Unit 1 notes for Post-Colonial Literature in English II: Canadian Literature, B.A English Literature, 3rd Year 6th Semester

Core Paper – XIV :Post-Colonial Literature in English II: Canadian Literature

Unit-1: Introduction

Postcolonial literature 

Post-colonialism

            The term “Postcolonialism” refers broadly to the ways in which race, ethnicity, culture, and human identity itself are represented in the modern era, after many colonized countries gained their independence. However, some critics use the term to refer to all culture and cultural products influenced by imperialism from the moment of colonization until today. Postcolonial literature seeks to describe the interactions between European nations and the peoples they colonized. By the middle of the twentieth century, the vast majority of the world was under the control of European countries. At one time, Great Britain, for example, ruled almost 50 percent of the world. During the twentieth century, countries such as India, Jamaica, Nigeria, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Canada, and Australia won independence from their European colonizers. The literature and art produced in these countries after independence has become the object of “Postcolonial Studies,” a term coined in and for academia, initially in British universities. This field gained prominence in the 1970s and has been developing ever since. Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said’s critique of Western representations of the Eastern culture in his 1978 book, Orientalism, is a seminal text for postcolonial studies and has spawned a host of theories on the subject.

            Postcolonial theorists critically study both colonial texts and texts written after colonialism. One of the primary reasons postcolonial literature has become as popular as it has is due in large part to theorists such as Said, Spivak, Fanon, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Homi Bhabha, and others, who explain the significance of the literature in relation to history, politics, philosophy, and literary traditions and discuss its place in contemporary society. Many of these theorists and critics are themselves from postcolonial countries and so speak with the authority of experience. Said, for example, is Palestinian; Spivak is from Calcutta, India; Fanon is from Martinique, a French colony. In challenging how writers and others have represented colonial subjects, these theorists seek to empower themselves and the literary projects of postcolonialists in their attempts to reshape perceptions and thinking about formerly colonized people.

Canadian Literature In English

Prose and poetry

From settlement to 1900

    The first writers of English in Canada were visitors—explorers, travelers, and British officers and their wives—who recorded their impressions of British North America in charts, diaries, journals, and letters. These foundational documents of journeys and settlements presage the documentary tradition in Canadian literature in which geography, history, and arduous voyages of exploration and discovery represent the quest for a myth of origins and for a personal and national identity. As the critic Northrop Frye observed, Canadian literature is haunted by the overriding question “Where is here?”; thus, metaphoric mappings of peoples and places became central to the evolution of the Canadian literary imagination.

Drama

    Like the poets and novelists, Canadian dramatists in their quest for a myth of origins have often turned to historical incidents. The earliest forms of dramatic writing, Charles Mair’s Tecumseh (1886) and Sarah Anne Curzon’s Laura Secord, the Heroine of 1812 (1887), both based on the War of 1812, were in verse. By the 1950s and ’60s several professional theatres had been successfully established, producing a more sophisticated milieu for dramatists such as John Coulter, whose Riel (1962) creates a heroic figure of Louis Riel, the leader of the Métis rebellion in 1885. As regional and experimental theatres multiplied, increasingly innovative and daring productions were mounted, such as John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1967), on homosexuality in prison; George Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1971), about an indigenous woman who is a prostitute; and James Reaney’s Donnelly trilogy (1976–77), about the feuds and the massacre of an Irish immigrant family in southern Ontario.

Canadian folklore

    Canadian folklore and fairy tales are amusing, clever and fun-loving tales that transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Many of the Canadian Native American tales are creation or origin myths that have strong themes of nature and the seasons similar to Native American folklore throughout the Americas. Like most countries, storytelling in Canada is deeply rooted in tradition and cultural identity. Collections like Professor Cyrus MacMillan’s Canadian Fairy Tales saved these great relics of Canadian history. American author, Cornelius Mathews collected Native American stories from across the Americas and published them in his Indian Fairy Book. An outspoken advocate for women’s equality, and Sioux writer, Zitkala-Ša, collected and published Native American tales in her book, Old Indian Fairy Legends.

    The first creative writer of Indigenous descent to break into mainstream European literary circles was E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake (1861–1913). Her father, George Johnson, was a Mohawk chief. Her first public reading in 1892 led to great acclaim and she was included in early anthologies, but modernist poets later criticized her work as sentimental. In her Canadian Literature article “‘The Most Canadian of all Canadian Poets’: Pauline Johnson and the Construction of a National Literature,” Carole Gerson writes about Johnson’s navigation and advocacy of Indigenous issues in the early 1900s and her influence on contemporary Indigenous writers.

    As an illustration of the importance of telling stories about Indigenous peoples, we can look at the publication of non-Indigenous playwright George Ryga’s play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1967). Ryga’s play was one of the first dramatic works to address colonial history head on. The play was first performed at the Vancouver Playhouse on 23 November 1967 with an Indigenous cast, and was directed by George Bloomfield. The date of the staging is not a coincidence. 1967 was Canada’s centennial, and the play was commissioned as part of a project of rethinking Canada and its history and peoples. 

