Letters to the Editor

Abstract

Colonialism, as Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper have pointed out, is often a multilayered process resisting “Manichean” binaries of the metropolitian masters, on the one hand, and the colonized subjects of the imperial periphery, on the other. Along with the structuring of subordination also come complicating subtleties, including histories of close geographical neighbors in which the dominant and the less powerful necessarily interact along various axes, some of which cut through doubled internal experiences of colonization. This is most emphatically the case in terms of the United States and Canada. Especially since the 1960s, it has been commonplace for Canadians to critique the ways in which the United States has “taken over” their culture, institutions of higher learning, natural resources, and material life. Such responses to the hegemony of the “Americans” and the peculiarities of the “Canadians” may well err in an overly nationalistic sense of indignation, but there are grains of truth (economic, cultural, and intellectual) in these views.