The four presenters include a variety of voices – two Professors Emeritae, Drs. Christl Verduyn and Nora Foster Stovel; one tenured Professor, Dr. Laura Davis; and one Sessional Instructor, Dr. Leilei Chen. Each presenter will take ten minutes to present her paper on Laurence’s Multi-culturalism, Environmentalism, book-banning, and translation, allowing time for the Respondent, Margaret Laurence’s granddaughter, Adele Laurence, to invite discussion among presenters and audience members.
These topics, including multiculturalism, ethnicity, and immigration, as well as ecology and censorship, are all very current, as the Government of Alberta in September 2025 proposed banning Laurence’s Manawaka novels from schools on the grounds of sexually explicit content, although we will argue that interracial sexual relationships also played a part in the ban. One presenter addresses Marian Engel’s defense of Laurence’s final Manawaka novel, The Diviners, which was banned in Ontario in the “Controversy” of the 1970s and 1980s for explicit sexual content, although the interracial sexual relationship may also have been an underlying reason.
Proposed paper titles include “Margaret Laurence’s Cultural Mosaic in the Manawaka Saga,” “What Margaret Laurence Taught Us about the Environment: Reading Laurence’s Writing through Eco-Criticism,” “Writer to Writer: Marian Engel’s Defense of Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners,” and “Globalizing ‘The Canadian Local’: Translating Margaret Laurence’s Short Stories into Chinese.”