Tavleen Purewal

Tavleen Purewal (she/her/hers) works on contemporary Canadian literature with particular research commitments to Black Canadian literature, Indigenous studies, critical race studies and affect theory.

Her monograph in progress, Torn Intimacies: Inscriptions of Indigeneity in Contemporary Black Canadian Literature, studies ostensibly negative Black feelings, such as non-belonging, misrecognition, and disorientation, as sites of unexpected and intimate articulations of Black and Indigenous co-resistance. With chapters on Lorena Gale, Lawrence Hill, George Elliott Clarke, Dionne Brand, Cecily Nicholson, and Wayde Compton, Torn Intimacies considers how relations between Black, Black Indigenous, and Indigenous communities in Canada affectively inscribe contemporary Black Canadian literature. This work calls for new analytics for studying differently racialized communities under settler colonialism.

Tavleen is also working on a second monograph about the formal strategies invoked by contemporary Black, Indigenous, and Asian Canadian writers to thwart colonial forms of intimacy that instrumentalize cross-racial affiliations.

Her articles on racialized writing, relations, and protests appear in Canadian Literature, ARIEL, Canada and Beyond, and as book chapters in Pictura: Essays on the Works of Roy Kiyooka and Call and Response-Ability: Black Canadian Works of Art and the Politics of Relation.