Culture and Identity:
Ideas and Overviews
Liane Curtis
Dipti Gupta
Will Straw
Department of Art History and Communications Studies
McGill University
Commissioned by the Department of Canadian Heritage for the
Ethnocultural, Racial, Religious, and Linguistic Diversity and Identity Seminar
Halifax, Nova Scotia
November 1-2, 2001
Available on-line in English and French at www.metropolis.net
The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect
those of the Department of Canadian Heritage.
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Foreward
For over 35 years, from the postwar period through the 1980s, Canadian cultural life
was marked by the importance accorded our great institutions of cultural purpose:
the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the National Film Board, the Canada
Council, and so on. The scale of these institutions mirrored the immensity of the
perceived threat coming from the south, from the culture of the United States.
Whatever Canadians thought of these institutions, their size and public visibility
were, in a variety of ways, comforting. Their scale compensated, as well, for what
many people—in English Canada, at least—sensed was the lack of a more
pervasive and everyday cultural tissue binding us together. The development of
these institutions organized our cultural history and focussed debate.
In the 1990s, the focus of public concern in the realm of culture shifted noticeably.
The significant controversies had less to do with monumental, national institutions
and more to do with local events and institutions. Controversies over the staging of
the musical plays Showboat and Miss Saigon, in Toronto, as well as ongoing
tensions over gay pride events, art gallery exhibits and cultural festivals (such as
Toronto’s Caribana), signalled two major shifts in Canadian cultural politics (for a
comprehensive account, see Henry and Tator, 2000). The focus of cultural politics
now had less and less to do with the independence of our national culture vis-à-vis
that of the United States. Rather, the resonant issues were increasingly those which
emerged within conflicts involving racial, ethnic, religious and linguistic identities. At
the same time, the stage on which these politics were played out was no longer the
national one (of public institutions and their funding, or regulation and legislation) but,
arguably, the local contexts of large cities and the communities within them. As
cultural politics within Canada have become more focussed on issues of community
and diversity, the terrain in which they unfold and become intelligible has,
increasingly, been that of the city.
Three interrelated developments might be noted here. First, it seems clear that, as
political controversies have come to do with questions of identity (racial, ethnic,
sexuality-related, etc.), they have become more cultural in focus and character.
Virginia Dominguez (1990) has spoken of “the culturalization of difference”—a
tendency to view difference through the prism of such cultural issues as
representation and image. Indeed, until the recent wave of political activism directed
at economic globalization, it appeared that most political “subcultures,” whether of
left or right, had taken the cultural realm as their principal area of intervention.
Secondly, cultural issues themselves have come to be dominated by questions of
identity. Whereas, in earlier periods, cultural activism might have been preoccupied
with issues of morality or with the quality of cultural experience, intervention in the
cultural sphere has more and more to do with cultural diversity and the manner of its
insinuation within our cultural life.
Thirdly, and finally, it might be suggested that, inasmuch as the crucial present-day
questions of cultural identity have to do with public visibility, community cohesion and
interaction, the space in which these questions are tackled most urgently and
regularly is that of the contemporary city. The politics of diversity unfold most
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noticeably (like most other political phenomena) within urban life. Furthermore, the
issues and preoccupations through which culture is understood tend to be those long
associated with urban life. The relationship of an avant-garde to a mainstream, the
civic responsibilities of the artist, critic and consumer, the right to occupy space and
produce spectacle—these issues, now at the heart of contemporary cultural life,
represent long-standing tensions within the life of the city.
Critical Traditions
Unsurprisingly, this transformation of the terms of cultural politics in Canada has had
dramatic effects on the language and concerns of cultural criticism. The impulse to
define national cultural traditions within Canada was strongest—in English Canada,
at least—from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, when it fuelled efforts to
strengthen the place of English-Canadian culture within Canadian educational
institutions. The critical position which dominated during this period was one which
presumed that there were thematic traits common to works of Canadian culture. It
was the job of the critic to find these amidst the variations of surface detail which
might make such works seem unrelated. Perhaps the best-known of these critical
claims was Margaret Atwood’s argument that the essence of the Canadian character
could be found in the simple drive to survive. The preoccupation with survival, she
suggested, provided the thematic substance of Canadian literature in both English
and French (Atwood, 1972). This was evident in the number of literary characters
who were victims; it could be seen, as well, in the preoccupation of Canadian
authors with landscape and the general hardship of life.
Other versions of this argument took shape across the humanities. In his influential
book Movies and Mythologies, Peter Harcourt (1977) found a thematic unity for
English-Canadian cinema in a crisis of character motivation. Looking at the scattered
feature film tradition of the 1960s and early 1970s, he noted that the “heroes” of
Canadian films were typically trapped in a real or emotional adolescence. Robert
Fothergill had reached similar conclusions, with his argument that the heroes of
Canadian films were typically “younger brother” figures (1977). Later, Geoff Pevere
would write of the “stubbornly worrisome” character of English-Canadian films,
regarding this as the appropriate response of one national culture to a powerful
neighbour whose own films were marked by the constant exhortation to be happy
(Pevere, 1992).
In the field of popular music, it was argued that the specificity of a Canadian style
was to be found in its interweaving of rural and urban influences, in open musical
textures of the sort found first in the folk revival of the late 1960s (Neil Young,
Gordon Lightfoot) and, subsequently, in the open, expansive rock music of Blue
Rodeo or the Tragically Hip (see, for example, Brown, 1991). Writing on Canadian
television, Morris Wolfe argued that the essence of Canadian television was its
slower, more restrained pace. In Canadian television programs, he suggested, there
were fewer “jolts per minute” than was typical of U.S. television, and evidence of a
more patient, restrained relationship to social problems (Wolfe, 1985). In her analysis
of the visual arts in Canada, Gaile McGregor claimed that Canadian artistic practice
was marked by a preoccupation with landscape, by an ambivalence towards nature
which wrestled with both its beauty and its terror (McGregor, 1985).
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In French Canada, the elaboration of a unified view of cultural activity unfolded over
a much longer period of time. While the historiography and cultural criticism of the
early 20th century posited French Canadian culture as the bearer of noble, traditional
values, most of what followed grappled with the question of how one might define
Quebec’s modernity. (See, for a useful account, Bouchard and Lamonde, 1995 and
Handler, 1998). More so than that of English Canada, French Canadian cultural
criticism has had to contend with a deeply-rooted, long dominant account of the
coherence of its culture, one set in place by the folklorists and national-Catholic
thinkers of the early 20th century. While there is considerable debate, at present,
over the treatment of socio-cultural diversity within contemporary Quebecois culture,
it seems clear that such diversity has long served as a metaphor for urban modernity
(see, for example, Marshall, 2000). Indeed, while the cultural production of ethnic
groups in English Canada has often served to restore a sense of community to the
novel or play as forms (by highlighting the closely-knit social structures of many such
groups), diversity, within French-language cultural products, serves more often as a
sign of the fragility of community. More so than English-Canadians, Francophone
writers have explored the extent to which their society and culture might participate
in a broader, continental (or hemispheric) experience of l’Américanité, marked by the
twin myths of nature and the modern metropolis (Nadeau, 1990).
What follows is an account of the move, within different areas of cultural scholarship,
to unravel many of the claims of an earlier wave of Canadian cultural criticism. For
the purposes of clarity, we have dealt with four “media” or areas of cultural activity:
cinema, music, literature and theatre. Literature will receive the most attention here,
both because its critical infrastructures are more solid, and because within literary
scholarship, it seems, the questions of identity have been examined most complexly.
Theatre, likewise, will be dealt with at length, since it is within the world of theatre
that the circulation of ideas between practitioners and scholars seems strongest. For
reasons of space and expertise, the fine arts of painting and sculpture are not
covered here. The overwhelming emphasis, here, on English-Canadian phenomena
may not be excused, but some justifications of limited validity may be offered. Allor
and Gagnon (1994) have expertly traced the complex relationships between the
Quebec state and the cultural “field,” relationships which have forged new relations
between citizens and state through the primacy afforded cultural life. Study of these
relations would require an analysis of public policy which is beyond the scope of the
present paper. In particular, the distinctiveness of “interculturalisme” as an official
paradigm for conceiving diversity within Quebec would require an extended analysis
best left to others and to another occasion.
