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

Those not in the habit of reading book titles carefully might be attracted to this one because the phrase “Canadian literature” seems to offer, if not the pleasures of a good story, at least those of an illuminating critical analysis of some favourite Canadian poetry and/or prose. Such readers may well be disappointed by this collection of largely abstract and earnestly political academic articles presented here as the most tangible product of an ambitious project the two editors conceived in the Spring of 2004; they will certainly find in this collection both less and more than they bargained for: virtually no literary criticism, but lots of theorizing about the literary enterprise.

Poets as well as academics, Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki are well known within CanLit circles for their literary critical work in the field variously referred to as “ethnic minority,” “multicultural,” and “diasporic” literatures in Canada. Kamboureli has produced groundbreaking analyses of diasporic literatures, and edited the important anthology Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature (1996), now in its second edition (2006), and Miki has written widely and insightfully about Asian Canadian literature. As Kamboureli explains in her thought-provoking “Preface” to the present volume, she and Miki were motivated by their growing concern about the “state of CanLit,” which they see as (a) having “arrived” as a field of serious study, while at the same time being seriously challenged by the “ethos of globalization” that is arguably undermining the nation state and, along with it, the legitimacy of “national” literatures, and (b) as being buffeted by interwoven policy trends in granting bodies and universities that seem to be putting the humanities, including literary studies, under siege. Believing that the convergence of these forces, along with CanLit’s “visibility in the public sphere,” the mainstreaming of multiculturalism and the “immediacy of diasporic and transatlantic politics” had created an urgent need as well as an opportunity for those with a stake in CanLit to re-examine their common enterprise, the editors embarked on what they called the TransCanada Project, an undertaking they saw as nothing less than a collaborative rethinking of “the disciplinary and institutional frameworks within which Canadian literature is produced, disseminated, studied, and taught” (xv).

In addition to the preface, a notes section, an index, a fulsome list of works cited, and a section of notes on contributors, the volume consists of thirteen articles by well-known figures in the CanLit firmament. All of the articles began as plenary talks at the inaugural conference for the TransCanada Project; thus, it is perhaps unsurprising that most champion the need to revise the nationalist framing of “Canadian literature” in order to situate it within the context of “globalizing processes and critical methodologies”(xv). The articles are united by their high quality and their similarity of perspective yet differentiated somewhat by form and approach. While most are “typical” academic articles, some are not. Lee Maracle’s highly philosophical “Oratory on Oratory” offers a detailed, assertive, and very useful discussion of First Nations epistemology, which she contrasts with Western ways of knowing. Rinaldo Walcott’s “Against Institution Established Law, Custom or Purpose” consists of three personal “anecdotes” and a conclusion; Ashok Mathur’s “Transubracination: How Writers of Colour Become CanLit” comprises a self-reflexive and chronological critical commentary. All of the articles testify in one way or another to the difficulties and complexities of the task at hand.

Such difficulties stem in no small measure from the conflicted nature of literature per se, a servant of two masters, the nation state it helps to construct, and in which it is “firmly entangled” (viii), as well as the creative, particularistic forces that inevitably resist both the homogenization and the exclusions upon which the construction of nation depend. They also stem from the contemporary state of Canadian literature. Mirroring the trajectory of the nation it serves, Canadian literature has evolved from being the expression of...