Canadian Cultural Research Articles

Crossing Canadian Cultural Borders: A study of the Aboriginal/White Stereotypical Relations in George Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe

This paper traces the intercultural journey of a young Aboriginal girl into the hegemonic white society. Rita Joe crossed the imaginary border that separates her reserve from the other Canadian society living in the urban developed city. Through this play, George Ryga aims at achieving liberation and social equality for the Aboriginals who are considered a colonized minority in their land. The research illustrates how Ryga represented his personal version of the colonial Aboriginal history to provide an empowering body narrative that supports their identity in the present and resists the erosion of their culture and tradition. The play makes very strong statements to preserve the family, history and local heritage against this forced assimilation. It tells the truth as its playwright saw it. The play is about the trail of Rita Joe after she moved from her reserve in pursuit of the illusion of the city where she thought she would find freedom and social equality. In fact the audience and the readers are all on trial. Ryga is pointing fingers at everyone who is responsible for the plights of the Aboriginals as it is clear in the play. He questions the Whites’ stereotypical stand against the Aboriginals. The play is a direct criticism of the political, social and cultural systems in Canada. The paper reveals Aboriginals' acts of opposition to racism, assimilation and colonization as represented in The Ecstasy of Rita Joe.

The Stratford Anomaly and Canadian Cultural Clusters

This article examines the anomalous status of Stratford, Ontario, as the city with the highest percentage of arts-related employment per capita in Canada and as the home of North America’s largest classical theatre, the Stratford Festival (SF). The authors assert that this small city’s diverse cultural achievements are not accidents of history, as they are typically portrayed in theatre and cultural criticism, but rather effects of a civic tradition that connects citizenship to cultural infrastructure in the interest of developing an amenity-rich city. To illustrate this point, the authors review the literature on cultural clusters as it pertains to small cities, show how Stratford differs from the statistical norms, then demonstrate how Stratford’s history of financial, political and social investment in cultural infrastructure undergirded the founding of the SF in 1953. This infrastructure, which dates back to the 1850s, is largely overlooked in academic criticism on the SF because critics depend on founder Tom Patterson’s portrait of the SF in First Stage: The Making of the Stratford Festival (1987, reissued 1999) as the origin, not the outgrowth, of Stratford’s cultural economy. In contrast to Patterson’s argument, which gets reiterated in academic and popular publications about Stratford, this article maintains that Stratford’s thriving cultural economy is not the product of a single institution or individual genius, but rather the outgrowth of an interconnected ecology of cultural agents, materials, influences, traditions and modes of communication.

OjibwaTableaux Vivants: George Catlin, Robert Houle, and Transcultural Materialism

This essay reconsiders the legacy of Ojibwa travellers who performanced tableaux vivants or 'living pictures' alongside George Catlin's Indian Gallery in Paris, 1845-46, many of whom died of smallpox before returning home. Contemporary Saulteaux artist Robert Houle's architectural installation, Paris/Ojibwa, first exhibited at the Canadian Cultural Center in Paris in 2010, features a stage set peopled by paintings of the deceased travellers. Paris/Ojibwa invites us to see how tableaux vivants incorporated an Ojibwa understanding of the potential liveliness of images and objects. When wedded to complex indigenous notions of personhood tableaux viviants reversed the ambitions of nineteenth-century ethnography: instead of turning living Natives into static images, they reanimated pictures. Inviting audiences to participte in an indigenous view of a shared modernity, Paris/Ojibwa restores sociability to the archive of Ojibwa representations and models transcultural materialism inside Western institutions.

Psychological Help-Seeking among Latin American Immigrants in Canada: Testing a Culturally-Expanded Model of the Theory of Reasoned Action Using Path Analysis

The current study investigated the psychosocial and cultural predictors of psychological help-seeking based on the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA: Ajzen and Fishbein 1980) in a sample of 223 adult Latin American immigrants living in Canada. Using path analysis, the results provided empirical support for the TRA, as both help-seeking attitudes and subjective norms were found to influence participants’ help-seeking intentions. Moreover, the re-specified culturally-expanded model showed a good fit to the data and revealed the direct and indirect effects that bi-directional acculturation (Latino and Canadian Cultural orientations), familism, and collective coping had on help-seeking intentions. The results point to the integral roles familism and subjective norms of social referents (e.g., parents, siblings) play in the help-seeking decision process among Latin Americans. Limitations, future research directions and clinical implications are considered and discussed.