Film
Throughout its entire history, English Canada has lacked a tradition of popular
filmmaking. As a result, academic research has not had access to a large body of
work which might reveal broadly-shared, popular attitudes towards cultural identity.
This is less true of Quebec where, as Bill Marshall’s book-length study of Quebecois
cinema shows, popular comedies (such as Les Boys, C’est à ton tour Laura
Cadieux, and the sequels to both) deploy ethnic figures for comic or dramatic effect.
In English Canada, whose cinema is almost exclusively an auteur cinema, destined
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for film festivals and repertory cinemas, the confrontation with cultural diversity is
viewed as one of the deliberate strategies of filmmakers seeking complex thematic
frameworks or novel formal strategies. The early films of Atom Egoyan, for example,
have been analyzed in terms of the ways in which non-communicability stands as
both a property of certain ethnocultural family structures and as a typical theme of
the so-called art film (see, for example, Desbarats, et al., 1993).
Until the emergence of an auteurist feature-film movement in the mid-1980s,
English-Canadian filmmaking was seen to unfold most successfully at the twin
extremes of the state-sponsored documentary and the avant-garde experimental
film. Cameron Bailey, in an important essay on the documentary African-Canadian
filmmaker Jennifer Hodge da Silva, has spoken of the dilemma of filmmakers of
colour before the 1980s (Bailey, 1999). Excluded, for the most part, from the “art
world” of experimental filmmaking, these filmmakers were drawn to what Bailey calls
a “cinema of duty”—documentaries which were conventional in form even as they
sought to represent the experience of those long excluded from Canadian cinema. In
the 1970s, the formalist bias of experimental filmmaking meant that issues of
ethnocultural identity were rarely, if ever, the focus of film practice. Bruce Elder’s
famous argument, that a truly Canadian cinema would be purely about the moment
of perception (with no reference to recognizable social phenomena), won few
adherents in its extreme version, but adequately described the project of an
experimental cinema before the 1980s (e.g., Elder, 1989).
In the 1980s, the situation of filmmakers of colour changed significantly. The National
Film Board, through a variety of experimental programs, opened the door to
proposals from young filmmakers of various backgrounds. At the same time, the
increased politicization of urban art “scenes,” and growth of such artistic forms as
video art, spurred a range of new practices in which the politics of cultural identity
nourished experimentation with audio-visual form (see, for an overview of much of
this work, Marchessault, 1995).
Those engaged in film studies research have often confronted a split between film
criticism/scholarship, whose focus has been the “national” traditions of documentary
and the feature film, as well as art criticism, which has dealt more consistently with
short, experimental films and video art. This split often replicates that between the
aspirations of feature films, which have long been considered a component of nationbuilding, and “short” films, which are taken to express positions from within particular
identity-based communities. This split is further reflected in the different funding
institutions and critical infrastructures which surround these two sorts of film. A larger
structural feature of Canadian culture, referred to in the Foreward to this article, may
be glimpsed here. While large-scale, national cultural institutions (of which a feature
film industry might be one, somewhat abstract, example) have long stood as
persistent dreams and fragile, often unaccomplished realities, locally-rooted, smallscale cultural activity has more effectively addressed issues of cultural identity and
diversity. It has done so within structures (such as that of the artist-run centres
network) which are no less the result of government policy and resources. The
artefacts produced within these structures are impressive, less for the monumental
character of any one of them, than for the richness of their accumulation over the last
twenty years.
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Film Studies as an academic discipline has been preoccupied with questions of
identity since the mid-1970s, when feminist theories developed, in conjunction with
the discipline’s own process of consolidation and institutionalization. Against this
backdrop, the study of Canadian film was, for several years, theoretically underdeveloped. Its concern with questions of national character came to seem
increasingly out of date alongside the rich paradigms of psychoanalytic and
ideological theory which developed internationally through the early 1980s. This
isolation of Canadian film studies from the discipline’s main currents ended in the
1990s, when film studies across the Anglo-Saxon world had turned its attention to
such questions as race and nationality. Now, the study of Canadian cinema could
unfold in tandem with mainstream theoretical concerns within the discipline. Recent
works, such as Dorland’s examination of relations between the Canadian state and
filmmaking communities (1998), or the Gendering the Nation collection, draw upon
rich traditions of Canadian scholarship but represent, as well, the convergence of
Canadian work with broader developments in policy studies and gender analysis,
respectively.
Music
In the academic world, popular music is something of an orphan, rarely studied
within university departments of communication, and usually ignored within the
discipline of music itself. While there are long-standing traditions of research on the
chanson québécoise (e.g., Giroux, 1993) as a cultural form, and on music as a form
of folklore, much less research exists on contemporary, urban musical forms.
Research within ethnomusicology has produced complex analysis of the “pathways”
through which musical forms are practiced and circulate within different regions of
Canada (see Canadian Musical Pathways Project); in so doing, it has mapped the
complex relations between tradition and innovation which are typical of musical life.
Scholarship on particular musical genres is often undertaken within subcultures of
fans and collectors, such as those who publish fan magazines or catalogues devoted
to Quebec pop or Canadian techno music.
At the same time, music’s place within the cultures of nations is not easily grasped.
On the one hand, music seems one of the most deeply rooted of collective cultural
practices. Its importance in folk ritual, military ceremony and festive interaction have
led us to see music as a fundamental part of national life, even when its present-day
forms are overwhelmingly industrialized and professionalized. Nevertheless, as Ian
McKay has noted, folk traditions are typically constructed retrospectively, pieced
together from elements which are removed from their original contexts. The
presumption that Celtic-tinged folk music forms best represented the culture of Nova
Scotia settled into Canadian common sense at the expense of any consideration of
that province’s long-standing cosmopolitanism and highly developed cultural life
(McKay, 1994).
Music is a cultural form whose “content” (in a political or social sense) is notoriously
difficult to isolate or judge. Music becomes meaningful, James Johnson suggests
(paraphrasing Hans-Georg Gadamer), when sound meets prejudice (1995: 2). These
prejudices are often those which strain to pin (or reduce) music to its origins, to the
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specific places or social groups which music is taken to represent. Jacques Attali,
winding his way around similar issues, argues that music evokes within its listeners
the “quest for lost differences,” a yearning for those specificities of place or
community which have been lost in the standardized, serial production of music as a
capitalist commodity (Attali, 1985: 5). The rowdy nationalism which now marks
concerts by Sloan, the Tragically Hip or the reconstituted Guess Who works to paper
over the fractures which more and more (amidst the Canadian explosions of club
music, Canto-pop, bhangra and hip-hop) disrupt notions of a singular Canadian
popular music tradition. At the same time, this nationalism depends on its own
assertion of lost differences, those features of the listening event which might make
an essentially Canadian experience of rock music somehow different from one
transpiring in the U.S. or elsewhere.
If the content of music is often difficult to seize, music nevertheless arrives marked
deeply with the signs of racial, ethnic and gender identities. Music videos, for
example, regularly assert the connection between musical forms or practices and the
gendered and racialized identities of those with whom they are most associated. The
wider incorporation of popular music within the audio-visual forms of television and
cinema have enhanced this dimension, making claims about music’s “abstract”
status, or its universality, more and more difficult to sustain.
Popular Music Studies, as an interdisciplinary enterprise, is increasingly popular with
graduate students and young scholars within Canadian universities. A number of
theses on rave or hip-hop, begun in recent years at various universities, are
addressing the complex place of music within the ethnocultural fabrics of Canadian
towns and cities (see, for the published version of one, Haines, 1999). As yet,
however, there are no academic journals which regularly publish scholarship on
Canadian popular music, nor national traditions of scholarship in the area. Arguably,
popular music is the cultural form in which questions of racial and ethnic identity are
played out most explicitly and intensely, from the street level of interpersonal
interaction through the global circulation of images and celebrities. The undeveloped
state of scholarship in this area is easily explained, but constitutes a regrettable gap
in our understanding of ethnocultural diversity and the cultural forms in which it is
expressed.
Future research on popular music might usefully begin by examining the ways in
which music is produced and brought to market. In a number of ways, popular music
depends on innumerable varieties of small-scale inter-personal collaboration, in
which the nature of work and the fixity of roles are perpetually reinvented. As a
result, music-making is inseparable from other patterns of collaboration and
interpersonal interaction, patterns shaped by the ethnocultural communities in which
the making of music takes place. While there are a number of macro-level analyses
of the Canadian music industries (e.g., Ernest & Young, 1995), there has been no
research on the formation of popular musical collectives or small-scale enterprises. A
bias towards traditional performer group formats, career trajectories and record
company structures remains within music industry policy, according to Straw (2000).
