Selves and Subjectivities: Reflections on Canadian Arts and Culture

Selves and Subjectivities Selves and Subjectivities REFLECTIONS ON CANADIAN ARTS AND CULTURE Edited by Manijeh Mannani and Veronica Thompson Copyright © 2012 Manijeh Mannani and Veronica Thompson Published by AU Press, Athabasca University 1200, 10011 – 109 Street, Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8 ISBN 978-1-926836-49-2 (print) 978-1-926836-50-8 (PDF) 978-1-926836-51-5 (epub) Cover and interior design by Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design. Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printers. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Selves and subjectivities : reflections on Canadian arts and culture / edited by Manijeh Mannani and Veronica Thompson. Issued also in electronic format. ISBN 978-1-926836-49-2 1. National characteristics, Canadian, in art. 2. Identity (Psychology) — Canada. 3. Identity (Psychology) in art. 4. Culture in art. 5. Arts, Canadian. I. Mannani, Manijeh, 1964– II. Thompson, Veronica, 1963– FC95.5.S45 2012 700.971 C2011-905793-X We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities. Assistance provided by the Government of Alberta, Alberta Multimedia De- velopment Fund. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons License, Attribution– Noncommercial–No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada: see www.creativecommons. org. The text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author. To obtain permission for uses beyond those outlined in the Creative Com- mons license, please contact AU Press, Athabasca University, at aupress@ athabascau.ca. CONTENTS S elves and Subjectivities 1 Manijeh Mannani and Veronica Thompson A Semiotic Reading of Hédi Bouraoui’s The Woman Between the Lines 13 Elizabeth Dahab Mourning Lost “Others” in Ronnie Burkett’s Happy 39 Janne Cleveland Putting an End to Recycled Violence in Colleen Wagner’s The Monument 69 Gilbert McInnis Representations of the Self and the Other in Canadian Intercultural Theatre 95 Anne Nothof Pulling Her Self Together: Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic 115 Veronica Thompson “New, Angular Possibilities”: Redefining Ethnicity Through Transcultural Exchanges in Marusya Bociurkiw’s The Children of Mary 151 Dana Patrascu-Kingsley The Elegiac Loss of the English- Canadian Self and the End of the Romantic Identification with the Aboriginal Other in Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers 175 Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber Playing the Role of the Tribe: The Aesthetics of Appropriation in Canadian Aboriginal Hip Hop 207 Thor Polukoshko Toward a Theory of the Dubject: Doubling and Spacing the Self in Canadian Media Culture 235 Mark A. McCutcheon List of Contributors 265 1 Selves and Subjectivities Manijeh Mannani and Veronica Thompson Canadian identity and its manifestations in the arts are the cen tral themes in Selves and Subjectivities, a collection of essays that explores emerging concepts about the representation of the Self and the Other in contemporary Canadian arts and culture. The essays touch upon a variety of issues, most notably gender and sexuality, displacement, trauma, performativity, and linguistic diversity on at least two levels: the individual and the collec tive. The original call for papers for this collection was broadly conceived to address emerging concepts of identity formation. To our delight, the majority of the submissions had a Canadian focus, which is reflected in these selections. The response made apparent the continuing problematics of identity and the cen trality of this debate within the Canadian imagination. 2 Introduction Canadian literature and culture have long been preoccupied with questions of identity, and it can be difficult to discuss representations of Canadian identity in the arts without suc- cumbing to clichéd tropes and turns of phrase; without con- sidering watersheds moments in Canadian identity formation; without restating Northrop Frye’s renowned claim that the essential Canadian question is, “Where is here?”; without claim- ing that “to be Canadian . is to exist in a constant state of becoming” (Pevere and Dymond viii). Questions of identity are evident in many of the earliest depictions of Canada and Canadians in explorer and settler art and writing; the arts in Canada continue to grapple with evolving questions of identity into the twenty-first century. Encounters with the Other characterize the exploration and settlement periods of Canadian history, as Aboriginal, French, and British peoples came into contact in the “New World.” Articulations of the Self and representations of the Other in exploration and settler period art and writing expose early and deep ambivalences surrounding identity and identity formation; during the settler period, as the settler finds his or her own