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 and culture have long been preoccupied with questions of identity, and it can be difficult to discuss representations of Canadian identity in the arts without succumbing to clichéd tropes and turns of phrase; without considering watersheds moments in Canadian identity formation; without restating Northrop Frye's renowned claim that the essential Canadian question is, "Where is here?";without claiming that "to be Canadian . . . is to exist in a constant state of becoming" (Pevere and Dymond viii).Questions of identity are evident in many of the earliest depictions of Canada and Canadians in explorer and settler art and writing; the arts in Canada continue to grapple with evolving questions of identity into the twenty-first century.Encounters with the Other characterize the exploration and settlement periods of Canadian history, as Aboriginal, French, and British peoples came into contact in the "New World."Articulations of the Self and representations of the Other in exploration and settler period art and writing expose early and deep ambivalences surrounding identity and identity formation; during the settler period, as the settler finds his or her own indigeneity increasingly questioned in the imperial centre and always questioned in Canada, equivocacies of identity are often foregrounded.Crises of identity persist beyond the settler period, despite, and perhaps due to, post-Confederation desires to establish a unified identity distinct from Britain and the United States in a "newly formed" Canada.Post-Confederation nationhood transformed into cultural nationalism, and for several decades literature and the arts were perceived as imperative to establishing a sense of a national identity, a Canadian Self.A resurgent desire to ascertain a unified Canadian identity emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, in part linked to expanded opportunities for publishing Canadian books, increased government grants to support Canadian arts, and the addition of 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

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