The effect of this bias is to favour rock bands and solo singers (who are typically of
European descent) over transitory hip-hop collectives or dance music producer-djs
(who are more likely to belong to visible minority communities).
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In Quebec, the extent to which dominant musical institutions favour particular genres
and performer-formats has been the focus of a significant level of debate. In a report
to the Société générale des entreprises culturelles du Québec, Marc Ménard
suggested that a key factor determining the sales of Québécois music in Québec
might be the availability of certain styles and genres (Ménard, 1998). Echoing
comments by journalist Alain Brunet, Ménard warned of a possible gap between
public tastes, which were becoming increasingly diverse, and the continued
homogeneity of popular music produced within Quebec. If the Québécois music
industries were to successfully meet ascendant public demand for hip-hop,
electronica and a myriad of other forms, a reorganization of industry structure to
effectively cater to that demand might be desirable.
The relationship of music policy to music industry development, and of both to
music’s status as ethnocultural expression, offers one fruitful avenue for future
research. Toronto’s status as one of the world’s leading markets for reggae music in
recent years, and Montreal’s important role in the dissemination of the AfroCaribbean form zouk have received limited scholarly attention (e.g., Guilbault, 1993),
but these phenomena merit further research. They are evidence, not merely of the
complexity of Canadian popular musical culture, but of processes of globalization
rarely discussed within scholarly literature on the subject.
Literature
The ethnicity paradigm in literary studies is at the least inadequate, because
it reproduces similarity and sameness in diversity…yet it is the location from
which we speak.
—Marlene Kadar (1995)
The Canadian scholarship on literature and identity has exploded over the last
decade. This explosion has given Canadian literary criticism and theory new
energies, and placed a variety of new issues on the scholarly agenda. Nevertheless,
it is difficult to untangle those developments, which respond to changes in the
character of Canadian literature, from those inspired principally by international
scholarly trends and redirections. The question of the authorial voice (in its
relationship to personal experience or group identity), debates over the status of
nationhood, and controversies over the term “postcoloniality”—all of these have
come to the forefront of Canadian literary scholarship in recent years. They are, quite
obviously, responses to the increasingly multicultural character of Canadian
literature. Nevertheless, such developments participate in a scholarly
cosmopolitanism; they are evidence of literary studies’ participation in the broader
Anglo-American enterprise known as cultural studies.
Following an extensive review of the literary-critical literature in Canada, we have
isolated a number of themes whose resonance in contemporary scholarship seems
strongest. The highly polemical quality of much recent literary scholarship has meant
that many writings refer to each other, pulling otherwise scattered and autonomous
studies of literary works into a space of shared controversy and argument. While
most scholarship on Canadian literature and its relation to identity is published within
academic periodicals, such as Essays in Canadian Writing and Canadian Literature,
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it became apparent that the literary anthology constitutes an increasingly important
form of intervention. Anthologies of Canadian literature are revealing documents,
inasmuch as their criteria of inclusion are often inflected by critical fashions and
shifting definitions of the “Canadian.” More focussed anthologies, such as those
collecting the writings of particular ethnic-literary communities, are important as
devices for rendering such communities visible within the larger culture. Often, and
explicitly, they represent the attempt to bring a distinct literary community onto the
larger stage. The introductions to anthologies, in the rationales they offer for the
selections made, or through their attempt to find coherence across a body of
disparate writings, are among the most important scholarly interventions in the
literary field.
—————
Canadian Nationalism, for us nonwhites, is a racist ideology that has branded
us as un-Canadian by acts of omission and commission.
—Mukherjee (1999)
The institutions of literary criticism and scholarship—university departments, the
book review columns of major periodicals, publishers of anthologies and other works,
etc.—have been the focus of sustained attention by scholars in recent years. Literary
theory has turned its attention towards those processes by which literary works (and
notions of literary value) are deployed in the service of socio-cultural power. One of
these processes is that by which national literary traditions come to be identified and
described. The other (related, but not entirely co-terminous) is that through which
canons (lists of works deemed significant and superior) are established.
The construction of Canadian literature as a category, Mukherjee argued recently,
“has been carried out under the aegis of nineteenth-century European notions of
nationhood . . . which proposed that a nation was racially and culturally different from
other nations and uniform at home” (Mukherjee 1999: 160). These notions of
nationhood, which presume a national “unifying spirit” or “soul” have, it is claimed,
affected the institutionalization of Canadian literature. They have influenced the
formation of canons, the development of educational curricula, and multiculturalist
policies at all levels of government (Mukherjee 1999: 160; see also Derksen
1995/96, Fee 1992, Gerson 1998, Goldie 1991, Kamboureli 1996, Moynagh 1998,
Mukherjee 1999, Samantrai 1995, Siemerling 1995, Wainwright 1998). In “Canadian
Literature and English Studies in the Canadian University,” Fee (1992) argues that
English studies in Canada founded itself upon British notions derived from the
thinking of Matthew Arnold (so-called “Arnoldianism”). Throughout the first half of the
20th century, departments across the country taught only “the best of English
literature” (25).
This dependence on English traditions helped Canada to differentiate itself from the
literary culture of the United States, and slowed the formulation of Canada’s own
literary canon until the late 1960s. When the time came to institutionalize a Canadian
canon, the emphasis was on formulating nationally unifying principles (Siemerling
1995: 10) and valorizing works that were “ordered, orderable, safe” (Lecker, quoted
in Mukherjee 1999: 158). The literary criticism typical of the 1960s and 1970s was
boosterish, preoccupied with asserting claims about the quality of particular works.
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More recent criticism has revisited these attempts to delineate a Canadian literary
tradition, paying attention to the exclusions implicit within them. Kamboureli (1996)
argues that “prevailing notions of Canada as a nation, of Canadian identity, and of
Canadian literature are still sequestered within a legacy of colonialism”(8). Canadian
critical theory is “premised on the notions of Canada’s duality [English/French],”
notions which cast various forms of ethnic writing to the margins (Mukherjee 1999:
157). The elaboration of multiculturalist policies, particularly in the 1970s, brought
issues of ethnicity onto the literary-critical agenda, but these have been surrounded
by controversy. Various authors have summarized the range of responses to the
Multiculturalism Act, viewed in some quarters as one more constitutional attempt to
“defuse, rather than address directly, ethnic unrest” (Thompson quoted in
Wiens 2000: 86, also discussed in Derksen 1997/98).
A larger, symptomatic question recurs within Canadian literary criticism: when does
minority or immigrant literature become Canadian writing (Kambourelli 1996, Kaup
1995, Mukherjee 1999, Rudy 1996, Siemerling 1995, Verduyn 1996)? The striking
range of voices to have emerged in Canadian writing is testimony to the fact that
multicultural literature is not minority writing at all. It remains “minority” only under the
heavy hand of traditional institutionalization. Samantrai (1995) claims that we do not
need a special category and treatment for “other” literatures. Instead, we must learn
to conceptualize our own, heterogeneous culture, in more adequate and inclusive
ways. White Anglophone European-Canadians are the ones who get to speak as
Canadians, Mukherjee argues, while “immigrant” writing is racially coded (Mukherjee
1999).
The most highly valued, canonized “minority” or “ethnic” writing, the argument goes,
has for the most part come from white immigrant writers, who have quietly blended
into a unitary national culture and, as a result, been divorced from their ethnic
background. A recurring example of this assimilation, in debates over Canadian
literature, are the Jewish writers of Montreal (Siemerling 1995, McCullough 1998)
and Ukrainian writers of the West (Mukherjee 1999). Critics of this literature employ
formalistic and stylistic analyses, of the sort typically applied to canonical literary
works, rather than considering such literature as the expression of ethnic identity. In
Silences Words Histories Jews, McCullough (1998) points to the lack of scholarship
which discusses Jewish Canadian literature in terms of the cultural specificity of
Judaism, particularly at a time (like the present) when discussion of the ethnic
character of other literary works is widespread. Little (1991) has noted the scarcity of
critical work which attempts to assert Canadian Jewish writing within a broader
Jewish history.
