Presenting the Past: The Tendentious Use of History in Contemporary Canadian Literature

Abstract

Since at least 1970, Canadian writers have been working to represent historical events and Native life in their poetry and prose fictions mainly from a postcolonial perspective and metafictively. They have produced a broadly written fiction that is ideologically postmodern in its deconstruction of realist fiction's presumptions and designs respecting history, while in their interrogation of the ideology in received versions of narrative history they implicitly further their claim to a truer historical truth. Examples of this revisionist literature proliferate in contemporary Canadian literature, in works by every major Canadian writer of the past half-century. Apart from the politics of its implicit claim to historical truth, more often than not such art is lessened by sentimentalism. Two of the most celebrated examples of this continuing revisionist literary history are Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981), which deals with the mistreatment of Japanese Canadians during and after the Second World War—their forced evacuation from Canada's West Coast, their internment, the confiscation of their property, and for some their deportation—and Rudy Wiebe's representative short story. “Where is the Voice Coming From?” (1982), which works as do his big novels of various indigenous people's histories of victimization.