Is Canada Postcolonial?: Unsettling Canadian Literature

Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian Literature

Edited by

LAURA MOSS

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Is Canada postcolonial? : unsettling Canadian literature / edited by Laura Moss

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-88920-416-0

1. Canadian fiction — History and criticism. 2. Postcolonialism.

I. Moss, Laura F.E.

(Laura Frances Errington), 1969-

PS8077.I8 2003                    810.9 971                    C2003-902058-4

PR9184.6.I8 2003

© 2003 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5

www.wlupress.wlu.ca

Second printing 2005.

Cover design by Leslie Macredie. Cover image:

untitled by Cliff Eyland, 2003.

Interior design and layout by Kathy Joslin.

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

Printed in Canada

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Table of Contents

Preface

Laura Moss

Is Canada Postcolonial? Introducing the Question

PART 1 : Questioning Canadian Postcolonialism

George Elliott Clarke

What Was Canada?

Neil Besner

What Resides in the Question, Is Canada Postcolonial?

Diana Brydon

Canada and Postcolonialism:

Questions, Inventories, and Futures

Donna Palmateer Pennee

Looking Elsewhere for Answers to the Postcolonial Question:

From Literary Studies to State Policy in Canada

PART 2 : Postcolonial Methodologies

Susan Gingell

The Absence of Seaming, Or How I Almost Despair of Dancing:

How Postcolonial Are Canada’s Literary Institutions

and Critical Practices?

Judith Leggatt

Native Writing, Academic Theory: Post-colonialism

across the Cultural Divide

Mridula Nath Chakraborty

Nostalgic Narratives and the Otherness Industry

Chelva Kanaganayakam

Cool Dots and a Hybrid Scarborough:

Multiculturalism as Canadian Myth

PART 3 : Is Canadian Literature Postcolonial?

Pam Perkins

Imagining Eighteenth-Century Quebec:

British Literature and Colonial Rhetoric

Douglas Ivison

I too am a Canadian: John Richardson’s The Canadian Brothers as Postcolonial Narrative

Cecily Devereux

Are We There Yet? Reading the Post-Colonial and

The Imperialist in Canada

Barbara S. Bruce

Figures of Collection and (Post)Colonial Processes in

Major John Richardson’s Wacousta and

Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water

Manina Jones

Stolen Life? Reading through Two I’s in Postcolonial

Collaborative Autobiography

Karen E. Macfarlane

A Place to Stand On: (Post)colonial Identity in

The Diviners and The Rain Child

Amy Kroeker

A Place Through Language: Postcolonial Implications

of Mennonite/s Writing in Western Canada

Jim Zucchero

What’s Immigration Got to Do with It? Postcolonialism and

Shifting Notions of Exile in Nino Ricci’s Italian-Canadians

Marie Vautier

Religion, Postcolonial Side-by-sidedness, and la transculture

Robert Budde

After Postcolonialism: Migrant Lines and the Politics of Form

in Fred Wah, M. Nourbese Philip, and Roy Miki

PART 4 : Meditations on the Question

Len Findlay

Is Canada a Postcolonial Country?

Terry Goldie

Answering the Questions

Victor J. Ramraj

Answering the Answers, Asking More Questions

Stephen Slemon

Afterword

Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index

LAURA MOSS

Preface

Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian Literature

I first posed the question Is Canada Postcolonial? in a paper at the 1999 Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (accute) Conference in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Since the topic was clearly beyond the scope of a single paper, the Is Canada Postcolonial? Conference was organized in 2000 at the University of Manitoba. In the call for papers beside the central Is Canada Postcolonial? question, several other related questions were also suggested for possible consideration. These included: Do theories associated with postcolonialism—such as those concerned with marginality, power, alterity, resistance, and historical revisionism—apply constructively into a Canadian context? Is postcolonial theory in Canada racially or culturally grounded? What is the nature of postcoloniality in a global economic situation? Are some Canadian writers more postcolonial than others? Can postcolonial theory be fruitfully applied to First Nations literatures? Is it possible for the discussion of postcoloniality to go beyond contemporary writing to include writing from earlier times? (Or, is The History of Emily Montague postcolonial?) What is gained for the literature of Canada by conferring or denying postcolonial status? Many of these questions were debated at the conference. Some participants chose to approach the questions through close readings of individual texts, while others chose to directly address the intersection of postcolonial theory and Canadian literary culture. There were a surprising number of papers interested in nineteenth-century Canadian literary works and a not very surprising focus on literature by First Nations writers. Most of the papers in this collection began at the conference.

