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105 “The Simpler and More Colourful Way of Life” 5 | One of the problems with the Folk paradigm, Ian McKay stresses, is that it promotes ethnically exclusive deinitions of culture. McKay highlights how identifying people as members of the “Folk” “only worked if there were some who were not ‘Folk.’” Those who found themselves on the wrong side of this opposition “either adapted to this uncomfortable situation by intensifying their own separate identity, or they sought, by assimilating, somehow to cancel the polarity” (I. McKay 1994, 13). With the growing assertion of their rights in the 1960s and 1970s, however, women and minority groups in Atlantic Canada began to counter such suppression and marginalization and to express their distinctive experiences and identities in more empowering terms (Conrad and Hiller 2001, 201–6). Largely excluded from overviews of literary production on the East Coast in the past, writers from racialized minority communities certainly have established a more signiicant presence in contemporary Atlantic-Canadian literature. Afro-Nova Scotian George Elliott Clarke is one of the region’s best-known writers, and the late Rita Joe was a signiicant literary elder for a whole generation of younger Native writers. Although Native writers in the region conspicuously have not achieved the same stature as their counterparts in other parts of the country—think of now-canonical igures such as Thomas King, Tomson Highway, and Eden Robinson—there are signs of burgeoning literary activity, such as The Mi’kmaq Anthology edited by Lesley Choyce and Rita Joe (1997). While Clarke has done much—especially with his two-volume anthology Fire on the Water (1991/92)—to afirm the long history of writing by people of African heritage in the Maritimes, in the last few decades there has been an undeniable profusion of work by Black writers , including Charles Saunders, Maxine Tynes, and George Boyd. While 106 Section 2: “About as Far from Disneyland as You Can Possibly Get” perhaps less pronounced than in the rest of Canada, there has been a growing trend since the 1970s to recognize Atlantic-Canadian literature as a multicultural literature. The gender imbalance that historically characterized the literature of the region has undergone an even more pronounced change, likewise relecting a broader trend across the country. Perhaps the most signiicant development in the literature of the Atlantic provinces over the last thirty years has been the proliferation of writing by and about women. While the region’s— indeed, arguably the country’s—best-known writer is a woman (L.M. Montgomery), writing by women in the region (Sophia Almon Hensley, Margaret Marshall Saunders, and Margaret Duley, among others) historically has been overshadowed by the work of male writers (Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, E.J. Pratt, Ernest Buckler, and so on). In the recent explosion of writing in the region, however, women have had almost as much of a presence as their male counterparts: poets such as Anne Compton, Anne Simpson, Lynn Davies, Sheree Fitch, and Mary Dalton, along with Joe and Tynes; writers of iction including Lynn Coady, Lisa Moore, Bernice Morgan, Donna Morrissey, M.T. Dohaney, and Linda Little; and playwrights such as Wendy Lill and Catherine Banks. While the work of these writers is stylistically and thematically diverse, from the somewhat sentimental outport realism of Morrissey’s iction to the topical and political theatre of Lill, to the cosmopolitan, urban impressionism of Lisa Moore’s work, one of the central features of contemporary writing by women in the Atlantic region is that it presents a collective challenge to the patriarchal bias of Folk archetypes, grounded in a gendered division of labour and of power and mobility as well. “Decidedly Monochromatic in Practice” Although there has been a long tradition in the region of constructing Acadians as Folk, Black and Native people, Ian McKay notes, have tended to be excluded (1994, 230). Thus, as Maureen Moynagh archly puts it, the “‘simpler’ and more colourful way of life” associated with the Folk “tended, not surprisingly, to be decidedly monochromatic in practice” (1998, 17; italics in original). Black and Native writers, however, have presented an increasing challenge to this “monochromatic” experience in a number of important ways: by asserting the signiicance of their pasts in the face of colonialism’s distortion or erasure of their histories; by articulating contemporary social, economic, and political concerns, including exploitative treatment by the dominant culture; by consciously critiquing the exclusivity of Folk images of life in the East; and, not...

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