Anne of Tim Hortons: Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature

Section Three: The Age of Sale: History, Globalization, and Commodification

169 The Age of Sale: History, Globalization, and Commodification| Section Three Historical iction, as many commentators have observed, tends to be characterized by a double vision: while it looks to the past, its representation of that past is necessarily refracted through, and often consciously energized by, concerns of the present. This insight is particularly salient in appreciating the current surge of historical iction in Atlantic-Canadian literature, part of a worldwide trend. In tracking signiicant developments in the contemporary literature of the region, and their implications for the current position of the region, then, historical iction is a crucial genre to consider. Atlantic-Canadian writers’ preoccupation with the past, for one thing, says much about the present situation of the region. Historical iction also provides an important alternative mode for engaging with many of the same concerns that we have seen thus far in this study: the region’s tenuous place in Confederation, the impact of economic trends and the restructuring of work, the experience of marginalized groups, and the commodiication of culture and heritage. Atlantic-Canadian writers’ conspicuous turn to history, furthermore, must be situated within the larger trend under neo-liberalism toward the commodiication of history and heritage. As the discussion of tourism in the previous chapter suggests, an important consequence of the growing reliance on tourism in Atlantic Canada is a troubling attitude toward the region’s past. In the lead editorial of “Bury My Heart at Peggy’s Cove,” a special issue 170 Section 3: The Age of Sale of New Maritimes that appeared in 1987, the editors highlighted the problems of state-sponsored tourism’s retailing of “easily digested stereotypes and clich és,” particularly for the representation and understanding of history: What happens when these stereotypes gain currency as a truthful depiction of history? As these stereotypes come to inluence more and more community events, will we become, in some strange postmodern sense, tourists in our own region, unable to digest more than bland, cardboard images of ourselves and our history? What happens to our sense of the past, when the state is given the authority to rewrite and package history to suit the tastes of the travelling public?… Is there not something vaguely Orwellian about a situation in which the state directly organizes and determines the experience of the past, giving us its own interpretation of “our story” and “our history” in the form of massive and expensive public spectacles? (“Limits of Tourism” 1987, 5) As the part of Canada irst explored and settled by Europeans, the Atlantic provinces have a long and rich history that in many ways is a source of pride in the region. Unfortunately, historical “richness” is not always grounds for celebration, because recognizing the complexity of the past in the Atlantic provinces, as elsewhere, entails recognizing the violence, exploitation, and other forms of conlict that characterized much of the region’s history. Thus, as the New Maritimes editorial suggests, in the context of an economy in which it has become increasingly necessary to celebrate the region’s history and its cultural heritage in order to generate revenue, there is a tendency to distort that heritage into a simpliied and sanitized version it for consumption by tourists. The recourse to tourism as a response to crises in the traditional resource sectors on the East Coast is not a recent phenomenon but goes back at least to the early twentieth century. However, tourism’s centrality to the regional economy has been intensiied during the era of neo-liberal restructuring, characterized by the industrialization of tourism in the region and by growing pressure to market the region’s culture and history, to exploit less tangible resources than its traditional natural ones. One of the principal problems with such a stylizing and airbrushing of history is that it amounts to a packaging of the past for consumption, rather than cultivating a constructive engagement with history as a continuing and evolving process. “The danger of heritage tourism for people living within its ambit,” D.A. Muise rightly cautions, “is palpable. If they come to accept a history cleansed from any taint of social conlict, their own lived pasts will 171 Section 3: The Age of Sale thus be neutralized, making it dificult if not impossible for their history to form a vital part of continuing political processes that redeine their lives” (1998, 132). This tension is particularly important when it comes to...