Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts: Narratives of English Canada

FOUR: Of Aliens, Monsters, and Vampires: Speculative Fantasy’s Strategies of Dissent (Transnational Feminist Fiction)

f o u r Of Aliens, Monsters, and Vampires: Speculative Fantasy’s Strategies of Dissent (Transnational Feminist Fiction) Belén Martín-Lucas Woman, as a sign of difference, is monstrous. —Rosi Braidotti, “Mothers, Monsters and Machines” A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster. —Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman The revisionist work of an important number of racialized cultural writers and critics in recent decades has exposed to the light many of Canada’s obscured secrets. The introduction of the Multiculturalism Act in July 1988 was a public gesture of the Canadian state towards the inclusion of its diasporic Others into a new definition of the nation, a recognition that was accompanied in the month of September of the same year by the Redress Agreement that sought to compensate Japanese Canadians for the wrongs inflicted on them during and after the Internment of World War II. These advances were the result of a long history of struggle for visibility and of persistent demands for recognition by migrant communities in Canada. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, as Larissa Lai points out, 1 0 7 1 0 8 B e l é n M a r t í n - L u c a s there was a small measure of public space, and a new and highly productive language that we found, and made for ourselves, to talk about the racisms, sexisms, and other oppressions on which the Canadian nation (and, for that matter, many other nations) are founded. Histories like those of the Japanese Canadian Internment, the Chinese Head Tax and Chinese Exclusion Act, the Indian Act, the Komagata Maru incident and many others were drawn to the surface by indigenous cultural workers and cultural workers of color, against the polite repressions of the Canadian state. (Lai, Brand 24) In the current decade, second generation diasporic subjects, “born in Canada of parents born elsewhere” (Brand, What We All 20), still grow up in a context that constantly treats them as foreigners or, in David Chariandy ’s words, as “that discomfortingly intimate stranger born here” (“The Fiction” 819). The implementation of the Multiculturalism Act has proven clearly inefficient in countering this imaginary. On the contrary, statistical data provides evidence that second generation racialized Canadians find it more difficult to identify as Canadian than their parents’ generation because they “are made to feel they do not belong to Canada” (Dhruvarajan 167) through persistent racialization and exclusion from the nation (see also Ralston, Handa, Nakagawa, Reitz and Banerjee). Despite what Smaro Kamboureli has acutely described as the “fetishization of its multicultural make-up” (viii), the Canadian state and the nations within it, including the multicultural one, have failed to address the political issues of power imbalance nested at the heart of the predominant neo-liberal ideologies. As Rinaldo Walcott has pointed out, “conceptually multiculturalism is a major concession, as the liberal democratic nation-state does not extend citizenship in equal fashion to all its members. Such a concession opens up vast opportunities to rethinking the nation and for state struggles, and thus for rethinking liberal versions of citizenship and national belonging” (“Against Institution” 19). Unfortunately, it seems that those opportunities have been hurriedly taken by neo-liberalism, as it has in fact profoundly altered citizenship practices with the infiltration of market logics into the political realm. As Aihwa Ong has convincingly argued: “The neoliberal exception articulates citizenship elements in political spaces that may be less than the national territory in some cases, or exceed national borders in others” (Neoliberalism 6). Individuals are categorized according to their market value, and granted elements of traditional citizenship (rights, or entitlement, for instance) according to the benefits they may provide to the economic market. Thus, Ong explains, “mobile individuals who possess human capital or expertise are highly valued and can exercise citizenship -like claims in diverse locations. Meanwhile, citizens who are judged Of A l i e n s , M o n s t e r s , a n d V a m p i r e s 1 0 9 not to have such tradable competence or potential become devalued and thus vulnerable to exclusionary practices” (6–7). For Himani Bannerji, the language of multiculturalism is just such a pronouncement of neo-liberal exclusion and discrimiNation whereby so-called “visible minorities” are categorized as such according to skin colour, Otherized by their race, and consequently managed by the state into a...