The Canadian Alternative (review)

The Canadian Alternative is a collection of twelve revised conference papers stemming from 'The Canadian Alternative' conference hosted by the Universität des Saarlandes (Germany) in 2002. In his closing comments, Robert Kroetsch opines that the conference had been a gathering of the 'citizens of the possible,' and the collection, like the conference, proposes to elaborate Canada's strategies for dealing with 'its specific cultural and geopolitical situation' – its proximity to the United States, its policies of multiculturalism and bilingualism, and its fraught histories of immigration and settlement.

Among the papers focused primarily on literary texts, The Canadian Alternative offers two essays that have a sustained focus on Frederick Philip Grove (Felix Paul Greve): Rosmarin Heidenreich's essay on the 'self-reinvention' of Grove and Will James (Ernest Dufault) considers the multiplicity of roles adopted by the two writers; Klaus Martens elaborates the 'transnational literary concepts' that Grove introduced to Canada as its 'first bohemian artist.' Other papers investigate Canadian science fiction (Arlette Warken), the fiction of Laura Goodman Salverson, Martha Ostenso, and Grove (Paul Morris), and Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush (David Lucking).

Defining national identity, perhaps most especially for an international audience, is never an easy task. That so many of the contributors to The Canadian Alternative attempt to articulate and explain national symbols and characteristics deserves, at one level, to be applauded. For example, Harmut Lutz's chief contribution is to guide the reader towards 'alterNatives' that focus on a respectful 'non-imperialist sense of place which transcends time and acknowledges alterNative stories yet unwritten.' In the same critical vein, Karin Beeler's essay concerns the alternative expression of the tattoo, which she argues has been used by creative writers such as Marian Engel, Mariko Tamaki, and J.J. Steinfeld, as well as by film and visual artists, to 'highlight issues of diversity,' 'help characters escape cultural restrictions,' and play with notions of stable cultural identity. However, there is a very real division in this book between those (literary) scholars who take pains to underscore how a contested concept such as multiculturalism operates and those who offer blanket national self-congratulation for legislating toleration. For instance, John C. Lehr's contribution about ethnic identity returns to multiculturalism as a 'Canadian value' but from a geographically determinist argument that is based on Canada as terra nullius. Of course, as Lehr himself briefly points out, Canada was not unpopulated, but rather than reassess what this means for his discussion of ethnic identity, Lehr holds up the 'very real mixing of peoples' as the first example of a settlement process whereby 'Americans are simply American, but Canadians hyphenate their identity.'

Throughout several of the papers in the collection, there is an assumption that Canada is defined in relation to the United States. Occasionally this comparison is implicit and based on non-exclusive alternatives, as with Dawne McCance's recollections of the 'Canadianness' of Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature or Helmut Reichenbächer's discussion of the cbc in terms of 'market forces and public services.' Often it is more overt, as in Raymond Hébert's keynote address, 'Some Fundamental Canadian Values.' He positions Canada as a 'nation of talkers' based on the discussions that took place for Confederation, which unfolded 'as Americans were slaughtering each other.' The tendency to discuss rather than take arms leads Hébert, a political scientist and past president of the Canadian Association of Canadian Studies, to make the unsupportable generalization that 'Canadians domestically communicate more intensely with each other and in more meaningful ways than do Americans.' Coming as it does at the beginning of the collection, Hébert's paper is the most noticeable example of the kinds of tenets that too often continue to be the foundation of Canadian studies: the promotion of a rhetoric of 'toleration' of difference, a belief that 'our society' has a stable meaning, and a lack of attention to what others might class as categories of privilege. While The Canadian Alternative makes...