A Culture of Rights: Law, Literature, and Canada by Benjamin Authers (review)

Benjamin Authers's A Culture of Rights cleverly examines the cultural, social, and political orbits of the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Charter) through thoughtful intertextual analysis and keen philosophical reasoning. In A Culture of Rights, Authers argues that the pre-eminent position of the Charter in the Canadian national imaginary is central to a cultural discourse of rights that shapes, and is shaped by, the interplay between law and literature. As this book explains, looking at law through a cultural lens helps to make visible the way Canadians understand their individual and collective relationships with the nation-state.

Authers interweaves his close readings of Canadian legal documents, Supreme Court of Canada case studies, and selected works of Canadian fiction from the past thirty years to illustrate the complex relationship between literature and law in Canada's culture of rights since 1982. This book offers readers an opportunity to think about the way Canadians legitimize their often-ambivalent sense of national identity through Western juridical traditions and colonial assumptions about the flexibility of "truth." Beginning with a reading of the Charter, Authers deconstructs the conceptual frameworks of rights discourse by reading them against the complex social and historical situations featured in Joy Kogawa's Itsuka (1992), Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm (1981), Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), and Jeannette Armstrong's Slash (1985), among others. Focusing in particular on Charter rights to expression, a free and democratic society, and a fair and public hearing, Authers demonstrates how lived experiences of the law are shaped by literary discourse.

By exploring the cultural dialogue generated by Canadian literary interpretations, and lived experiences of the law, Authers highlights how legal discourse influences our cultural understanding of "Canada as premised on a rights-based ideal of individual and collective good." A Culture of Rights highlights the adoption of the Charter as a key moment in the codification of rights as part of the Canadian national imaginary. While predominantly focused on works from the 1980s and 1990s, Authers's book has timely applications to ongoing conversations of literary cultural nationalism, individual and collective sovereignty, and Canadian legal frameworks. At a time when Canadians are increasingly leaning on rights-based discourses to understand themselves within the national and international community, this book provides a useful way of thinking through the cultural politics that underscore these relationships.

The reading of Kogawa's Itsuka (later Emily Kato) featured in the first chapter of the book unpacks the sense of idealistic futurity embedded in the right to a free and democratic society and underscores the way this idealism foregrounds other Charter rights. Similarly, the chapter "Excessive Rights: Freedom of Expression and Analogies of Harm" highlights the tension between obscenity and art through a reading of Atwood's Bodily Harm and the Supreme Court of Canada case R. v. Butler by focusing on the analogous structure of the court's test for social harm and Atwood's similar narrative critique of "Project P," Authers elucidates the constitutive interrelationship between law and literature in our national consciousness as well as the limits of these protections.

While A Culture of Rights's "'We Don't Need Anybody's Constitution': Indigenous Peoples and Resistance to Rights" does highlight the oftenantagonistic relationship between the Canadian government and First Nations, there is little mention in other chapters of the relationship between Indigenous peoples and evolving Charter politics during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Such as it is, his critique misses an opportunity to engage more broadly with the position of Indigenous peoples in the national imaginary in the present, considering more deeply the way their presence inflects Canadian rights-based discourse with a colonial spectre. Nonetheless, Authers's readings of Slash, R. v. Sparrow, and R. v. Van der Peet provide a thoughtful consideration of the politics of recognition, which he uses to highlight the way Indigenous women are particularly marginalized by Canada's attempts to define Indigenous societies against...