Canadian Literature and the Temporality of Dying Colonialism

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This article historicizes cultural appropriation in Canadian literature today by examining key texts from the critiques of cultural appropriation in Canadian culture in the 1990s. Appropriation is contextualized in relation to a modernist temporality that constructs an Other outside of modernity and to the temporality in Frantz Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism, a temporality in which the colonized is liberated but the colonizer is still “choked” and not yet rehabilitated. Reading appropriation through its cultural historical context in relation to modernist art and conceptual art, the practice of appropriation emerges as an extension of colonial practices and as an extractivist economy. Countering this, I point to the Indigenous concept of “cultural belongings” as a form of critique and alterity that counters the logic of cultural appropriation.