Transnational Canadas

Kit Dobson

Description

Transnational Canadas marks the first sustained inquiry into the relationship between globalization and Canadian literature written in English. Tracking developments in the literature and its study from the centennial period to the present, it shows how current work in transnational studies can provide new insights for researchers and students.

Arguing first that the dichotomy of Canadian nationalism and globalization is no longer valid in today’s economic climate, Transnational Canadas explores the legacy of leftist nationalism in Canadian literature. It examines the interventions of multicultural writing in the 1980s and 1990s, investigating the cultural politics of the period and how they increasingly became part of Canada’s state structure. Under globalization, the book concludes, we need to understand new forms of subjectivity and mobility as sites for cultural politics and look beyond received notions of belonging and being.

An original contribution to the study of Canadian literature, Transnational Canadas seeks to invigorate discussion by challenging students and researchers to understand the national and the global simultaneously, to look at the politics of identity beyond the rubric of multiculturalism, and to rethink the slippery notion of the political for the contemporary era.

Sujets

• Literary criticism

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 07 avril 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554586684
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 16 Mo

Extrait

TRANSNATIONAL CANADAS
TRANSNATIONAL CANADAS
Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization
KIT DOBSON
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, 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.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Dobson, Kit, 1979-
Transnational Canadas : Anglo-Canadian literature and globalization / Kit Dobson.
(TransCanada series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-55458-063-7 (paper) ISBN 978-1-55458-165-8 (e-book)
1. Canadian literature (English) -20th century-History and criticism. 2. Canadian literature (English)-21st century-History and criticism. 3. Literature and globalization-Canada. 4. Transnationalism in literature. 5. Canadian literature (English)-Minority authors-History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: TransCanada series
PS8071.D62 2009 C810.9 0054 C2009-900709-6
2009 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada www.wlupress.wlu.ca
Cover photograph by Kit Dobson. Cover design by David Drummond. Text design by Daiva Villa, Chris Rowat Design.
This book is printed on FSC recycled paper and is certified Ecologo. It is made from 100% postconsumer fibre, processed chlorine free, and manufactured using biogas energy.
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.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION Globalization and Canadian Literature
PART ONE RECONSTRUCTING THE POLITICS OF CANADIAN NATIONALISM
INTRODUCTION TO PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE Spectres of Derrida and Theory s Legacy
CHAPTER TWO Ambiguous Resistance in Margaret Atwood s Surfacing
CHAPTER THREE Nationalism and the Void in Dennis Lee s Civil Elegies
CHAPTER FOUR Leonard Cohen s Beautiful Losers and the Crisis of Canadian Modernity
CONCLUSION TO PART ONE
PART TWO INDIGENEITY AND THE RISE OF CANADIAN MULTICULTURALISM
INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO
CHAPTER FIVE Critique of Spivakian Reason and Canadian Postcolonialisms
CHAPTER SIX Multiculturalism and Reconciliation in Joy Kogawa s Obasan
CHAPTER SEVEN Multicultural Postmodernities in Michael Ondaatje s In the Skin of a Lion
CHAPTER EIGHT Dismissing Canada in Jeannette Armstrong s Slash
CONCLUSION TO PART TWO
PART THREE CANADA IN THE WORLD
INTRODUCTION TO PART THREE
CHAPTER NINE Transnational Multitudes
CHAPTER TEN Mainstreaming Multiculturalism? The Giller Prize
CHAPTER ELEVEN Global Subjectivities in Roy Miki s Surrender
CHAPTER TWELVE Writing Past Belonging in Dionne Brand s What We All Long For
CONCLUSION TO PART THREE
CONCLUSION Transnational Canadas
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A book is a collaborative, even communal effort. This book would not exist without the communities that have contributed to it. Thanks are due to everyone who read all or part of this project since its humble beginnings in my doctoral work, my supervisor, Linda Hutcheon, and committee members Heather Murray and Daniel Heath Justice foremost among them. My gratitude goes out to those who have helped me work with this material in other ways: Len Findlay served as the external examiner of the original dissertation, and Smaro Kamboureli continues to be a hugely important supporter. They gave me invaluable feedback on aspects of my thinking and writing, as did (alphabetically speaking) David Chariandy, Chantal Fiola, Manina Jones, Maia Joseph, Lindy Ledohowski, Jody Mason, Ashok Mathur, Katherine McKittrick, Andrea Medovarski, Roy Miki, Caroline Rueckert, Jessica Schagerl, Rinaldo Walcott, and Kristen Warder. I am grateful, moreover, for the communities in which I have lived and worked while completing this project, and have nothing but gratitude for Melina Baum Singer, Allison Burgess, Sean Carrie, Anthony Collins, Rohanna Green, Em Harding, Krysta Harding, Anna Lidstone, Eli MacLaren, Elysha Mawji, Arti Mehta, and Archana Rampure. All of these people have helped my thinking and writing in one way or another, although any flaws that remain here are necessarily mine.