The conference, however, was only the starting point of discussion for the participants. Since the fall of 2000, participants have been in dialogue with one another and carried on the discussions begun in Winnipeg. The essays of those present at the conference have been substantially revised in light of the lively debate and the rigorous comments of the audience, and in light of the comments by the readers who reviewed their papers for this collection. As well, the collection introduces a few new voices into the mix. George Elliott Clarke’s essay, for example, speaks to an editorial desire to widen the terms of discussion and the parameters of Canadian literature.

The collection is driven by a shared concern with the place of Canadian literature in ever-evolving literary theories and the place of Canada in theories and practices of nationalism, postnationalism, and postcolonialism. Such places, however, differ for each of the authors. I have encouraged diversity instead of superimposing some kind of unifying critical methodology. Each paper addresses the question Is Canada Postcolonial? either in brief or in full. The responses to the question range from the wholehearted inclusion of Canada and the other invader-settler countries in postcolonial studies to a vehement rejection of examining these contexts in such terms. No two contributors seem to agree on precisely what Canada and, more contentiously, postcolonial mean or what the answers might be. I have chosen not to standardize the spelling of postcolonial, post-colonial, or post-Colonial because the subtle distinctions (the hyphen and choice of case) are telling reminders of the variety of definitions of the word at work in the collection.¹ Indeed definitions proposed by some can be seen to be on a collision course with those proposed by others. This might be because of the contentious nature of the issues raised. It might also be because so much of postcolonial theory is manufactured and imported to Canada from the United States, Australia, Britain, India, and other locations outside Canada that terms manufactured elsewhere sometimes fit uneasily, if at all, into a Canadian context. Overall, however, the essays do engage with a remarkable degree of consistency with issues such as displacement, hybridity, collaboration, memory, ambivalence, and syncretism in a Canadian context. Of central concern is how Canadian literature engages with British and American (cultural) imperialism and neo-imperialism; positions First Nations literatures; rethinks history in colonial and chronologically post-colonial works of fiction and poetry; examines constructions of race and ethnicity in poetry and prose; explores the flawed memory of Canadians; differentiates between multicultural policy and practice; undergoes canonical revision; and writes back to colonial education. W.H. New begins his chapter on Canada in his 1975 introduction to Commonwealth and South African literature, Among Worlds, with: searching for the national identity is a kind of congenital art form in Canada (101). In 2003, one might say that searching for a postcolonial identity now epitomizes such an art form. This collection wrestles with the current state of postcolonialism and postcolonial issues from the vantage point of Canadians and those working on Canadian literature.

A book like this is determined in content as well as quality by the contributors who agree to participate in the project. It would have been preferable to have more representation from First Nations scholars and critics, and from Quebec.² These were not as forthcoming as might have been wished, although, ironically, one of the strongest themes in the book is a rehearsal of Len Findlay’s call to Always Indigenize!

Many people have joined together in the creation of this collection. First, I would like to thank the contributors for being a pleasure to work with. I appreciate their continued commitment to this project. Several funding agencies deserve acknowledgement as well. I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for providing an Aid to Occasional Conferences Grant for the conference. The University of Manitoba Faculty of Arts was generous in its support of my research as was the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

The University of Manitoba Department of English and the Institute for the Humanities provided support for the organization of the conference. Debra Dudek, Arlene Young, and Natalie Johnson joined me in all the stages of organization leading up to the conference. I thank them all. Several colleagues read drafts of the collection and provided me with indispensable advice on the direction of the manuscript. I would like to thank Brenda Austin-Smith, Alison Calder, Warren Cariou, David Cuthbert, Dana Medoro, Adam Muller, and Pam Perkins, in particular, for their collegiality in the penthouse of the Fletcher Argue Building. Amy Kroeker worked tirelessly pulling together twenty-three different styles of formatting and footnotes to create a comprehensive package for publication. She deserves my greatest thanks for creating order out of chaos. Thank you also to Cliff Eyland for allowing us to use his untitled painting on the cover and to Monique Mojica for permission to reproduce Jim Miller’s photograph of the Wooden Indian pose, from her play Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots, in Diana Brydon’s essay. I would especially like to thank my colleagues at my new academic home at the University of British Columbia for support and encouragement during the final stages of this project: particularly Sherrill Grace, Erin Hurley, and Bill New. Thanks also to Ranjini Mendis, Wendy Robbins, and CACLALS for their support. My appreciation goes to Brian Henderson, Elin Edwards, and Leslie Macredie at Wilfrid Laurier University Press for their guidance and assistance throughout the publication process.

