Transcultural Imaginaries: History and Globalization in Contemporary Canadian Literature by Nora Tunkel (review)

As institutional terminologies continue to undergo revision or, arguably, simple rebranding, Nora Tunkel’s study considers “the evolution of an ‘independent’ (i.e., non-colonial) Canadian cultural imagination toward its contemporary, transcultural ramifications.” The project offers commentary on multiple fronts: earlier formations of Canadian literary studies; already “well established” methodologies for engaging with contemporary literature; murky relational modifiers including multi, post, inter, and poly; and readings of exemplary texts (all but one published in 2000) designated as “rewritten Hi/stories,” “recreated Her/stories,” and “reappropriations” of an “AlterNative Past,” to list a few of Tunkel’s imaginative descriptors.

Amid its proliferation of hyphenated and compound names, however intriguing, Transcultural Imaginaries stops short of explaining, testing, or putting into practice its reminted subgenres and proposed alternatives to inadequate social-cultural and theoretical categories. A validation and unyoking of “subaltern (or minority) discourse” from its relationship with “postcolonial discourse” is accomplished through failure to mention the Subaltern Studies Group, rural India during and after British colonial rule, or thinkers like Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and their foundational and interventionist scholarship. In subsuming the “minority” within the “subaltern,” Tunkel furthermore alleges that “the subject of gender and other potential markers of difference and marginalization” is excluded from the “whole theoretical school” because the “postcolonial tendency developed out of very specific historical contexts … and is thus more strongly linked to political and cultural circumstances.”

This puzzlingly decisive statement and others like it are rarely supported with examples from the relevant research, yet the research and the way it may have “developed” or “evolved” remain a focus while more labels bleed into or usurp one another. Linda Hutcheon’s notion of “historiographic metafiction,” for example, comes up many times, yet the work in which the concept appears is never cited. Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History (1989) is absent from the bibliography; a “critical reading” of this work, “as well as the studies that followed,” is promised but not delivered. Instead, Tunkel refers to secondary critics, inferring rather than quoting their work with Hutcheon. Mediating a dispute whose crux itself is obscure, Tunkel remarks on Herb Wyile’s contention that Canadian historical fiction is becoming “less experimental rather than more.” Gordon Bölling’s uncited objection to Wyile is “just as valid,” because Bölling “regards [historiographic metafiction] as a narrative genre, separate from postmodernism, which existed long before the 1960s and continues to do so.” A baffling footnote adds, “In this respect, Bölling also strongly criticizes Hutcheon.”

Phrases like “long before the 1960s” are rife in Transcultural Imaginaries, markers of unexplained historical significance. “Twenty years have passed,” Tunkel notes, “since the revolutionary publication of Hutcheon’s important studies on historiographic fiction: a period long enough to suggest that several significant alterations may have occurred in the genre since.” Such alterations, however, like Hutcheon’s important book, go unidentified. How things in fact alter over time – a sense of movement in the history that Tunkel’s selected literary texts register, intercept, and rewrite – is possibly the most glaring lacuna of the book. “Migrants” (as opposed to those identified as “non-migrants”) appear on the Canadian scene devoid of history and are inserted into another cleaned of struggle, economic factors, and politics. Regarding an apparently pan-Asian variety of immigration, “as the rigid (and racist) immigration restrictions of the early twentieth century were slowly being reformed, increasing social plurality led to ‘diversity’ becoming an acknowledged part of Canadian identity.” Perhaps this erasure of the agents, opponents, and material details of “slow reform,” along with the perception of decades as self-evident units of the past, helps Tunkel to draw Joy Kogawa’s Obasan out of the unfinished business of Japanese-Canadian internment and into deracinated, “subaltern” community with other 1980s women’s novels, Susan Swan’s The Biggest Woman in the World and Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic.

Likewise, works by George Elliott Clarke are introduced with a paragraph on the...