The Pluralities of Literature
Multiculturalist literature and the criticism which engages with it increasingly argue
that we must move beyond homogenous notions of nationhood, “into a consideration
of the complex traffic between and within cultures and regions” (Heble 2000: 27).
The long-standing question of Canadian literary criticism, “Where is here?” now
seems inseparable from another question—“Who am I?” (Pennee quoted in Hulan
2000: 63). In the various responses to this latter question, we will find the plurality of
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identities which Canadian literature expresses. To accept the voices which formulate
these answers, we must develop new forms of “cultural listening” (Hulan, 2000;
Heble, 2000). These will be “predicated on an ability to listen to history as a
conversation among dissonant voices” (Heble 2000: 28).
Nevertheless, much current criticism carries the call to move beyond simple
affirmations of pluralism and the celebration of difference. In her discussion of
Chinese-Canadian poetry, Joanna Clarke (1995) argues that, in multicultural
discourse, a celebration of differences leaves the dichotomy of mainstream and
marginal in place. Other critics have expressed concern over the danger of
homogenizing difference when studying multicultural literature, as if different
ethnocultural literary works all shared the single property of being multicultural
(Beauregard 1999, Clarke 1998, Clarke 2000, Gunderson 1999, Kadar 1995,
Kamboureli 1996, Samantrai 1995, Wylie 1999). Smaro Kamboureli (1996), editor of
Making of Difference: An Anthology of Canadian Multicultural Literature, notes that in
order to appear inclusionary, many Canadian literature anthologies have included
ethnicized, racialized or gendered writers. Ghassan Hage (quoted in Beauregard,
1999) calls this process one of “practical tolerance” in a multicultural society:
“Multicultural tolerance should be understood as a mode of spatial management of
cultural difference” (56). As Kamboureli argues, “[t]hese acts of tokenism and
practical tolerance assign a single meaning to cultural differences, homogenize the
very diversity multiculturalism wishes to embrace, and disregard the fact that a
writer’s identity and work is not fixed and cannot be defined in a single way
(Kamboureli 1996: 3).
At the risk of being overly-schematic, we might isolate three possible positions here.
One would see all works of multiculturalist literature as sharing certain features—
features which express a uniform condition of marginality, for example. From this
perspective, each work of multiculturalist literature is full of lessons for those writing
within different ethnocultural communities. Each writer struggles to find devices and
themes with which to express marginality, as part of a broader, collective enterprise
involving writers from other communities. Another position would regard
multiculturalist works as expressing the distinctive, essential identity of the
communities or ethnocultural groups in which they are produced. Here, no single
model of marginalization will suffice. A third position would embrace the capacity of
multiculturalist literature to upset categories and fixed identities, to resist easy
identification. Multiculturalist literature, in this sense, captures and conveys the
indeterminacy which marks identity in the contemporary world. The tensions
between these three positions are at the heart of contemporary criticism’s polemical
richness.
In an important article, George Elliott Clarke (1998) articulates the importance of
destabilizing static patterns of difference and identity:
African-Canadian consciousness is not simply dualistic. We are divided
severally; we are not just black and Canadian but also adherents to a region,
speakers of an official language (either French or English), disciples of
heterogeneous faiths, and related to a particular ethnicity (or national group),
all of which shape our identities. African Canadians possess, then, not merely
a double consciousness but also a poly consciousness (17).
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Clarke draws a link between cultural identity and national identity, arguing that
African-Canadian identity is “as fraught with indefinition as Canada itself”(18). It is
this indefinition that must be emphasized and highlighted within literary discourse.
The heterogeneity Clarke seeks to define is expressed in those versions of AfricanCanadian identity which he studies at length. African Canadianite or Antillanite
identity is one example of this heterogeneity: “a condition that involves a constant
self-questioning of the grounds of identity…unites the Caribbean islands through
their shared history while recognizing their diversity.” This is opposed to a traditional
“Africanite [that] attempts to unify the many African cultures, languages, histories and
peoples by negating their diversity” (27).
This complexity is developed in Ranu Samantrai’s discussion of the writing of
Rohinton Mistry:
He is by ethnicity a Parsi, by national origin an Indian, and by residence a
Canadian as an example…the problems of classification raised by this
literature expose the inadequacy of our categories, and provide a way to
foreground instabilities in the idea of the nation as an imagined
community (34).
Samantrai acknowledges the need for a more sophisticated and
contemporary pluralism: one that will begin by recognizing the significance
and range of identity-forming contexts and “avoid the trap of safeguarding the
homogeneity of the parts while advocating the heterogeneity of the whole”
(Samantrai 1995: 48).
Wylie (1999) notes the growing resistance to notions of cultural purity within Native
literature, and the ascendant need for a pluralistic, historicized cultural literacy.
Stereotyping and Hybridity
Critical writing on identity and literature has often stumbled when dealing with the
question of stereotypes. Post-structuralist literary theory has convincingly, it seems,
laid to rest claims about literature’s capacity to truthfully and fully capture the
complexities of experience. If this is true, a question remains: on what grounds might
one then criticize processes of stereotypification in literature? Stereotypes may be
crude, and they are inevitably cultural constructions. If all literary writing offers
particular, partial versions of experience, however, what renders the stereotype
different from other literary renderings of particular identities? It is around this issue
that much of the interesting recent work in Canadian literary theory and criticism
turns.
To counter representations of static homogenizing ethnic identities, Ng (1998, 1999)
and Kadar (1995) suggest that the best attack on static and homogenizing ethnic
stereotypes is one which works to identify and destabilize them. Marlene Kadar
(1995) has drawn attention to the tendency, within Hungarian-Canadian writing, to
present an “essential “Hungarianess.” Against this, she suggests, Hungarian
Canadian writers might turn to various life-genres, finding therein the material with
which to deconstruct stereotypes. The broader question of so-called “life-genres” will
13
be examined later, but they have been embraced as offering resources through
which the traps of stereotypical representations might be diminished. Stereotypes
are considered a distinct problem in the literary representations of Asian (Huggan
1994, Ng 1998, 1999) and Native (Lundgren 1995) Canadians. Maria N. Ng’s “Chop
Suey Writing: Sui Sin Far, Wayson Choy, and Judy Fong Bates” explores the
solidification of stereotypes within fictional representations of Chinese Canadians.
Despite significant changes in Chinese-Canadian communities across the country,
Ng points to the overwhelming persistence of stereotypes in fiction writing, and asks:
“are Chinese all over Canada forever chained to laundromats, restaurants,
sweatshops, and herbal medicine shops in variations of Chinatowns?” (171) When
literature presents a homogeneous cultural world, Ng suggests, the disparity
between fictional worlds and social reality must be addressed (Ng 1998).
Stereotypes contribute to simple oppositional thinking and perpetuate “otherness.”
Literary criticism in Canada has been marked by post-structuralism’s affinities for
theoretical premises which embrace indeterminacy and articulation. This is most
obvious in the numerous discussions of “cultural hybridity” (Blake 1996, Coleman
1993, Ng 1998, Siemerling 1995, Wiens 2000, Wylie 1999). Canadian ethnic writing
is often seen as hybrid in character, and the work of Homi Bhabba is a regular
reference in critical work which discusses such writing. Bhabba describes the state
of hybridity as “the rearticulation, or the translation, of elements that are neither the
One...nor the Other...but something else besides which contests the terms and
territories of both” (quoted in Ng 1998: 174). Many literary critics have been
concerned with exploring this “something else besides,” out of a belief that writing
which offers hybrid representations of ethnicity can help destabilize binary modes of
thinking. The model of that binary thinking, for many writers, is that described in
Edward Said’s influential book Orientalism (Blake 1996, Coleman 1993, Ng 1998,
Siemerling 1995, Wiens 2000, Wylie 1999). Blake (1996) and Chester (1999)
discuss the analytical tool of “metissage”: “a mixing and an interaction of cultures
and tradition, an inclusion of the marginalized” (Blake 1996:164). Blake explores the
writing of mixed-blood women from central Labrador and locates it at the intersection
of three cultures: European, Inuit, and Indian. This practice of writing is seen to offer
a terrain on which cultures and races blend and, in doing so, subvert essentialist
claims of race, gender, and culture.
