Is Canada Postcolonial?: Unsettling Canadian Literature (review)

For good or bad, the essays in this volume will not settle the question of its title. Then again, that was not the purpose, editor Laura Moss declares in her introduction. Readers are warned that 'No two contributors seem to agree on precisely what "Canada" and, more contentiously, "postcolonial" mean, or what the answers might be.' Moss recasts W.H. New's 1975 observation that 'searching for the national identity is a kind of congenital art form in Canada' and proposes that in 2003 'searching for a postcolonial identity now epitomizes such an art form.' Indeed, contributor Robert Budde provocatively asserts that this search epitomizes current academic enterprise in English literature departments across Canada. 'Postcolonial language, and the apparent mastery of that "field," is clearly a blue-chip investment in the academic world,' Budde writes. 'Postcolonial knowledge as a type of "coinage" seems to be minting valuable cultural currency in the form of a theoretical terminology, a privileged discourse in danger of being used only for its own solipsistic perpetuation.' In this sense, this volume reflects and, to a degree, extends current academic research and practice rather than anticipating or shaping its future.

Postcolonial terminology and analysis have acquired a kind of paradigmatic character out of which has emerged a proliferation of recent Canadian publications on the subject, including this volume, which brings another 'two dozen voices to the conversations already in place.' The term 'postcolonialism' has become an elastic and expanding one, and Moss gives numerous examples of its use in regard to a wide range of concerns and issues: 'cultural imperialism; emergent nationalisms with a nation and between nations; negotiating history and the process of decolonization; hierarchies of power, violence, and oppression; censorship; race and ethnicity; multiculturalism; appropriation of voice; revising the canon and "writing back" to colonial education; and Indigenous languages and "englishes" versus Standard English.' The term circulates as well in reference to work by First Nations writers, immigrant writers, non-white writers, other marginalized writers, women writers, gay writers, and writers from religious minorities. This very variety and eclecticism may render the paradigm a bit shapeless and perhaps ultimately less effective than envisioned.

Moss acknowledges that these concerns and issues pre-date literary postcolonial approaches. 'Long before the word "postcolonial" gained international currency,' she notes, Canadian critics and authors were asking questions about Canadian literature in a global context. Beyond those Moss mentions, researchers and writers in ethnic studies, Canadian studies, and other interdisciplinary studies during the 1970s and 1980s were exploring the texts and issues upon which postcolonial terminology and theoretical debate were subsequently brought to bear. At the same time, First Nations literary critique too was well on its way. It was 'looking at the words of [its own] people,' as Jeanette Armstrong phrased it in 1993, asserting the significance and relevance of First Nations critical and creative writing in the deconstruction of colonialism and the reconconstruction of a new order of culturalism beyond colonial thought and practice. This work has flourished and it would indeed have been preferable, as Moss notes in her preface, to have included more representation from First Nations - and Quebec - scholars and critics in the collection. This is a puzzling lacuna in 2003, itself unsettling given the wealth and importance of the work that has emerged from these communities.

The volume nevertheless constitutes an interesting and valuable contribution to discussions currently animating many departments of English literature in Canada, in four well-constructed parts. 'Questioning Canadian Postcolonialism' presents essays by George Elliot Clarke, Neil Besner, Diana Brydon, and Donna Palmeteer Pennee. 'Postcolonial Methodologies' are examined by Susan Gingell, Judith Leggatt, Mridula Nath Chakraborty, and Chelva Kanaganayakam. The largest group of essays asks 'Is Canadian Literature Postcolonial?'with contributors Pam Perkins, Douglas Ivison, Cecily Devereux, Barbara Bruce, Manina Jones, Karen E, Macfarlane, Amy Kroeker, Jim Zuccerho, Marie Vautier, and Robert Budde focusing on individual authors and texts. The volume concludes with 'Meditations on the Question' by Len Findlay, Terry Goldie, Victor Ramraj, and Stephen Slemon...