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Culture and Identity:
Ideas and Overviews

Liane Curtis

Dipti Gupta

Will Straw

Department of Art History and Communications Studies

McGill University

Commissioned by the Department of Canadian Heritage for the
Ethnocultural, Racial, Religious, and Linguistic Diversity and Identity Seminar

Halifax, Nova Scotia

November 1-2, 2001

July 2001

Available on-line in English and French at

The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect
those of the Department of Canadian Heritage.

Foreward

For over 35 years, from the postwar period through the 1980s, Canadian cultural life was marked by the importance accorded our great institutions of cultural purpose: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the National Film Board, the Canada Council, and so on. The scale of these institutions mirrored the immensity of the perceived threat coming from the south, from the culture of the United States. Whatever Canadians thought of these institutions, their size and public visibility were, in a variety of ways, comforting. Their scale compensated, as well, for what many people --— in English Canada, at least --— sensed was the lack of a more pervasive and everyday cultural tissue binding us together. The development of these institutions organized our cultural history and focussed debate.

In the 1990s, the focus of public concern in the realm of culture shifted noticeably. The significant controversies had less to do with monumental, national institutions and more to do with local events and institutions. Controversies over the staging of the musical plays “Showboat” and “Miss Saigon,” in Toronto, as well as ongoing tensions over gay pride events, art gallery exhibits and cultural festivals (such as Toronto’s Caribana), signalled two major shifts in Canadian cultural politics (see, for a comprehensive account, see Henry and Tator, 2000.). The focus of cultural politics now had less and less to do with the independence of our national culture vis-à-vis that of the United States. Rather, the resonant issues were increasingly those which emerged within conflicts involving racial, ethnic, religious and linguistic identities.. At the same time, the stage on which these politics were played out was no longer the national one (of public institutions and their funding, or regulation and legislation), but, arguably, the local contexts of large cities and the communities within them. As cultural politics within Canada have become more focussed on issues of community and diversity, the terrain in which they unfold and become unintelligible has, increasingly, been that of the city.

Three interrelated developments might be noted here. First, it seems clear that, as political controversies have come more and more to do with questions of identity (racial, ethnic, sexuality-related, etc.), they have become more cultural in focus and character. Virginia Dominguez (1990) has spoken of “ “the culturalization of difference” --— a tendency to view difference through the prism of such cultural issues as representation and image. Indeed, until the recent wave of political activism directed at economic globalization, it appeared that most political “ “subcultures,” ” of whether the of left or right, had taken the cultural realm as their principal area of intervention.

Secondly, cultural issues themselves have come to be dominated by questions of identity. Whereas, in earlier periods, cultural activism might have been preoccupied with issues of morality or with the quality of cultural experience, intervention in the cultural sphere has more and more to do with cultural diversity and the manner of its insinuation within our cultural life.

Thirdly, and finally, it might be suggested that, inasmuch as the crucial present-day questions of cultural identity have to do with public visibility, community cohesion and interaction, the space in which these questions are tackled most urgently and regularly is that of the contemporary city. It is not simply the case that Tthe politics of diversity happen to unfold most noticeably (like most other political phenomena) within urban life. More importantlyFurthermore, the issues and preoccupations through which culture is understooand tend,increasingly, to be those long associated with urban life. The relationship of an avant-garde to a mainstream, the civic responsibilities of the artist, critic and consumer, the right to occupy space and produce spectacle --— these issues, now at the heart of contemporary cultural life, represent long-standing tensions within the life of the city.

Critical Traditions

Unsurprisingly, this transformation of the terms of cultural politics in Canada has had dramatic effects on the language and concerns of cultural criticism. The impulse to define national cultural traditions within Canada was strongest --— in English Canada, at least --— from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, when it fuelled efforts to strengthen the place of English-Canadian culture within Canadian educational institutions. The critical position which dominated during this period was one which presumed that there were thematic traits common to works of Canadian culture. It was the job of the critic to find these amidst the variations of surface detail which might make such works seem unrelated. Perhaps the best-known of these critical claims was Margaret Atwood’s argument that the essence of the Canadian character could be found in the simple drive to survive. The preoccupation with survival, she suggested, provided the thematic substance of Canadian literature in both English and French (Atwood, 1972). This was evident in the number of literary characters who were victims; it could be seen, as well, in the preoccupation of Canadian authors with landscape and the general hardship of life.

