Cultures of Coloniality: Latina/O Writing in Canada by Gabrielle
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Cultures of Coloniality: Latina/o Writing in Canada by Gabrielle Etcheverry A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Canadian Studies Carleton University, Ottawa Ontario © 2015 Gabrielle Etcheverry ABSTRACT This study examines Latina/o Canadian literature and drama dealing with the themes of exile, migration, acculturation, and hybrid cultural identities, while also analyzing the national and transnational contexts in which these texts are produced. My study contends that the scant critical attention that this substantial and significant body of literature has received is due to its existence at the margins of dominant Anglo-Canadian national cultural discourses and transnational Latina/o cultural formations. In order to understand this relationship between the national and the transnational, I investigate how multilingual Latina/o Canadian writers and texts negotiate their hemispheric positions and affiliations, as well as how essentialized, U.S.-based definitions of latinidad obscure specific Latina/o experiences and literary practices in Canada. Further, I suggest that a decolonial hemispheric framework is particularly useful for understanding literature written by Latin Americans in North America and for mapping some of the connections and disjunctures between national and transnational literatures in rapidly changing “post”-colonial societies. My study of Latina/o Canadian literature considers differing sites, practices, and genres in order to demonstrate both the diversity of this body of writing and its changing place on the sometimes intersecting margins of national and transnational literary and cultural formations. Thus, this study encompasses analyses of exilic poetry, diasporic drama, travel writing, and memoir in Spanish, English, and French from the late 18th century to the present. While such differences in timeframe and genre point to the heterogeneity of Latina/o cultural production and experience, I argue that their shared thematic concerns nevertheless connect these texts across languages, generations, and national borders. In this way, my study makes a timely intervention in the fields of Latina/o, hemispheric, and critical Canadian cultural studies. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project has been completed with the help of many people. I would like to especially thank my supervisor, Sarah Phillips Casteel, for her unflagging support, encouragement, and belief in my work. I wish also to express thanks to my long-suffering committee members, André Loiselle and Brian Johnson for sticking it out with me over many years and for always providing helpful and cheerful feedback and support. I have also benefitted enormously from conversations, feedback, and/or guidance from Karleen Pendleton Jiménez, Dalia Kandiyoti, Catherine Khordoc, Eva Mackey, Natalie Alvarez, Eve Haque, Donna Patrick, and David Sheinen. To Samah Sabra and Robyn Green, I will always be grateful for their careful reading of earlier versions of this study and the useful comments and edits they provided. The School of Canadian Studies holds a special place in my heart for all the support they have provided over the years and for their willingness to accommodate me when I entered the doctoral program with a newborn in tow. We were very fortunate to have found a second home on the 12th floor of Dunton Tower with so many wonderful and encouraging people. In many ways, my family has been the core of this project. Since a portion of this study relates a piece of history in which they play a small part, their tremendous support has been instrumental in its retelling. I could not have done this work without you. My gratitude exceeds words. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction - Cultures of Coloniality: Situating Latina/o Canadian Literature Within the National and Transnational 1 Chapter 1 – Contesting Canadian Latinities: Carmen Aguirre’s Something Fierce and English Canada’s Institution of Literature 48 Chapter 2 - Of Other Times and Places: Alternative Chronotopes in the Poetry of Chilean Exiles in Canada 94 Chapter 3 - Fear and Loving in Las Americas: Space and Affect in Latina/o Canadian Diasporic Drama 141 Chapter 4 - Writing from Nootka: Exploration, Migration and Indigenization in Two Hispanic American Texts 197 Conclusion 248 Works Cited 250 Introduction Cultures of Coloniality: Situating Latina/o Canadian Literature Within the National and Transnational “Americanity and coloniality are mutually imbricated from the beginning.” Walter Mignolo Latina/o Canadian literature is an understudied field, yet one that is significant for the ways in which it exposes the uneven relationships between particular national and transnational literatures. National literatures have often been equated with a specific national culture, language, and identity. However, the rise of ethnic “minority” and migrant literatures in the late twentieth-century has increasingly troubled this facile understanding of national literature. As Walter Mignolo writes, “migratory movements are disarticulating the idea of national languaging and, indirectly, of national literacies and literatures […] The notion of homogeneous national cultures and the consensual transmission of historical and literary traditions, as well as of unadulterated ethnic communities, are in the process of profound revisions and redefinitions” (236). Mass migration through globalization and other transnational movements, thus, is not only challenging ideas of homogenous national cultures and literary traditions, but also the very idea of a fixed linguistic identity tied to “authentic” culture. Despite these cultural shifts and the supposed demise of the nation in the context of globalization, my research explores the ways in which the national still operates in the literary, particularly in terms of identity construction and the position (or absence) of minoritized, multilingual literatures within significant cultural institutions, such as national arts organizations and 1 mainstream literary criticism.1 At the same time, I situate the national within larger hemispheric contexts, especially Latina/o Canadian literature’s place at the juncture of national and transnational literatures and cultures. In this way, my study of Latina/o Canadian cultural production also highlights the ways in which the transnational “Latino” identifier is an increasingly unsatisfactory category of socio-cultural classification and analysis. In order to understand these broader issues of the intersection between national and transnational cultures and identities in a hemispheric context, I examine Latina/o Canadian literature to demonstrate how symbolic markers and material relations of modern identity such as nation, space, history, and language are embedded and negotiated in Latina/o Canadian writing. I argue that the so-called postcolonial nation remains a key site in the overlapping imaginaries (Appadurai 5), or culturally constructed identities, in which Latina/o Canadian literature is enmeshed. Moreover, the transnational Latina/o cultural formation with which this literature also intersects imposes an overarching cultural identity that nevertheless elides its particularities and diversity. This literature’s specific intersection within dominant Anglo-Canadian national cultural discourses and transnational Latina/o cultural formations, then, ensures its relative invisibility in hemispheric literary and cultural contexts. As such, Latina/o Canadian literature provides a striking example of coloniality—or the “long-standing patterns of 1 Canadian postcolonial criticism has played a productive and distinguished role in analyzing “multicultural,” “ethnic” and Indigenous literatures in this country (see for example Cynthia Sugars, ed. Unhomely States). However, it does not for the most part focus on the issue of language and has been widely critiqued for totalizing “post” colonial experiences and identities and unproblematically transmitting the idea that the end of de facto colonialism has meant the end of colonial relations of inequality (see Thomas King “Godzilla vs. Postcolonial”). 2 power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations” (Maldonado-Torres 248). By investigating exemplary Latina/o Canadian literary texts and practices, as well as their encounters with national cultural institutions (the role of universities in canon formation, funding agencies, and government departments) and transnational cultural processes, I ask how specific ideals of Canadian national identity are reproduced in the Anglo-Canadian literary field and how such aspects of identity might be transgressed in Latina/o Canadian writing. I further explore how essentialized, U.S. -based definitions of latinidad and Latina/o culture and identity obscure the specific Latina/o experiences and literary practices in Canada. In so doing, I am contributing to a growing body of work in Latina/o studies that has emerged in the United States over the last decade and which elucidates how current constructions of Latina/o identity erase important distinctions among Latina/os within the U.S. itself. Where much of this work has focused on the ways in which the socio-cultural “Latino” category essentializes diverse national, classed, gendered, and racialized experiences and identities within U.S. national borders, I posit that