A Puzzle Constantly Changing Itself: Cultural Studies in the 21st Century

A review of Grossberg, Lawrence. 2010. Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Mookerjea, Sourayan, Imre Szeman and Gail Faurschou, eds. 2009. Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Smith, Paul, ed. 2011. The Renewal of Cultural Studies. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue ed. by Diane Brydon and Marta Dvořák (review)

Diane Brydon and Marta Dvorak, editors. Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginarles in Dialogue. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier up, 2012. 321 pp. $85.00. Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginarles in Dialogue originated in conference at Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris called and Vision: Situating Canadian Culture Globally in 2008. Editors Diane Brydon and Marta Dvorak have ably assembled papers from conference address abiding concerns of conference and especially notion of that gives book its title. Brydon and Dvorak declare that they are interested in how readers negotiate meaning in contexts where norms of understandings diverge, that is, how different subjects might interpret similar materials across different settings. For editors, these settings are ones that are shaped in particular by notion of globalization, by movements across and through different nation-states and subject positionings. The rubric for understanding these interactions is what they term crosstalk, which they see metaphor for ways in which audial and visual imaginaries interact create complex forms of interference. The editors focus on Canada, including Quebec, as means of focusing on forms of that can, in some way, be situated partly in relation Canada but that also extend beyond such borderings. They see crosstalk, in particular, continuous, ongoing, and co-constructing activity that relentlessly performs unbordering, resulting in a field where Canadian may not disappear but may well become destabilized and rearticulated. While such notion of provides overall framework for engagements found in volume, subsidiary concerns also structure book, particularly those of crosstalk, improvisation; dialogism, polyphony, voice; and space, place, and circulation. Brydon and Dvorak set an ambitious agenda for understanding functioning of transnational flows in literary context in Canada, one that remains clearly in editors' focus. The contributors volume respond this structure in variety of ways. Writer Olive Senior opens volume with consideration of the importance of voice and in her practice. Voice and vision enable Senior consider how colonial and postcolonial movements between her youth in Jamaica and her being situated in Canada influence her writing. This meditation builds on address that Senior gave during initial conference and provides an opening book that is situated within creative practice, thereby complementing theoretical concerns of editors in their introduction. Section one of book, focusing on concerns of collaboration, crosstalk, and improvisation, documents literary practices that might fall aslant of more frequently studied aspects of Canadian cultural work. Ajay Heble and Winfried Siemerling collaboratively produce chapter on their ongoing Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice project, project that focuses particularly on how improvisation--often within context of jazz--impacts cultural practice. For them, reading through writers like Michael Ondaatje and Wayde Compton, jazz and mixing might provide metaphors for discourse that can demonstrate political potential in crossing of borders. Similarly, Daniel Coleman argues, in following chapter on David Chariandy's novel Soucouyant and Lee Maracle's novel Daughters Are Forever, that these two texts' use of notion of melancholia to describe residual effects of colonial trauma might allow for productive conversation between Caribbean diasporic and Salish Indigenous contexts. Coleman's goal of generating an epistemological crosstalk demonstrates Brydon and Dvorak's proposed methodology being put work politically significant ends. Ric Knowles's subsequent contribution focuses on work of Monique Mojica and work-shopping of her performance pieces in order read for ways in which theatre might help suture wounds inflicted by colonization. …

Canadian Federalism, Cultural Diversity and Conceptions of Fundamental Rights

It is often said that human rights, as enshrined in major international instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, are particular to Western culture and convey cultural values that, far from being universal, are antithetical to radically different cultures, such as Asian or Middle East cultures. However, these arguments overlook the question of how different conceptions of human rights may coexist within a single Western country. Canada provides an interesting case of a multinational State where federalism results in the autonomy of one national group, French-speaking Quebeckers, and where special rights are granted to the indigenous peoples.In this paper, I will attempt to verify whether there are differences between the conceptions of human rights held by the majority English-speaking group and those held by Quebeckers (especially French-speaking Quebeckers) and the indigenous peoples. I will then outline the interactions between those conceptions and highlight their areas of conflict.

Introduction: Crossroads – Canadian Cultural Intersections

Introduction: Crossroads – Canadian Cultural Intersections

Voices Rising: Asian Canadian Cultural Activism (review)

Voices Rising: Asian Canadian Cultural Activism (review)

Voices Rising: Asian Canadian Cultural Activism (review)

Voices Rising: Asian Canadian Cultural Activism (review)

