Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

d'une véritable oeuvre de fiction."
Approche de la vieille école, sans aucun
doute, mais il reste que les premiers
chercheurs en littérature canadienne partaient,
en toute bonne foi, d'une conception
acceptée et bien établie des méthodes
de recherche et des objectifs de l'enquête.
Tous les deux à la retraite, Lebel et
Robidoux ont raison d'être fiers de leurs
contributions intellectuelles ainsi que de
leur rôle de pionniers dans nos universités.
De fait, les Mélanges offerts à chacun (1980,
1992) par leurs étudiants et collègues
témoignent d'influences incontestables.
Pourquoi vouloir par la suite recueillir de
vieux textes? Nous devrions d'abord nous
demander s'ils sont toujours pertinents aux
enquêtes actuelles. Par le fait qu'il était
introuvable, le premier essai du recueil de
Robidoux présente un document précieux
sur la fondation d'une littérature nationale.
Bien que la méthode soit devenue désuète,
la documentation historique reste fort pertinente.
En contraste, les comptes rendus
de Lebel (sorte de texte fragmenté), tout en
témoignant d'un esprit remarquable,
restent de peu d'utilité pratique sauf peutêtre
pour le biographe ou l'historien, peintres
d'une époque. Le regard rétrospectif de
nos penseurs ne dépasse parfois pas le personnel.
Disturbing The Peace.
Ormond McKague (éd.)
Racism in Canada. Fifth House $15.95
Marlene Nourbese Philip
Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and
Culture. Mercury $15.95
Reviewed by Geoffrey V. Davis
Those of us overseas who watched the
events at Oka or the 1992 Toronto riots on
our television screens, who have seen a performance
of Pollock's Komagata Mar и
Incidentor Lill's The Occupation of Heather
Rose, or have read a novel like Kogawa's
Obasan, will no longer subscribe—if we
ever did—to the view that Canada is a land
of harmonious racial relations where
racism does not exist. The treatment of
East Indian immigrants in pre-World War I
Vancouver and the removal of Japanese
Canadians from the ВС coast after Pearl
Harbour point to a history of racism; atttitudes
towards native people and recent
immigrants provide more recent evidence
that the problem has not gone away.
Nevertheless, Canada's image hitherto has
hardly been that of a racist society, racial
outbreaks have seemed isolated incidents,
and the policy of multiculturalism has been
thought an honest attempt to further
equality between the various peoples who
make up the Canadian population and to
support their cultural expression.
The two books under review—the one
compiled in the wake of Oka, the other in
the shadow of Toronto—survey the country's
racist past, seek to reveal the workings
of racism in contemporary Canadian society
and argue that it is systemic, that it permeates
Canada's institutions. They give
little credit to the policy of multiculturalism,
doubting that it is an effective instrument
against racism. In his preface to
Racism in Canada, for example, the editor
contends that "there are few issues .. . more
pertinent and more fundamentally important,
more threatening to Canada's development
as a humane and progressive
society, more hidden and misunderstood,
than racism." Racism, he asserts, is to be
found everywhere in Canadian society and
Canadians have been far too complacent
about it. Only recently, as aboriginal people
have organised in protest and "the racist
assumptions of the past" have been increasingly
called into question, has "a process of
challenge and confrontation" been initiated,
within which he firmly situates the
present work.
Racism in Canada is a work of political
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