Other versions of this argument took shape across the humanities. In his influential book Movies and Mythologies, Peter Harcourt (1977) found a thematic unity for English-Canadian cinema in a crisis of character motivation. Looking at the scattered feature film tradition of the 1960s and early 1970s, he noted that the “‘heroes”’ of Canadian films were typically trapped in a real or emotional adolescence. Robert Fothergill had reached similar conclusions, with his argument that the heroes of Canadian films were typically “ “younger brother” ” figures (1977). Later, Geoff Pevere would write of the “‘stubbornly worrisome”’ character of English-Canadian films, regarding this as the appropriate response of one national culture to a powerful neighbour whose own films were marked by the constant exhortation to be happy (Pevere, 1992).

In the field of popular music, it was argued that the essence specificity of a Canadian style was to be found in its interweaving of rural and urban influences, in open musical textures of the sort found first in the folk revival of the late 1960s (Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot) and, subsequently, in the open, expansive rock music of Blue Rodeo or the Tragically Hip (see, for example, Brown, 1991). Writing on Canadian television, Morris Wolfe argued that the essence of Canadian television was its slower, more restrained pace. In Canadian television programs, he suggested, there were fewer “ “jolts per minute” ” than was typical of U.S. television, and evidence of a more patient, restrained relationship to social problems (Wolfe, 1985). In her analysis of the visual arts in Canada, Gaile McGregor claimed that Canadian artistic practice was marked by a preoccupation with landscape, by an ambivalence towards nature which wrestled with both its beauty and its terror (McGregor, 1985).

In French Canada, the elaboration of a unified view of cultural activity unfolded over a much longer period of time. While the historiography and cultural criticism of the early 20th century posited French Canadian culture as the bearer of noble, traditional values, most of what followed grappled with the question of how one might define Quebec’s modernity. (See, for a useful account, Bouchard and Lamonde, 1995 and Handler, 1998). More so than that of English Canada, French Canadian cultural criticism has had to contend with a deeply-rooted, long dominant account of the coherence of its culture, one set in place by the folklorists and national-Catholic thinkers of the early 20th century. While there is considerable debate, at present, over the treatment of socio-cultural diversity within contemporary Quebecois culture, it seems clear that such diversity has long served as a metaphor for urban modernity (see, for example, Marshall, 2000). Indeed, while the cultural production of ethnic groups in English Canada has often served to restore a sense of community to the novel or play as forms (by highlighting the closely-knit social structures of many such groups), diversity, within French-language cultural products, serves more often as a sign of the fragility of community. More so than English-Canadians, Francophone writers have explored the extent to which their society and culture might participate in a broader, continental (or hemispheric) experience of l’Américanité, marked by the twin myths of nature and the modern metropolis (Nadeau, 1990).

What follows is an account of the move, within different areas of cultural scholarship, to unravel many of the claims of an earlier wave of Canadian cultural criticism. For the purposes of clarity, we have dealt with four “ “media” ” or areas of cultural activity: cinema, music, literature and theatre. Literature will receive the most attention here, both because its critical infrastructures are more solid, and because within literary scholarship, it seems, the questions of identity have been examined most complexly. Theatre, likewise, will be dealt with at length, since it is within the world of theatre that the circulation of ideas between practitioners and scholars seems strongest. For reasons of space and expertise, the fine arts of painting and sculpture are not covered here. The overwhelming emphasis, here, on English- Canadian phenomena here may not be excused, but some justifications of limited validity may be offered. Allor and Gagnon (1994) have expertly traced the complex relationships between the Quebec state and the cultural “ “field,” ” relationships which have forged new relations between citizens and state through the primacy affccorded cultural life. An analysisStudy of these relations would require an analysis of public policy which is beyond the scope of the present paper. In particular, the distinctiveness of “ “interculturalisme” ” as an official paradigm for conceiving diversity within Quebec would require an extended analysis best left to others and to another occasion.

Film

Throughout its entire history, English -Canada has lacked a tradition of popular film making. As a result, academic research has not had access to a large body of work which might reveal broadly-shared, popular attitudes towards cultural identity. This is less true of Quebec where, as Bill Marshall’s book-length study of Queébecois cinema shows, popular comedies (such as Les Boys, C’est à ton tour Laura Cadieux, and the sequels to both) deploy ethnic figures for comic or dramatic effect. In English Canada, whose cinema is almost exclusively an auteur cinema, destined for film festivals and repertory cinemas, the confrontation with cultural diversity is viewed as one of the deliberate strategies of filmmakers seeking complex thematic frameworks or novel formal strategies. The early films of Atom Egoyan, for example, have been analyzsed in terms of the ways in which non-communicability stands as both a property of certain ethnocultural family structures and as a typical theme of the so-called art film (see, for example, Desbarats, et al., 1993).