Finally, I would like to thank Simon and Owen for providing a wonderful balance in my life. Mom, Julia, Beverley, and Dad, thanks for the advice and support at every stage (from paper, to conference, to book). Most of all, Fred, thank you for your never-ending encouragement throughout the entire process.

NOTES

1 I have also chosen not to standardize spelling to be either American or British, so decolonisation and decolonization, for example, are both used.

2 This is a book primarily about English-Canadian responses to postcolonialism. For more detailed responses to the position of Quebec within Canada and the specific situation of Quebec culture in postcolonial debates, see the forthcoming special issue of Quebec Studies (Fall 2003) called Is Quebec Postcolonial? edited by Vincent Desroches.

LAURA MOSS

Is Canada Postcolonial? Introducing the Question

In a 1972 article, National Identity and the Canadian Novel, published in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Canadian Fiction, Frank Birbalsingh compares ex-colonial nations and their emphases on national identity in the face of colonial structures.

National identity is an important literary theme especially among colonial or neo-colonial peoples who have not evolved an organic sense of community or cultural homogeneity. Obvious parallels exist in social and cultural conditions that prevail among such peoples. These parallels exist, for example, between Canada and other self-governing Commonwealth states, most of which were established after World War Two. The basic similarity between Canada and these ex-colonial states, for example, Australia, India, or Nigeria, is that they are all in the process of trying to build nations on a common model that is predominantly British. Wide contrasts and local differences inevitably prevail in many cases where the countries receiving the British model are greatly varied in geography, linguistic forms and historical experiences. But, in general, all these countries experience broadly the same cultural instability and uncertainty that attend any growing society trying to develop its own distinctive customs and manners, no matter what its original cultural models or physical resources. (57)

Thirty years later, the question of Canada’s national identity in a comparative postcolonial framework still relies on the emphasis placed on the basic similarities and/or the wide contrasts and local differences of colonial, neo-colonial, and postcolonial histories, locations, and cultures. As Birbalsingh points out, Canadian literature shared with other Commonwealth literatures a history of struggle for a post-independence national identity. Indeed, this significantly predates postcolonial studies. Just as Commonwealth literature is a precursor to World Literature Written in English, Birbalsingh’s articulation of thematic and contextual parallels and disparities provides a precursor to current debates about the place of Canada in contemporary postcolonial theories.

There has long been a debate over the legitimacy and utility of studying the literary culture of a nation like Canada in the same terms as the Anglophone literature of the more conventionally accepted post-colonial contexts of India, Trinidad, and South Africa, for example.¹ A clear divide in the postcolonial paradigm is often perceived between the invader-settler nations of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, where the process of colonization was predominantly one of immigration and settlement, and those parts of the world where colonization was more predominantly a process of displacement, impoverishment, sublimation, and even annihilation. However, too sharp a division may obscure the terrible consequences of colonialism for the Indigenous peoples in the territories settled, as it might overlook the complexity of cultural and political reconstruction in territories exploited under the economic and political imperatives of empire. Two key questions arise from the perceived dichotomy: one, can Canadian literature be considered within a postcolonial context and, two, is Canada postcolonial? Responses to the first provide a critical framework for the second.

Canada and Canadian literature are often omitted from discussions of postcolonialism, in a kind of post-Commonwealth Studies context, on the understanding that you simply cannot compare Canada and Nigeria, for example, because of the vastly different histories, relationships with imperial power, contemporary social and political environments, and current relationships to globalization. This argument is based on the submission that Canadians are simply trying to get a piece of the trendy postcolonial pie without an adequate understanding of certain profound differences. Yet, Canada as a colonizing power in relation to the First Nations must bear scrutiny, just as Nigeria needs to be accountable, for instance, in relation to the Ogoni struggle.

Although a great deal has been written about postcolonialism—as a chronological marker, a global condition, a geographical category, and a literary reading strategy—over the past fifteen years, until very recently surprisingly little has specifically addressed the position of Canada and Canadian culture. This is particularly the case with those working on postcolonial concerns outside of Canada. There is downright antagonism, often, for those who suggest that Canadian literature can be read in conjunction with postcolonial theories. Still, there are several volumes that provide important groundwork for this collection. Critics of Commonwealth literature, such as John Matthews in Tradition and Exile, W.H. New in Among Worlds, and Max Dorsinville in Caliban Without Prospero, to name a few, asked questions about Canadian literature in a global context long before the word postcolonial gained international currency. More recently, Sylvia Söderlind’s Margin/Alias, Smaro Kamboureli’s Scandalous Bodies, Dionne Brand’s Bread Out of Stone, Marie Vautier’s New World Myth, Fred Wah’s Faking It, Arun Mukherjee’s Postcolonialism: My Living, Diana Brydon’s special issue of Essays in Canadian Writing entitled Testing the Limits: Postcolonial Theories and Canadian Literatures, Christl Verduyn’s Literary Pluralities, and Himani Bannerji’s Thinking Through stand out for their engagement with a variety of postcolonialisms in relation to Canadian literary practices. These are important recent antecedents to the work that is presented in this collection. Clarifying the role of critical approaches to Canadian culture is increasingly important for critics dealing with the rapidly changing shape of Canadian literature. Because postcolonial theory has gained credence throughout the world, it is productive to ask how Canadians can participate in this global dialogue and how the conversation may include the culture and literature of Canada. Whereas in the past, the focus of postcolonial discussions in Canada has been directed outward in a comparative context (Canadian culture compared to the cultures produced in other locations), it is now more often concentrated inward to look at the complexities within Canada itself. This collection does not answer the question definitively, but rather, adds almost two dozen voices to the conversations already in place.

