Dervila Cooke, Association for Canadian Studies in Ireland | Irish, Indigenous and Transcultural Narratives in Québec: Ways of Belonging (Palgrave Macmillan 2024)
In her monograph, Indigenous and Transcultural Narratives in Québec: Ways of Belonging (Palgrave Macmillan 2024), Dr. Dervila Cooke of Dublin City University (Ireland), examines mixed cultural identities through the lens of transcultural negotiation and Indigenous identities. The corpus encompasses contemporary creative works in Québec that have important sociopolitical significance, with a focus on life writing, testimonial documentary films, and personal essays. This monograph analyses four key practitioners: Naomi Fontaine, Abla Farhoud, Anita Aloisio, and Akos Verboczy.
Dervila Cooke researches and teaches at Dublin City University in Ireland. Her research focuses primarily on contemporary creative cultural production, primarily for France and Quebec, including on postcolonial aspects. She edited the 2016 thematic issue of Comparative Literature and Culture (CLCWeb, online, open access) on the representation of immigration in contemporary writing in France, Quebec, and Ireland. Since then, she has published two monographs with Palgrave Macmillan, both in 2024, on autobiographical or testimonial narratives by culturally mixed authors. The first of these monographs is Indigenous and Transcultural Narratives in Quebec: Ways of Belonging. The second is Life Writing and Transcultural Youth in Contemporary France: Azouz Begag, Maryam Madjidi, and Laura Alcoba. Her early research focused on French writer Patrick Modiano, exploring the ideas of auto/biofiction and testimony, post-memory, the history of the Second World War, traumatic personal memory, a problematic relationship with Frenchness and a mixed Jewish identity. Her main works on Modiano are her 2005 monograph Present Pasts and the special issue of French Cultural Studies that she edited in 2012 (Modiano and the Image. She is also interested in flâneurs, including flâneuses, in the contemporary cultural sphere.
