Abstract
In order to get past the blind spots that have developed in contemporary postcolonial theory, it is essential to seek out complementarities and solidarities in different national situations and in different modernities. This essay undertakes this task by exploring the homologous situations faced in Brazil and Canada in their respective attempts to create genuine national cultures. As in many postcolonial situations, the problem of creating an authentic culture is directly related to the sense that postcolonial culture is necessarily imitative and belated. In Misplaced Ideas, Roberto Schwarz exposes the hidden class character of the problem of cultural authenticity in Brazil, and in so doing, shows that the trauma of national-cultural identity merely reflects the contradictory structural position of Brazil’s postcolonial elite. Using Schwarz’s insights to explore the Canadian situation, the author shows that the same forces are at work in Canada. Though the crisis of a lack of an authentic Canadian culture has recently been surmounted as a result of the apparent international success of Canadian culture (especially literary fiction), that author cautions that this “success” story hides the class basis of Canadian culture in both its belated and isochronic phases (the latter being the moment when cultural belatedness is overcome). Making use of Brazilian theory to examine problems in Canadian culture allows us to see that Canadian modernity, long thought to be simply a derivative of the UK and USA, has similarities with Brazilian modernity that are essential to understanding the space and place Canada occupies in globalization.
Highlights
Empire and culture have to be on the globalization agenda, especially in a white invader-setter colony like Canada where... culture is supposed still by too many to be something imported for consumption as an additive to, or sedative for, economic servitude. — Len Findlay, “Content Providers!” The age of globalization is the age of universal contagion. — Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (136)
There seem to be so many differences that one might be inclined to see the points of connection as mere coincidence: the cultural circumstances and expressions of both countries might appear similar in outward appearance, but their inner logic emerges out of entirely different material circumstances that cannot be passed over in silence
Only the most retrograde form of comparative literature would feel comfortable assigning these forms the same meaning, the same social value, or the same social or cultural role and significance. This does not, it seems to me, mean that there is no value in making connections or comparisons between Brazil and Canada, and especially of doing so under the general rubric of postcolonial criticism and theory, which brings to the fore the historical and economic circumstances under which each nation came into existence
Summary
Empire and culture have to be on the globalization agenda, especially in a white invader-setter colony like Canada where... culture is supposed still by too many to be something imported for consumption as an additive to, or sedative for, economic servitude. — Len Findlay, “Content Providers!” The age of globalization is the age of universal contagion. — Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (136). As Schwarz points out, given the context of the international mass media against which these suggestions were framed in the period after the 1960s, “an emphasis on the international dimension of culture becomes no more than a legitimation of the existing mass media,” and this is not “emancipatory or aesthetically acceptable” (5) If these two positions mark out the territory of possible solutions to the crisis of an inauthentic culture, there doesn’t appear to be much hope that Brazil can overcome the sense that it possesses a derivative culture; neither solution is adequate, and each generates new problems of authenticity, whether in the form of a mythologized, exclusionary nationalism developed in opposition to the taint of the foreign or in the form of a false cosmopolitanism that represents little more than a belated acceptance of the global order and Brazil’s place within it. It is the case that failing to understand the political and social function of Canadian literature as it relates to class makes it difficult to understand the ways in which Canada is more like Brazil than we might have imagined
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