Is Canada Postcolonial?: Unsettling Canadian Literature

Are We There Yet? Reading the “Post-Colonial” and The Imperialist in Canada

The Imperialist, although rather long and somewhat given to politics, is a thoroughly readable and stimulating book. It is photographic in its fidelity to local conditions and types, while its subtle humor and literary finish set it far about the average novel. Anyone may read it with interest and satisfaction. But to the Canadian […], it means more than any other Canadian story, for it gives with truth and with art a depiction of our own community as it appears in the “pattern and the colors” of the Empire. There is much that is trivial, much that is amusing, and a great deal to be proud of in the Elgins of Ontario—and as Canadians and Imperialists, in the best sense of that abused word, we owe a debt to Mrs. Everard Cotes, who has told our story. —“J.G.,” Rev. of The Imperialist, Saturday Night, 4 June 1904, cited in Duncan Back to the “Post”: Revisiting the “Pitfalls” of the Term In 1992, Anne McClintock drew attention to what was then—and ten years later still is—a fundamental problematic for post-colonial theory, when she suggested that the term itself might be, as she put it, “prematurely celebratory” (294). The very existence of the term and the theory, that is, and what McClintock noted then as its nearly “global” (294) application in scholarship, can, and frequently does, function as a comforting affirmation that, because the British and other nineteenth-century empires are no longer discernible as political structures, the era of colonization is over, and we—globally, more or less—are in the postcolonial , as we are in the postmodern and the postfeminist. Exceptions Notes are on page 189. 177 C E C I L Y D E V E R E U X Are We There Yet? Reading the “Post-Colonial” and The Imperialist in Canada to the post-colonial thus understood as an index of the contemporary are, implicitly, regressive or anachronistic: they have not come out of the age of imperialism, now over. However, while the imperial apparatuses of the last century appear to have been dismantled with the removal of imperial governments, bureaucracies, and educational systems, the “post” in post-colonial, in an important sense, anticipates what has not, as McClintock rightly indicates, conclusively happened on an international scale. The dismantling of empire remains incomplete in many formerly imperial locations: it is not difficult to see how, as she suggests, Canada, the United States, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, all “remain […] break-away settler colonies that have not undergone decolonization” (295). While they are themselves “distinguished by their formal independence from the founding metropolitan country” (they are not “colonies” nor are they part of another nation’s empire), they are also characterized, she observes, by their own “continued control over the appropriated colony” (295). They continue to function within the old imperial ideological systems that were themselves fundamentally colonial in their imperatives, particularly, as is well established , with regard to Indigenous peoples and non-white immigration. The organizing principles of these societies and some of their national policies pertaining to race and citizenship have changed in each case, but the structures themselves remain at least to some extent intact, by virtue of the figuring of “national” history as the history of white settlement , and by virtue of the continued reproduction of that history in the present in the discourses of national “identity.” Thus, McClintock writes, given what she indicates is the fact of Native Americans’ continued endurance of some of the forms and effects of imperial ideology, it is only by a “fiat of historical amnesia [that] the United States of America…[can] qualify as ‘post-colonial’” (294). Canada, similarly, cannot yet “qualify”: it is readily apparent that a national project of recognition and amendment of the long history of assimilative practices with regard to First Nations peoples remains, at least in 2001, incomplete, as does the recognition of a range of national acts of exclusion and protectionism. Some effects of these acts have been acknowledged, and, in some instances, some redress has been made, as in the cases of the internment of Japanese-Canadians during and after the Second World War and of the wrongful sexual sterilization of people considered to be “mentally deficient” in Alberta and British Columbia between the 1920s and the 1970s. Other cases of colonial 178 C E C I L Y D E V E R E U X [18.218.184.214] Project MUSE (2024-04-24...