The North American Novel in the United States: Ishmael Reed's Canada

Abstract

Within the perspective of the constitution of a new North American geopolitical entity, the possibility of constituting a new societal identity also appears; yet this very possibility poses a deep question for the symbolic unity of the different cultures implied. Indeed, even if different cultures partake in a common space, and are now even asked--through NAFTA--to partake in a more unified economic, social, and (proto-)political space, they nevertheless often represent themselves according to totally different traditions and institutions. Even more, these cultural differences could be better described, according to Seymour Martin Lipset's (1990) point of view, through their mutual opposition, in what appears to show not a unity, but rather a continental divide. Without entirely accepting Lipset's appreciation of the situation, it is tempting to say that cultural values, traditions, and institutions are defining fairly different realities, perceptions of life, and social in North America--say between Mexico, the United States, and Canada, and even between Quebec and Canada, not to mention the multiple regional all over the continent, nor the hyphenated (or ethnic identities) that have proliferated in the last decades, mostly in the United States. Although this would seem on the surface to fit Lipset's analysis, in fact it dramatically radicalizes its conclusion, since we can no longer refer to a divided situation in terms of an analysis opposing simply identities. Up to a certain point, these national identities collapse in a of cultural representations. From another point of view, perhaps is it this maelstrom of cultural that defines the particular of North America today, if not its very originality, at least when we consider that it gives way to a deep questioning concerning what is the originality of North America, and how this originality is and has been constituted. In the 1980s and 1990s, such thinkers as Carlos Fuentes or Michel Morin, for instance, have presented some theoretical propositions that deal with the meaning of North America; it is, according to them, through a (re) reading of the imagination of North America, that is to say, through the reinterpretation of the stock of its historical memory and its continuous conflictual representations, that the meaning of North America is to be found (Fuentes 1992; Morin 1982). (1) These (re) readings entail important consequences for cultural identities; Mexican culture is, for Carlos Fuentes, deeply implied and interrogated by the historical memory and conflictual representations of its own in North America--just as Quebec's French culture is in the analysis of Michel Morin. The original clash of European and native societies following the colonization or the conquest, the development of modern political and social institutions in the nineteenth century, the social and cultural conflicts that collide with contemporary economic developments, and many other elements appear to be common to both Mexican and Quebecois contexts--as they are for the American and Canadian ones too--even though, here again, some important differences have to be recognized as defining the particularity of each of these situations. But, as well, the historical memory and the conflictual representations of North America do concern all the different cultural situations on the same level--just as these different cultures are equally implied in the constitution of a North American (id)entity. There are many aspects of this global societal evolution in North America that can be treated in order to give us a somewhat clear picture of a symbolic unity. Reflecting about through a statistical analysis of surveys conducted in 1981 and 1990, Nevitte, Basanez, and Inglehart (1993) suggest that there is a strong convergence among Mexican, American, and Canadian societies toward what is called post-materialist values (such as tolerance, responsibility, manners, independence, etc. …