Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization (review)

Kit Dobson likes to dive into cultural theory at the deep end. His densely argued, occasionally irritating, but always admirable study offers a ‘cognitive mapping’ of a political landscape that would provide an ethical basis for community in a transnational, disparate world. He undertakes two big jobs: to theorize a ‘self-critical and responsible deconstructive [Marxist] politics’ that critiques transnational capitalism, and to trace the shifting nationalist presumptions of English Canadian literature since 1967 in the light of this hopeful theory.

The first job proposes what had once seemed impossible: a ‘deconstructive Marxism’ reconciling the rival claims of intelligible ideology (which puts things in place) and deconstructive language (which unsettles that place). It articulates ‘an intelligent response to capitalism’ that will illuminate the conflicted character of Canadian nationalisms. The theory is displayed in compact essays inspired by Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, whose prose evaporates just when we yearn for it to be specific. Derrida replaces Marx’s classless society with a ‘non-totalizing form of political universalism’ tenuously bonded by ‘a link of affinity, suffering, and hope, a still discreet, almost secret link.’ It is hard to imagine a practical alliance based on anything so resolutely problematic, but perhaps Derrida’s purpose is to make us yearn for justice by following a messianic detour to nowhere (utopia). Subsequent chapters drawing on Spivak’s silent subaltern and Hardt and Negri’s transnational ‘multitude’ repeat the same problem of alleviating real suffering by yearning for indefinable, ‘new juridical arrangements’ beyond the authoritarian grasp of nationality and sovereignty. Deconstruction is strongest when exposing injustice but hesitant when envisioning justice, which is – Derrida warned elsewhere – ‘an experience of the impossible.’ Transnational Canadas is bedevilled by this difficulty: strong when on attack; vague when proposing new ‘forms of belonging’ that avoid, on the one hand, domesticating ethnic and racial distinctions in order to reimpose national unity and, on the other, fetishizing difference for its own vacuous sake.

Dobson’s second job, aligned unevenly with the first, appears in well-informed analyses of Canadian works from three periods: a nationalist phase of the 1960s and 1970s (Atwood’s Surfacing, Lee’s Civil Elegies, Cohen’s Beautiful Losers); a multicultural phase of the 1980s (Kogawa’s Obasan, Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, Armstrong’s Slash); and a recent postmodern phase (Lam’s Bloodletting, Miki’s Surrender, Brand’s What We All Long For). His controlling argument is tendentious in the sense that the works are carefully chosen to lead from the national to the transnational, the essential to the provisional, the nostalgic to the visionary. They are interpreted insofar as they are ideologically satisfactory in tracing this progressive – or at least yearning – pattern. In the first period, because the nationalist fervour accompanying centennial celebrations was ill-suited to the fractiousness of Canadian society, authors defined national values through handy oppositions that their texts, to their credit, expose as unreliable: Canada versus America, English versus French Canada, official Canada versus aboriginal or ethnic communities. There is always something unaccountable in these texts, which the next group exploits to reveal how the generosity of official multiculturalism actually reinforced a dominant national hierarchy. The third section ventures past the fixity of master narratives, past the radical free play of post-structuralism, to the threshold of an ‘out-of reach “beyond,”’ which teases us out of thought in Miki’s and Brand’s writing. How can one conceive of a just, sustaining community when the terms for both defining it (national, ethnic, racial) and dispersing it (transnational, cosmopolitan, nomadic) are all judged repellent? The answer is: ‘across borders, rhizomatically connecting to each other without a predetermined logic.’ At such botanical moments, Dobson’s own prose threatens to evaporate as it evokes the wavering political agency of an ‘unfixed subjectivity . . . understanding its locatedness as a node in a series of dissenting bodies.’

Transnational Canadas is sophisticated, engrossing, but sometimes irritating. Dobson reports Armstrong’s charge that Canada ‘is a nation-state that has a...