Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies

The Cunning of Reconciliation: Reinventing White Civility in the “Age of Apology”

209 The Cunning of Reconciliation: Reinventing White Civility in the “Age of Apology” Pauline Wakeham On 22 September 1988, then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney delivered a formal apology and announced a compensation package for the internment , forced relocation, and seizure of property of Japanese Canadians duringWorldWar II.While Mulroney’s Conservative government imagined this gesture of reconciliation to be a singular, exceptional event, the state’s actions that day established a powerful precedent,spurring a diverse range of minoritized constituencies to either initiate or intensify redress campaigns for a variety of injustices.1 Failing to anticipate the future that was approaching on the horizon, the federal government’s responses to calls for redress were initially sporadic and haphazard, emerging in a series of fits and starts shaped by policy reversals and partisan rivalry.Over time, however, the government’s reconciliatory gestures have begun to accumulate and proliferate with increasing rapidity, producing the semblance of a national commitment to addressing the injustices of an ostensibly past era. As Stephen Harper asserted in his 2006 apology for the Chinese head tax:“Even though the head tax, a product of a profoundly different time, lies far in our past, we feel compelled to right this historic wrong for the simple reason that it is the decent thing to do, a characteristic to be found at the core of the Canadian soul” (Office of the Prime Minister, Address). Rewriting a history of reluctant responses to marginalized constituencies’ redress campaigns, Harper’s statement reveals how the phenomenon of reconciliation has become naturalized as a product of the “core” of Canadian beneficence and integrated into a national mythology of magnanimous governance. 210 Wakeham In this essay I analyze how, since the late 1980s, the proliferation of redress movements spearheaded by marginalized groups and the accumulation of gestures of rapprochement by the federal government have gradually been assimilated into a Canadian nationalist teleology, narrated as the latest stage in the country’s supposedly long-standing tradition as a just and tolerant society. According to Daniel Coleman, the grand récit of Canada’s beneficent governance is underpinned by the doctrine of white civility—a belief in Canada’s successful domestication of the “gentlemanly code of Britishness” into a model of justice and equality ostensibly best fulfilled by a culture of English (male) whiteness (10). Applying Coleman’s argument to a reading of the current moment, this essay argues that, over recent decades, the ideology of white civility has been reconfigured to frame the government’s admission of wrongs against minoritized constituencies as, paradoxically, an indicator of beneficence, as further proof of the state’s—and, more generally, Canadian society’s— enlightened ability to reflect upon the past and to perform contrition in the present to produce national cohesion.Through transactions of conscience ,wrongs are converted into evidence of national right.In the very process of purportedly promoting cultural rapprochement, an emerging dominant formulation of reconciliation works to secure a belief in a national imaginary of Canadian civility that overwrites ongoing power asymmetries and gross inequities. My critique of white civility’s latest evolution thus builds upon Elizabeth Povinelli’s compelling observation that“the ideals of liberalism are not about knowledge and its exposure to truth and revelation, but about the fantasies necessary to act in a liberal society and how these fantasies are protected and projected into social life through specific textual practices.The critique of liberalism does not begin with where it fails or where subjects know or do not know this failure, but rather where it seems to be succeeding” (155).The reinvention of white civility in the contemporary culture of redress—ostensibly a moment of reckoning with the failures of Canadian egalitarianism— has paradoxically become one of liberalism’s considerable “successes” for sustaining a fantasy of national benevolence. The second and integrally linked prong of this essay analyzes how the emergence of reconciliation relates to what Coleman argues is Canada’s latest paradigm of civility: multiculturalism. Attending to the crucial overlaps and disjunctures between official multicultural policy and the federal government’s developing approach to marginalized groups’ calls The Cunning of Reconciliation 211 for redress, I demonstrate that the latter is not entirely reducible to the former. Rather than suggesting a totalizing epochal shift from an era of multiculturalism to one of reconciliation, I argue instead that the emergence of reconciliation as a dominant social discourse has prompted a retooling of the...