Multicultural

Canadian
Literatures
 Contestation of Canadian Cultural
nationalism in the 1980s and 1990s
*Breaking of the oppositions:
Nature/culture (i.e. increasing urban emphasis,
aboriginal approaches to the natural world)
Mainstream/minority cultures (i.e. from
biculturalism to multiculturalism)

*Recognition of other identities:

Diasporic cultures
Indigenous cultures
Diaspora: the movement, migration, or
scattering of a people away from an
established or ancestral homeland
i.e. the Asian diaspora in Canadian cities
Indigenous: something or someone who is
native to an area or who naturally belongs
there.
i.e. Indigenous Canadian peoples.
 The new diasporic/indigenous
writing contests the following ideas
about Canada
Lack of identity (they know who they are)
Lack of history:
a) happened in another country (diaspora)
b) previous to colonization (indigenous)

Connection to the wilderness:

a)most recent immigrants live in cities
b) indigenous attachment to the land
 Settler-Invader Colony
Empire White settler (British subject until 1947)

Diasporic
Subject
Indigenous subject
Diasporic writers, topics and
texts
 Nino Riccis Going to the Moon

The vertical mosaic (English-

Canadians, German-Canadians,
Italian-Canadians)

The immigrant narrative

The Vertical Mosaic
 Nino Riccis
Going to the Moon

The immigrant narrative:

plot
structure and themes
autobiograhical
tendency
narrative style
 Questions on
Nino Riccis
Going to the Moon
1) The story is symbolically structured around Catholic iconography, seen in the
working of certain binary pairs and the repetition of certain words. Could you
identify any of these?

2) What other binary pairs are at work in the text, i.e. in relation to the setting,
geographical, linguistic, etc?

3) The story deals with the question of belonging. But, where is home?

4) Is the story circular? In which ways?

5) What's the meaning of the title?

 Hiromi Goto's The Body Politic

(In)Visibility (Visible
minorities)
(Questioning) Identity
politics
Racism (gender/race)
Ex-centricity
Irony
 Corinne A. Lees Recipe

Critique of multiculturalism
Marketing of cultural identity
History of discrimination
Racism (gender/race)
Ex-centricity
Irony
The Marketing of the Multicultural
 Definitions of Irony
(according to Linda Hutcheon, Circling )
doubled or split discourse which has the
potential to subvert from within (154)
a way of resisting and yet acknowledging
the power of the dominant (163)
one way of creatively modifying or even
twisting the language to signal the
foreignness of both the user and her/his
experience (163)
Questions on Gotos The Body Politic

How does the text relate to the notion of visible

minority?
How do the formal aspects of the poem,
including its graphic nature, reflect on that
debate?
In which ways does this poem undermine the
expected content and shape of mainstream
Canadian Literature?
What does the title mean?
 Questions on Lees Recipe
Whats the texts vision of multiculturalism in
Canada?
How does the poems dialogic structure
reflect on its content?
Can you identify some of the historical
references?
What does the title mean?
 Bibliography
ASCHROFT, Bill, Gareth GRIFFITHS and Helen TIFFIN, eds. The Empire
Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. London
and New York: Routledge, 1989.
----, eds. Key Concepts in Post-colonial Studies. London: Routledge,
1998.
GOTO, Hiromi. Body Politics. West Coast Line 28.1-2 (1994): 218-19.
HUTCHEON, Linda. Circling the Downspout of Empire: Post-
Colonialism and Postmodernism. ARIEL: A Review of International
English Literature 20.4 (1989): 149-175.
HUTCHEON, Linda. Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies.
Toronto: Oxford UP, 1991.
LEE, Corinne Allyson. Recipe. Making a Difference: Canadian
Multicultural Literature. Ed. Smaro Kmaboureli. Toronto: Oxford UP,
1996. 339-342.
PORTER, John. The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and
Power in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965.
RICCI, Nino. Going to the Moon. Making a Difference: Canadian
Multicultural Literature. Ed. Smaro Kmaboureli. Toronto: Oxford UP,
1996. 484-490.
Between: Living in the Hyphen
(Dir. Anne Marie Nakagawa, 2005)