Forms and Contexts
Within Canadian literature, the anthology has emerged in recent years as a tool for
intervention, resistance and healing. Asian-Canadian anthologies, in particular, have
come to play a significant role. In Anthologizing the Collective: The Epic Struggles to
Establish Chinese Canadian Literature in English, Lien Chao (1995) explains that
although occasional works about or by Chinese Canadians “may have raised
awareness of the community’s collective marginality, its one-hundred-year reluctant
silence in Canadian culture can only be broken by a collective response”(147).
Anthologies offer such a collective response, particularly for literary voices which
have traditionally been ignored by teachers, critics and readers. Chao (1995)
discusses three Chinese Canadian anthologies entitled Inalienable Rice, Yellow
Peril, and Many-Mouthed Birds. He writes:
14
These anthologies embody and illustrate the epic struggles that the Chinese
Canadian community has to undertake in order to establish its literature. The
anthology is one of the most effective literary forms for hosting a forum, for
embracing writings in different genres, and for introducing an emerging
literature into the current mainstream…The discursive configurations in the
anthologies represents the collective endeavour of Chinese Canadian writers
to transform the historical silence of the community into a voice of resistance
(148).
Hence, anthologies provide opportunities for particular groups to engage in a
collective confrontation with their own histories. A variety of recent anthologies have
been designed to reflect the heterogeneity of Canadian literary discourse, restore
literary texts to their broader socio-political contexts, and develop a sophisticated,
pluralistic approach to Canadian literature. They anthologies include, Floating the
Borders: New Contexts in Canadian Criticism (1999), Precarious Present/Promising
Future? Ethnicity and Identities in Canadian Literature (1996), Cultural Identities in
Canadian Literature (1998), Making a Difference: An Anthology of Canadian
Multicultural Literature (1996), and an anthology on Canadian racial minority women
entitled Intersexions: Issues of Race and Gender in Canadian Women’s Writing.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the status of language itself is at the core of controversies
over Canadian literature and its future. The choice of language has never been
innocent within Canadian literature, both because of Canada’s official bilingualism
and as a result of 20th century literature’s broader fixation on language as the
material substance of the literary work. Recent literary practice and scholarship have
rendered language even more problematic. One cannot write in the English
language, for example, without taking up specific positions within the variety of
possible English dialects or accents. In so-called minority communities, writers
confront a persistent dilemma: should they use English (or, more rarely, French) in
ways which forsake formal, linguistic experimentation, seeking instead to accurately
capture the everyday language typical of such communities? Or is linguistic
experimentation the only means by which such writers may escape the ghettoes of
“community” literature? (See, for discussion of these issues, Chao 1995, 1999,
Clarke 2000, Clarke 1998, Derksen 1995/96, 1997/98, Fisher 1999, Gingell 1998,
Heble 1993, Kaup 1995, NG 1998, Rudy 1996, Wah 1997/98, Wiens 2000.) In an
article on Caribbean-Canadian literature, Monica Kaup (1995) underlines this
literature’s extreme formal diversity and high sensitivity to the relations between
vernacular and standard English. She writes:
While [Austin] Clarke writes in a realist tradition, and is known for his skilful
use of dialect and dialogue in recreating the vitality and humour of West
Indian speech, other authors have chosen language as a primary subject, as
an important source of contest, in search for a Canadian identity. They
recognize a need to deconstruct and reconstruct English, to explore tensions
of imperial and mother tongues; they are drawn to explore conflicting
experiences of silencing and authenticity that are both concealed in the
English spoken in the Caribbean (181).
In an article on “First Peoples’ Poetry,” Susan Gingell (1998) traces the process by
which residential schools made Natives feel their differences in ways that resulted in
a silencing of their voices. As no single correct version of Cree exists, and no one
15
dialect is privileged above another (whereas this hierarchy of dialects is common in
English), many Native women give voice to their own experience (and that of others)
through an indigenized English, through texts which are predominantly English but in
which the Cree language and dialects thereof are interwoven (Gingell 1998: 453454, Egan 1995). These techniques (separately and as a whole) underline the
limitations of “standard English.” They represent a “degree of poetic agency by the
writer who productively works within and against such restrictions” (Wiens 2000: 88).
The technique employed here has been called “code-switching,” granting writers “the
power to own but not be owned by the dominant language” (Wiens 2000: 89).
The language in which “minority” writers choose to speak is, obviously, the focus of
sustained debate. The poems in the anthology discussed by Clarke are written only
in English. Lien Chao (1995) argues that the choice of English “paradoxically
marginalizes writing in Chinese even as it seeks to counteract the marginalization of
Chinese-Canadian writers”(Clarke 2000: 131). As Chao (1995) points out, however,
the choice of English is often a political one, rooted in the recognition that English is
the only written language which many Chinese-Canadians possess, and the only
one through which they may be reached.
“Minority” writers often use techniques of “defamiliarization” to upset the familiarity of
linguistic norms. They will disturb conventional English syntax, create bizarre
metaphors, employ untranslated words, insert dialogue and dialect in original
tongues, and change standard poetic forms (Chao 1995, 1999, Clarke 1998, Clarke
2000, Egan 1995, Fisher 1999, Gingell 1998, Heble 1993, Kaup 1995, NG 1998,
Wells 1997, Wiens 2000). George Elliot Clarke (1998) notes the presence of
defamiliarization in Caribbean Canadian writing, specifically in the literary tradition of
dub poetry, which foregrounds Jamaican varieties of English (33). Similarly,
Zackodnik (quoted in Wiens 2000), writing about the literary work of Dionne Brand,
explains that Brand’s writing deploys a “nation language that is transformative,
polyvocal, and constantly shifting…Brand locates her critique of language…in the
heteroglossia of both languages [standard English and nation language]”(88).
This politicization of language extends to the choice of literary form. While it is
common to consider to view the novel as the most important literary form in the
emergence of national cultural literary traditions (e.g., Anderson, 1983), many have
argued that poetry is an appropriate option for those writing from within minority
communities (Joanna Clarke (2000), Fred Wah (1997/98) Jason Wiens (2000). In
her examination of a Chinese-Canadian poetry anthology, Clarke embraces poetry
as a genre for outcasts, for speaking from the margins (127). Poetry’s malleability
allows writers to free themselves from formal conventions, to express themselves as
they wish, creating a space in which they can “move around. “ Wiens (2000) calls
Caribbean Canadian writer Dionne Brand’s poetry an “enunciative space that is
contingent and contradictory” (88).
Just as common, however, is the claim that so-called life genres (personal
narratives, autobiographies, ethnographic self-portraits) are the most effective
means of giving minority communities a sense of voice and the opportunity to
express resistance (Blake 1998, Bowering 1995, Coleman 1993, Egan 1995,
Freiwald 1996, Kadar 1995, 1996, Watson 2000). “Minority” writers’ life writings offer
16
alternatives to the traditional, often monolithic Canadian history found in the
textbooks of classrooms across the country. Through life genres, writers may tell
their stories, reappropriating the past through the act of “reremembering” (1997).
Kadar (1996) gives the example of Grossman’s An Ordinary Woman in Extraordinary
Times, an autobiographical narrative told by a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who
immigrated to “democratic” Canada. Canada’s claims to democracy are challenged
within this narrative, as they are within many other ethnic life writings. Blake (1998)
examines the personal narratives/autobiographies of mixed-blood Labrador women,
demonstrating the ways in which various histories and forms of cultural hybridity
become apparent within these narratives.
Literature: Conclusions
Much recent Canadian literary scholarship unfolds under the rubric of the
“postcolonial,” a term which both designates an emergent area of theoretical concern
and displaces many older templates (such as “Commonwealth” literature). Wiens
(2000) notes that:
postcolonial theory (the theory itself) as a global project of positing
alternative canons and ways of reading remains bedevilled by the same
problematics of asymmetrical relations of power that it attempts to
contest…while international academic study has tended to locate “Canadian
literature” within a postcolonial frame, in Canada itself there is little
consensus about the accuracy of the term “postcolonial” in relation to
Canadian cultural production (85).
