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or taking over, other cultures. Against the imperialism of any “particularism masquerading as the universal,”38 the essays in this text propose a concept of universal identity that emerges out of a socially specific context of struggle. For instance, liberal individualism, defined as a system that places the rights of the individual over that of social groups, is charged with masquerading as a universal when it claims to remain neutral in the “private ” matters of religion or culture. Liberal individualism reveals its bias by siding with the individual against the group claims. A truly democratic society must preserve the universal as an absence, or empty place, in order to protect and maintain the cultural plurality. The advantage of seeing the absence of a full identity as an empty place to be temporarily filled in by some group representing the universal is that it not only allows different cultural groups to struggle for democratic control, or dominance, but it also helps keep the national community open to cultural differences. Accepting the lack of a universal Canadian identity as an empty place therefore offers a more hospitable version of cultural identity because it compels all Canadian cultural groups to negotiate their identities on an ongoing basis. Negotiating a provisional identity demands that a cultural group perform an obligation or duty both to the universal and to the particular poles of national identity. More precisely, maintaining a provisional identity demands a “double duty”39 from all social groups toward maintaining their own particular identity and that of others. Living on the borderline between the universal and the particular means welcoming different things or groups to represent Canadian cultural identity in order to adapt to changing social contexts. Canadian cultural poesis may then be described as an act of hospitality, the invention of new gestures, new ways of welcoming the marginalized other, the stranger, and the foreigner, in order to construct new cultural arrangements between the universal Canadian identity and their own particular identity. An act of hospitality defines a poetics of culture, for in the act of making an identity, that identity is also made by the other through the new relationship forged in the act.40 The contributors to this anthology are Canadian intellectuals and artists who were brought together not only to focus on cultural issues in a Canadian context, but also to stimulate further investigations into the complexities and contradictions of Canadian cultural pluralism. The contributors are aware that by analyzing Canadian culture they are also producing Canadian culture. To help remind the reader that Canadian Cultural Poesis as a text is also an artifact that participates in the making of culture, we have included four original projects, works of “public art” that take visual culture to task on its own terms. They explore how some contemporary visual artists re-present Canadian culture, influencing how Canadians see themselves. The art and the essays in this anthology show that Canadians 20 introduction see themselves as more than they are today, as something other than what they are. In the words of one Canadian cultural critic, “the real identity of all nations is the one we have failed to achieve.”41 To understand Canadian Cultural Poesis as it is used in this book means that we have to look at this failure to reach our ideal not as merely negative but as an opportunity to make and remake our identity in a more inclusive way. Notes 1 Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004). 2 Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 35. 3 Eagleton, 2. 4 Eagleton, 5. Eagleton defines the relationship that culture has with nature in the paradoxical terms of a “supplement,” a term that he borrows from Jacques Derrida’s book, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Derrida defines the supplement as a process that does not allow a thing, such as nature, to be self-sufficient, or maintain a clear-cut distinction with something outside it, for the “supplement adds itself, it is a surplus…. But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace” (144–45). What appears to be a superfluous addition to something is also essential to define its identity. 5 Ian Angus, A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 3. 6 I am following Ernesto Laclau’s definition of the hegemony as...

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