Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION Smaro Kamboureli The world needs an epistemological change that will arrange desires. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, —An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012) I From CanLit to Canlits: White Diaspora, Filiation, and Complicity Literary fields develop by means of a double trajectory: while they remain in a state of constant flux, they acquire their disciplinary status by posing as stable categories, feigning the kind of constancy that allows readers to take a lingering and critical look at them. The field of Canadian literature is not an exception to this normative state. As a literature with a colonial descent, it has always been inscribed by the anxiety and insecurity typifying the ambivalent desire of settler cultures: to differentiate themselves from their imperial origins by establishing a literary idiom representative of the local even while craving recognition from the metropole under the rubric of its presumed universal literary values. Far from being linear, this route is palindromic, for in the process of coming into their own, literatures of settler cultures strive to come to terms with the double ethos of filiation and complicity. At the same time that they are driven by an emancipatory impulse as they strive to attain the status of national literatures, the residual memory of their elsewhereness compels them to keep looking back; they thus remain eager to disassociate themselves from their colonial heritage but also to emulate its time-honoured paradigms. They behave like prodigal kin; theirs is a “schizoid consciousness” (Huggan 30),1 hence their ambivalence. This ambivalence takes different 2 Smaro Kamboureli configurations, but the recitability of white settler cultures’ acute desire to exceed their colonial origins that is attended by compulsory nation building endures; moreover, white settler cultures rarely fail to reproduce the colonial vestiges of their history. Colonialism, even when it is not directly evoked or is presumed to have been eradicated in this so-called postcolonial era, survives in how “white diasporas” (Ashcroft et al. 19) behave. “This pattern,” as Graham Huggan writes, “reconfirms the dis-ease—the epistemological, even metaphysical uncertainty—which accompanied historical processes of white settlement” (29). This filiative and complicitous conduct is aptly summed up by Lee Maracle, who calls white settlement “Diaspora” and equates this “Diaspora” with “the mother countries” (55).2 For Maracle there is no distinction between the imperial centre and its colonies that have evolved into nation-states; the sliding of one signifier into the other exposes their filiative structural relationship and speaks to the displacement that marks such metonymic relations, a displacement that works in this context in more ways than one. Diaspora is displaced from and attempts to displace the mother country, a recognition (in part) of its complicity with it, while it itself displaces the others it encounters. While Diaspora writ large in Maracle’s essay refers to the hegemonic role of white settler culture and its pervasive impact on Indigenous peoples, I also take it to refer to the subsequent diasporas it has accommodated and instrumentalized in its process of becoming a nation-state. Maracle is not being reductive when she collapses the differences between white settler cultures and diasporic communities within such cultures; rather, Diaspora as a condensed signifier evokes the archives of Western violence, archives here to be understood not only “as repositories of state power but as unquiet movements in a field of force, as restless realignments and readjustments of people and the beliefs to which they were tethered, as spaces in which the senses and the affective course through the seeming abstractions of political rationalities” (Stoler 32–33). As such an archive, one whose violence is not just a thing of the past but has a durability that continues to warp the present, Diaspora as Maracle’s choice term also works to produce “a condensed historicity” that “exceeds itself in past and future directions” (Butler, Excitable Speech 3). Diaspora has played a “usurp[ing]” role, Maracle writes, by “claim[ing] discovery, and then proceed[ing] to define, delineate, and demarcate the cultural, intellectual, economic, spiritual, and physical being” of those it has “established exclusive dominion over” (55–56). Nevertheless, by rendering it as a site located at the same level as that of the other diasporic communities it contains and manages, Maracle curbs its power. She thus undoes the epistemic habit3 that applies the designation diaspora to people other than white settlers, and in the process Introduction 3 affirms the unceded...