Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (review)

Edited by noted CanLit scholars Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki, Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature serves notice of a generational shift in the state of research into English-Canadian literature, following its establishment – as a career-creating, grant-giving, and book-publishing institution/industry – in the early 1970s. The days of fervent nationalism, thematic criticism, and feminist insurgency have been superseded by fretting over cultural identity (or identities) in the context of globalization, concern for establishing a workable critical theory that will respect (and reflect) the multitudinous solitudes of Canada and its literatures, and the call for fresh examination of ‘Indigeneity.’

Asserts Kamboureli in her preface, ‘CanLit’ now speaks to and about Canada as ‘an unimaginable community,’ that is to say, as an unfinished project, ‘always transitioning.’ Its state is ‘precarious,’ ‘nervous,’ and rich with complex ambiguities or ambiguous complexes. This inherent ‘elsewhereness’ of Canada necessitates ‘new terms of engagement’ with its literature(s).

Despite this appeal for the ‘new,’ Kamboureli views CanLit specialists as still struggling to define this bit of real estate in relation to ‘the British, the Commonwealth, and the American’ (and the French), though now with reference to (and sometimes regard for) First Nations, gay and lesbian, and minority cultural voices. If so, we cannot repeal Northrop Frye’s decades-old provocation, ‘Where is here?’

Diana Brydon kicks off this baker’s dozen of papers (dating from a 2005 conference) by asking that CanLit scholars read ‘our national literature in global contexts and in dialogue with Indigenous concerns.’ She also proposes that we study ‘the texts emerging from the new South Africa, as it undergoes its own metamorphoses, from an apartheid settler state to a multicultural democracy.’ To do so, however, we would need a domestic ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ commission to address the wrongs the British-Franco, white-supremacist settler-state has committed against Aboriginal peoples and ethnic minorities.

Lee Maracle feels that Salish models of oratory, unlike the ‘Western,’ convey ‘a powerful sense of justice,’ encourage holistic thinking, and utilize a ‘lean, poetic, dramatic . . . structure.’ Yet her schema erects just one more ‘collapsible’ binary opposition.

Stephen Slemon suggests that ‘CanLit’ is imperilled both by the displacement of literary study by ‘Media and Communication Studies’ and by universities bidding new minority-group professors accept conventional scholarly models and values. Richard Cavell also registers a cogent point: ‘Canada is the product of not one but two empires, and thus . . . we were international before we were national.’ His vision of Canada as a shadowy offshoot of European imperialism is remarkable because it is unflinchingly political.

Lily Cho tasks us to dwell in the ‘dissonance between diaspora and citizenship . . . to enable memory to tear away at the coherence of national forgettings.’ Scholars must interrogate Canadian history so that the true nature of Confederation – invasion, exploitation of land and people, and Anglo jingoism – is revealed.

Len Findlay’s anchor paper reminds us of ‘Canada’s paradoxical status as a First World / Third World client state’ but also of the constant effort (as Daniel Coleman’s contribution attests) ‘to recentre sanctimonious nordicities at the expense of Canada’s hurtful history.’ The ‘Great White North’ stays ‘white’ by whitewashing its racism.

Trans.Can.Lit specifies problems of our contemporary literary scholarship: either too much navel-gazing or too much cheerleading for the ‘global’; either too great an exclusion of ‘others’ or too great their ‘assimilation’ to bourgeois, liberal norms. This critique is useful, but it is limited by the ‘false consciousness’ that ‘new’ thought is being produced.

No, ‘CanLit’ remains the expression of an imperially implanted, (progressive) conservative, European monarchy wedded culturally and economically to a libertarian, radical republic. Wherever ‘here’ is, it begins here, in this essential contradiction of our existence. (As such, our ‘ancestors’ – Frye, George Grant, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, etc., remain embarrassingly pertinent.)

Perhaps the ‘new’ content of this truth would have emerged in Trans.Can.Lit had there been more close reading (like...