Linda Hutcheon has argued that the term “postcolonial” can be applied accurately
only to the writings of indigenous peoples in Canada, and not to writing by
descendants of European invader-settlers, such as Atwood and Kroetsch (quoted in
Wiens, 2000). The slipperiness of the term “postcolonial” has been noted by theorists
of globalization, such as Arif Dirlik:
The term postcolonial in its various usages carries a multiplicity of meanings
that need to be distinguished for analytical purposes. Three uses of the term
seem to me to be especially prominent (and significant): (a) as a literal
description of conditions in formerly colonial societies, in which case the
term has concrete referents, as in postcolonial societies or postcolonial
intellectuals; (b) as a description of a global condition after the period of
colonialism, in which case the usage is somewhat more abstract and less
concrete in reference, comparable in its vagueness to the earlier term Third
World, for which it is intended as a substitute, and (c) as a description of a
discourse on the above-named conditions that is informed by the
epistemological and psychic orientations that are products of those
conditions (1994: 331-332).
Literally, of course, Canada is an ex-colony, but the crucial, lingering question is
whether “postcoloniality” accurately or usefully describes the condition of middleclass literary culture in a settler nation such as ours. Questions such as this one are
likely to remain at the centre of Canadian literary scholarship over the next decade or
more.
17
Theatre
The nation is the condition of the drama; the drama is the proof of the nation.
—Vincent Massey, quoted in Filewood (1994: 15)
Background
The status of theatre in Canada becomes problematic with the first attempts at
definition. By the time Europeans arrived in North America, most aboriginal tribes on
the continent had created rituals as part of their cultural life. Like the rituals of the
ancient Greeks and Romans, much of what was presented could well be described
as theatre: dance, incantation (plainsong), the telling and performing of legend and
history. One ritual drama, the Mystery Play (Kwakiutl, British Columbia), bore strong
similarities to mystery plays in Europe. Historians of Canadian theatre will claim that
the first Canadian play in the Western sense came in 1606, when Marc Lescarbot
wrote Le Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France and staged it in Indian war
canoes to honour the arrival of French dignitaries at Port Royal. Playwriting in
Canada in English dates back to the eighteenth century, and in the 19th century
Canadian playhouses sprang up in substantial numbers (primarily, however, to
accommodate American and British touring companies (Wasserman, 1993: 9).
Theatre intended to express the identity of particular ethnic-linguistic communities
has existed in Canada since the turn of the last century. In Manitoba and Ontario,
Ukrainian communities had developed local theatrical activity. In Montreal, Yiddish
theatre, by locally-based and touring companies, was presented at the Monument
National and other venues. The first half of the 20th century saw the development of
a thriving amateur theatre, much of it rooted in the concerns and social structures of
immigrant communities.
So-called ethnic theatre truly exploded in the period following World War II, with the
massive influx of immigrants and refugees (including theatre professionals),
principally from Europe. Theatre companies from diverse cultural communities
became more prominent features of local theatrical activity. The Italian Piccolo
Teatro (1949-76), the Latvian DV Theatre (1951-) the Ukrainian Zahrava (1956-84),
the Hungarian Art Theatre (1958-) all in Toronto, the Yiddish Theatre (1956-), the
German Deutsches Theatre (1952-) both in Montreal, and the Lithuanian Aukuras
(1950-), in Hamilton are among the most prominent examples of this explosion.
The 70s and 80s saw the creation or growth of several Black companies, including
the Black Theatre Workshop (Montreal), Theatre Fountainhead and Black Theatre
Canada (Toronto). In the 80s, Nova Scotia's Kwacha was supported by both critics
and audiences. Though Asians have participated in Canadian theatre since at least
1933, when the Chinese United Dramatic Society presented Cantonese Opera, it
was late in the 20th century before the various communities of Pacific Rim-origin
formed theatrical companies. These have included the Korean Kookdan (Toronto,
1982), the Filipino Carlos Bulosan Cultural Workshop (Toronto, 1984) and Canasian
Artists Group (Toronto, 1983). The range of productions of companies like these
extends from European classics (Piccolo's production of Goldoni's La Locandiera), to
the traditional theatrical forms of specific groups (Toronto's Iranian Namysh-
18
Khaneh's classical works in Farsi), to fusionist theatre linking the community with
theatrical traditions of the host country (as in the Yiddish Theatre's production of
Michel Tremblay's Les Belles Sœurs, and plays dealing with the experience of
people in a new land (Canasian's production of Rick Shiomi's Yellow Fever). Though
it had happened very slowly, we have also seen the integration of multicultural
voices into mainstream theatre, through the activities of companies like Passe
Muraille (which regularly mounts works from outside the white mainstream), Centaur
Theatre's co-production with Black Theatre Workshop of Playboy of the West Indies,
the various productions across the country of American David Henry Hwang's
M. Butterfly and Dennis Foon's New Canadian Kid, the very positive reception for
George Seremba's Come Good Rain, the recognition accorded playwright/actor
Djanet Sears’ play Harlem Duet, playwright/producer Rahul Varma’s Counter
Offence and his multicultural Teesri Duniya (Montreal) and Michel Monty's treatment
of white/Black relations in Montreal, Prise de Sang. Artist Betty Quan’s play, Mother
Tongue, is all about identity, language and communication (the family is ChineseCanadian, and one of the main characters is also deaf and speaks in sign language).
Marty Chan’s play Mom, Dad, I'm Living with a White Girl has been the most popular
play by a Canadian-Chinese playwright.
It was not until the 1960s, notably with George Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, that
Aboriginals and the problems within aboriginal communities received attention within
Canadian theatre. Over the last two decades, native ceremonies have been revived
(in some cases for tourist audiences at reservations) and First National cultural
expression is increasingly available across Canada. Singers, dancers and players,
from tribes and communities across Canada, now tour the country and the world.
Aboriginal theatre has entered a new phase in the last two decades with the
presentations of plays by authors such as Drew Hayden Taylor and Tomson
Highway. Many of these deal with the clashes experienced by First Nations people
living within a European-urban society. The formation, in 1974, of the Native Theatre
School has spurred the growth of First National Theatre; the organization mixes
professional theatre training with traditional aboriginal teachings. In 1980, the
Indigenous Theatre Celebration was held in Toronto, bringing together Aboriginal
peoples from all over the world. Important, too, was the formation of the Native Earth
Performing Arts. In the Yukon, the Nakai Theatre Ensemble produces Inuit theatre
and in Quebec, the Mikisiw company expresses the concerns and worldviews of the
Atikamekw community. One important voice to have emerged from Aboriginal
theatrical communities is that of Métis playwright Ian Ross, whose work fareWel won
the Governor General's Award in 1997 and was staged by Ken Gass at the Factory
Theatre in 1999. In January 2000, the Crazy Horse Theatre in Calgary opened with
Drew Hayden Taylor's Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth.
Debates and Policies
In 1972, the Liberal government under Pierre Trudeau created a Ministry of State for
Multiculturalism, offering funding to those communities which had taken shape with
the opening up of Canada’s immigration policies (to include non-whites) in the
1960s. By the early 1980s, many of the so-called visible minority groups had
developed mature theatre groups and skilled theatrical artists. The trap in which they
found themselves, however, became more and more evident. While, as suggested,
19
ethnic-community theatre had existed in Canada for several decades, the
Eurocentrism of most of these groups made them distinct from the new groups which
emerged in the 1970s. As many of the members of earlier community theatre
companies found a place within the anglophone or francophone theatrical
communities, people of colour (perceived as less suitable for these “mainstream”
companies) confronted a dilemma which has not received full resolution since.
These people could create their own forms of community theatre, on the model of
those developed by various groups of European descent, but they would remain
confined within the “community” theatre model. Because of the amateur status of
these groups, actors, playwrights and other professionals were unlikely to receive
the sorts of salaries which those of European descent could find within professional,
mainstream theatres.
Here we confront one of the significant differences between theatre and literature or
the visual arts. While novelists or painters of various backgrounds may use stylistic
languages and formal devices no different from those of the mainstream, in the
performative arts the bodies of performers continue to bear the signs of their racial
and ethnic identities. The rise of the term “visible minority” within cultural policy
discourse has been most important in the case of audio-visual media (such as
theatre, television and film), where bodies are visible and identifiably “other” or not.
Within such media, the difficulties of assimilation become pronounced, and the
notion of a neutral “language” which all might use is less easily imagined.