    After the success of Ryga’s play in 1990, many Indigenous Canadian writers have found publishing success. In 1993, Thomas King’s novel Green Grass, Running Water was nominated for the Governor General’s Award in Fiction—the first book written by an Indigenous author to receive the nod. A decade later, King also became the first person of Indigenous descent to deliver a CBC Massey Lecture. Another milestone was Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach, which was nominated for the 2000 Governor General’s Award and The Giller Prize.

Mi'kmaq literature

    Traditional oral stories of Mi’kmaq are unique to the Mi’kmaq community, and define their values and beliefs about the world in which they live. "The Legend of the Hand of the Medicine Man" and "The Invisible One" are examples of Mi’kmaq oral stories. Glooscap is a commonly known cultural hero in Mi’kmaq literature. A trickster figure who outsmarts many self-serving characters, Glooscap appears in the Creation Story and "Muin, the Bear's Child". Glooscap also appears in Rita Joe’s poetry and Lorne Simon’s novel, Stones and Switches. Rita Joe is a well-known Mi’kmaq writer and poet who received the Order of Canada in 1990. She writes about the loss and resilience of her culture, themes which appear poems such as "I lost my talk" and "Wen net ki’l - Who are you?". She writes in both Mi’kmaq and English. Other Mi’kmaq poets include Lindsay Marshall, Shirley Bear and Teresa Marshall.

Mohawk literature

    The Mohawk people are geographically dispersed across Canada and the United States. Mohawk Nation is one of the six nations in the Iroquois Confederacy, aside from Oneida,  Seneca,  Onondaga,  Cayuga and Tuscarora Nations.  The Confederacy led to the creation of a governance system called the Great Law of Peace. Mohawk traditions, beliefs and worldview are founded upon the Creation Story, the Great Law of Peace, the concept of the Seventh Generation, the Two Row Wampum Treaty and the Confederacy. Beth Brant is an essayist and short-story writer who incorporates Mohawk Creation Story in her writings. Writer Peter Blue Cloud, from Kahnawake, Quebec also utilizes the creation story in his work. Cloud's "Weaver’s Spider’s Web" features the Coyote, a trickster figure, and a powerful woman, an important symbol in Longhouse cultures.

Anishinaabe and Ojibway literature

    A century-old oral tradition has been documented in collections by Basil Johnston such as Ojibway Heritage, Tales the Elders Told, and Sacred Legends. Author George Copway (1818–69) wrote an autobiography titled The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-gah-bowh (1847) telling a story of an Indigenous person having been converted to Christianity.  It was the first book written by a Canadian Indigenous person in English. Copway's work is contrasted by Richard Wagamese’s Keeper’N Me, an autobiographical novel that prioritizes Ojibway beliefs and values. Drew Hayden Taylor addresses Indigenous identity and other topics in his plays such as Toronto at Dreamers’ Rock, and essays like "Pretty Like a White Boy: The Adventures of a Blue Eyed Ojibway".

Cree literature

    Some recurring themes in Cree literature include the vanishing of buffalo signifying the disappearance of a way of life centered around the migration of buffalo, as well the notion of confinement on the reserves. Tomson Highway is a Cree writer, playwright, and musician born in northern Manitoba. Highway’s autobiographical novel, Kiss of the Fur Queen features the trickster figure Weesageechak, an important figure that parallels Christ in the Christian world. The themes of the novel include sexual abuse in residential school and healing.

Garrison Mentality :-

    The garrison mentality is a common theme in regards to Canadian literature and Canadian cinema. The term was first coined by literary critic Northrop Frye and further explored by author Margaret Atwood, who discussed Canada's preoccupation with the theme of survival in her book Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. This mentality is assumed to come from part of the Canadian identity that fears the emptiness of the Canadian landscape and fears the oppressiveness of other nations.

    In texts with the garrison mentality, characters are always looking outwards and building metaphorical walls against the outside world.

    Michael Greenstein contributed an article entitled Beyond the Ghetto and the Garrison: Jewish-Canadian Boundaries - Beyond Nationalism: The Canadian Literary Scene in Global Perspective in a 1981 publication of the Canadian periodical Mosaic.

    Julie Spergel calls for an examination of the terminology in " Constructing a Multicultural Identity at the Canadian Frontier: Mordecai Richler and Jewish-Canadian Writing La construction d’une identité multiculturelle sur la Frontière canadienne : Mordecai Richler et l’écriture juive au Canada" published in 2005. Spergel asserts: "Much can be said about the interactions between the garrisoned or ghettoised and the larger community that creates their feelings of isolation or division." 

    Sherrie Malisch summarizes: "As a shorthand for deficiencies in the Canadian national spirit, the term garrison mentality appears in everything from a political rant against “Laurentian elites” (Bricker) to an institutional critique of the CBC (Miljan and Cooper). In the words of David Staines, the garrison mentality has, for Canadians, become “part of our critical vocabulary, indeed of our very language”.