Moveable Margins: The Shifting Spaces in Canadian Literature (review)

‘The fact that official policy must, by simplifying issues, construct or reconstruct binaries is why every culture needs literature.’ Donna Bennett’s argument about the vital role literature plays in countering the limitations of both cultural policy and binary thinking provides a fitting epigraph for much of the work collected by Chelva Kanaganayakam in Moveable Margins, eleven essays that seek to re-examine shifting spaces in contemporary Canadian literature. Now, in the middle of the ‘culture wars’ in Canada, the book is nothing short of vital reading. While in recent days some cultural commentators have focused on the economic benefits to the nation of a vibrant arts community, others have concentrated on the devastating effects funding cuts to arts programs will have on expanding views of Canadian culture. If arts and culture programs are at stake, so too is the complexity of creative engagements with culture embedded in literature that Bennett alludes to above. As Margaret Atwood said in the 25 September 2008 Globe and Mail, ‘[T]o be creative is, in fact, Canadian.’ The essays in this collection situate such Canadian creativity in an extraordinary range of spaces that necessarily emphasize the fluidity of cultural production in Canada today.

The project of this book is to locate Canadian literature beyond the limitations invoked by the tired and out-of-date oppositional framework of mainstream and marginal writing that underwrote discussions of Canadian literature for years. Kanaganayakam claims that ‘whatever margins that were established over a period of time have shifted in multiple ways over the last several decades as the corpus of Canadian literature insisted on being redefined and reformulated.’ It seems that a recognizable centre has been replaced by constantly moving margins. Although acknowledging the range of responses to ‘margins’ in the book, Kanaganayakam also points to a commonality in the ways that the authors engage ‘the functions of community and space in relation to changing perceptions of boundaries.’ With the concentration on space, place, and community, these essays provide much-needed grounding to the soul searching that has accompanied many of the political discussions in recent days.

As if to signal the groundedness of the essays, most of the authors draw on the spatial metaphor – sometimes linking it to existential and genealogical metaphors, as Cynthia Sugars does in her discussion of the imperfect search for post-colonial ancestors, and sometimes locating it on a chronological plane or in gendered terms, as Diana Brydon and Jessica Schagerl do in looking at globalism and empire. Thinking about space and landscape, either in terms of proximity or distance, allows the authors variously to approach the work of writers that span the spectrum of contemporary Canadian literature (in genre preferences, regional affiliation, and ethnic heritage), writers including Dionne Brand, Warren Cariou, Wayson Choy, Rienzi Crusz, Chief Dan George, Thomas King, Larissa Lai, sky Lee, Yann Martel, Michael Ondaatje, Al Pittman, M.G. Vassanji, and Fred Wah, to name some of those whose work is treated in detail.

Beside the enduring focus on landscape and place, the fact that many of the contributors to this book have also contributed to discussions of post-colonialism and globalization in Canada is evident in a recurrence of interest in issues of belonging, home, community, and audience in Canada and in the world. Post-colonial readings abound in this book. John Ball’s exploration of Douglas Glover’s Elle and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi as Canadian Crusoes significantly updates decades of ongoing work on writing, back to canonical texts. Paolo Horta’s close reading of cosmopolitanism in Ondaatje’s The English Patient also engages with extant discussions of the same topic.

The essays in this book do not all take a pan-Canadian approach to the literature produced in Canada. George Elliott Clarke’s call for a specific pedagogy of African-Canadian literature, Daniel Heath Justice’s work on affirming the sovereignty of Indigenous national literatures, Stephanie McKenzie’s writing about the overlaps between national identifications in Aboriginal poetry and...