Anxious Allegiances: Legitimizing Identity in the Early Canadian Long Poem by C.D. Mazoff (review)

humanities 401 As a political scientist not very familiar with the minutiae of Quebec politics, I found this a depressing story. The `stuff' of nationalist politics is resentment and fear: resentment at past injustices, real or imagined, and fear of the inability to face change in an open society. This is as true for Canadian as for Quebec nationalism. Its proponents often present it as a liberating movement, but in practice it always turns out to be the opposite. It is the politics of exclusion, of limited development, of the second rate. Quebec language policy has not simply restricted the freedoms of the English-language minority: it has impoverished the economic, social and intellectual life of everyone in Quebec. It has already robbed Montreal of much of the vitality it had as a cosmopolitan city. I hope this book sells well and merits a second edition. An expanded second edition would make it more accessible to a large general readership, if it provided more background material. Work of this quality deserves it. (PETER SILCOX) C.D. Mazoff. Anxious Allegiances: Legitimizing Identity in the Early Canadian Long Poem McGill-Queen's University Press 1998. xii, 174. $49.95 C.D. Mazoff's Anxious Allegiances makes a valid contribution to the study of early Canadian poetry on a number of counts. It usefully broadens the canon of early verse, too often limited to the works of Oliver Goldsmith, Joseph Howe, and Alexander McLachlan. To this meagre sampling, Mazoff adds Adam Hood Burwell, Thomas Cary, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Adam Kidd, J. Mackay, John Richardson, Charles Sangster, and William Kirby as well as lesser-known poets such as Jacob Bailey, Cornwall Bayley, Peter Fisher, James Knox Liston, Standish O'Grady, and William A. Stephens. Although he occasionally notes that some of the poems are not well written, Mazoff turns away from the approach of earlier critics fixated on aesthetic failings. Rather than dismissing the poems as `versified rhetoric,' as did Northrop Frye so famously, Mazoff takes the poems' rhetorical character seriously, treating them as `strategic answers' to questions of cultural identity and authority. Reading the poems as arguments rather than aesthetic objects leads Mazoff to investigate the poets' use of rhetorical strategies to legitimize European`presence on foreign soil.' I value Mazoff's unapologetic interest in the politics of these poems, and his broad coverage effectively demonstrates the scope of literary production in the colonial period. Particularly valuable is Mazoff's method of organization. Rather than single-author chapters or a strictly chronological approach, Mazoff opts for a `regional/chronological breakdown.' Chapters on the long poems of Lower Canada, the Maritimes, 402 letters in canada 1999 and Upper Canada allow Mazoff to indicate in a nuanced way the particular political and economic conditions that shaped textual production in different parts of the territory that would become Canada. He explains, for example, why hostility to Native peoples is much more pronounced in Maritime long poems, which justify Loyalist usurpation of Native land, than in those of the Canadas, where Native co-operation in trade and war was crucial to imperial interests. In contrast, antiAmericanism plays a major role in the national self-definition of Upper Canadian poetry, more so than in other regions, because of the threatening presence of non-Loyalist American immigrants. The regional approach enables Mazoff to address how various regions were developing a recognizably Canadian narrative that was nonetheless inflected by regional differences. Mazoff's focus on the politics of poetry, and especially on ideological contradiction in the texts, is an appropriate and potentially very fruitful avenue of investigation, as Mazoff's references to such literary giants as Edward Said and Fredric Jameson should indicate. I have no doubt that Mazoff is right to argue that all of these texts are engaged, one way or another, in projects of colonial or national legitimation. Yet the insistence on locating `the rhetoric of imperialist and mercantilist ideology' occasionally risks reducing every poem to the same objectionable formula, as when Mazoff concludes discussion of a single text by reminding us that this poem, like so many others in the collection, uses its rhetorical strategies `to justify possession of a land that is already possessed and...