While those artists who had trained in the community theatres of ethnic groups of
European extraction entered the mainstream French and English-language theatres,
such access was blocked for those emerging from the theatrical communities of
visible minority groups. Visible minority groups and artists continued to be poorly
represented, both in multicultural organizations and in the professional English and
French theatre industry. Shunted between arts councils and the various
multiculturalism agencies, visible and cultural minority theatre artists grew
increasingly frustrated with their lack of access to mainstream Canadian theatre and
the difficulties of gaining reliable funding for their groups. In the late 1980s, arts
councils and theatre associations across the nation began reassessing their policies,
a process which gradually resulted in the dismantling of discriminatory practices and
culturally prejudicial definitions of theatre. In 1988, Canadian Actors’ Equity
Association held the First National Symposium on Non-Traditional Casting in
Toronto, taking a stand in support of professional actors of colour. The following
year, the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists held a similar
conference, which spurred the creation of Into the Mainstream, a directory of visible
and audible minority members, published in 1990/91, 92/93 and 94/95.
One of the observations to emerge from our literature review was that, by the early
1990s, the word “multiculturalism” had often been replaced by terms such as
“cultural diversity,” “intercultural” and “cross-cultural.” Debate over the public
responsibilities of theatre was intensified as a result of the community protests of
1993, which focussed on Toronto productions of Miss Saigon and Showboat. These
debates brought the issue of “cultural appropriation” to centre stage, and suggested
that Canadians of ethnic/immigrant backgrounds had high expectations regarding
their participation in (and representation by) Canadian theatre.
20
Scholarship on Theatre
A review of the relevant literature reveals that much of the important criticism and
scholarship on theatre in Canada is written by playwrights, producers and other
members of theatrical communities. In part, this reflects the practical complexities of
theatrical activity. Issues of cultural identity and diversity in theatre play themselves
out in decisions about casting, in the building of audiences within (and across)
communities and in struggles for funding. While the more abstract, theoretical issues
of representation, voice and nation run through discussions of theatre in Canada, an
ongoing dialogue between practitioners and scholars (or playwrights and theorists) is
more common than in the cases of literature, cinema and music. At the same time,
many of the most important academic journals devoted to Canadian theatre will
publish the texts of plays alongside analytical articles, as if these plays themselves
are contributions to larger debates over the status of theatre in Canada.
Canada has four major English theatre journals: Canadian Theatre Review
(University of Toronto Press), Theatre Research in Canada, Essays in Theatre
(University Of Guelph), The Canadian Journal of Drama and Theatre. In the French
language, there is Jeu : Cahiers de théâtre. Alongside the academic journals just
mentioned, there are periodicals like CanPlay—a national newsmagazine of
Canadian Playwriting—and the quarterly Alt. Theatre (published by the Teesri
Duniya theatrical company). Of these journals, Canadian Theatre Review and
Alt. Theatre have published extensively on multicultural themes. The 1998 issue of
Canadian Theatre Review, for example, was dedicated entirely to South Asian
Canadian Theatre, and the 2000 issue to Italian Canadian theatre. In a 1988 issue
that focussed partially on “Theatre and Ethnicity,” two articles assessed the
government’s multiculturalist policies with respect to such issues as non-traditional
casting (Stolk, 1988; Shiomi, 1988).
Most of the articles in Canadian Theatre Review are written by artists; in particular,
those pieces dealing with such issues as ethnic identity and multiculturalism are
authored by practitioners and others active in the theatre world. Most issues of the
Canadian Theatre Review contain the text of a play. Alt. Theatre magazine was
started in June, 1988 by Teesri Duniya Theatre in Montreal. The magazine seeks to
deal with issues of cultural diversity and their relationship to the stage. In its first
issue, the Theatre’s artistic director, Rahul Varma, argued that for artists of diversity,
the clash of inherited theatrical styles with those of the dominant culture are giving
rise to something new and uniquely Canadian. The work by diverse ethnic groups
draws on artists’ styles and experiences in ways which combines the influences of
their country of origin with those of their adopted country. The magazine has been
able to attract writers working in diverse ethnic communities, and is probably one of
the few theatre magazines devoted to multicultural theatre and theatre communities
within Canada.
21
The most prominent theme in the literature examined here was the tension between
mainstream and margin. This theme is played out at three levels:
1) At the level of plays themselves, as in the frequent dramatization of the status of
immigrants as they confront life in their host countries.
Plays such as Reading Hebron by Jason Sherman, Job Stealer, Isolated Incident,
Counter Offence by Rahul Varma, Harlem Duet by Djanet Sears, and Paradise by
the River by Vittorio Rossi deal with those conditions that prompt people to depart
from their countries of origin, and their attempts and struggles to integrate into the life
of their adopted country. The use of theatre to explore issues of immigration is best
represented in collections of plays gathering together different voices. In one of
these, Canadian Mosaic (1994), edited by Aviva Ravel, six playwrights present
problems specific to particular cultural communities in theatricalized form. The issue
of identity permeates all of the plays: should immigrants or members of minority
groups abandon the culture of their origins in order to integrate into mainstream
Canada, or is it possible to preserve that culture and be no less Canadian? The
anthology has a series of study questions following each play, which students might
use as the basis of discussion of issues of identity, race and ethnicity (Ravel, 1995).
Beyond the Pale: Dramatic Writing from First Nations Writers & Writers of Colour
(1996) edited by Yvette Nolan, Betty Quan and George Bwanika Seremba, is a
collection of plays by Native and writers of colour. The plays here tell the story of a
great number of Canadians—stories of survival against almost impossible odds. As
Tony Hamil, the managing director states in the foreword: “these increasingly
confident voices are those of the first languages ever spoken in this land, and of
many different languages spoken in other countries and now spoken here. They are
also voices of many distinct dialects of English. They are, moreover, uniquely
different perspectives, that are now inarguably voices of this country.”
Plays are often devised to deal critically with issues internal to ethnocultural
communities. Rahul Varma of Teesri Duniya, and Binning of Vancouver Sath have
explored one of the most serious issues faced by the South Asian community in
Canada, its treatment of women. The plays of the Quebec writer Marco Micone deal
with the experiences of Italian immigrants in the context of debates about the nature
of society, language and culture in Quebec and Canada. Often, plays such as these
are written in the author’s mother tongue, and then translated for the Canadian
stage. Many plays, as a result, continue to be performed in different ethnic
languages so as to reach different communities or sections of a larger community.
Our survey of the literature suggests that different communities are involved
unevenly in the debates over a multicultural theatre. Dialogue on the issues
summarized here is centred in the Black (involving artists of African, Caribbean and
Haitian descent), South Asian, Native American and Italian communities in Canada.
Very few writings, at present, address issues within the Greek, Japanese, Chinese or
Korean communities, though this is likely to change in the years to come. The role of
theatre in confronting the issues faced by those of mixed-race background has thus
far received little attention.
22
2) Within the world of theatre itself, in the relationship between so-called “ethnic”
or “multicultural” theatre and so-called mainstream theatre.
The Madras-born critic, playwright and story writer Uma Parmeswaran, who teaches
at the University of Winnipeg, sees the way of the future as a merger between what
used to be mainstream with what used to be peripheral:
We are in the process of forging a new national cultural identity in Canada, an
identity that will be a composite of many heritage cultures….The concepts of
“mainstream” as a synonym for “white,” and of “founding nations” for the
English and French will become part of the past, as will the relegation of
aboriginal culture to the peripheries. As the margins move towards the center,
the center will perforce give way (for the instinct for survival is always the
ultimate moving force) and there will be a series of mergers and divisions
between older and the newer sets of cells that will change the total
configuration. Much will probably be lost by way of ethnocultural distinctions
but many ethnocultural components will also become part of the composite
culture. Perhaps that culture will be a seamless coat of many colours rather
than the patchwork quilt that is today’s multiculturalism…I see seamlessness
and patchwork as alternating movements (Parmeswaran, 1996: iv).
Here, of course, we see echoes of debates over literature, which talk about the
redefinitions of “Canadian” that a diversity of cultural practices are working to bring
about. Nevertheless, as suggested, the movement of “ethnic” theatre from margins to
mainstream raises important issues of casting.
A wide cross-section of plays by Canadian playwrights has managed to bring multiethnic casts and issues to the Canadian stage. Teesri Duniya Theatre and Black
Theatre Workshop have expressed their concern at how, for the longest time, roles
which might have been played by people of colour were performed on stage by white
actors. According to Ken McDonough, a professional translator, actor, playwright and
writer, “Theatre has been slow to react to Canadian demographics. There are more
minority actors, but they are still refused roles on the basis of their physical
attributes.” He further states that the practice of colour blind casting resolves certain
tensions of “appropriation” and “reservation.” He writes that “unless a person of a
particular background were absolutely required, roles would be distributed on merit.
