"Not Crossing the Nation's Borders but Nevertheless Bordering on Transgression"
Donna Pennee (Guelph)
This paper seeks to address the call for papers through the question of the teaching of Canadian Literatures as a practice that constitutes both a continuation of and a departure from the institutionalized history of literature as a key mode of delivery in civic (i.e., in "normalizing") education. As a thesis, this is a statement of such obviousness that it would seem not to bear repeating, yet it is precisely to "the obvious" that pedagogy must attend insofar as the obvious performs so much social—and so much complex—work. An equal obviousness is that literary studies are being conducted in an era of "globalization" in which the very categories on which the curricular edifice has stood (territorial sovereignty and cultural sovereignty as mutually constitutive) can no longer (pretend to) bear the weight of cumulative historical, geopolitical changes and the concomitant diversification of "culture" as a vehicle for expressing and organizing (theoretically) homogeneous social structures. While the present moment of globalization implies also a "post-cultural" moment in the anthropological sense that "cultures" are no longer experienced or distributed (and thus no longer susceptible to analysis) as "bounded," the historical impetus of postcolonial responses to a much earlier moment of globalization (i.e., imperial and colonial territorial expansion) remains an impetus grounded in both cultural and geopolitical specificities. To put together the terms "postcolonial" and "Canadian Literatures" is to keep on the table for discussion how the literary is both an historically developed and an historically imminent site for arguing that culture represents identity and processes of identification. Literary cultural expression has been both a source of and response to colonization: as such, postcolonial literary studies are necessarily a methodological hinge between (perhaps the end of?) cultural nationalism and (perhaps a more benign?) globalization. In this space, such an argument and the pedagogical moves that it entails assumes that some form of citizenship it still to be found and acculturated in a university literature classroom.
Given such considerations, the proposed objective of this paper, then, is to theorize this space of literary citizenship as a space for critical comparative studies in an also methodologically bounded space. In other words, the paper will address the degree to which a would-be transgressive pedagogy depends on the ongoing power of the nation as a referent and a concept, even as we may disagree with the term's uses, or may be wary of practices in its name. Literary citizenship entails communicative acts that function to the degree that they do precisely because we perform (in part) as subjects in our production and recognition of the attributes of "Canada" as a nation and of literatures as identificatory, though we are differentially positioned to do so. While it is true (or a truism?) that such terms as "nation," "nationalism," and "culture" do not have singular or stable meanings, they are terms that nevertheless circulate in day-to-day power relations, inside and outside of the geographic entity of "Canada" with sometimes pernicious but always sufficient stability to make a difference. That such terms circulate, that they have explanatory power, that they have a high though not homogeneous recognition factor, that they are key to certain actions and affects in the world despite their ambiguity, and that they are contentious terms precisely because people differentially located and empowered cannot agree on their contents (and are differentially on the receiving end of their meanings and/as practices), implies that the curricular organization of teaching national literatures is unavoidably engaged in questions of postcoloniality, that the teaching of postcolonial methods of reading is unavoidably entrenched in questions of nation, nationalism, and in the (un)binding and (re)distribution of cultures as grounded (but not necessarily landed) forms of citizenship. The question that arises then is: How Arnoldian (i.e., normative) does the postcolonial literary project remain, or, why must borders always be assumed to be a bad thing? (The paper will work with theorists of globalization, community, citizenship, and policy studies rather than with single creative texts.)
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"Place-Conscious Writers: Constructing the Canadian Nation in the Works of Mary di Michele and Lola Lemire Tostevin"
Shelley Boyd (McGill)
Within contemporary Canadian women's writing, studies of nation and place have been few. Influential is critic Patricia Smart's argument that feminist writers, such as Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, and Betsy Warland, have neglected the category of nation in their writing, preferring a more "utopian feminism-spiralling out of national reality into mythical, woman-affirming spaces, islands, or deserts presented as cut off from national cultures, though paradoxically they are often located in other countries" (17). In terms of the French feminist theory that has influenced writers like Brossard and Marlatt, Smart's argument may hold some validity. Luce Irigaray's notion of the plurality of woman's autoeroticism in This Sex Which is Not One and Hélène Cixous's dark territory of feminine difference in "The Laugh of the Medusa" tend toward the universal, denying the specifics of place. Critic Frank Davey appears to agree with Smart's assessment of Marlatt's novel Ana Historic: "What may appear superficially to be a political novel, a novel that challenges from a feminist perspective how society is structured, . . . is in the end not a political novel at all. For the pre-Oedipal space it both dreams of and realizes as the 'home' of woman is yet another utopian plentitude, eternal, natural" (208).
