How can postcolonialism be applied to Canadian literature?

In all that has been written about postcolonialism, surprisingly little has specifically addressed the position of Canada, Canadian literature, or Canadian culture.

Postcolonialism is a theory that has gained credence throughout the world; it is be productive to ask if and how we, as Canadians, participate in postcolonial debates. It is also vital to examine the ways in which Canada and Canadian culture fit into global discussions as our culture reflects how we interact with our neighbours, allies, and adversaries.

This collection wrestles with the problems of situating Canadian literature in the ongoing debates about culture, identity, and globalization, and of applying the slippery term of postcolonialism to Canadian literature. The topics range in focus from discussions of specific literary works to general theoretical contemplations. The twenty-three articles in this collection grapple with the recurrent issues of postcolonialism — including hybridity, collaboration, marginality, power, resistance, and historical revisionism — from the vantage point of those working within Canada as writers and critics. While some seek to confirm the legitimacy of including Canadian literature in the discussions of postcolonialism, others challenge this very notion.

Laura Moss is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia and the former director of the UBC International Canadian Studies Centre. She is the associate editor of the journal Canadian Literature, co-editor (with Cynthia Sugars) of the two volume Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts (2008, 2009), and the editor of Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian Literature (WLU Press, 2003).

Born in 1899 in Quebec City, Francis Reginald (Frank) Scott was a public poet, an accomplished editor and mentor of a generation of writers, an influential professor of constitutional law, and a founding member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). Emerging as one of the “Montreal Group” of modernist poets of the 1920s, Scott spent the next five decades writing poetry and working to transform both Canadian poetics and politics. With a penchant for satire, Scott’s work is sometimes playful and witty and sometimes gravely concerned with the legacies of political ineptitude and the fragility of both humanity and the environment.

George Elliott Clarke is the inaugural E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. Named a Trudeau Foundation Fellow in 2005, Clarke is a revered poet, librettist, and novelist. For his collection Execution Poems, he received the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2001. His bestselling poetry-novel, Whylah Falls, is a major text in Canadian literature.

Laura Moss' profile page

''Laura Moss's question, posed to twenty-two Canadian literature specialists, has elicited a fascinating range of responses....The sense of a conversation among the contributors is sustained by frequent cross-referencing among the essays....This is a timely, enjoyable and eminently readable book, which achieves range and diversity without sacrificing coherence.''

Faye Hammill

"This volume puts its finger on the pulse of the debate surrounding postcolonialism in Canada."

American Review of Canadian Studies

''At last is an extended debate on a crucial matter: the relationship between colonialism, postcoloniality, and national discourse. The sheer impossibility of answering the question posed in the title energises lively and informative discussion and debate, illuminating not only the subject of Canadian literatures but issues central to other fields. Twenty-three Canadian intellectuals consider Canada's literary history, the current status of literary discourse, and its likely future. The richness of the coverage, together with the inescapable indeterminacy, is encouraging to those of us who continue to believe in a Canada politically, socially, and intellectually uncompromised.''

Helen Tiffin

"Laura Moss has planted a provocative, timely question and gleaned twenty-two well-ripened critical responses. That the answers aren't 'yes' or 'no' but 'it depends' and 'let's keep debating it' makes this gathering both quintessentially Canadian and paradigmatically postcolonial. Here is where we can begin reorienting CanLit criticism for this unsettling new century."

Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne

"In this deliberately 'unsettling' collection, Laura Moss asks if Canada is postcolonial. If you've never asked the question yourself, these essays make it clear why it's time you did. Not that the question has an easy answer -- far from it. For this book does not leap to easy absolutes; it wrestles instead with process and the possibilities of engagement. The apparently simple question in the title leads to a score of fascinating and more complex questions, about politics and the Canadian state, ethnicity and marginality, literature and the limits of definition. If and What if: the riskiness of the uncertain. The essays here discuss critical theory and practice, for example, but also political imperatives and invitations, pedagogy and personal responsibility, art, artifacts, and the rhetoric of difference. Passionate, earnest, argumentative, intelligent, and above all engaged, these essays ask us to think about what we think we already know about art and life, and to think again."

William H. New

"Is Canada Postcolonial? raises important and timely, if perhaps unanswerable questions, and offers a number of insightful tentative, non-definitive, and divergent-cum-contradictory answers. Indubitably both the wide-ranging textual analyses and the metacritical contributions open up new areas of thought, and anyone interested in the postcoloniality of Canada will find Moss's book very useful."

Zeitschrift fur Kanada-Studien, 28:2

"Is Canada Postcolonial? is a highly readable collection of critical responses to a provocative and timely question. The diverse answers, provided by some of Canada's most eminent scholars, truly unsettle Canadian studies by examining the uses and abuses of currently popular postcolonial critical frameworks in the study of Canada and Canadian literatures."

Arun P. Mukherjee

"An important, thought-provoking collection, ably edited by Laura Moss."

Canadian Literature, 188, Spring 2006

"Reflects...[and] extends current academic research and practice."

University of Toronto Quarterly – Letters in Canada 2003