Canadian Cultural Policy-making at a Time of Neoliberal Globalization

Canadian Cultural Policy-making at a Time of Neoliberal Globalization Sabine Milz (bio) The imperative for research is to identify precisely what remains national today in what has historically been constructed as national, to decode what national means today, and to ascertain the new territorial and institutional conditionalities of nation states. Saskia Sassen In the introduction to the special issue "Canadian Literature and the Business of Publishing" of Studies in Canadian Literature (SCL), Jennifer Andrews and John Ball observe that "in most studies of Canadian literature, the material stuff of publication is bracketed off in favour of what can be said about a text's (immaterial) words" (2). They further note that "[w]hen the study of the published book and the publication processes has been discussed, it has been treated as a specialized area of research" (2), as in the case of the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University or in special issues such as the SCL one which sets out to foreground the processes of literary production in Canada, that is, the material side of literature. Andrews and Ball introduce the special SCL issue by calling attention to the many challenges Canada's book industry has faced over the past decades as an economy of small scale characterized by "huge geographical distances and regional differences ... [and] the easy availability of British and American books published with economies [End Page 85] of scale" (1–2). They point to the crucial role governmental policies and programs as well as the literary power struggles of the youth generation of the 1960s and 1970s—of "the many stubborn idealists, renegades, adventurers, bookworms, scholars, and, yes, fortune-seekers" (2)—played in the development of an independent Canadian literature and book industry. These actors not only initiated and advocated the Canada-wide emergence of independent Canadian-owned presses in the 1960s but also created a climate in which these publisers could take risks with promoting unknown authors and authors writing about unconventioanl themes. Recalling the nationalist vision of Canadian Literature's centennial "Publishing in Canada" issue, Andrews and Ball insist that "publishing in Canada is unique and vital to our national identity" (3); it performs a key national function, and that seems to be what motivates Andres and Ball's call for a method of Canadian literary study that recognizes the materiality of literature. While the argument developed in this paper is motivated by a claim or desire that also underlies Andrews and Ball's emphasis on the "national" —namely the claim or desire that the function of Canadian literary goods and services is irreducible to the logic of the market, that is, to the logic of "guaranteed commercial success" (4)—it reframes this claim or desire —expressed by Andrews and Ball as an issue of national culture and identity—as an issue of cultural decision-making and democratic public culture. Critical invocations of national cultural value such as Andrews and Ball's are complicated and troubled by the fact that, as this paper will show, contemporary cultural policies and programs are inaugurated by a federal government which subscribes to the neoliberal paradigm in its discourse of "national culture" and its protection of Canadian literature and its production from direct market dependency and commodification. In view of this nexus of the national and the neoliberal, I will argue, the contemporary study of the materiality of Canadian literature, and of its mediated-institutionalized structural modes in particular, needs to engage in processes of querying the habitual, modern notions of democracy and the public sphere and, more specifically, of how these notions currently play out in the contexts of Canada's public cultural sphere. This paper engages in such a process of querying to decode what the terms "national" and "public" mean today in the institutional contexts of Canadian literature and its production. I will start this process of querying and decoding by examining the issue of cultural protection/ism in the historical context of the post Second World War projects of cultural nationalism and cultural industries. Canadian critics such as George Parker and Rowland Lorimer have variously [End Page 86] demonstrated that "the history of Canadian book publishing policy dates back...

Rockefeller, Carnegie and Canada: American Philanthropy and the Arts and Letters in Canada (review)