In her article English Canada’s Postcolonial Complexities, Donna Bennett reminds us that asking postcolonial questions of English-Canadian literature can be productive so long as we do not impose a single kind of postcolonialism (196). While it is certainly useful and necessary to remember the plurality of postcolonial theories in a Canadian context, this statement also points to one of the many pitfalls of using the term postcolonialism in Canada. The term postcolonial changes definitions, or at least emphasis, if one is looking at the text itself (its plot, theme, characterization, or politics), the author and her place of origin, or the community from which she is writing. Depending on the focus of postcolonial studies, Canada may or may not be included in the list of postcolonial locations. In addition to referring to the results of the interaction between imperial culture and indigenous cultural practices, the term postcolonial may also refer to the location of the production of the text (the former colonies of the British empire, for example). Or, postcolonialism may be roughly defined as a concern with a series of issues including: cultural imperialism; emergent nationalisms within a nation and between nations; negotiating history and the process of decolonization; hierarchies of power, violence, and oppression; censorship; race and ethnicity; multiculturalism; appropriation of voice; revising the canon and writing back to colonial education; and Indigenous languages and englishes versus Standard English. All of these issues are at play, to a greater or lesser degree, in Canadian literature. Does this, however, make Canadian literature particularly postcolonial, or does it simply mean that the application of postcolonial theory is perhaps sometimes relevant to Canadian contexts?

The question of Canada’s postcoloniality, I realize, relies rather heavily on the concept of the nation-state and the almost inevitable generalizations that must be made to answer such a broadly conceived question. It may even make it an unanswerable question, as Stephen Slemon suggests in his Afterword to this collection. In some ways it requires a more clear cut answer than the variously defined concept of postcolonialism can offer. Elsewhere, Slemon differentiates usefully between a postcolonial condition (global situation) and a postcolonial state (Critical 186). In this collection, the writers are interested in both the status of Canada as a postcolonial state and in the imagined manifestations of a plurality of Canadas and Canadians in Canadian literature as cultural entities that participate in postcolonial affairs. Inextricably allied with the question Is Canada Postcolonial? is the question of whether or not the literature of Canada may be productively viewed using postcolonial theory. Further, how may postcolonial theory be used profitably in the Canadian literature classroom? What does it mean on a pedagogical level to read Canadian literature postcolonially? Such questions provide the subtext for this collection.

To read a Canadian text postcolonially is to read Quebec in Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague as a synecdoche of a hybrid nation, to see the Quebecois, the Huron, and the Iroquois as figures of alterity, and to wonder why the Huron and the Iroquois have no representative voices in this polyphonic narrative. It is to read James DeMille’s Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder as a novel about cannibalism and the consumption of otherness as Maggie Kilgour reads it, and as a novel about the reinforcement of a natural colonial order when Adam and Almah assert their leadership over the Kosekins in the final pages. It is to read Charles G.D. Roberts’s Songs of the Common Day for his lack of acknowledgement of the displacement of Native peoples beside his nationalist assertion of the validity of the landscape of the Maritimes as a suitable subject for poetry. It is to read Tekahionwake/E. Pauline Johnson’s Cry for an Indian Wife as performing ethnicity in the same fashion as the poet herself did when acting the roles of both the Mohawk Princess and the Victorian woman.

