Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada by Jonathan Kertzer (review)

Abstract

'Blackness'is neither timeless nor universalbut geographically,culturally,historically , and politicallyconstituted.In fact, Kanneh rightlyargues,whatWalker'snovel fails to analyse is the 'poeticisation and narrativisation of a history which has continuously reinvented Black Americans from the time of slavery onwards' (p. I 6). African Identities is a studyrichlydetailed and admirablysophisticatedin its use of cultural theory and its engagement with the large number of writers it treats. Kanneh weaves highly diverse threads (literature, history, and anthropology) together as he highlights the multivalent meanings that Africa registers on the literaryimagination. The work'sinterdisciplinarynaturewill make it an invaluable resource in African studies, African-American studies, and cultural studies in general. Importantly,African Identities is a decidedly readablework. Forany reader interestedin the politics of literature,without a doubt, thisis a book worth reading. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ MARGO HENDRICKS Worrying theNation:Imagining a NationalLiterature in EnglishCanada. By JONATHAN KERTZER. (Theory/Culture) Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. I998. xi + 243PP. $40;?30. Worrying theNation,or more accurately,worryingabout discoursesof nationhood in contemporary Canada, offers a vigorous contribution to the latest phase of the debate about Canadian identity. Propelled by the 1988 MulticulturalismAct with its officialemphasison diversityand racialdifferenceas fundamentalcharacteristics of Canadian society, cultural and literarytheorists(especially English-Canadians) have been anxiously engaged with questions of how Canadianness might be redefined to take into account these late-twentieth-century shifts of emphasis in traditional demography and ideology. As a literary critic and cultural historian, Kertzer focuses his attention on problems relating to English-Canadian literary traditions and Canadian history. His anxiety at times borders on the apocalyptic: 'Whathappens to a national literaturewhen the very idea of the nation has been set in doubt?' (p. 5) or, echoing the title of E. D. Blodgett's I993 essay, 'Is a History of the Literaturesof Canada Possible?'(p. II). One of the major strengthsof this book is what we might expect from someone interestedin literarytradition,the appeal to history.Kertzer'sresearchmakesplain that debates over the possibility of a Canadian nation and a national literaturego back to pre-Confederation days in fact, with E. H. Dewart's 1864 Selections from Canadian Poets.As he shows, the dominant anglophone literary tradition which defined itselfin relation to nineteenth-centuryEuropean Romantic historicismhas always encountered problems in its attempts to formulate a discourse centred on homeland and national destiny. In his study of two mid-twentieth-centurynationbuildingpoems , E.J. Pratt'sheroicepic about the buildingof Canada'stranscontinental railway(1952) and Dennis Lee's CivilElegies (1972), Kertzerdemonstratesthat they are at best ambiguously celebratory. Pratt's adventurers and politicians encounter the 'uncanny alienness' of the land (p. 76) while Lee's anguished quest for an authenticnation failsto discoverany historicalor contemporarygroundsfor such authenticity.MargaretAtwood's Survival: A Thematic Guide toCanadian Literature, also published in 1972, belongs to this English-Canadian tradition, though her wariness about the future now looks like a harbinger of the radical shifts that Canada's discourse of nationhood is currently undergoing. In a chapter entitled 'The Nation as Monster' Kertzer charts the revisioning of traditional Canadian themes and values in recent ethnic, feminist, and Native writing, showing that in 'Blackness'is neither timeless nor universalbut geographically,culturally,historically , and politicallyconstituted.In fact, Kanneh rightlyargues,whatWalker'snovel fails to analyse is the 'poeticisation and narrativisation of a history which has continuously reinvented Black Americans from the time of slavery onwards' (p. I 6). African Identities is a studyrichlydetailed and admirablysophisticatedin its use of cultural theory and its engagement with the large number of writers it treats. Kanneh weaves highly diverse threads (literature, history, and anthropology) together as he highlights the multivalent meanings that Africa registers on the literaryimagination. The work'sinterdisciplinarynaturewill make it an invaluable resource in African studies, African-American studies, and cultural studies in general. Importantly,African Identities is a decidedly readablework. Forany reader interestedin the politics of literature,without a doubt, thisis a book worth reading. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ MARGO HENDRICKS Worrying theNation:Imagining a NationalLiterature in EnglishCanada. By JONATHAN KERTZER. (Theory/Culture) Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. I998. xi + 243PP. $40;?30. Worrying theNation,or more accurately,worryingabout discoursesof nationhood in contemporary Canada, offers a vigorous contribution to the latest phase...