Is Canada Postcolonial?: Unsettling Canadian Literature

What Resides in the Question, “Is Canada Postcolonial?”

As the title of a conference and a call for papers, the question “Is Canada Postcolonial?” is suggestive, provocative, and engaging. Considered further , however, the question emerges as an uneasy formulation that begs several theoretical and ontological questions, and has potentially powerful pedagogical implications as well. What follows is an attempt at a distillation of the questions begged by this formulation and still, to my mind, unresolved. A year after the conference took place, I remain uncomfortable with the question, and uncomfortable, as well, with our various “answers”; I quote the word because in this incarnation, I do not think that the question can be satisfactorily answered. But it can be asked, I believe, at once more specifically and more variously, as evidenced in the papers at the conference it engendered. Before proceeding to the problems I perceive in the question thus formulated , I would like to acknowledge some bare facts: first, I am very careful about how and when I use the term “postcolonial” in the classroom or my writing because my perception is that the term is increasingly deployed loosely and diffusely, to the point that its meaning threatens to evaporate. Second, and in only apparent contradiction, I hope, as I write I have recently finished teaching a graduate course in Canadian literature in Brazil (from March through May 2001) ambitiously (or perhaps fraudulently) entitled “The Postcolonial Moment: Canadian Writing at Century’s End,” a course that helped me to realize just how particular, various, and culturally determined are the understandings of postcolonial theory and practice. Third, I have realized more strongly than before that I do not understand, and I am beginning 40 N E I L B E S N E R What Resides in the Question, “Is Canada Postcolonial?” to doubt that I ever did, what the relations, or more properly the disjunctions , between “postcolonial” and “Canada” might signify. It seems to me that to ask “Is Canada Postcolonial?” confounds both terms to begin with, by proposing an ontological if not an essential equation of Canada with postcoloniality (or, indeed, proposing an essential separation of the two terms, which is equally confounding) that destabilizes the more viable and legitimate relational (rather than ontological) status of the terms. The question thus formulated presupposes that the nation, in its current incarnation, “is” (or is not) postcolonial: further, the question might be assumed to suggest, if answered in the positive, that Canada as a nation has somehow now evolved into a postcolonial entity. But that assumption rushes the question and hurries the argument. A more fruitful series of questions might inquire whether postcolonialism is a methodology; a condition; or a development, chronological or otherwise , really so simply related as it might seem either to colonialism, to ideas of nation, or to both. Finally, we might inquire whether and how predominant ideas of Canada and postcolonialism can live with each other, and in what configuration. In 2001, all of these questions are urgent ones; all of them inform not only our theoretical disposition but our pedagogy, whether we consider them explicitly in the classroom or not (in fact, the less explicitly they are considered, the more powerfully they operate in the classroom); and, for literary studies as for other areas of Canadian studies, they are questions that now need continuous redefinition rather than preemptive answers. I Why, and for whom, does the question “Is Canada Postcolonial?” seem to be so late, so naive, and so monolithic as to cause a kind of reflexive stagger—as well as to give rise to what sounds in the imagination like an instinctive, many-voiced chorus of “NOs”? Is it because the question seems too much like a straw dog, to sound too much like a latter-day formulation of, or to be in almost perverse dialogue with, some such allegedly rhetorical questions as “Was Canada a nation,” or “Was Canada a colony?” or “How was Canada a nation/colony?” and their many cousins and cognates? These are the kinds of questions that circulated around the heady issues of identity that, in their most recent era (they have arisen cyclically in Canadian criticism since before Confederation ), so animated Canadian critics in the fifties and sixties, so irritated critics in the seventies and into the eighties, and then disappeared off the screen in the nineties. They are the kinds of questions What Resides in the Question, “Is Canada Postcolonial?” 41 that produced...