Canadian Literature: Post-colonialism or Diaspora?
Whither cultural influence?
Session organizer:
Duncan Lucas
Dept. of English,
McMaster University
1280 Main St. W,
Hamilton, Ontario
L8S 4L9
lucasd@mcmaster.ca or duncanal@interlynx.net
"This Land is My Land At Long Last": Questioning Canada's
Postcolonialism through Plainsong and Green Grass, Running Water
My paper considers the question of postcolonialism in Canada through
Nancy Huston’s Plainsong and Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water. Both
published in 1993 by writers with tangled national affiliations (the
Alberta-born Huston has lived in self-imposed exile in France since she was a
college student, and King, who was born in California to a German/Greek mother
and a Cherokee father, is now a Canadian citizen), the novels explore and
challenge the influence of Canada’s European settlers on its marginalized
populations and seek to articulate a contemporary Canadian national identity.
In Huston’s novel, the narrator, Paula, reimagines a century of Canada’s past
in her own highly emotional, personal terms. In her creation of a binary
conflict between Canada’s ancestral colonial powers and the populations that
suffered under their influence, Paula aims to overthrow those powers and affirm
possession of the nation for Canada’s marginalized. But the binary nature of
Paula’s postcolonial approach to the past privileges only her perspective, leaving
most of Canada’s cultural others languishing on the margins. The primary focus
of King’s Green Grass, Running Water is not on overthrowing the legacy of
Canada’s colonial powers, but rather on the continuing challenge of maintaining
First Nations communities and identities in the twentieth- and twenty-first
centuries. King’s characters must engage with and resist not a phenomenon of
the past, but political and social pressures exerted by a diverse range of
contemporary entities, including land developers, customs agents, Canadian
tourists, and cultural productions from Moby-Dick to John Wayne films. In
portraying the cultural influences of colonialism as pervasive and ongoing, I
argue that King’s novel provides a more viable model of understanding difference
in Canadian literature and culture today.
Adele Holoch
University
of Iowa
“Denaturalizing Canadian Citizenship: Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Small
Arguments”
In an interview, Souvankham Thammavongsa states that Small Arguments
collects small lives and argues for their belonging. While doing so, it also
serves as an argument for my own belonging. I was born in a refugee camp. I was
not given a birth certificate. It is not enough that I am living. A piece of
paper needs to prove this. Small Arguments offers this.” This collection
of poems opens up pressing questions about the nature of belonging within
Canadian political, cultural, and literary structures, and the connections that
exist between written text and structures of citizenship. Small Arguments underlines
the importance of documentation to citizenship and the obvious lack of such
documents for many migrants who make a home in Canada, substituting poem for
birth certificate, through form, content, and diction. The epigraph to
Thammavongsa’s collection argues that philosophy has the ability to “show the
strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest
things in daily life” (Bertrand Russell). By deploying metaphors of nature, Small
Arguments makes it clear that poetry can also compel its readers to see
those diasporic bodies that are typically made invisible within social and
political Canadian spaces. This paper seeks to read Thammavongsa’s collection
through two distinct lenses by considering, on the one hand, the text in terms
of the politics of decolonization it discusses extensively, and on the other
hand, through the text’s relation to self-publishing and zine culture. By
approaching the poems as both a site of political discussion and as cultural
artifact, this paper teases out the various ways in which the text critiques
Canada for its ongoing internal colonial practices.
Christine Kim
Department of English, York University
“Re/placing Native Canadian
Citizenship: Reading Thomas King’s
stories in Relation to the Multicultural Nation”
Canada is increasingly theorized as both postcolonial and diasporic space. This panel addresses the complexity of the relationship between these theoretical discourses, and my paper attempts to engage this debate from the Native perspective as it emerges through the stories of Thomas King. I argue that plotting postcolonial and diasporic critiques with indigenous discourses in hybrid counterpoint negotiates what Spivak calls the “deconstructive predicament of the postcolonial”: this process of engagement enables the colonized to reclaim catachreses “from a space that one cannot not want to inhabit and yet must criticize” (1993). While this space can be defined as both a ‘postcolonial’ and ‘diasporic’ Canada, it is also one that must be read in relation to the Native cultures central to it. I suggest that the stories of Thomas King enable the re/placement of Native Canadian citizenship in spiral relationships with the discourses of the Nation. The multiple perspectives he engages express Native worldviews centering “All my Relations” and locate Native Canadian ‘culture’ as circling around a ‘Multicultural’ continuum that necessarily engages both the diasporic and the postcolonial.
Linda Rodenburg
University of Otago