Ethnicity in the Mainstream: Three Studies of English Canadian Culture in Ontario by Pauline Greenhill

Abstract

For Kiberd, what is most troubling about this relationship is that the inad­ equacies of the fathers tend to be transmitted to their sons. Like Declan Kiberd’s essay, Richard Kearney’s “Modern Irish Cinema: Re-viewing Traditions” also deconstructs cultural stereotypes, in this case, stereotypes associated with the cinematic projection of violence as an ir­ rational proclivity inherent in the Irish national character in such films as Odd Man Out, The Gentle Gunman, and Shake Hands with the Devil. The collection ends with John Wilson Foster’s “Culture and Colonization: A Northern Perspective,” a moving personal appeal in which Foster calls for a revision of the prevailing negative view of the “Ulster Protestant.” Foster argues that the Irish colonial experience is not merely a phenomenon ex­ perienced by the southern Irish, but an important factor in the creation of the psyche and the society of the North far different from the stereotypical hostilities that inhere in the label “Ulster Protestant.” The acceptance on both sides of the border of a shared colonial experience can be, according to Foster, enormously liberating both for Ulster Protestants like himself, and for citizens of the Republic. These essays speak in a variety of voices that is only in part explained by the different nationalities of individual contributors. The inclusivity derives primarily from the diversity of critical approaches taken by the contributors. Yet along with the diversity there is also unity and connection. The papers work well together. The stated theme of the 1988 conference is accurately reflected both in the rubric associated with the conference and in the title of this volume, surely an unusual situation for which Michael Kenneally, the conference organizer as well as the editor, is to be congratulated. This essay collection is a worthy addition to the growing academic literature treating aspects of Irish literature and culture. b e r n ice s c h r a n k / Memorial University of Newfoundland Pauline Greenhill, Ethnicity in the Mainstream: Three Studies of English Canadian Culture in Ontario (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Uni­ versity Press, 1994). viii, 193. $34.95. Pauline Greenhill is an ethnographer, but her book will be interesting to teachers of English literature. The word “English” is a very slippery signifier. What it means in the title of this journal is quite different from what it means in the title of Greenhill’s book. (It is also often used as a synonym for Anglophone.) Greenhill distin­ guishes two meanings; the first indicates ancestry, the English as a subset of the British; the second indicates a social identity. “I explore,” she says, 104 “how English ethnicity is invented, reproduced, recreated, used and prac­ tised in cultural performance” (9). In other words, she is concerned with issues that have engaged literary and cultural criticism for many years: the construction of personal identity and social myth. Her texts are immigrant conversations, the practices of a Morris dance group, and the constructions of local and “high” culture attached to the Shakespearian theatre festival in Stratford, Ontario. Her citations include names — Bakhtin, Barthes, Bourdieu — well known to literary critics. To isolate Englishness as one of many ethnicities, rather than as the “stan­ dard” version of Canadianness, is a political act, a step toward an exami­ nation of the power of that “standard” in national life. Greenhill studies people who identify themselves as English in opposition to that mainstream Canadianness, by joining clubs with names like The United Kingdom Club (does that include Scots and Welsh?) or The Royal City Guild, by Morris dancing or putting on plays by Shakespeare. According to her definition, I, though born in Worcestershire, am not (thank heavens) ethnically English since I had never heard of such clubs, have never seen a Morris dance, and teach Canadian literature. According to Greenhill, such conscious ethnicity is the result of personal choice and self-invention rather than of ancestry and it is both constructed and expressed through such practices as joining clubs or performing folkloric dances. In Greenhill’s study, this chosen identity takes its purest form in member­ ship of English clubs since not all her Morris dancers claim English identity, Shakespeare belongs to internatinoal show business...