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Article Excerpt
In recent years, the various debates around "postcolonialism" in Canadian literary criticism have not only shaped the practice of individual scholars, but they have been exerting mounting pressure on the field to reflect on its own operating assumptions and to modify them to meet the needs of specific contexts. Among the various postcolonial concerns in contemporary Canadian intellectual life, debates about the meanings of Canadian nationalism and Canadian identity and their implications for racialized minority peoples, controversies around issues such as "appropriation," "authenticity," and "minority positioning," and critics' increasing attention to local particulars under the surface of official "multiculturalism," all bespeak critics' increasing awareness of a crisis in the cultural representations of Canada and all urgency to reconsider "Canadianness" through postcolonial perspectives. Rather than attempt to summarise the institutional history of postcolonialism in Canadian academic life, however, I will explore the problems that confront contemporary Canadian theories of postcoloniality in relation to concerns such as cultural representations of Canada and minority positioning. This discussion will draw upon such Asian Canadian texts as Joy Kogawa's Obasan, Kerri Sakamoto's The Electrical Field, and Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Card, examining the relationship of these texts to dominant and exclusionary definitions of Canadian literature.
I suggest that the discussion of "Canadian postcolonialism" would lose much of its significance if it reproduced the familiar Anglocentric narrative of nation-formation that assigns "origin" to imperial Britain, which fails to address the internal hierarchies of power based on cultural and racial factors. As Ania Loomba suggests, it is perhaps more helpful to consider "postcolonial" as a descriptive rather than an evaluative term: rather than aiming to categorize postcolonial spaces or trace its institutional history, the term would probably be most useful if it is used to signify flexibly the contestation of colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism (Loomba 12). Such a position would allow us to include as "postcolonial" subjects people displaced culturally, socially; linguistically, or geographically, by domination and oppression, people such as Aboriginals, and people in Canada of Asian, African, or Caribbean origins. For my purposes in this paper, the word "postcolonial" is useful not only because it draws attention to minority literatures which, to appropriate Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, have "emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre" (2), but also because it suggests a reading strategy or methodology appropriate to literatures that challenge a unitary value system and a single ideological climate in a Canadian context.
I will first examine some of the interactions between Canadian minority literature and Canadian national identity by foregrounding the two trends in Canadian literary production: one is the longstanding persistent concern over the need for literature to represent and nurture a unified Canadian identity; the other is the more recent but equally persistent concern of minority writers to articulate their subject positions because of and in spite of the all-encompassing nationhood.
In a country such as Canada, the formation of literary canon plays a big role in the construction of national identity'. That literature might indeed express national culture was assumed fairly widely in English-speaking Canada "from at least the time of Confederation to the 1970s" (Seiler 150). In his "The Canonization of Canadian Literature: An Inquiry into Value," Robert Lecker paints a unitary picture of the 1960s Canadian critical landscape that values "a relation among national consciousness, literary history, and a kind of idealised mimesis"(662). Lecker notes that during the 1970s, the so-called thematic critics, most notably Margaret Atwood, D. G. Jones, and John Moss, continued to valorise "the literary expressions of nationalism so central to the evolution of the canon" (662). They valued "realistic, linear, conventional novels that were the central, defining texts of the new Canadian tradition--one that valued works that affirmed the country and its people" (668). Thematic critics' interest in what literary works say about "Canada" and "Canadians" reveals that there is a unified view of what makes Canadian writing valuable. Their reading of Canadian texts became what Jeff Derksen calls "a sort of archaeological dig for hidden and universal Canadianness" (64).
In her article "Decolonization, Displacement, Disidentification: Writing and the Question of History," Lisa Lowe has argued for the complicitness of the novel with nation-state identity: "With the emergence of print culture as an institution of modernity in the West, the ... novel has held a position of primary importance in the interpellation of readers as subjects for the nation, in the gendering of these subjects, and in the racializing of spheres of activity and work" (Lowe 99). As can be observed from the formation and definition of the Canadian "Lit Canon," the novel as a form of print culture has constituted a privileged site for the unification of the citizen with the "imagined community" of the Canadian nation, while the canon elicits the reader's identification with an idealised "national" form of identity through relinquishing particularity and difference. Thus, it is not surprising that in critical guides to Canadian literature such as Margaret Atwood's Survival, Atwood constructs Canadian literature as a site where the remnants of the old colonial relationship with Britain and the new colonial relationship with the United States could be resisted and subverted, and a Canadian national identity could be established. What Atwood and others fought for is now considered by some critics as a "postcolonial" struggle aimed at decolonisation. As Ashcroft et al. claim, "the development of national literatures and criticism is fundamental to the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies. Without such developments at the national level ..., no discourse of the post-colonial could have emerged" (17). However, in spite of all the seemingly legitimate grounds for "postcolonial struggle," it was...
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