Is Canada Postcolonial?: Unsettling Canadian Literature

Answering the Questions

At the “Is Canada Postcolonial?”conference, the most interesting questions were about that adjective, “postcolonial.” Some of us, such as Diana Brydon, Susan Gingell, and Victor Ramraj, have been involved in what is now called “postcolonial studies” for some twenty-five years, and John Moss was there even before us. In our time, the complexion of those doing postcolonial studies has changed, as Victor noted a number of times during the conference. As the complexion of Canada has shifted one way, the complexion of those studying postcolonial issues in Canada has shifted the other. At the beginning people such as Diana and Susan and I were quite unusual. There were few involved in what was then called “Commonwealth Literature” who were, excuse the expression, “white,” and born in Canada. This seems to have changed over the years and I wonder if some of our difficulties with the title question are not a reflection of the various ways we have trouble with that process. There are many problems with the term, or perhaps the concept, “postcolonial,” some of which are observed in Chelva Kanaganayakam’s paper. An English course taught in my department at York University is named “Post-colonial Writing in Canada.” The original description read: “This course will introduce the students to a number of Canadian writers of Native, South Asian and Caribbean backgrounds whose work emerges from an experience of colonialism.” Two years ago I tried to change the title of the course to “Minority Writing in Canada.” My first purpose was to include other writers of visible minorities, particularly Asian Canadians, a group that now regularly appears in the syllabus of 300 T E R R Y G O L D I E Answering the Questions the course, under the table so to speak. But I also wished to get rid of the “postcolonial” reference. At York “postcolonial” is a collective term for the literatures of the former British Commonwealth, a usage common elsewhere. This does not deny that many other literatures have relationships with colonialism and imperialism but they don’t appear in an English department. This usage is thus not precise but at best reasonable, and first of all pragmatic. No such label would be needed except for our acceptance of a market in which the national literatures of countries such as India and Jamaica are unlikely to get individual courses, at least before the specialized honours seminars, and “postcolonial” seems a better grab-bag than most. I felt it was a problematic term for English 3440 for two reasons . First it denied the possibility of seeing Canadian literature in general as postcolonial; second, it seemed to imply that “postcolonial” is always brown or black. I also had a third concern, however. The limitation to visible minorities from the former British Commonwealth and Canadian First Nations suggested that there is something quintessentially specific to this category. The term “visible minorities” is itself a stereotypical Canadian euphemism and thus an embarrassment. Who is “visible” to whom and why? The group is seldom defined but no one can deny that it is a way of designating “other-than-white” without mentioning a nasty word such as “race.” It is a term Canada has assumed to deal with that changing complexion. At least one “race” group has carefully excluded itself. Native persons often assert the importance of the difference between the “visible minorities” category and the Inuit and First Nations. There are many parts to this but the essence is indigeneity. A Native person is no doubt the object of racism and oppressed by a white hegemony but she or he defines her or his identity rather from a specific relation to the land. Indigenous peoples in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand maintain that the term “postcolonial” is depressingly laughable without Native sovereignty. There have been many arguments over the meaning of “postcolonial ” and presumably it is not necessary to repeat them here. I still find the discussion by Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge to be the most compelling but I disagree with parts, as I do with McClintock, Slemon, Trivedi, Appiah, and others. Note, however, that unlike many of those examples, my discussion here emphasizes the literatures. In an article titled “Queerly Postcolonial,” which followed the trajectories of queer and postcolonial theory, I suggested that the present critiques that are Answering the Questions 301 labeled “postcolonial” do not descend from the early versions of literary...