In twentieth-century Canadian literature, reading postcolonially is to read the romanticized portraits of the vanishing race in Duncan Campbell Scott’s The Forsaken and Onondaga Madonna in light of Scott’s position in the Department of Indian Affairs advocating the assimilationist policies that facilitated the vanishing of races. It is to read Earle Birney’s poem David as a war-inspired national allegory. David—for whom mountains are made to see over, map, and name in a fashion paralleling Western colonial expansion—represents war-torn England and Bob, the pupil represents the maturation of a Canada learning to break free from the futile and broken idealism of the teacher. It is to read Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook as a merging of oral storytelling and modernist prose poetry that juxtaposes the doubly hooked figures of Coyote, James, Lenchen, and Felix. It is to read Rudy Wiebe’s epic of Mennonite immigration, The Blue Mountains of China, as a necessary precursor to his novel The Temptations of Big Bear, and to debate the question of the appropriation of voice in both novels. It is to read Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners as Morag’s attempt to come to terms with the disjunctive past and the present of the Métis and the Scots on the prairies while singing of Wolfe the donkless hero.

To read contemporary Canadian literature through postcolonial theory is to read the magic realism in Jack Hodgins’s The Invention of the World as postcolonial allegory, as Stephen Slemon does, or to read Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage as an allegory of the victims of history on the lower decks and the opportunists of history on the upper decks, as Diana Brydon does. It is to read Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion as an insertion of immigrant workers and immigrant stories into the history of the building of Bellrock, Toronto, and Canada. It is to read Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water as a commentary on the desire for the performance of a pan-Indian identity and as a satire of everything from Christianity to popular culture. It is to read the need to wonder how much one might endure and yet live, as Bjorn does in Laura Goodman Salverson’s The Viking Heart, beside Kristjana Gunnars’s similar need, written sixty-six years later in The Prowler. It is to read Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief as an assertion of the continuity of settler history in the portrait of the many generations of the Clann Calum Ruadh in Cape Breton as migrants bonded by love and death, alcohol and pride, loyalty and pain. It is to read Frances’s soiled Girl Guide uniform in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees as a stained symbol of youth and Empire in this dramatic reinscription of the local history of Cape Breton.

To read postcolonially is to read Monique Mojica’s Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots as both an alignment of American and Canadian histories of exploitation and a subsequent erasure of the border between the countries and the specificities of their histories. It is to read border-crossing in Janette Turner Hospital’s Borderline or Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water. It is to read diasporic migration in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost. It is to read Tomson Highway’s use of Cree in Kiss of the Fur Queen as a small step towards redressing the damage of residential schools depicted in the novel. It is to read the space between the local and the post-national in Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand and SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe, as Alison Calder does. It is to read of the hypocrisy of local government in the displacement of the people of Africville in George Boyd’s Unconsecrated Ground. It is to read of the disappearance and reappearance of a black community in Vancouver in Wayde Compton’s anthology Bluesprint. It is to read George Elliot Clarke’s Whylah Falls and acknowledge a desire to decide whether Scratch Seville is black or white, as Maya Simpson does. It is to read Clarke’s work on the development of Africadian literature from the late eighteenth century to the present in Odysseys Home beside Execution Poems or Blue as a response to the notion that blackness in Canada is a recent phenomenon. It is to read Fred Wah’s bio-text Diamond Grill beside his treatise on hybridity, Faking It, or to read Dionne Brand’s polemical essays in Bread Out of Stone or Map to the Door of No Return beside her lyrical and harsh love poetry in No Language is Neutral. It is to read the murder mystery of Ganesh let loose in Calgary in Ashok Mathur’s Once Upon an Elephant. It is to read Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers, and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance as Canadian literature even though Canada is only mentioned in passing in Mootoo’s novel, and is not mentioned at all in Baldwin’s novel or in Mistry’s. To paraphrase In the Skin of a Lion’s epigraph from John Berger, to read Canadian literature postcolonially is to accept that never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.

To read these specific works of poetry, fiction, and drama postcolonially, in these wide terms, is perhaps to resurrect the much maligned thematics of the 1970s or to risk being reductive, oversimplified, and prescriptive, and consequently risk decontextualizing or depoliticizing the texts. However, it is also, perhaps, a way to strategically open the literary works to the possibility of reading revised or new versions of history, nation-building, nation-deconstructing, and Canadian identities. It may even provide a space in which it is possible to introduce the context and the politics of the production and consumption of the texts into the classroom. Surely it depends on who is reading, who is listening, and why. To teach literature through the application of postcolonial theories in the classroom is to teach with an eye on the historical inequalities of colonialism and an eye on contemporary injustices brought about by cultural imperialism, neo-colonialism, and globalization. The discussion, however, goes beyond the application of theories to specific works of Canadian literature, addressing the implications on a larger scale.