It is a known fact that when roles are played well, the audience sees only the
characters, not the colour of their skin” (McDonough 1998:6). May roles be owned by
particular identity groups, McDonough asks; if they may, what are the risks of
enforcing this ownership?
The issue of non-traditional casting or colour-blind casting is recurrent in most of the
literature on ethnic or multicultural theatre groups across Canada. Issue no. 56 of the
Canadian Theatre Review called for a National Symposium on Non-Traditional and
Cross-Cultural Casting. The symposium, held in February 1989, was sponsored by
the Canadian Actors Equity and was organized by Marvin Ishmael, Sandi Ross,
Janet Lo, Suzanne Coy and Brenda Kamino. In issue no. 83 of the Canadian
Theatre Review, actor Henry Gomez wrote about the frustration of African Canadian
actors, particularly due to low employment. He suggested that “the lofty sounding
principles of multiculturalism and employment equity, which are daily seen as a trick
23
whereby white European retain the privilege of being the gatekeepers and imagemakers of Canadian society” (Gomez 1983:12). He asks: “In an enlightened and
pluralistic society should we not heed the voices of the people who have been
historically subjugated by the forces of white supremacy?” (Gomez 1983:13)
3) With respect to theatre’s place in contemporary culture, and its status as
“marginal” relative to mainstream cultural media, such as television or film.
The theatre’s position within contemporary culture has been marginal for several
decades now. This is compounded by the marginalization to which ethnic
communities are subject. If Canadian cultural life best embodies ethnic and racial
diversity at the level of those small-scale practices (such as theatre) which are most
deeply rooted in community life, then the fragility of theatre serves to weaken or
disarm multicultural expression.
The Arts in Transition Report (released by the Canadian Conference for the Arts
(CCA) in 1997-98) concluded that audiences for the performing arts in Canada are
either declining or not growing adequately, and that there is an urgent need “to
integrate the arts more deeply and widely in the broader community” (2,3). The
report warns that “unless the work of an arts organization is rooted in and meaningful
to its community, its survival is precarious” (18). It stresses the need for meaningful
participation in art (as distinct from spectatorship alone) and it suggests that arts
groups and artists must do more to engage with the increasing cultural diversity of
the country (30). While well-intended, insistence on “meaningful participation” in art
surrounds theatre-going with that taint of duty from which, in the minds of many, it
already suffers too much.
At the same time, certain ethnocultural communities confront the fact that their own
members frequently place little value on cultural activity, particularly that of an
experimental or activist kind. To expedite the birth of a truly multicultural theatre,
companies such as Teesri Duniya Theatre, Black Theatre Workshop and others
believe that it is essential to foster the development of artistic sensibilities within
individual members of diverse communities. They realize how little value is usually
placed on a career in the arts in most minority cultural communities. Community
projects such as that which Teesri Duniya has initiated with the South Asian
community are an opportunity to identify and encourage community members who
show real artistic promise. Those who are interested in devoting themselves to the
arts must be allowed equal access to the means to do so.
Theatre: Some Conclusions
As with the scholarship on literature discussed earlier, most of the writing on theatre
is engaged in questioning or redefining such terms as “Canadian” and “Canadian
theatre.” In the case of theatre, writers confront the fact that theatre does not play a
central role in the lives of most “ordinary” Canadians, and is largely the
preoccupation of an intellectual or artistic elite. Most of the literature reviewed has
questioned or redefined prevailing definitions of “Canadian” and “ Canadian theatre.”
One of the major setbacks to understanding this even further is the fact that theatre
ceases to reside in the culture of ordinary people and becomes the concern of an
24
intellectual or an artistic elite. The poor and the poorly educated do not go to the
theatre (Hood, 1989: 30). The presence of visible minorities within the world of
theatre, as a result, seems less crucial than the question of their participation in the
worlds of music or television.
Finally, French-language periodicals devoted to Theatre, such as Jeu : Cahiers de
théâtre, have not confronted issues of multicultural identity to the same extent as
those in English. While French-language theatre in the country is slowly becoming
more diverse and multicultural, the issues themselves are debated less frequently
and less intensely in printed fora.
25
Afterword
Canadian cultural policy, for many decades, has been founded on the presumption
of scarcity: that we lack sufficient numbers of domestically-produced films, sound
recordings, television programs and books to sustain a lively national culture. Amidst
the abundance we feel in the contemporary book or music superstore, claims of
scarcity are likely to lose their mobilizing force. Indeed, the fields of popular music or
literary writing have long been marked by an abundance of creative activity. The
crucial policy questions, arguably, concern the reproduction of that which is
produced, the mechanics of distribution, and the nature of those institutions and
discourses through which these are given value. The incorporation of music and film
policy under the rubric of “cultural industries” has diverted attention from schemes
which might give amateurs access to equipment and expertise in community-based
centres (rather than focussing on those embarking upon “careers” in these areas). At
the same time, research might focus more on historical and contemporary patterns of
film exhibition in native communities, or on the role of community radio stations in
sustaining non-heritage languages and diverse musical traditions.
In 1997, Ian Angus offered his book A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural
Plurality, and Wilderness as a swan song to the “English Canadian left-nationalist
politics” with which he had long felt deep affinities. The left-nationalist perspective on
Canadian cultural life had withered, he suggested, under the impact and alternative
appeal of globalization. Globalization itself, as a socio-economic phenomena, had
enshrined postmodern thinking as the dominant philosophical position within EnglishCanada. Postmodern thinking, Angus argued, involved a rejection of most of the
foundations of Canadian cultural nationalism. While cultural nationalists had insisted
that our commonalities, as Canadians, were the foundation of our institutions and
way of life, postmodernists, in Angus’ account, treated any discussion of such
commonalities as simply a means for silencing the diverse voices to be found in
Canadian life. “The polarization is thus between diversity and unity,” Angus
suggested, “and there is no middle ground” (218).
Whether there is a middle ground within this debate (and whether a middle ground is
even desirable) is not entirely certain. Nor is it clear whether the lively, contemporary
research on Canadian culture will unravel any conviction that cultural life in Canada
is distinct, or, on the contrary, offer rich new ways of imagining that distinctiveness. It
seems clear that, as culture moves to the centre of our economies and civic lives, it
is an increasingly fundamental part of the ways in which we act as citizens and
imagine our collective lives. When the crucial issues in Canadian cultural life seemed
to be those of government support and protection, cultural citizenship involved little
more than acceptance of the minor sacrifices state policies asked us to endure. As
the cultural realm becomes the terrain upon which we work out the terms of our coexistence in a diverse, complex society, cultural citizenship may designate
something much larger. It may encompass those principles and practices through
which identities are expressed and the terms of their co-existence worked out.
One version of this argument would suggest that forms of cultural expression
contribute to a national conversation, and thus fulfill the aims of article 3 (g) of the
Multiculturalism Act, in that they “promote the understanding and creativity that arise
26
from the interaction between individuals and communities of different origins.”
Literature has long been of interest for the degrees of ease or difficulty with which
different voices co-exist within it. Music, as Jacques Attali has argued, serves as an
early indicator of new modes of work and collaboration, forms of interaction which
may be glimpsed in the hip-hop posse or the hyphenated labour of the disc jockeyrecord producer. Theater, increasingly, serves as a realm in which act of creation is
indistinct from the working out of principles of collective co-existence. Research
might focus more on cultural “fields” as creative worlds in which work is organized,
voices find their place and ethical structures are elaborated.
In this respect, culture is both a laboratory for citizenship and a key intermediary in
our relationship to the larger social body. In theatre, debates over mixed-race identity
or non-racial casting carry enormous practical weight, but are laden with broader
implications for the ways in which we work to resolve questions of identity and
participation. Fans of popular musical forms (such as techno or heavy metal) learn
complex ethical protocols as part of their apprenticeship in the cultural worlds
surrounding these forms. Has this apprenticeship replaced or displaced that typically
provided by the educational system or churches? While, for many, theatre-going or
the reading of novels may be considered unappealing obligations, might these be
recast as socially desirable practices through which lessons of coexistence are
learned and socially valued knowledges are imparted?
27
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