Demystifying and Challenging the Settler Colonial Nation through Digital Literature

Scholarship of digital literature frequently eschews considerations of national contexts, and for good reason: works of digital literature are primarily distributed over the Internet, which easily transcends national borders, while creators and scholars of digital literature frequently find community online and internationally as the study of digital literature is still typically marginalized within artist communities, scholars’ home departments, and academic studies more generally. The transnational positioning of the digital literature community further enables creators and scholars to avoid the national designations that have held sway—frequently arbitrarily and without consideration for how these nationalizations uphold status quos—in academic disciplines of other artforms. In my presentation, I consider how the transnational or even a-national approaches of digital literature and its scholarship can be trained back on the nation to demystify and challenge the development of the cultural imaginary of a nation according to hegemonic norms of dominant socio-ethnic and -economic groups within a given state. This becomes particularly important, I argue, within a context of working towards decolonization in settler colonial states (or, more accurately, on lands occupied by settler colonial states), as national ideologies work to enforce the appearance of the permanence and immutability of the nation and the state which in turn makes attempts toward decolonization feel impossible. While I focus on the context with which I am most familiar—the settler colonial state Canada and its cultural imaginary of the nation—I believe these insights can be extrapolated to considerations of other settler colonial national contexts and more generally to the workings of hegemonies with national contexts of any kind. Using examples from works by the High Muck a Muck Collective and Skawennati (Mohawk), I demonstrate how these works use digital rhetoric to confront the hegemonic writing of the cultural imaginary of the Canadian settler colonial nation.

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