There are such widely divergent responses to the question of Canada’s postcoloniality, that critics can only seem to agree on the complexity of the issues it raises. The answer to this question within Canada is often an equivocal yes… and no… and maybe. When I began thinking about the question Is Canada Postcolonial? I came up with a different answer every time I posed the question. Regardless of my point of entry, all answers seemed to begin with it depends. My answer, according to Diana Brydon in her paper in this collection, is the typical Canadian response. It depends on whether or not you:

• focus on Canada as a member of the British Commonwealth;

• focus on the vastly different histories of the countries in that Commonwealth;

• view Canada as both an invader and settler colony;

• view Canada as holding two solitudes and/or other solitudes;

• see Canada as a nation of immigrants;

• see Canada continuing the colonization of First Nations people;

• isolate Canada as a member of the G8 and a powerful player in globalization;

• isolate Canada as a country with pockets of poverty;

• define Canadian primarily as not American;

• think of a Molson I am Canadian! identity;

• consider multiculturalism in Canada to be more than a series of folklore festivals; and/or

• consider Canada to be a nation of writers from widely diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

The conditional clauses continue rolling off the tongue. In order to counter the charge of being overly limited in scope, even some of the harshest critics of the inclusion of Canada in postcolonial studies will say an emphatic no, but will follow it shortly with a reference to work by an exceptional group: maybe First Nations writers, maybe recent immigrant writers, maybe immigrant writers from other postcolonial locations, maybe nonwhite writers, maybe other marginalized writers, maybe women writers, maybe gay male writers, or maybe writers from religious minorities. The repetition of maybe foregrounds the impossibility of a simple answer to the question of Canada’s, or even Canadian literature’s, relationship with postcolonialism.

Two arguments that pave the way for the opinions recently generated in favour of including Canada and other invader-settler cultures in postcolonial discussions and reading them in postcolonial terms concentrate on the role of education as a tool of colonial rule and on the role of nationalism in the development of postindependence communities. Both arguments have been used to justify comparisons between invader-settler works of literature and literature produced in other less contentiously postcolonial locations. The first argument is based on the premise that there is a fundamental need for resistance to the European history and culture imposed on (ex-)colonies through the education system regardless of (or in spite of) their locations. The central idea is that the literature taught as part of the civilizing mission of colonialism does not adequately reflect the local environments of the readers. Instead, it often presents an English norm beside the colonial exotic. It is what leads most emphatically into the writing back model of post-colonialism or postcolonial literature as corrective in its resistance. Consequently, comparisons of various rewritings of canonical literary works (such as the proliferation of texts, globally, that rework The Tempest, Jane Eyre, Pygmalion, Robinson Crusoe, Heart of Darkness, and the Bible, to name the most popular works) across borders are not only justified because of the shared subject matter but also yield important strategies of educational decolonization in a range of contexts.

There are also authors who effectively address the cultural imperialism of the education system by de-exoticizing local environments as they set their literary works within a particularly Canadian space and show how ideologically constructed that space has been. Canadian literature has many examples of works that are pointedly located in a Canadian cultural, political, historical, and geographical landscape, sometimes presumably in response to the teaching of colonial models. This is often viewed in tandem with the development of a Canadian national identity. Robert Kroetsch’s work from the 1970s (such as Badlands and Seed Catalogue), for example, illustrates a desire to validate the local in terms of its own history in response to the familiar notion that history happened elsewhere. The example of Kroetsch’s work points to the fact that some of what is now carried under the umbrella term of postcolonialism, in effect predates the term. It also points to one of the shortcomings of regarding literature as indirectly responding to education systems in an international postcolonial framework. When he writes that the authorized history, the given definition of history, was betraying us on those prairies, Kroetsch is responding as much, if not more, to the domination of wrong-headed histories written by Eastern historians—meaning those writing from Ontario—as he is to the histories of Europe (Alberta Writer 76). Canadians sometimes write back to other Canadians.

The second argument that is a precursor to the current debates about postcolonialism in Canada integrates the emphasis on nationalism that exploded after 1967 in Canada into a discussion of the development of nationalisms around the globe. Such is Birbalsingh’s argument cited above. The argument is based on the premise that since Canadian literature shares a history of struggle for a postindependence national identity with other Commonwealth literatures, it provides a useful point of comparison with those literatures and in the same terms as those literatures. Canadian literature is necessarily implicated in a colonial legacy because of its continued focus on issues of identity and nation, and in postcolonial responses to that legacy. This argument is one of the earliest legitimations of responding to the literatures of Canada and Trinidad, for example, using the same theoretical framework. Such a broad use of postcolonialism, however, has been criticized for not being careful enough in its differentiation between the histories of colonialism and nationalism. It has also been argued that, within Canada, nationalism relies on a unified notion of nation that is outdated and exclusionary. Arun Mukherjee, for instance, has criticized a homogeneous version of Canadian nationalism because it is for us non-whites a racist ideology that has branded us ‘un-Canadian’ by its acts of omission and commission (Canadian Nationalism 79).