Reviewed by: Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada: American Philanthropy and the Arts and Letters in Canada Andrew Horrall Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada: American Philanthropy and the Arts and Letters in Canada. Jeffrey D. Brison. Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queen's University Press, 2005. Pp. 264, $75 Jeffrey Brison's Rockefeller, Carnegie and Canada is an important addi- tion to a growing body of work that explores what Maria Tippet once described memorably as the 'walking sticks' of early twentieth-century Canadian culture. Brison takes a broad view, examining the two most important props for Canadian culture and scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century. In examining how individuals and institutions interacted with the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, Brison challenges what he sees as a nationalistic 'creationist myth' that positions the Massey Commission as Canada's cultural watershed. This book, which is a revision of Brison's PhD thesis, and, the introduction of the book still resembles a thesis in the way the author positions his argument against those of earlier scholars and lays out a chapter-by-chapter map of his argument. While this is one of the objects of a scholarly dissertation, it has a tendency to slow down the published work. But this is a minor point, because the narrative pace soon quickens and the prose throughout is fluid and engaging. Brison has drawn extensively on underused sources in the Rockefeller and Carnegie archives to argue that pre–Massey Canadian culture was not a simple struggle between elite and popular culture, or resistance to the perception of growing American dominance. The many characters from both sides of the border who appear in Brison's work are well drawn in what is largely a story about the interaction of individuals. The nineteenth-century American industrialists Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were two of the world's richest men when they established individual charitable foundations at the start of the twentieth century. The self-made Scottish immigrant Carnegie believed that a wealthy man should devote his fortune to fostering good in the community, [End Page 685] while the devout Rockefeller saw his financial success as a sign of divine blessing. Carnegie began giving money to an almost whimsical collection of causes including libraries and churches that appealed to him personally, while Rockefeller favoured universities, hospitals, and scientific research. Little of this funding was directed strategically or sustained until the end of the First World War, when trustees were appointed and professional corporate structures put in place at both foundations. Under these new regimes, systematic funding programs were developed and both foundations shifted their focus gradually towards cultural projects. As part of this professionalization, the foundations tried to develop coherent North American strategies. In Canada this meant identifying and endowing 'centres of excellence.' Some of the biggest beneficiaries of these schemes included institutions with countrywide aspirations like the perennially impoverished Ottawa-centric National Gallery, which was transformed into the country's cultural hub by Carnegie money in the 1930s. Others, like Dalhousie University, were singled out as regional centres, to the detriment of nearby institutions. And whole departments were built around outstanding individual scholars like Toronto's Harold Innis and Laval's George-Henri Levesque. At the same time, Brison amply shows that these men and institutions resisted the foundations' desires to manage their Canadian programs as though the country were a smaller reflection of the United States. One great strength of this work is the way Brison frames the story as a continuous series of negotiations between and within the two foundations and Canadian clients. He is conscious of the greater cultural and historical contexts, so that the influence of any one individual is never overstated. What emerges is a story of neither American dominance nor reactionary Canadian cultural nationalism. It is a much more nuanced interplay of the public and private agendas of men and institutions motivated by varying combinations of opportunism, cupidity, pragmatism, and passionate belief in the projects for which they were seeking support. The stakes were high because successfully wooing the trustees might transform an individual or institution into one of the nation's most important and powerful...

Black Canadian Cultural Criticism

A Review of: Abdel-Shehid, Gamal. 2005. Who Da Man? Black Masculinities and Sporting Cultures. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.

Talking with Ghosts: Haunting in Canadian Cultural Production

Talking with Ghosts: Haunting in Canadian Cultural Production

Introduction: The Social Effects of Culture

This report provides an overview of a research Initiative to Study the Social Effects of Culture (ISSEC) which was jointly undertaken by the Department of Canadian Heritage (PCH), the Canadian Cultural Research Network (CCRN) and the University of Ottawa as a result of discussions that took place at a jointly-sponsored colloquium held in November 2003. The participants at that colloquium, which was entitled “Accounting for Culture: Examining the Building Blocks of Cultural Citizenship”, concluded that more basic research was required on the social effects of culture to supplement ongoing investigations regarding the economic impact of culture and to fill a significant knowledge gap in this area. In particular, it was noted that without a sound and plausible understanding of the connection between individual cultural involvement and other social behaviours and without rigorous empirical evidence, it is difficult to make the case that cultural consumption and participation produce socially valuable externalities that warrant public policy support. The participants at the workshop, held in Montreal on August 24 and 25, 2004, concluded that there were six possible functional social effects of culture:
 
 1) fostering civic participation
 2) contributing to community development
 3) formation and retention of identity
 4) building social cohesion
 5) modifying values and preferences for collective choice
 6) enhancing collective understanding and capacity for collective action.
 
 These effects, which are inter-related and mutually reinforcing, were tested via a series of research propositions, and resulted in a series of papers which are intended to contribute to the evidence base on this subject.

International Cultural Relations as a Factor in Postwar Canadian Cultural Policy: The Relevance of UNESCO for the Massey Commission

The Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (The Massey Commission, 1949-1951) is widely seen to be Canada’s most important position paper on national cultural policy. This article explores the relation of this significant document to UNESCO and its characteristic discourse of “cultural relations.” Not only did UNESCO appear in the terms of reference for the Massey Commission Report, but it also was a repeated touchstone for submissions to the Commission. This overlooked international aspect of the Massey Commission underscores the connection between politics and culture in Cold War Canada providing a clear case of how international political language becomes entangled with—and helps to legitimize—artistic and cultural endeavours. The combination of the discussion of education and culture with that of development and trade allowed Canada to reconsider its position on public funding for the arts.

