What is Canadian literature? The question of how we might define Canadian literature has often been debated through discussions about, for example, canons, institutions, and most recently settler colonialism. But as I return us to this question, I want to pose it differently by approaching the field of Canadian literature as problems of methodology and object. In doing so, I hope to reflect upon how we understand Canadian literature as a category or Canadian literary studies as a field, and, moreover, what work we see them as performing. In reflecting upon how our methods and objects define the field of Canadian literary studies, my intention is to ask questions about how we approach it, the kinds of analytics we employ, and the questions we chase. And as critics working within the field, what do we read? Or to put it another way, what have we conventionally gravitated towards as a proper object for Canadian literary studies? In presuming that others lie beyond the bounds of the field, what moves are being made about how we map geographies and write histories? How does that speak to the histories of Canada and which relations it has been willing to acknowledge?
The field has undergone a key paradigm shift in response to the important work being produced by Indigenous scholars and their incisive critiques of settler colonialism. In the short space of this editorial, I want to highlight one particular intervention with the intention of extending this line of thought to see how it might prompt further re-evaluations of Canada and the field of Canadian literary studies. One way to reframe Canada from the perspective of Indigenous peoples is to understand how, as Audra Simpson writes of the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, “they have survived a great, transformative process of settler occupation, and they continue to live under the conditions of this occupation, its disavowal, and its ongoing life, which has required and still requires that they give up their lands and give up themselves” (2).
Simpson approaches settler colonialism in part by examining Indigenous sovereignty and the challenges it poses to settler states, and also by advocating refusal as an alternative to the politics of recognition (10-11). Drawing on the examples of how Haudenosaunee passports are not always recognized and the challenges of deciding membership in Kahnawà:ke, she highlights how Kahnawà:ke struggles with the pressing problem of “how to be a nation, when much of one’s territory has been taken. These processes also bring into question how to proceed as a nation if the right to determine the terms of legal belonging, a crucial component of sovereignty, has been dictated by a foreign government” (10). And while Simpson argues that sovereignties can sometimes be embedded within each other, she also draws our attention to the uneven relations of power that shape them as it is impossible to overlook how
one proliferates at the other’s expense; the United States and Canada can only come into political being because of Indigenous dispossession. Under these conditions there cannot be two perfectly equal, robust sovereignties. Built into “sovereignty” is a jurisdictional dominion over territory, a notion of singular law, and singular authority (the king, the state, the band council, tribal council, and even the notion of the People). (12)
Simpson highlights how control of territory lies at the heart of the settler-colonial project and makes itself known through conflicts over sovereignty. I want to hold onto her point and use it to open up ways of recognizing how deeply embedded problems of territory, sovereignty, and nation are within Canadian literary studies. To be more precise, there exists in the field a central contradiction in that, even as parts of Canadian literary studies work to reframe the ethical, legal, and political foundations of Canada by engaging with settler colonialism, the field continues to operate under the working belief that Canada is a nation whose sovereign borders determine its limits. In other words, concepts of territory, sovereignty, and borders continue to drive how we conceptualize the field. This is clearest in how we often define Canadian literature as a body of literature that is written by authors in Canada and/or texts published in Canada. And it is an assumption that also became the basis of debates over literary canons that took place in the late twentieth century and resulted in the inclusion of bipoc writers such as Austin Clarke, Joy Kogawa, M. G. Vassanji, and Thomas King. The guiding assumption was that these writers were also Canadian because they lived or had been born in Canada, but hadn’t been recognized as such because they were not white. To be clear, I am not contesting the importance or validity of those interventions in the slightest. I am, however, interested in asking how we can think about BIPOC writing in relation to power and justice in ways that destabilize rather than reinforce the sovereignty of nation-states.
To think through this possibility, I turn to the literary anthology, a vehicle that is often used to engage with the politics of national representation by expanding the range of included texts as well as reframing conversations for classrooms and other readers. Karina Vernon’s The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology carefully interrogates how we imagine the prairies as well as those who live and write there. Situating her project in relation to other prairie writing, she notes: “Of course, the prairies has been imagined into being by other writers too, but the ‘realist’ tradition is the one most often taught, anthologized, and read as representative of the prairies’ regional essence. Significantly, the ‘authentic’ prairie subject that emerges from this archive is rarely gendered, never raced, and definitely not black” (Vernon 2). Vernon intentionally produces a different narrative about the prairies by showcasing an archive of underrecognized writers that returns us to nineteenth-century writers such as Daniel T. Williams, Alfred Schmitz Shadd, and Mildred Jane Lewis Ware and takes us to the contemporary moment with Roland (Rollie) Pemberton, Frank Fontaine, and Miranda Martini. In order to sketch out the kinds of social spaces that Black writers create and live in, Vernon directs our attention “toward the geographies black prairie writers are connected with, including other parts of Canada, the US, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Africa” (3). As an archive of the prairies that makes visible “its relation to the black world, including the transatlantic slave trade and resulting cultures and networks of the black Atlantic” (3), Vernon’s anthology expands Canada beyond its borders and complicates its relations to territory while still keeping in view Canada’s colonial dimensions. Peter James Hudson’s work on the histories of finance and racial capitalism also helps us to think about the relations between Canada and the Black Atlantic as it traces the expansion of US banking as intertwined with colonial expansion. While primarily concerned with tracing the expansion of US financial institutions into the Caribbean, he also reminds us that as American bankers sought to realize their ambitions, Canada already had a presence in the region: since the mid-nineteenth century, Canadian chartered banks had
dominated the financing of the North American trade in the British West Indies and the Spanish-speaking islands. US bankers had lagged behind. Their European and Canadian competitors were quick to seize on the region’s shifting needs for capital, brought on by both the end of slavery and the emergency of nominally free populations of African and [I]ndigenous workers and peasants, and by demands for capital by independent postcolonial states seeking to fund their modernization projects. (Hudson 6)
Vernon’s and Hudson’s projects situate Canada within networks of racial capitalism that extend nations far beyond their borders.