Further, many scholars question the very concept of nationalism in Canada because it is so often predicated on the dissolution of the First Nations. Criticizing the failed attempt to negotiate a structural recognition of [First Nations] constitutional rights to land and self-governance of the British Columbia Treaty Commission (BCTC), Taiaiake Alfred argues that with rare exception, indigenous people do not accept the founding premise of the BCTC process: indigenous nations must surrender their independent political existence and ownership of their lands to Canada (Deconstructing 2). In a recent lecture entitled The Crisis in Aboriginal Leadership, Alfred distinguished between the terms Aboriginal and First Nations, precisely because Aboriginal, as in Aboriginal peoples of Canada, is not a Native language word but a word created by government in what he calls the culmination of assimilation policies (Crisis). For Alfred, the term First Nations reflects a remnant of the idea of nation-to-nation communication and it retains the notion of distinction from Canada. Aboriginal as it gets translated into policy, law, and practice, follows what Alfred calls the objective of the Canadian government, which is to assimilate First Nations people into multicultural Canada. The term Aboriginal, he argues, says that you are an ethnic group within Canada and as such are subject to the basic structures of society even though those structures are built on the destruction of [First Nations] people and on the domestication of a formerly free people by taking away land, health, and the basics needed for psychological survival (Crisis). In personal correspondence, Alfred responded to Is Canada Postcolonial? with no, it’s not postcolonial but neo-colonial, but even that may not be true, because that would assume that it actually went through a different phase from its original colonial state.² Thus, Canada is emphatically not post-colonial but is still actively engaging in colonial practices.

According to some contemporary critics, however, it is precisely because of the position of Canada as a colonizing nation that postcolonial theory is so important and pressing in this context. This is where the distinction between post-colonial as a chronological marker and postcolonial as a reading strategy or a set of issues is particularly relevent. In the case of the latter, postcolonial discourses in Canada encompass considerations of colonialism so that, for some, there is little doubt as to whether Canadian literature specifically or invader-settler literature in general, including writing from Australia and New Zealand, should be included in postcolonial discussions. For Brydon, it is vital to note that postcolonial frames of interpretation are most enabling when they facilitate distinctions between different orders of colonial experience, rather than, on one hand, conflating Third World and invader-settler societies as equally victimized or, on the other hand, banishing settler societies from the sphere of ‘properly’ postcolonial subject matter (Reading 2). For Brydon, then, it is precisely the point of comparison that can be the most potent in discussions of postcolonialism as such comparison can highlight the distinctiveness and specificity of colonial legacies.

In contrast to focussing on Canada as an agent of colonialism, some critics focus on more historically located acts of resistance to colonialism within Canada. Bennett contends that Postcolonialism is a point of view that contains within it a basic binarism: colonial opposed to post-colonial, in which postcolonial is a viewpoint that resists imperialism (168). The trouble with such a binary is that it leaves little room for the ambiguity of Canada as both colonial subject and agent. While placing emphasis on the historical relationship between Canada and Britain and on the responses to the traumas of imperialism certainly works in discussions of the nineteenth century and even some twentieth-century works of literature, it works less effectively in regard to contemporary literature. It may even be considered to be a somewhat anachronistic move. Surely those writers in Canada putatively grappling with postcolonial issues are not doing so only in response to the legacy of colonialism. While the value of exploring colonization and its aftermath is beyond debate, it is limiting to look only at contemporary culture (and fiction as a cultural product) as a response to historical events. Looking at Canada as a settler/white colony in opposition to an invaded/indigenous population is also ineffective for several reasons. First, it places Native populations in a constant state of opposition rather than separation. This not only ignores discussions of self-governance and denies the existence of the Métis but it also freezes First Nations writers in a historical role rather than integrating (not assimilating) Native writers into the larger canon of contemporary Canadian literature. Second, it does not acknowledge the fact that many contemporary Canadian writers are not of English/Scottish/Irish/French heritage and it is restrictive to view Canada as a country of writers descended from those who settled or those who were invaded. Third, it does not allow room for resistance or opposition to the very real threat of American cultural imperialism. Finally, it does not leave room to look at Canada, and Canadian literature by extension, as demographically dynamic. Each of these rejoinders is expanded upon in this collection.

