Canadian Identity

1
Canadian Identity

• An Introduction to Themes in Canadian Literature

2
Key Topics

• Personal Nationalism
• Collective Nationalism
• Multiculturalism
• Eurocentrism
• Ethnocentrism
• Phallocentrism
• Marginalization
• Otherness
• Assimilation or Annihilation
• Romance and the Cult of Primitivism

3
Personal Nationalism

• Equivalent to a sense of patriotism (a personal
  feeling of love of ones country).
• Closely connected to the landscape, wilderness,
  nature.
• A sense of place or home.
• An emotional and private response that evokes
  deep attachment, pride, and hope for the future.

4
Collective Nationalism

• May not be possible in a multicultural society.
• Difficult for Canadians who are attached to
  regionalism instead of nationalism.
• Difficult when ones culture is a branch-plant
  conglomerate (Fraser A Sense of Being) of
  foreign marketing interests.
• Associated with imperialism, aggressive foreign
  policy, domination, and isolationism.
• Marginalized groups struggle with annihilation,
  absorption, and the need to fit into the
  dominant culture.

5
Multiculturalism

• Identity, assimilation, and rejection are issues
  not only for immigrants but for longtime
  residents who experience the psychological,
  political, and economic realities of living
  between cultures.
• Has positive benefits in that Canadians can
  appreciate and recognize diversity in their
  communities in terms of religion, culture,
  language, and rituals.

6
Eurocentrism

• The belief that European societies are superior
  to those of other continents.
• The assumption that the norms and presuppositions
  of European culture have universal validity at
  the expense of African, Native American, and
  Asian values and perspectives.

7
Ethnocentrism

• Interpreting and judging a country, ethnic group,
  or culture foreign to us on the basis of our own
  ethnicity, nationality, or culture.
• Means judging and justifying ones own group as
  superior to all others.

8
Phallocentrism

• Names the belief that the male is superior to the
  female.
• More generally, the belief that what is male is a
  legitimate, universally applicable point of
  reference for all things human.

9
Marginalization

• Anything marginal is outside of what is central
  and therefore dominant.
• Marginalization is the process through which an
  individual, group, thing or activity is made
  marginal, stripped of any claim to centrality
  and the power that position implies.
• Reading the margin is a primary activity of
  deconstructionist criticism, which aims to
  analyse what a text tries to exclude, bury,
  suppress, conceal, or marginalize.

10
Otherness

• Used to refer to anyone who is not I.
• The Other actually defines me because it is the
  ultimate signifier of everything I am not.
• The Other has been identified as Woman,
  Indian, Metis, Inuit, French Canadian,
  African, Disabled non-Christian or as
  Foreigner etc.
• The Other is what is feared what exists to be
  conquered.

11
Assimilation or Annihilation

• Roland Barthes, a semiotician and social critic,
  observed in Mythologies bourgeois society
  (obsessively committed to validating itself as
  natural and inevitable) can cope with the Other
  in only two ways either by converting it into a
  replica of itself, or by denying (and if possible
  annihilating) it altogether (paraphrased by
  Robin Wood in Hollywood and the Other in
  Macleans 1982).

12
Romance and the Cult of Primitivism

• Primitivism is a belief in the superiority of a
  primitive way of life, characterized as the
  earliest stage of civilization and thus is
  worshipped as more natural.
• Jean Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract
  (1700s) romanticized the noble savage as a
  being ruled by instinct over reason and natural
  liberty over civil liberty, as respecting
  physical strength over law and the General
  Will.
• This image is steeped in eroticism and
  projected feelings of paternalism and safety in
  response to European fears of nature, the
  wilderness, and death.

13
The Bush Garden

• Subtitled Essays on the Canadian Imagination.
• The sense of probing into the distance, of
  fixing the eyes on the skyline, is something that
  Canadian sensibility has inherited from the
  voyageurs (Northrup Frye The Bush Garden Anasasi
  Press 1971 222).
• Frye establishes a contrast within our culture
  that both fears and honours nature, that
  contrasts civilization with wilderness.
• As Suzuki states in A Planet for the Takingwe
  operate under a strange duality of mind (275).

14
Conclusion

• Canadians are part of a diverse society made up
  of individuals striving for a sense of personal
  and collective identity.
• Marginalized mini-societies exist within a larger
  dominant culture that attempts to assimilate or
  historically annihilate differences.
• Original Peoples struggle with issues of identity
  and acceptance within the two solitudes of
  contemporary Canadian culture the English and
  the French.

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Conclusion continued

• Once a colonial culture, Canadian society is now
  a post-colonial culture that must establish its
  own identity after the dismantling of the Empire
  which created it.
• We share the same issues as many African, Asian
  and Caribbean states that suffered the loss of
  their pre-colonial culture, except that we have a
  small population, high level of literacy and many
  natural resources.
• We must assess the cultural, linguistic, legal
  and economic effects of colonial and
  post-colonial rule to create new governments and
  new identities.

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Discussion Question 1

• What does it mean to you to be Canadian?

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Discussion Question 2

• Infer why some Canadians want to be seen as
  different from Americans and why others do not.

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Discussion Question 3

• What is your experience as a Canadian traveling
  abroad?

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Discussion Question 4

• Do various age groups view the differences
  between Canadians and Americans differently?
  Compare and contrast the viewpoints of various
  age groups.

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Discussion Question 5

• Have you ever experienced prejudice or
  harassment in Canada due to your gender, race,
  religion, ethnicity, culture or background?
• Are there advantages and disadvantages of living
  between cultures?

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Discussion Question 6

• Do you think Canadians are a tolerant or
  intolerant people? What might help us become more
  accepting of others?