Nexus: Cultures, Pluralism and Globalization

Journal of Canadian Studies• Revue d'€tudes canadiennes Nexus: Cultures, Pluralism and Globalization Michael D. Behiels E ver since the 1951 Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (the Massey Commission), the term culture has taken on an ever-increasing range of meanings.1 The Massey commissioners thought of culture largely in terms of the traditional highbrow visual and performing arts activities and serious literature. They were concerned with the threat posed to these activities by an increasingly all-pervasive American lowbrow popular culture reaching Canadians via radio, television and the print media. In their pursuit of a liberal humanistic democratic society, the commissioners urged the Canadian government to nurture the expansion of highbrow Canadian cultures, francophone and anglophone. The Canadian government responded, somewhat belatedly and in a piecemeal fashion, to the commissioners' many recommendations, but their intended goal of state-funded educational and uplifting cultural programmes was never fully implemented nor achieved in the way they had envisaged. Why? Largely because Canadians, in a society transformed dramatically by new information and communication technologies, extensive post-war immigration, and rapidly changing social values and norms of behaviour, came to perceive and experience culture(s) in ways completely unforeseen by the Massey commissioners. Canadians debate and experience cultural pluralism, including traditional highbrow visual and performing arts, all matter of popular cultures, youth countercultures , corporate and business cultures, political cultures, family cultures, religious cultures, etc. Cultural constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions of our past, our present and our future are intimately related to the expanding pluralist nature ofthe various communities- family, local, regional, national and international - that we adopt, inhabit, alter and often abandon for other cultural experiences. "Cultural expression," in the words ofJames Marsh andJocelyn Harvey, "is more and more bound up with the development of cultural industries, which play a key role n.ot only in disseininating works, but in forming the way in which the culture itself ls perceived.112 It is the various challenges posed by the commercialization of cultures :ind the nexus of connections inherent in this tension-ridden environment of cultural pluralism that this seemingly eclectic collection of essays explores. What these =ssays do share is a common belief that cultures, however defined, experienced and turned to commercial ends, matter. They matterbecause cultures and everything they represent remain central to our shared human experience. Volume 36 •No. 1 • (Printernps 2001 Spring) 5 6 Introduction • Behiels The construction of a Canadian tradition of literary "classics" and national literary "icons" has been a long and arduous task for the Canadian literary and publishing establishments. This process was aided and abetted greatly by L.M. Montgomery's immensely popular 1908 novel, Anne of Green Gables. Cecily Devereux analyzes how and why the nationalism of 11 our11 Anne ofGreen Gables was immediately, and continually to this day, transformed from a "Canadian Classic" into a highly lucrative ''commodity export." The American, British, Australian and Japanese publishing establishments appropriated A1111e of Green Gables into their respective national and nationalist discourses of children's literature, theatre and films. Canada's quintessentially British-Canadian A1111e of Green Gables was reconstructed into very different American, British, Australian and Japanese Annes ofGreen Gables. If sizeable profits were to be had in the process, and they most certainly were and are, then so much the better! Devereux is drawn to conclude that "Anne's circulation as a 'commodity' may well thus serve as an index not of difference at all - local, national or global - but of a fundamental ideological sameness in the representation and in the narratives of national identity." National values and themes managed to trump universal values and themes underlying (/our" Anne because these are so much easier to communicate and commercialize. The same process of commodifying culture for the purpose of constructing a civic identity occurs regularly in all of Canada's major urban centres. This past year, the mayor of the newly created mega-city of Toronto, Mel Lastman, chose the Canadian Moose, done up in a myriad of colours and garbs, as the symbol of the deeply rooted "Canadianism" of what is, in reality, the most pluralistic and most cosmopolitan of Canadian cities. Robert and Tamara...