Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Canada

Introduction

1 the impetus for this volume comes from a sense that over the past couple of decades, both the tenor of Canadian cultural and literary studies and its terms of critical debate—such as race, nation, difference, and culture— have shifted in significant ways. The chapters in this collection focus on literary and cultural treatments of a wide range of topics pertaining to Canadian history and politics spanning one hundred years. Our contributors explore, for example, the Asian race riots in Vancouver in 1907 (Lee), the cultural memory of the internment and dispersal of Japanese Canadians in the 1940s (Kim), the politics of migrant labour and the “domestic labour scheme” in the 1960s (Mason), the role of foster care in fracturing Aboriginal families and communities in the 1960s and 1970s (Eigenbrod), the politics of the transgendered and transsexual body in queer studies in the late 1980s and 1990s (Capperdoni ), and the trial of Robert Pickton in Vancouver in 2007 (Emberley). Our particular interest lies in how diaspora and indigeneity have and continue to contribute to this critical reconfiguration, as well as how conversations about diaspora and indigeneity within the Canadian context have themselves been transformed. Cultural Grammars is an attempt to address both the interconnections and the schisms between these multiply fractured critical terms, as well as the larger conceptual shifts that have occurred in response to national and post-national arguments. The objective of the volume is to examine tensions within and between concepts of indigeneity and diaspora, and to analyze the ways those tensions transform concepts of nation. Cultural Grammars is shaped by a number of timely and provocative questions: Whose imagined community is the nation? Introduction Christine Kim and Sophie McCall 2 christine kim and sophie mccall What are the limits of “Indigenous literary nationalism” and how can the movement acknowledge the complexities of its own terminology? What does it mean for subjects to be precariously positioned in relation to one or more nation-states? To what degree are diasporas comparable? On what grounds might Indigenous and diasporic critics converse? Cultural Grammars does not offer an overarching narrative or single line in response to any of these questions ; rather the volume places side by side chapters that analyze very different discourses and practices. In this sense, the book generates an open field for further research and reading. POSTCOLONIAL NATION In attempting to address the tensions between indigeneity and diaspora, we noted that the term “nation” often impinged upon our discussions. Indeed, we found that theories of diaspora and of indigeneity, while often critical of the discourses associated with modern, industrialized nation-states, silently relied on nation-based imaginings of collectivities. We came to realize that diaspora and nation are interdependent and mutually constituting, just as indigeneity and nation are reciprocally contingent and responsive. This insight echoes critics such as Benedict Anderson (1983), Himani Bannerji (2000), and Sneja Gunew (2004), who draw attention to the persistence of the nation in an age of globalization and of Aboriginal sovereigntist social movements. While the death of the nation has so often been prophesied, with varying degrees of optimism , fear, and ambivalence, it nevertheless continues to shape the language of Canadian cultural and literary studies. How do we understand the mixed feelings that arise in response to the prediction that the nation will disappear, especially when paired with its refusal to do so? This situation compels us to consider the endurance of national discourse and question why the nation is a site we continue to return to in our deliberations of literature, culture, and politics. Such an investigation demands that we consider the historical stakes of conversations about the nation and literature in Canada and how have they been reconfigured in the contemporary moment. At the same time, such a project reminds us that the study of Canadian literature is a relatively recent phenomenon. In her introduction to HomeWork , Cynthia Sugars traces the emergence of Canadian literature as a subject of scholarly study from 1952 with the inclusion of a panel at ACUTE, and dates the teaching of the subject as beginning in the 1960s (1–4). The surprise that A.S.P. Woodhouse voiced at the high degree of interest generated by introduction 3 this panel on Canadian literature indicates how lingering colonial attitudes toward education, culture, and emerging literatures have shaped the development of the study of Canadian literature. In this way, it can be seen that...