Is Canada Postcolonial?: Unsettling Canadian Literature

Canada and Postcolonialism: Questions, Inventories, and Futures

Taking the Gramscian Inventory1 “Is Canada Postcolonial?” Canadians know the expected Canadian response. It depends. It depends on the definitions; it depends on who is asking the question, and from what position, in space, time, and privilege. Postcolonial if necessary, but not necessarily postcolonial, as both Mackenzie King and Linda Hutcheon would have it. Canada if necessary, but not necessarily Canada as originally conceived, to which a series of constitutional changes negotiated, implemented, or considered since 1867 attests. This is not a bad answer and may be the best we can provide. Yet to phrase the question this way—“Is Canada postcolonial?”—poses postcoloniality as an identity question rather than a process of radical questioning toward an unknown and destabilized future. Such a question seems to deny postcolonial theory its radical potential to challenge residual colonialisms still dominant in Canadian society. Or could this timing and this wording mean that postcolonial theory (now marginally institutionalized, its operative terms rapidly becoming normalized) has already lost that potential? As Benita Parry suggests, “postcolonial” (itself a theory suspicious of theories) is a useful term if used “with suspicion” (21). We might say the same about “Canada.” Canada, a nation suspicious of nationalisms , has been a convenient construction for enabling a certain way of life for many people, but along with its rhetoric of peace, order, and good government, Canada carries an unsavoury colonial history of theft and oppression, a history whose consequences remain to be Notes are on pages 74-77. 49 D I A N A B R Y D O N Canada and Postcolonialism: Questions, Inventories, and Futures addressed and redressed today. Understanding the politics and poetics of address and redress is the designated task of postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory has come under attack since its inception, yet it remains in my view a productive perspective through which to interrogate contemporary historical and disciplinary formations and to imagine a more socially equitable future.2 As frameworks for understanding the world, both postcolonialism and Canada require continual vigilance and renovation. I take this to be the specific purpose of the provocative question: “Is Canada Postcolonial?” The question requires taking stock of critical investments in these terms, and how best we might proceed with them, whether to employ, dismantle, or renovate them in future. David Scott, in Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality, suggests that when a concept such as postcoloniality becomes normalized, it becomes time “to ask whether the critical yield” continues to be productive , and “if not, to ask what set of questions is emerging in the new problem-space that might reconfigure and so expand the conceptual terrain in which an object is located” (8-9). Whether or not postcoloniality has yet reached this stage of normalization, we need to ask the same about the cluster of questions, including the obsessions with identity and with Quebec, which have conventionally preoccupied students of Canada. In asking if Canada fits within postcolonial models for understanding the world, we are also asking, not just what we mean by postcolonialism, but also what we mean by Canada and what kinds of questions seem most relevant to the problems Canadians face in the present. To ask, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, whether Canada is postcolonial, is to invoke a third, un-named term: that of Indigenous survival and resistance to colonialism and to Canada as currently constituted. Therefore, to ground the investigation, I offer the following object as a marker of Canada’s current relation to postcolonial concerns. This figure stands at the entrance to the large grocery store where I sometimes do my shopping. Rushing in and out, I never saw him until he was pointed out to me. A brief survey of my students revealed the same thing. All had shopped at this store; none had noticed this stereotypical “wooden Indian.” Indeed, when they encountered the parody of “the Cigar Store Indian” in Monique Mojica’s Princess Pocahantas and the Blue Spots, these students had to ask me what a “Cigar Store Squaw” was.3 They were unable initially to connect the parodic reconstruction in this photo from the play’s production to 50 D I A N A B R Y D O N their everyday lives. In Mojica’s exaggerated re-enactment, the frozen image becomes a living body assuming the pose constructed by white desire: an image of the Native freely offering the gift of place...