Until the emergence of an auteurist feature-film movement in the mid-1980s, English-Canadian film making was seen to unfold most successfully at the twin extremes of the state-sponsored documentary and the avant-garde experimental film. Cameron Bailey, in an important essay on the documentary African-Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Hodge da Silva, has spoken of the dilemma of filmmakers of colour before the 1980s (Bailey, 1999). Excluded, for the most part, from the “ “art world” ” of experimental film making, these filmmakers were drawn to what Bailey calls a “ “cinema of duty” --— documentaries which were conventional in form even as they sought to represent the experience of those long excluded from Canadian cinema. In the 1970s, the formalist bias of experimental film-making meant that issues of ethnocultural identity were rarely, if ever, the focus of film practice. Bruce Elder’s famous argument, that a truly Canadian cinema would be purely about the moment of perception (with no reference to recognizable social phenomena), won few adherents in its extreme version, but adequately described the project of an experimental cinema before the 1980s (e.g., Elder, 1989).

In the 1980s, the situation of filmmakers of colour changed significantly. The National Film Board, through a variety of experimental programs, opened the door to proposals from young filmmakers of various backgrounds. At the same time, the increased politicization of urban art “ “scenes”,, ” and growth of such artistic forms as video art, spurred a range of new practices in which the politics of cultural identity nourished experimentation with audio-visual form (see, for an overview of much of this work, Marchessault, 1995).

Those engaged in film studies research have often confronted a split between film criticism/scholarship, whose focus has been the “ “national” traditions of documentary and the feature film, and as well as art criticism, which has dealt more consistently with short, experimental films and video art. This split often replicates a splitthat between the aspirations of feature films, which haves long been considered a component of nation-building, and “ “short” ” films, which are taken to express positions from within particular identity-based communities. This split is further reflected in the different funding institutions and critical infrastructures which surround these two sorts of film. A larger structural feature of Canadian culture, referred to in the Foreward to this article, may be glimpsed here. While large-scale, national cultural institutions (of which a feature film industry might be one, somewhat abstract, example) have long stood as persistent dreams and fragile, often unaccomplished realities, locally-rooted, small-scale cultural activity has more effectively addressed issues of cultural identity and diversity. It has done so within structures (such as that of the artist-run centres network) which are no less the result of government policy and resources. The artefacts produced within these structures are impressive, less for the monumental character of any one of them, than for the richness of their accumulation over the last twenty years.

Film Studies as an academic discipline has been preoccupied with questions of identity since the mid-1970s, when feminist theories developed, in conjunction with the discipline’s own process of consolidation and institutionalization. Against this backdrop, the study of Canadian film was, for several years, theoretically under-developed. Its concern with questions of national character came to seem increasingly out of date alongside the rich paradigms of psychoanalytic and ideological theory which developed internationally through the early 1980s. This isolation of Canadian film studies from the discipline’s main currents ended in the 1990s, when film studies across the Anglo-Saxon world had turned its attention to such questions as race and nationality. Now, the study of Canadian cinema could unfold in tandem with mainstream theoretical concerns within the discipline. Recent works, such as Dorland’s examination of relations between the Canadian state and film making communities (1998), or the collection Gendering the Nation collection, draw upon rich traditions of Canadian scholarship but represent, as well, the convergence of Canadian work with broader developments in policy studies and gender analysis, respectively.

Music

In the academic world, popular music is something of an orphan, rarely studied within university departments of communication, and usually ignored within the discipline of music itself. While there are long-standing traditions of research on the Québécois chanson québécoise (e.g., Giroux, 1993) as a cultural form, and on music as a form of folklore, there is much less research exists on contemporary, urban musical forms. Research within ethnomusicology has produced complex analysis of the “ “pathways” ” through which musical forms are practiced and circulate within different regions of Canada (see Canadian Musical Pathways Project);,and, in so doing, it has mapped the complex relations between tradition and innovation which are typical of musical life. Scholarship on particular musical genres is often undertaken within subcultures of fans and collectors, such as those who publish fan magazines or catalogues devoted to Quebec pop or Canadian techno music.

At the same time, music’s place within the cultures of nations is not easily grasped. On the one hand, music seems one of the most deeply rooted of collective cultural practices. Its importance in folk ritual, military ceremony and festive interaction have led us to see music as a fundamental part of national life, even when its present-day forms are overwhelmingly industrialized and professionalized. Nevertheless, as Ian McKay has noted, folk traditions are typically constructed retrospectively, pieced together from elements which are removed from their original contexts. The presumption that Celtic-tinged folk music forms best represented the culture of Nova Scotia settled into Canadian common sense at the expense of any consideration of that province’s long-standing cosmopolitanism and highly developed cultural life (McKay, 1994.).