatigably organizing flyers, food, and thoughts for this day; to Melissa Falkiewicz and Annika Michel who as student helpers ensured that we did not run out of coffee and other essentials; to all speakers and guests, and specifically to Dr. Hildegard Kuester, who continues to support the Center at Marburg in Martin Kuester’s spirit. And last but not least, to Prof. Dr. Martin Kuester himself, who still remains the mastermind behind Canada Day in Marburg.

Prof. Dr. Carmen Birkle
Philipps-Universität Marburg
North American Literary and Cultural Studies