We can also reframe inclusion within the nation as a question or problem rather than a simple premise or assertion by routing it through the work of migration scholars such as Kornel S. Chang and Radhika Mongia, who remind us that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, borders were created in response to migration, not threatened by it. Speaking of the Pacific Northwest during this time period, Chang addresses the contradictions of borders by pointing out, “The imperatives of a ‘white man’s country’ that justified settler expansion and the exploitation of markets and labor abroad also at once rendered national boundaries at home inviolable and racially exclusive” (4). He focuses on Chinese labour migration during this period, noting,
The US-Canadian boundary became the primary site of this struggle with Asian ethnic labor recruiters, white labor activists, East and South Asian migrants, and local civil servants locked in protracted struggle over the permeability of the border. The rapid circulation of people, goods, and resources kindled a countermovement to harden national borders in the Pacific Northwest even as these movements integrated the region into a larger Pacific world. (13)
Flexible to the extent that Canada desired access to markets and cheap labour but rigid when it no longer required the bodies that drove them, borders become both signifiers of imperial privilege and racialized exclusion.
Moving through a different part of this archive of Asian migration, Mongia further complicates the relations between Canadian borders and migrants. By tracing a “colonial genealogy of the modern state” via Indian migration, Mongia provides insight into how technologies such as the passport were used as the globe shifted from empire-states to nation-states (3–4). Noting that while the movement of indentured Indian labour was facilitated by state-controlled systems, the movement of non-indentured Indians received a very different response as white-settler colonies like Canada sought ways to prohibit this movement (2). Like Chang, Mongia demonstrates how “territorial borders did not emerge first, only later and incidentally to be policed, monitored, guarded. Rather, borders are produced and experienced in specific forms and become porous or impassable with respect to certain subjects conceived in historically specific ways” (148). The passport, like the head tax, literary tests, and Continuous Journey regulations, was one of many mechanisms designed to restrict migration as it drew together discourses of race and nation (116). In guiding us through these histories, Mongia interrogates “[t]he historical nationalization of migration . . . where certain migrations, at particular moments, come suddenly to provide the framing of identity in national and nationalist terms, or to catalyze the introduction of nationality as an institutionalized category into migration law, or to produce unforeseen eruptions of fervent nationalist claims” (6).
The point I am trying to make by moving through migration scholarship is that Canada has long understood itself in response to migrants, and that this fiction of the nation has worked to naturalize a set of borders and a sense of identity for the purpose of excluding migrants. The nation can be conceptualized differently, not by assuming the sovereignty of borders but rather by understanding Canada as produced by global forces and movements. Such a reframing lets us see Canada less as a static, given entity and more as a contingent formation that is produced at particular moments for certain reasons. And by extension, for those of us situated within the field of Canadian literary studies, we might also ask of particular writers or texts why one is legibly Canadian at a particular moment. What larger projects do such logics enable or obscure? Such queries prompt us to rethink the field of Canadian literary studies and the kind of work Canadian performs.
We might also take such an approach to other global sites and historical moments in order to interrogate Canada’s relationship to them. For instance, as Yves Engler’s The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy details, Canada was involved in many Cold War activities throughout the globe and profited handsomely from them. While the narrative of Canada as a peacekeeping nation encouraged people to focus on how it welcomed refugees from Southeast Asia in the 1970s, what has often been overlooked is how Canada was also active in the creation of the conditions that devastated countries and forced people to flee their homes. As a junior partner to the global imperialism of the US, Canada benefited in innumerable ways from Cold War imperialism.
