ABSTRACT
Thomas and Barfoot have both written novels with specifically Canadian locations in British Columbia and Ontario, the interests of a realistically plural definition of Canadian writing it is worthwhile resisting the 'Made in Canada'/'Fait au Canada' label as too restrictive and too colonial for a postcolonial literature. Neither Latakia nor Dancing in the Dark concerned with nationality though both concerned with colonialization in its gender sense and with the damaging effects of sexual power politics on women's lives. Postmodernist narratives which shift between flashbacks, memories of past and moments in the present, and the disrupted story-telling methods produce very different effects, with Latakia insisting on multiplicity and inclusiveness and Dancing in Dark attempting to sever connections and to create an enclosed space for the narrator. As stories of women's lives they have much in common with the autobiographical fictions of Laurence, Munro or Kogawa, though extreme fragmentation of these two narratives suggests that women's resistance to traditional structures of authority.
