Arts and Literature in Canada:Views from Abroad, Les arts et la ...

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Lorna IrvineZoning Canada’s ZeitgeistAdam, Ian and Helen Tiffin, eds., Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, Calgary, University of Calgary Press,1990, 214 p.Lecker, Robert, ed., Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value, Toronto,University of Toronto Press, 1991, 251 p.Söderlind, Sylvia, Margin/Alias: Language and Colonization in Canadianand Québécois Fiction, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1991,264 p.These three books extend several of the categories constructed by W.H. Newin his discussion of contemporary English-Canadian criticism and theory inthe 1990 Spring/Fall edition of the International Journal of Canadian Studies.Devoted to issues of power and authority, each is intent on broadening thescope of Canadian theory, sometimes by creating dialogues between Canadaand Québec, other times by situating Canadian literature within a globalframework. Past the Last Post raises wide-ranging questions about themeaning of the term “post-colonialism” by looking at literatures from differentparts of the world. Canadian Canons emphasizes the personal and publicpolitics involved in choosing books that will become Canada’s majorrepresentative texts. Margin/Alias investigates the ways in which languagebetrays various states of colonization, concentrating specifically on Canadianand Québécois literatures. All three books reflect current debate aboutauthority, marginality, and conflict. By engaging English-Canadian andQuébécois works in such debates, each broadens the scope and influence ofAnglophone literary theory both in Canada and abroad. In their efforts to markout a specifically Canadian territory, these books concentrate on definingterminology. Although occasionally defensive about the degree ofsophistication of the Canadian critical project, they invest new authority intheir subject and the reaction it generates.Past the Last Post, the most broadly based of the books, begins by addressingthe divided agenda of current approaches to colonization. Some theoristsinterpret post-colonialism as the efforts of formerly marginalized groups toinvestigate and transform the colonizing strategies that combined to keep themsilent. Other interpretations of post-colonialism suggest the importance ofdifference, and advocate separation as a form of resistance to imperial powers.While the book’s essays differ in perspective—some more theoretical thanInternational Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes6, Fall/Automne 1992
IJCS/RIÉCothers—each addresses terminology, emphasizing a few similarities anddifferences among various “posts”: post-modernism, post-structuralism, postcolonialism.Several critics suggest that post-modernism, with its emphasis onthe death of the subject, works in opposition to post-colonialism because itdiscredits individualism and personal authority, whereas formerly colonizedpeople understandably yearn for a voice and authority of their own. Postmodernismalso discredits the kind of nationalism (and national identity)particularly important in post-colonial situations. While most “posts”recognize contemporary breaks with tradition, often through the use of parody,and acknowledge the importance of including many different voices in anyrepresentation of reality, the editors of Past the Last Post emphasize that postcolonialisttheorists need to search out the pasts of groups that have been“‘Othered’ by a history of European representation,” so that the formerlycolonized can reject such “othering” (x).Several critics want post-colonial readings of post-modernism to compensatefor the latter’s globalism, and almost all agree that the various “posts” havehelped erode the “centrality of British literature and canon-based studieswithin academic institutions” (xv). They point to the contemporary variety ofliterary works in English that form college syllabi. Stephen Slemon, in“Modernism’s Last Post,” argues that the term “post-colonial” is most useful“not when it is used synonymously with a post-independence historical periodin once-colonized nations but rather when it locates a specifically anti-or postcolonialdiscursive purchase in culture.” This post-colonial purchase, Slemoninsists, “begins the moment that colonial power inscribes itself onto the bodyand space of its Others and which continues as an often occulted tradition intothe modern theatre of neo-colonialist international relations” (3). In“Decolonizing the Map,” Graham Huggan illustrates the fascination of postcolonialwriters with the image of the map, emphasizing the ways in whichmaps are “shifting grounds” (132) that reveal not only territorial changes butalso new physical configurations that move cartography “away from the desirefor homogeneity towards an acceptance of diversity” (132). Both Slemon andHuggan defend recuperation (of language; of history; of land) as the majorproject of post-colonialism.The final two papers emphasize Canadian literature, and are connected. In“‘Circling the Downspout of Empire’,” Linda Hutcheon stresses the commonex-centricity and doubled vision of post-colonialism and post-modernism. Asshe has commented elsewhere—for example, in The Canadian Postmodern,where she suggests that “postmodernism offers a context in which tounderstand the valuing of difference in a way that makes particular sense inCanada” (Preface ix)—she argues here that the structures of magic realism andthe rhetorical strategies of irony and allegory are common to both discourses,although she also emphasizes that the two are not interchangeable. Postmodernism,she notes, unlike post-colonialism, exhibits considerable politicalambivalence. Like other critics, she acknowledges the somewhat neo-colonialtendencies of post-modernism, exhibited particularly in a blindness to Native154
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Review Essays/Essais critiquesLorna
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Barbara KorteEnglish-Canadian Persp
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Dorothée KomTypologie des narratai
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Elisabeth CencigThe Jordans:Remembe
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Roshan G. ShahaniIn Quest of a Habi
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Immigrant Voices from Indiapromised
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Immigrant Voices from Indiawhich is
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