Strangers in the Mirror: In and Out of the Mainstream of Culture in Canada (review)

Reviewed by: Strangers in the Mirror: In and Out of the Mainstream of Culture in Canada Sneja Marina Gunew (bio) Sanjay Talreja and Nurjehan Aziz, editors. Stranger in the Mirror: In and Out of the Mainstream of Culture in Canada TSAR. xviii, 150. $24.95 In this volume Nurjehan Aziz continues the project she began in her earlier volume Floating the Borders: New Contexts in Canadian Criticism (1999) of questioning the orthodoxies of Canadian culture. This volume, usefully positioned as a school text (and for the 'intelligent general reader'), highlights some exemplary Canadian cultural moments to illustrate the numerous blind-spots and biases that pervade the mainstream media as well as revealing the mechanisms which reproduce stereotypes and misconceptions about marginalized groups and individuals. As a way of approaching this collection, Chelva Kanaganayakam's essay usefully analyses the ambiguities of 'representation' as involving both homogenization and essentialism. Traditionally, representation carries the dual implications of 'depiction' and 'delegation,' that is, speaking about and speaking for. These dualities converge to some degree in that depictions also designate a limited number of subject positions that may be taken up by actual people. Clearly the complexities in both minority individuals and communities far exceed the range of these depictions. And official [End Page 441] Canadian multiculturalism too often amounts merely to the capacity to 'allocate spaces within the margin,' effectively leaving the mainstream untouched. What these essays attempt is precisely to question or to make visible mainstream assumptions and prejudices. They range from Arun Mukherjee's weary anger at noting how 'some lives are more important than others,' in a 1987 CBC news report about bombs going off in two different parts of the world and noting that, as the day progresses, media attention to a tragedy in Sri Lanka wanes in contrast to the Irish example, to Cecil A. Foster's meditation on and confession concerning an initiative to set up a Black-specific Toronto radio station that failed because it was assumed that the complex and diverse interests of the Black community could be contained by one such institution. Talented Black writer Rozena Maart has an interesting (and pedagogically usefully comparative) double entry comprising an interview with the newly appointed executive director of Ed Video, Karen Kew, and a theoretically dense piece on a controversy in that same organization precipitated by a white teacher screening Birth of a Nation in spite of being requested by some colleagues not to do so. Maart's impassioned delineation of the event is a complex contribution to the growing field of critical whiteness studies. The idea that some lives matter more than others weaves its way through many of the pieces, whether it be Sharon Beckford's essay on the absences in the Pier 21 museum or Rahul Varma, director of the important Canadian play Bhopal, drawing attention to the fact that the perpetrator of that tragedy is still a free man in the United States. As well as including arts practitioners in a variety of media, there are important contributions by teachers across a range of levels about the implications of these shortcomings on future generations. Both Alnaaz Kassam and Chelva Kanaganaya-kam stress the point that the alienation of youth marginalized in the dominant culture by such media mechanisms contributes to the problems now catching the attention of a globalized communication machine. If youth engage in 'nativist' over-simplification of their supposed home culture this will not help them mediate a hybridized existence that is fundamentally about creating 'a new set of markers negotiating the values of another culture' for community and individuals, away from the traps of identity politics and the fundamentalisms they engender. [End Page 442] Sneja Marina Gunew Sneja Gunew, Department of English, University of British Columbia Copyright © 2006 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

Talking with Ghosts: Haunting in Canadian Cultural Production

Talking with Ghosts: Haunting in Canadian Cultural Production

Literature on the periphery of capitalism: Brazilian theory, Canadian culture

Any attempt to theorize the surprising similarities between Brazilian and Canadian cultural and literary history has to begin by openly acknowledging the vast and irrecoverable differences between them—differences of history, culture, economics, geography, and so on. Indeed, 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 (or at least, might seem so in many cases), but their inner logic emerges out of entirely different material circumstances that cannot be passed over in silence.

Religion, Literature and Canadian Cultural Identities

For the most part, the essays in this special Canadian issue reverberate with an overtly politicised appreciation of literature's transformative potential, as they explore things literary and religious in Canadian writers and writings, from late nineteenth‐century Protestant celebrations of Canada's role in Great Britain's South African War to contemporary Native Canadian representations of the violence perpetrated upon and endemic to their communities. This introduction locates these essays among shifts in Canadian social and cultural identity, from the biculturalism of the French and English, through the multicultural mosaic of twentieth‐century immigration, to today's transcultural kaleidoscope. Three areas of religion and literature work press for greater consideration, each in its own way postcolonial in character: religion, literature and ecology; foregrounding Native Canadian writers and writing in a reassessment of the role of Christian missionaries in the colonial and imperial project; and developing interpretive strategies for articulating comparative studies in Canadian religions and literatures. Snow, North, Wilderness: these stereotypes of Canada suggest a fierce uniformity—but even from earliest times, such generalisations have been inaccurate. To read Canadian literature attentively is to realise how diverse Canadian culture is—how marked by politics and religion, how influenced by differences of language and geography, how preoccupied (apparently) by the empirical world, but how fascinated by the mysterious and the uncertain.