The Transpacific Travel from India to Canada in <i>Life of Pi</i> by Yann Martel and Its Link to Transculturality and Transdisciplinarity
Abstract
Patrick Imbert
Univeristy of Ottawa
Canada
The goal is to see how the transpacific travel of the immigrant Piscine from India to Canada in the best seller and Booker Prize novel Life of Pi allows us to revisit the dynamic of exclusion, and the idea of nation and place as well as to recognize alterity in perspectives emphasizing more transculturalism than multiculturalism. This anthropo-thematic analysis will lead us to a theoretical perspective based upon the comparison between trans-multi-interdisciplinary and trans-multi-intercultural perspectives and to establish links between the trans, the multi and the inter in the context of the legitimacy of symbolic and geographic displacements and of multiple encounters as they are linked to the Americas.
References
Abley, M. 2009. ‘Mixed Blessings’, Canadian Geographic April: 66.
Aguinis, M. 1991. La gesta del Marrano. Buenos Aires: Planeta.
Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Barth, F. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Bergen: Universitetsforlaget and London: Allen & Unwin.
Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine.
Beck, U. 2006. Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Benessaieh, A. 2010. Transcultural Americas/Amériques transculturelles. Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa.
Bissoondath, N. 1994. Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada. Toronto, Penguin.
Bouchard, G. and Lacome, M. 1999. Dialogue sur les pays neufs. Montréal: Boréal.
Brenner, J. E. 2008. ‘The Logic of Transdisciplinarity’, in B. Nicolescu (ed) Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice. Creskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press.
Chen, Y. 2004. Quatre mille marches. Montréal: Boréal.
Coupland, D. 2007. The Gum Thief. Toronto: Random House.
Elkouri, R. 2009. ‘D’Alger à Anjou’, La Presse samedi 14 février: 3.
Espagne, M. 2004. ‘Approches anthropologiques et racines philosophiques’, L’horizon anthropologique des transferts culturels, Revue germanique internationale 21: 213-226
Finkenthal, M. 2001. Interdisciplinarity, Toward the Definition of a Metadiscipline? New York: Peter Lang.
Finkenthal, M. 2008. Complexity, Multidisciplinarity and Beyond. New York: Peter Lang.
Girard, R. 2008. Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde. [1978] Paris: Livre de poche.
Greimas, A. J. 1966. Sémantique structurale. Paris: Larousse.
Imbert, P. 2004. Trajectoires culturelles transaméricaines. Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa.
Imbert, P. (ed) 2008. Theories of Exclusion and of Inclusion and the Knowledge-Based Society: Canada and the Americas. Ottawa: Canada: Social and Cultural Challenges in a Knowledge Based Society.
Imbert, P. 2009. ‘Francophonies minoritaires: de l’homogène enraciné à la transculturalité de la société des savoirs’, in Patrick Imbert (ed) Américanité, cultures francophones canadiennes et société des savoirs: Le Canada et les Amériques. Ottawa: Éditions : Chaire de l’Université d’Ottawa: ‘Canada: Enjeux sociaux et culturels dans une société du savoir’, 27-47.
Imbert, P. 2013a. Les Amériques transculturelles: les stéréotypes du jeu à somme nulle. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval.
Imbert, P. 2013b. Rencontres multiculturelles: imprévu et coïncidences: Le Canada et les Amériques, P. Imbert (ed) Ottawa: Éditions : Chaire de l’Université d’Ottawa: ‘Canada: Enjeux sociaux et culturels dans une société du savoir’.
Imbert, P. 2014. Comparer le Canada et les Amériques: des racines aux réseaux transculturels, Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval.
Iyer, P. 2000. The Global Soul. New York: Vintage.
Kline, S. 1998. Conceptual Foundations for Multidisciplinary Thinking. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Kymlicka, W. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Laborit, H. 1976. Éloge de la fuite. Paris: Gallimard.
Lévinas, E. 1961. Totalité et infinité; essai sur l’extériorité. La Haye: Nijhoff.
Lévy, P. 2006. Le feu libérateur, Paris: Arléa.
Levy, P. 2007. ‘Société du savoir et développement humain’, in P. Imbert (ed.) Le Canada et la société des savoirs: Le Canada et les Amériques. Ottawa: Éditions Chaire de l’université d’Ottawa : ‘Canada: Enjeux sociaux et culturels dans une société du savoir’, 115-173.
Lupasco, S. 1947. Logique et contradiction. Paris: PUF.
Martel, Y. 2001. Life of Pi. Toronto: Vintage.
Montuari, A. 2008. ‘Foreword: Transdisciplinarity’, in B. Nicolescu (ed), Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, ix-xvii.
Nicolescu, B. 1966. La transdisciplinarité. Paris: Du Rocher.
Nicolescu, B. 2008. ‘In vitro and in vivo Knowledge-Methodology of Transdisciplinarity’, in B. Nicolescu (ed) Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 1-21.
Ottawa Business Journal 24 avril 2009: 11.
Paterson, J. 2009. ‘Le sujet en mouvement: Postmoderne, migrant et transnational’, Nouvelles études francophones 24 (1): 10-18.
Rivard, Y. 2005. Le siècle de Jeanne. Montréal: Boréal.
Rivero, A. 2005. ‘Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in Contemporary Spanish American Fiction’ in E. Fishburn and E. L. Ortiz (ed), Science and the Creative Imagination in Latin America. London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 53-69.
Santini, S. 2010. ‘Intermédium et porosité disciplinaire: parcours intermédial de Philippe Despoix’, Spirale 233: 41-44.
Sandoval García, C. 2007. El mito roto : Inmigración y emigración en Costa Rica. San José: Editorial UCR.
Sarmiento, D. F. 1986. Facundo. [1845] Barcelona: Planeta.
Social Capital Outcomes of Adult Learning and Literacy Initiatives. Québec: The Centre for Literacy/le centre d’alphabétisation. August 2010.
Warrior, R. 2009. ‘Native American Scholarship and the Transnational Turn’, Cultural Studies Review 15 (2): 119-130.
Welsch, W. 1994/1995. ‘Transculturality – the puzzling form of cultures today’, California Sociologist 17-18: 194-213.
Wimmer, A. and Glick Schiller, N. 2002. ‘Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migration and the social sciences’, Global Networks 2 (4), 301-334.
University of Ottawa Canada
Patrick Imbert studied semiotics and literature at the University of Ottawa, and obtained his Ph.D. in 1974. He started his academic career in 1974 as an assistant professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. In 1975, he taught at the University of Ottawa where he became a Full Professor in 1984. He was professor of the year of the Faculty of Arts 1998, and has a University Research Chair entitled: ‘Canada: Social and Cultural Challenges in a Knowledge-Based Society’. He was Executive Director of the International American Studies Association (2005–2009), and became the President of the Academy of Arts and Humanities of the Royal Society of Canada in 2009 (2009–2011). He is co-founder and vice-president of the City for the Cultures of Peace. He is also director of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded project (2010–2013) entitled ‘Établir des paradigmes opératoires pour comparer les variations discursives dans les Amériques menant des identités enacinées, de leur inclusion ou exclusion, aux identités ransculturelles dans le contexte de la glocalisation’.
The Copyright Holder of the submitted text is the Author. The Reader is granted the rights to use the material available in the RIAS websites and pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative CommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). Any commercial use requires separate written agreement with the Author and a proper credit line indicating the source of the original publication in RIAS.
- License
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY 4.0 license.
- Author’s Warranties
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution - By the same conditions 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
- User Rights
Under the Creative Commons Attribution license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
- Co-Authorship
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.