Earlier versions of portions of Part Three appeared in two installments in Studies for Canadian Literature ; many thanks are due to the editors and readers of the journal. I am further indebted to my colleagues and mentors past and present in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, and in the Department of English at Dalhousie University, as well as to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Killam Trusts. Wilfrid Laurier University Press deserves a great deal of gratitude for taking me on as a first-time, upstart author, Lisa Quinn in particular, and the feedback from my two anonymous readers at the press was invaluable.
Thanks are also very much due to my ever-supportive parents, Debbie and Keith, my sister, Beth, and my daughters, Alexandra and Clementine, both of whom arrived during the writing of this book. This book is dedicated to my indefatigable partner, Aubrey Hanson, who remains my most thorough and thoughtful critic, and a constant source of inspiration and conspiration.
INTRODUCTION Globalization and Canadian Literature
In David Chariandy s 2007 novel, Soucouyant , the protagonist silences his black Caribbean mother s conversation with her own memories by insisting that there are no ghosts in the Scarborough, Ontario, neighbourhood in which they live. 1 In a sense, he is right: there have not been any ghosts in that mostly white society that they can recognize for themselves. The ghosts there are those of the white families and the Indigenous people who came before them. At the same time, the protagonist s mother, Adele, in her creeping dementia, is letting ghosts from her past in both Canada and Trinidad take on a life of their own. Trinidadian spirits like the vampiric soucouyant of the book s title are becoming, in Chariandy s narrative, part of the Canadian psychosocial landscape.
Chariandy s protagonist s words are a direct echo of ones spoken by the character Mr. D - in Susanna Moodie s 1852 Roughing It in the Bush . Mr. D - states famously that there are no ghosts in Canada because the country is too new for ghosts. 2 Mr. D - means, of course, white ghosts, those of the settler community that is beginning to clear the lands through which Moodie travels. In a dialogue that David Chariandy was generous enough to conduct with me about his novel, he acknowledged the reference, suggesting that the line in his book might cast considerable irony on the idea that the spaces now named Canada have no ghosts of their own. 3 Having ghosts to call one s own profoundly affects one s relationship to space in Canada. In SKY Lee s 1990 novel, Disappearing Moon Caf , the characters who populate Vancouver s Chinatown call the whites that surround them devils and ghosts. 4 These ghosts, belonging firmly in another world, remind the novel s Chinese and Chinese Canadian characters of their outsider status.
Canada s settlers spent a long time before these recent works populating the country with ghosts of their own. These ghosts, to borrow a concept for which Daniel Coleman has recently and intelligently argued, contributed to the construction of Canada as a country of white civility. 5 This process intensified after 1951, when the Massey Commission found that despite a lengthy literary history including Moodie and other authors, neither in French nor in English have we yet a truly national literature. 6 The subsequent years witnessed an intensification of the development of precisely such literatures, with the support of a growing series of institutions and bodies. It is at the point of such growth that this book begins its inquiry.
At the heart of Transnational Canadas lies the argument that, from a literary perspective, the nationalism of Canada in the 1960s and 70s that worked to consolidate this literature, and the multiculturalisms of the 80s, 90s, and new millennium that have sought to reformulate it through dismantling its ethnocentrism, have become conjoined with the world of globalization. While it was formerly popular to celebrate the nation as a bastion against globalization on the left, today it seems that the national and the global are, instead, interlocking scales of capital. The existing arguments that seek to read Canadian literature in relation to globalization or transnational studies have made inroads in discussions of Canadian literature but have not yet been articulated in depth. This study began, at least in part, over a feeling of dissatisfaction with statements such as the following by Stephen Henighan that
the collective idea of Canada was demolished on November 21, 1988, when Canadians voted to subordinate our national project to the requirements of continental free-trade . A nation-state erodes in a neo-liberal, free trade environment: dismantle the state and the nation washes away. Deprived of the abstract ideals of a nation, people return to the Gemeinschaft : their horizons ever narr