MAPPING DIFFERENCE THROUGH THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARDS: NATIONAL IDENTITY PEDAGOGY IN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FICTION, 1971-1982 By DESI VALENTINE Integrated Studies Project submitted to Dr. Lisa Micheelsen in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts – Integrated Studies Athabasca, Alberta October, 2014 MAPPING DIFFERENCE IN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FICTION ii Abstract In this study, I explore the political, historical and social contexts of Canadian literary canon formation and identify the Governor General's Awards as a key mechanism of the Canadian state's national identity project. During the post-war period, the Government of Canada became concerned with differentiating our culture from that of the United States and of Great Britain, resulting in a new interest in uniquely Canadian cultural production. Nationally and internationally the 1960s and 1970s were times of great political unrest, reflected in Canada by minority group civil rights pressures and, most intensely, by French-Canadians' demands for nationhood within the province of Quebec. Out of this milieu emerged the Canada Council for the Arts' acquisition of the Governor General's Awards in 1959, The Official Languages Act of 1969, and the 1971 White Paper on Canadian Multiculturalism, which contains the founding and enduring tenets of our current multiculturalism policies. In order to problematize Canada's multicultural mythology, I look for de-racialized, counter-discursive narratives of difference to mark points of resistance against the emerging legitimation of state-vetted formations of social identities during the policies' nascent expansion. Via self-consciously positional critical discourse analyses of novels given the Governor General's Award for English-Language Fiction during this period, I outline a provisional collective biography of 1970s Canada. I conclude that the education in Canadian identity narrated by state-vetted fiction of this period represents the double-pedagogy of inclusion/exclusion through which Canada's past and current processes of ethnic and behavioural 'whiteness' are superficially contested but purposefully maintained. MAPPING DIFFERENCE IN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FICTION iii To Mike, for all of the times you listened to me parse theory well past midnight, filled the backseat with library books, traveled across the country and the planet to watch me present my work, held my hand, dried my tears, poured my wine, shut down my laptop, cheered for me, and proved yourself to be my best and dearest friend. Thank you, my love. I could never have done this without you. MAPPING DIFFERENCE IN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FICTION iv Acknowledgements I would like to express sincere thanks to Dr. Lisa Micheelsen for opening my eyes to critical theory, for introducing me to the interdisciplinary, educational social justice project that is Cultural Studies, and for her encouragement and feedback throughout my degree program. Thank you so much, Lisa. Your kind words kept me lifted when I wasn't sure I would make it through this. I am also grateful for the support and guidance of Dr. Joseph Pivato and Dr. Carolyn Redl, who have made me a better writer, a better public speaker, and a better educator than I dreamed possible two years ago. Thank you for helping to clear a space for me to write my way home. MAPPING DIFFERENCE IN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FICTION v Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................... ii Dedication ................................................................................................................ iii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................. iv Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 Canadian Multiculturalism ........................................................................................ 4 Canadian Multicultural Literature ............................................................................. 9 The Governor General's Awards .............................................................................. 15 Methodology ............................................................................................................ 19 Study Sample ................................................................................................ 24 Research Question ....................................................................................... 24 Findings .................................................................................................................... 25 Critical Summaries ....................................................................................... 26 1972 - The Manticore ....................................................................... 26 1973 - The Temptations of Big Bear ............................................... 29 1974 - The Diviners ......................................................................... 32 1975 - The Great Victorian Collection ............................................ 34 1976 - Bear ....................................................................................... 35 1977 - The Wars ............................................................................... 36 1978 - Who Do You Think You Are? ............................................. 38 1979 - The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne ...................................... 39 1980 - Burning Water ...................................................................... 41 1981 - Home Truths ......................................................................... 43 MAPPING DIFFERENCE IN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FICTION vi Discussion ................................................................................................................ 44 Concluding Remarks ................................................................................................ 50 References ................................................................................................................ 52 MAPPING DIFFERENCE IN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FICTION 1 Mapping Difference Through the Governor General's Awards: National Identity Pedagogy in English-Language Fiction, 1971-1982 Introduction The public memory engineered by national pedagogy through the culture of celebrity is not necessarily the kind mobilized by a nostalgia of the past. Memory, in this context, is not ana-historic; rather, it has a proleptic function. It engages the past but it does so in order to restructure the present and remember the future. The cohesiveness of the national imaginary that emerges from it is not the same as the cohesive nation of that past. While the cohesiveness depended on constructing an imaginary homogeneity, the cohesive nation of the present has moved beyond a genetic sense of national kinship; instead, it depends on – in fact it celebrates – the politics of difference. (Kamboureli, 2004, p. 51) This passage from Smaro Kamboureli's chapter "The Culture of Celebrity and National Pedagogy" in Cynthia Sugars' (2004) Home-Work: Postcoloniaism, Pedagogy & Canadian Literature provides the entry point for this paper's exploration of difference in Governor General's Award winning English-language fiction from the inception of Canada's Multiculturalism policy in 1971 to the patriation of the Canadian Constitution and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. I am, irrevocably, situated in the present and therefore cannot be fully immersed in the circumstances of the past. As Carolyn Redl (1996) points out in "Neither Here nor There: Canadian Fiction by the Multicultural Generation", cultural texts read differently through a backward looking gaze (p. 23). I cannot claim to be immune to the national imaginary through which my present tense is filtered, but I am intent on interrogating its politics of difference. MAPPING DIFFERENCE IN ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FICTION 2 I was born in the late 1970s, entered elementary school the year the Canadian Constitution was patriated, and I graduated from high school into an officially Multicultural Canadian populace in which it was perfectly all right for me to be black/brown/mixed- race/mulatto/African-Canadian, but extremely poor manners for me to talk about how the race on my face may influence my job prospects, my wages, or my particular allotment of cultural capital (Brydon, 2003, p. 68; Goldie, 2003, p. 301; King, 2012, p. 185). Like Smaro Kamboureli (2000), Roxana Ng (2005), and a growing host of Canadian scholars and critics, I hope to write about difference from difference, working from a self-conscious awareness of my socially constructed positionality to interrogate the discursive scaffolds on which our positions in difference are balanced and how they may be shifted free. I use the plural of 'scaffold' intentionally because we each occupy multiple positionalities, and the cultural capital those discursive locations infer varies among sociopolitical contexts. Stuart Hall tells us there are no fixed identities (1996) – personal or cultural, an assertion with which Kamboureli (2000) agrees; however, the illusion of fixity allows for the productive interrogation of those structures that most benefit from such illusions. In more pragmatic terms, a cautious acceptance of difference as a fixed category against which identities adhere relationally as 'Other' allows me to build a box around my field of analysis in order that the