indigeneity increasingly questioned in the imperial centre and always questioned in Canada, equivocacies of identity are often foregrounded. Crises of identity persist beyond the settler period, despite, and perhaps due to, post-Confederation desires to establish a unified identity distinct from Britain and the United States in a “newly formed” Canada. Post-Confederation nationhood transformed into cultural nationalism, and for sev- eral decades literature and the arts were perceived as imperative to establishing a sense of a national identity, a Canadian Self. A resurgent desire to ascertain a unified Canadian identity emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, in part linked to expanded opportunities for publishing Canadian books, increased government grants to support Canadian arts, and the addition of Introduction 3 Canadian literature courses in university English departments. However, a definitive Canadian identity remained elusive, and inadequate, given the regional and cultural differences spanning the country. Recognition of racial, ethnic, gender, and class in- equalities, too, precluded a unified national identity; the Multi- culturalism Act belied it. Instead, and as a result, debates around Canadian identity in the past two to three decades have explored the multiplicities of Canadian identities. Selves and Subjectivities enters this debate, presenting a collection of essays that embodies and articulates recent manifestations and delineations of Ca- nadian identity, and that questions and challenges existing ones. This volume also enters current debates about Canadian identity advanced through analyses of the arts in Canada. Sherrill Grace’s On the Art of Being Canadian, for example, asserts that “the art of Canada continues to tell us what ‘being Canadian means’” (4; emphasis in the original) and then substantiates her claim through a study of a wide range of Canadian arts, includ- ing fiction, film, and photography. Grace approaches various art forms to ask, “What do the arts and our artists show us or tell us about being Canadian or about being ourselves?” (7) and to illustrate the “persistent yet changing concerns with Canadian identity” (12). In Canadian Cultural Poesis: Essays on Canadian Culture, editors Garry Sherbert, Annie Gérin, and Sheila Petty, too, consider ways in which Canadian identity is interpellated and challenged in a collection of interdisciplinary essays orga- nized around the topics of media, language, identity, and politics and connected by shared ambivalences about Canadian identity. According to the editors, “Canadian cultural poesis may . be described as an act of hospitality, the invention of new gestures, new ways of welcoming the marginalized other, the stranger, and the foreigner, in order to construct new cultural arrange- ments between the universal Canadian identity and their own particular identity” (Sherbert et al. 20). The essays collected in 4 Introduction Selves and Subjectivities contribute to these continuing debates on Canadian identity by moving beyond the act of “welcoming the marginalized other”; the essays further acknowledge and theorize the complex negotiations of the Self and Other in Canadian arts and culture as persistently dialogic and multiple. The essays collected here also reaffirm Diana Brydon’s as- sertion about “the need to rethink Canadian literature beyond older forms of nationalism and internationalism and toward multiscaled visions of place — local, regional, national, and global — each imbricated within the other” (14). Brydon continues: “Writers and critics are rethinking relations of place, space, and non-place in ways that complicate understandings of where and how the nation fits” (14–15). “They are not tran- scending nation but resituating it,” she concludes (15). Accord- ingly, the contributors to this collection are re-evaluating and resituating the parameters of subjectivity vis-à-vis the Other. The resulting reflections on the Self and the Other are equivo- cal and ambivalent, and they speak to the complex political and social debates that are attempting to achieve a definitive understanding of Canadian identity. The varied backgrounds of the artists studied and of the contributors themselves mirror the multifaceted makeup of this country: both engage with a broad spectrum of genres and adopt a wide range of methodologies. Among the artists examined are Tunisian-Canadian poet, writer, literary critic, and scholar Hédi Bouraoui; iconic poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen; Aboriginal rap group War Party; Governor-General’s- award-winning playwright Colleen Wagner; feminist poet and novelist Daphne Marlatt; film director David Cronenberg; actor, writer, and puppeteer Ronnie Burkett; and Ukranian-Canadian author and media scholar Marusya Bociurkiw. The

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