Another piece in the critical framework offered by postcolonial discourse for this collection of essays on Canadian postcoloniality comes out of a response to the notion that it is somehow limiting to consider Canadian writing as anything other than multicultural literature in a transglobal world. By focusing on the relationship between art and community, however, postcolonial theory subverts the boundless context such an enterprise implies. The entry for multicultural voices in the recently published Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada begins: Alongside Canadian ‘mainstream’ literature is a literature created by numerous ethnic groups that arrived after the first British and French settlers (764). The idea that Canadian literature is divided into (at least) two streams, mainstream and ethnic, flowing in tandem, does not recognize the extent to which the mainstream of Canadian literature now includes multicultural voices. Many contemporary writers write about a Canada in which cultural diversity is presented as ordinary and unexceptional, even as they include depictions of social inequalities and what Philomena Essed has called everyday racism.

For the last three decades the Canadian population has grown more ethnically diverse at the same time as official government policy has promoted a multicultural vision of Canadian society. The policy was meant to recognize the plurality of Canada, to address what the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism called the collective will to exist of ethnic groups beside the English and the French, and to reverse the assimilationist policies of earlier governments. Some argue that because Canada is increasingly multicultural, postcolonial theories readily apply to its literature. On the one hand, Tamara Palmer Seiler joins the terms when she discusses a postcolonial, multicultural aesthetic in which postcolonialism and multiculturalism are discourses that, in complex interaction, express Canadian experience on the margins of several empires—an experience that continues to be shaped not just by difference, but by various kinds of difference, as well as by complex hybridity that is never static (62). The very nature of Canadian multicultural society means that writers often engage with issues of cultural diversity, cultural survival, and cultural innovation. These ideas, in turn, are seen by some as postcolonial.

On the other hand, Sneja Gunew differentiates between postcolonialism and multiculturalism:

[Postcolonialism] is to a great extent perceived to be defined by its specific historic legacies in a retroactive way [while] multiculturalism deals with the management (often compromised) of contemporary geo-political diversity in former imperial centres and their ex-colonies alike. It is also increasingly a global discourse since it takes into account the flow of migrants, refugees, diasporas, and their relations with nation-states. (Postcolonialism 22)

Gunew further distinguishes between literary postcolonialism (a continuation of the old notion of Commonwealth literature), literary multiculturalism (the discourse of the migrant condition), and public versions of postcolonialism and multiculturalism that are the province of state power. That all of the essays within the framework of this collection employ sundry versions of these definitions of both postcolonialism and multiculturalism, simply proves the complexity of the terms and the complications that arise in the debates.

In spite of the government’s affirmed commitment to multiculturalism as an integral part of Canadian values, clearly not all Canadians embrace the concept and many continue to debate the efficacy and desirability of the policies. A recent panel discussion on Canadian and American attitudes to multiculturalism sums up many of the problems of multiculturalism in relation to Canadian literature (Huggan and Siemerling). George Elliot Clarke, a panelist, notes that one of the main objections to the policy is that it reinforces the concept of symbolic ethnicity which provides an appearance of democratic pluralism, but is, in reality, a racist policy of assimilation at best, exclusion at worst (Huggan and Siemerling 100). Rinaldo Walcott also critiques multiculturalism by arguing that it reduces cultures to their basic denomination, which turns them into folklore (Rude 43). Neil Bissoondath has declared the government’s version of multiculturalism, or ethnicity as public policy, to be a forum for encouraging exoticism and fostering social divisiveness (212). Multiculturalism has resulted in pigeonholing some authors as ethnic, racially marking other authors, and dictating topics worthy of consideration by other authors. Such criticisms must be read beside theories of multiculturalism ranging from Stanley Fish’s notion of boutique multiculturalism, to Charles Taylor’s politics of recognition, and from Slavoj Zizek’s idea that multiculturalism is a form of liberal racism, to Susan Moller Okin’s question Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Still, Clarke is convincing when he writes:

Multiculturalism in Canada may have been promulgated as a means of trying to gloss over issues of race, language, and class; but I think that writers and artists in Canada have been able to take advantage of the policy, and to continue to promote it as a means of getting their works out to the public as well as a means of establishing their cultural presences within their work. (Huggan and Siemerling 104)

In this project several essays implicitly and explicitly explore ways in which writers have taken advantage of the policy, as Clarke says, in the production of their literary works. Others, Chelva Kanaganayakam most notably, disentangle the myths of multiculturalism from the subject of postcolonialism.

The answer to the question of Canadian literature’s postcoloniality for some critics, notably those writing from outside Canada, but certainly not limited to them, is emphatically no. Broadly speaking, Canada is simply too rich, too white, and too strong to be considered beside other postcolonial locations or in the same politicized terms as other actual colonies,