Y-Dang Troeung’s memoir Landbridge and monograph Refugee Lifeworlds lay out her story as a Cambodian refugee and also provide us with a critical lens to engage with refugee lifeworlds. As she sketches out complex personal and familial histories, Troeung also offers a critique of the long imperial relations between Canada and Cambodia that have been disguised as benevolence. Even as she describes media attempts to turn her into the figure of the grateful refugee who had been welcomed into Canada, Troeung also reminds us of the labour that was extracted from her parents as they worked long hours in factories and picked worms at night with her brother, all for low wages. Reframed in this way, refugees become a reminder not of the benevolence of Canada but rather of its ongoing practices of exploitation within and outside its borders. This is a necessary, but in some ways more familiar, kind of critique that the field has become used to hearing and making, one that identifies the ethical shortcomings and contradictions of the nation. It is a kind of critique that bears repeating over and over again. But Troeung also calls out what we might recognize as a different set of problems of borders and surveillance, one that hits a little close to home for scholars. In Landbridge, she writes of her scholarly manuscript being rejected by an editorial board as not being scholarship worth publishing. The board deemed Cambodia too minor a subject for a monograph, the work not academic enough, and concluded that Troeung, “as an author, could not claim to be an expert on the subject matter—that is, on [her] own history” (24). Similarly, Refugee Lifeworlds describes the challenges of having refugee knowledge be recognized as legitimate. For instance, she describes watching people ask her parents about their experiences in refugee camps, curious about this part of their lives but not about the years before. In noting this phenomenon, Troeung highlights how refugee lives only come to hold meaning as they encounter the Global North, how “the refugee becomes legible only when whiteness enters the frame as an adjudicator of the refugee’s humanity” (ix). Vinh Nguyen has also written on this problem of being devalued as a scholar who is part of the community that he writes about, thus producing unconventional research: “It is not objective, scientific, and detached in its quest for absolutes (that is, truth and universality), which are the hard stuff of knowledge” (470). Troeung and Nguyen highlight an important problem of knowledge production as they point to how, typically, one can either be a scholar writing about a problem or a local informant who represents the problem. It is, however, very difficult to be legible as both simultaneously. In drawing attention to the limited space for refugees producing scholarship about refugees, Troeung and Nguyen compel us to recognize how scholarly fields are configured and who they continue to imagine as their readers and peers.
To rethink the field in relation to the various genealogies I’ve outlined in this editorial is hopefully to further destabilize Canada and Canadian as fixed signifiers. My hope is that we might reframe Canada and Canadian not as terms or categories that anchor the field, but rather as problems to be thought through in relation to and via particular archives, literatures, histories, theorists, sites, and creative practices. The articles in this general issue also contribute to our rethinking of Canadian literary studies as they collectively ask us to rethink the relation between Canadian literary studies and other fields, literary as well as from other disciplines. They also ask, in their respective ways: What constitutes a Canadian way of reading or a Canadian object? Moreover, who is a Canadian literary reader or audience? Naava Smolash’s “‘The False Fronts Haven’t Seen the Prairie’: Sinclair Ross’ As for Me and My House Reread as Settler Text” offers one way of doing this work as she provides a critical settler-studies approach in rereading Sinclair Ross’ As for Me and My House in relation to Maria Campbell. Kelly Baron’s “‘The Trick Is That the Dancing and Singing Are Unrepeatable’: Empowering Improvisations in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees” also offers a rereading of a text that has become a staple of many Canadian literature syllabi by approaching it through memory-work and more recent work in trauma studies.
Jade Crimson Rose Da Costa’s “Theory Is Not a Luxury: Literary Studies, Sociology, and Minoritarian Critique” offers a different kind of re-evaluation as it engages with the potential of literary studies and sociology to further analyses of race, Indigeneity, gender, and sexuality. Similarly, Pierre-Luc Landry and Zishad Lak’s “For Whom Does the Water Flow: The Politics and Aesthetics of Eeyou Istchee’s Water in Blue Bear Woman by Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau” and Andy Weaver’s “Black Heterotopic Space in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!” engage with texts that open up pathways between Indigenous studies, Black studies, Canadian literary studies, and many others. And finally, Kit Dobson’s forum on literary biodiversities assembles a thoughtful group of scholars who offer interventions on the intersection of literature and science.
Works Cited
Chang, Kornel S. Pacific Connections: The Making of the US-Canadian Borderlands. U of California P, 2012.
Engler, Yves. The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy. Fernwood Publishing, 2009.
Hudson, Peter James. Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean. Oxford UP, 2017.
Mongia, Radhika. Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State. Duke UP, 2018.
Nguyen, Vinh. “Mẹ-search, Hauntings, and Critical Distance.” Life Writing, vol. 12, no. 4, 2015, pp. 467–77.
Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Duke UP, 2014.
Troeung, Y-Dang. Landbridge. Alchemy, 2023.
—. Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia. Temple UP, 2022.
Vernon, Karina, editor. The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2020.
Please note that works on the Canadian Literature website may not be the final versions as they appear in the journal, as additional editing may take place between the web and print versions. If you are quoting reviews, articles, and/or poems from the Canadian Literature website, please indicate the date of access.