Although Smart and Davey witness a tendency in contemporary Canadian women's writing to construct woman-affirming spaces and to avoid national realities, one cannot deny the efforts of such feminist writers as Mary di Michele and Lola Lemire Tostevin, who examine the particulars and politics of their own senses of national place. As hybrid writers who both use two languages, di Michele and Tostevin display rigorous considerations of nation within their works. In her early books of poetry, di Michele interrogates the experience of her Italian immigrant family, creating an ethnic space
within Canada. Similarly, Tostevin writes about her marginal position as a French-Canadian living in the predominantly anglophone province of Ontario. Di Michele and Tostevin are place-conscious writers, working from the boundaries of linguistic, cultural communities. In their recent writing, di Michele and Tostevin have further complicated their constructs of place and particularly nation, including other locales in addition to their native and adopted countries. In Luminous Emergencies (1990), for example, di
Michele places herself in Chile and acts as a witness to the atrocities of Chile's 1973 political unrest. Similarly, in The Jasmine Man (2001), Tostevin's Canadian protagonist learns about the French people's history of violence against Algerians and experiences the problematic tensions of race through her extramarital relationship with an Arab man from Tunisia. Both works reveal di Michele's and Tostevin's continuing sensitivity regarding
the politics of place, as the racial and gendered hierarchies of other locales are linked to and alter their understandings of the Canadian nation.
Indeed, di Michele's and Tostevin's attention to specifics of place (rather than evasion of it), their focus on national reality (rather than on utopian or mythic visions) challenge Smart's hypothesis. Rather than spiralling out of their senses of Canadian nation, di Michele and Tostevin choose to focus in on these constructs. Even when they are situated in remote and distant locales imbued with the mythological, these writers bring myth and the imaginary to bear on their constructions of a national reality. For example, di Michele's Debriefing the Rose (1998), which focuses on the Greek island of Lesbos, and Tostevin's Cartouches (1995), which explores Egypt in connection with the death of her father, reveal these writers' on-going considerations of the Canadian nation within their writing practices. Situated either on an island or in the desert—two geographical places that Smart lists as disconnected from national realities—these writers appear to create non-Canadian emphases in these works; there are, nonetheless, references to Canadian place names and allusions to other Canadian writers. How do these potentially disruptive Canadian presences impact readers as their attention is drawn both outside and within these writers' constructs of the Canadian nation. If di Michele's and Tostevin's writing explores their place in Canada and as Canadian women, then it also places them as such. Examining how these writers generate the specifics of nation as they move between their constructions of Canada and their visions of Greece and Egypt, I will focus directly on intersections of place revealed in and through language. The concept of nation is obviously a complex one that has been variously interpreted. For di Michele and Tostevin, nation is a geographic and social place—marked by distinct
boundaries, yet still shaped by other locales. In addition, this place called a nation is a linguistically constructed one, formulated via a writer's on subjective position and creative interpretation.
Work Cited
Smart, Patricia. "The (In?)Compatibility of Gender and Nation in Canadian and Québécois Feminist Writing." Essays on Canadian Writing 54 (Winter 1994): 12-22.
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"Where Is Here? Citizenship and Difference Through (Canadian) First Nations' Literature"
Erin Vollick (McGill)
Pointing to a central tension in the creation of a distinct Canadian literary identity, poet Earle Birney wrote, "it's only by our lack of ghosts/ we're haunted" ("Can. Lit") It was critic Northrop Frye, however, who developed the term mythopoeia to articulate the mythic structures that Canadian writing required, answering the questions "who am I?" and "where is here?" This paper will demonstrate, however, that in attempting to create a
national literature Canada closes its borders at the risk of paradox and hypocrisy.
This paper will reexamine Ranu Samantrai's critique of Canadian citizenship
and difference ("States of Belonging: Pluralism, Migrancy, Literature") through First Nations' literature. Whereas Samantrai argues that ethnic and cultural difference is reductive in determining Canadian literary citizenship, I will argue that writing by the First Nations —often ignored or subsumed within debates over Canadian literature— further complicates a critique of difference and marginalization, and undermines the very concept of Canadian nationalism.
Using Thomas King's "Borders" and Jeannette Armstrong's Slash, I will explore the concept of nationhood within nation(s), where Aboriginal identity is both enclosed and erased by the national and literary border between Canada and the U.S. Armstrong's narrator Slash, for instance, believes that the struggle for control over ancestral lands and
self-determination within individual bands is negated by colonization; as Native peoples are collectively assimilated by the Nation-State(s), so must they fight collectively for liberation. Likewise, King's "Borders" describes a situation in which Mohawk citizenship literally catches a family between the U.S. and Canadian border, exemplifying how the First Nations differ fundamentally in their conceptions of identity and citizenship. Moreover, these works illustrate that in Native (Canadian) literature —where
land, as opposed to borders, is an integral source of identity and heritage— Frye's question "who am I?" is eclipsed by the deliberation "where is here?"
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