Is Canada Postcolonial?: Unsettling Canadian Literature

Is Canada a Postcolonial Country?

1. Is any country anywhere today postcolonial? Former colonies, whether of the invader-settler or dominion settlement or mandated variety, frequently fall into neo-colonial practices, a process fuelled by ancient animosities and exacerbated by arbitrary redrawing or relinquishment of maps and boundaries, and the leaving in place of colonial administrative structures to be used by Indigenous elites against their own people. Moreover, given that colonial powers managed domestic exploitation in the mother country and her metropole in part by exporting surplus or problem populations so that they could themselves exploit subject peoples in overseas “possessions,” has the giving up of such possessions diminished or intensified social stratification at home? Has decolonization, necessarily viewed as a domestic as well as an international project, been anything more than an illusion, the persistence of old dependencies within the aura and aspirations of political independence? What has the empire writing back or striking back amounted to in practice? Why is Said’s orientalism currently being challenged so vigorously by Cannadine’s ornamentalism? 2. Is there a special import to the term “country” that hides inside the weak synonymy of country/state some unresolved, perhaps even unresolvable , tensions between residually colonial land and law, and between national sovereignty and membership (or not) in North America , the Americas more generally, the first world, the G7, the rapidly expanding NATO, and so on? 3. Such tensions would seem not so much to disturb as to establish and sustain the field of postnational arguments and expectations. 297 L E N F I N D L A Y Is Canada a Postcolonial Country? However, the death of the nation-state has been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the nation-state needs to continue for two broadly contradictory reasons, one triumphalist and one dissenting: transnational corporations and the United States both need nation-states as satellites or proxies to talk (down) to, and to help develop and implement the deregulating political and fiscal instruments necessary for further “globalization ” of “the” market economy; at the same time, citizens need nation-states as sites of resistance to such political and economic hegemony exercised by unelected elites and insiders. Given this distribution of power and interest, does the postcolonial become a reality only as a marginal, dissenting presence, or as a new, revisionary civics that can look forward confidently to redefining and redistributing economic and cultural value? 4. Does “postcolonial” as a concept, designation, and set of social practices enjoy only a derivative and too often nebulous existence, a set of oppositional or negative identities linked contingently to the characteristics of one or another colonial regime, or are the derivative, relational , and contingent the only options anyway? And how then can one discriminate between weak and strong or even good and bad indeterminacy and instability? 5. Does the prefix “post” point to historical continuity or inevitability or rupture, or a mixture of these elements? And how can multiple temporalities , sutures, and sunderings be better understood and even managed in the broad public interest? 6. Does the phenomenon of deterritorialization mean a new focus for justice or does it enact a diversion or lie to cover the shift from landgrabbing to more comprehensive intellectual and cultural appropriation ? (In the words of Nimachia Hernandez of UC Berkeley spoken at a Banff colloquium on Indigenous and Western Science sponsored by MIT, “our [Blackfoot, and more generally Indigenous] knowledge is being treated like the last commodity.”) The modalities of dispossession turning on the doctrine of terra nullius have been supplanted or at least significantly supplemented by actions one might ascribe to terra virtualis as the value form and shifting “ground” of cybercolonialism. 7. If we try more fully to Indigenize the question that already engages a wide range of scholars, enacting a dependency on First Nations, Inuit, and Métis knowledge and entitlement which colonialism by definition diminished, denied, or chose to forget, we might translate the Canadian version of the postcolonial question as threatening a shift from the predatory terra nullius to the cyber-predatory 298 L E N F I N D L A Y terra virtualis—that wired and wonderful world, mysteriously planetary yet dematerialized, which aggravates inequality and injustice even as it promises to end them. 8. Such Indigenizing is all the more likely to happen if Canadians continue to read—lovingly yet critically—our literary “own” while endeavouring to understand and use the potential of such concepts as treaty textuality...