Selves and Subjectivities: Reflections on Canadian Arts and Culture

Canadian identity and its manifestations in the arts are the cen tral themes in Selves and Subjectivities, a collection of essays that explores emerging concepts about the representation of the Self and the Other in contemporary Canadian arts and culture.The essays touch upon a variety of issues, most notably gender and sexuality, displacement, trauma, performativity, and linguistic diversity on at least two levels: the individual and the collec tive.The original call for papers for this collection was broadly conceived to address emerging concepts of identity formation.To our delight, the majority of the submissions had a Canadian focus, which is reflected in these selections.The response made apparent the continuing problematics of identity and the cen trality of this debate within the Canadian imagination.Canadian literature courses in university English departments.However, a definitive Canadian identity remained elusive, and inadequate, given the regional and cultural differences spanning the country.Recognition of racial, ethnic, gender, and class inequalities, too, precluded a unified national identity; the Multiculturalism Act belied it.Instead, and as a result, debates around Canadian identity in the past two to three decades have explored the multiplicities of Canadian identities.Selves and Subjectivities enters this debate, presenting a collection of essays that embodies and articulates recent manifestations and delineations of Canadian identity, and that questions and challenges existing ones.This volume also enters current debates about Canadian identity advanced through analyses of the arts in Canada.Sherrill Grace's On the Art of Being Canadian, for example, asserts that "the art of Canada continues to tell us what 'being Canadian means'" (4; emphasis in the original) and then substantiates her claim through a study of a wide range of Canadian arts, including fiction, film, and photography.Grace approaches various art forms to ask, "What do the arts and our artists show us or tell us about being Canadian or about being ourselves?"(7) and to illustrate the "persistent yet changing concerns with Canadian identity" (12).In Canadian Cultural Poesis: Essays on Canadian Culture, editors Garry Sherbert, Annie Gérin, and Sheila Petty, too, consider ways in which Canadian identity is interpellated and challenged in a collection of interdisciplinary essays organized around the topics of media, language, identity, and politics and connected by shared ambivalences about Canadian identity.According to the editors, "Canadian cultural poesis may . . .be described as an act of hospitality, the invention of new gestures, new ways of welcoming the marginalized other, the stranger, and the foreigner, in order to construct new cultural arrangements between the universal Canadian identity and their own particular identity" (Sherbert et al. 20).The essays collected in the Self/Other relationship.The allegory reveals the complex and persistent connection between the Self and the Other and how the mitigation of grief requires the acknowledgement and acceptance of both.Colleen Wagner stages another traumatic loss in her play The Monument, which is the subject of Gilbert McInnis's essay.McInnis contests the generally held idea that Wagner's play is inspired by the Bosnian War and the war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.Rather, he asserts that the 1989 massacre of fourteen women by Marc Lépine at École Polytechnique in Montréal and the subsequent decision by a group of women in Vancouver to "create a monument in memory of the fourteen students" (70) form the backdrop against which the play was written.McInnis focuses on the interplay between the two characters, Stetko, a soldier charged with the murder of numerous women, and Mejra, the mother of Ana, whom Stetko murdered during an unidentified war somewhere abroad.Set in the aftermath of this war, the play investigates the horrific violence and ensuing monumentalizing of its victims.Applying René Girard's distinction between the superficial and deeper levels of meaning in a play (the first corresponds, in Girard's description, to the "cathartic or sacrificial reading" of the play and the second to the "revelation of mimetic rivalry and structural scapegoating") (70), McInnis draws parallels between the play and the documentary Marker of Change: The Story of the Women's Monument, which is based on the commemoration of the fourteen murdered women.As The Monument moves toward reconciliation and forgiveness, McInnis highlights how the dynamics of the victimvictimizer relationship are explored through a reversal of roles: in the first instance, Ana is the object of Stetko's brutality; in the second, Stetko is victimized by Ana's mother, Mejra.As Stetko changes from a victimizer to a victim, he is forced to recognize the subjectivity of his own victims.In his explication of the Historic," Veronica Thompson turns to an examination of the colonial past and postcolonial present of Canada.Grounded in the intersections across feminist and postcolonial theories, the essay investigates the connections between language and maternal experience in settler-invader identity formation in Marlatt's canonical novel.By juxtaposing the theories of language of Homi Bhabha, Dennis Lee, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray, Thompson provides a reading of the female body and the mother-daughter relationship in colonial and postcolonial spaces that create new possibilities of selfhood for the protagonist, Annie.In her reassessment of her roles as wife and mother, Annie constructs a story for Mrs. Richards, a figure whom she discovers in the Vancouver library's historical archives.Despite scant historical information, Annie and, by extension, Marlatt embellish significant details of Mrs. Richards's life that function as both metaphor and catalyst for Annie's own birth in the narrative, details such as the birth of a child, and a potential lesbian relationship.Annie's historical reconstructions serve to question and supplement established patriarchal, colonial history, and the novel culminates in a redefinition of Self that recovers female histories.Gendered ethnicity is the prominent issue in Dana Patrascu-Kingsley's examination of Marusya Bociurkiw's novel, The Children of Mary.Patrascu-Kingsley identifies the need in contemporary Canadian culture to move beyond defining ethnicity as merely the superficial differences among communities and to interrogate "traditional static notions of ethnicity" (154).She posits the necessity to challenge "the binary model of us/them" (151) and to engage in reflective and thorough cross-cultural dialogues.The essay analyzes the ways in which Bociurkiw's narrative destabilizes stereotypes associated with ethnicity, gender, and race as they intersect.

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