Cultural Studies in Canada: Past, Present and Future

Chapter 6

Cultural Studies in Canada

Past, Present, and Future

Imre Szeman and Andrew Pendakis

One of the problems of identifying and describing what constitutes the field of Canadian cultural studies is that, in practice, cultural studies would itself raise an alarm about the presumptions and conceptual problems guiding such a project. Rather than assume a clear and neatly defined area of scholarly inquiry that takes place within an equally clearly defined geographical area—the fiction guiding all forms of area and nation-specific studies—cultural studies would draw attention to the mistakes, lim-its, and problems of imagining a national culture, national-cultural movement, or an intellectual heritage delimited by transient and necessarily artificial political borders. Cultural studies would point instead to the ways in which sites and fields of analysis are always already connected to numerous other spaces of invention and creation, whether local, regional, or national. It would draw attention to the ways in which researchers in Canada who are engaged in the interdisciplinary critical analysis of culture and of the relations between culture and power—what defines cultural studies at its core—make use of conceptual antecedents and intellectual heirs with origins around the world, primarily (though not exclusively) in the English-language academic traditions of the United States and Britain, German philosophy and social sciences, and French sci-ences humaines. Cultural studies would point to the major divide that still exists in the approaches to the study of culture and power in the anglophone and francophone academy, as well as to the growing influence and impact of First Nations writing and theory within Canada. And it would attend to the very real significance of the belated development of cultural studies in Canada, which has tended to undercut a specifically Canadian contribution to cultural studies, and which has meant that cultural studies north of the 49th parallel is very similar to that practiced south of that line: “a highly disaggregated field composed of several dozen relatively autonomous subfields, whose numbers seemed ready to increase … an accepted term of convenience for all kinds of

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Cultural Studies in Canada 111

historical or popular-culture-based inquiries, very often disconnected from the British line of cultural studies, from French poststructuralism, from Frankfurt School theory, and from Anglo-American traditions of cultural criticism deriving from writers from Swift to Williams and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Susan Sontag to Noam Chomsky” (Leitch and Lewis 88).

Yet the connections between culture and power that cultural studies has always insisted must be at the centre of the analysis of contemporary culture also means that in avoiding a too easy account of Canadian cultural studies, it nonetheless would not give up on the importance of naming just what it is that is distinctive about this practice in the Canadian academe. National borders may well be fictions, but they are fictions given reality through cultural forms and practices, communication systems, and a variety of state institutions and structures, including that of the university and the ways in which it identifies its objects of analysis. And while it is important to be cautious about too quickly aligning national borders with national ideas, the practice of cultural studies is acutely aware that “if we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable” (Jameson 6). The specific structural-historical configuration of Canada—a settler colony located next to a nation distinguished by its cultural and communicative prominence in the twentieth century as much as by its political and military power—has meant that the very adop-tion and appropriation of American and British theoretical models has drawn attention to the operations of cultural hegemony and the power of communication systems. If cul-tural studies in Canada has come to have themes, theories, and theorists that are similar to cultural studies done elsewhere in the world—a consequence of the development of cultural studies as a field in the era of the global circulation of academic ideas—it is nev-ertheless the case that specificities of the development of Canadian culture has meant that there is a focus on questions related to the way in which the Canadian nation-state has configured the nation’s media, culture, and race and ethnicity in order to exercise the biopolitical management of its citizenry.

The earliest examples of the practice of cultural studies in Canada—a group of think-ers who could be considered to have shaped the direction taken by cultural studies in the country after the work of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies hit its shores—can be found in the work of a group of thinkers who have influenced a wide range of schol-arly research (including research in literature) in the country: Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), George Grant (1918–1988), and Harold Innis (1894–1952).1

McLuhan was one of a number of important cultural theorists (including literary critic Northrop Frye and Innis) located at the University of Toronto in the 1950s. Of primary interest to McLuhan was the relationship between technology and culture, with a special emphasis on the transformations introduced into human “patterns of association” and the forms of subjectivity produced by new modes of communica-tion (McLuhan and Watson 57). His central thesis is that technology is not primarily a question of utility—technical problems neutrally solved by innovation perfected—but is a holistic cultural phenomenon that creates and re-creates the human sensorium,



112 Reflections on the Discipline

multiplying and mutilating its capacities to collectively see, think, and feel. Any new technology, what he called an “extension of man,” negates and erases as much as it capac-itates or induces (McLuhan, Understanding 6). A medium’s form shapes, in a manner more total (and unconscious) than its content, the tone and feel of a society. In fact, content could perniciously blind critics to the broader, genuinely ontological changes enacted upon a society by its media. The task for McLuhan is to evaluate the sensorial and social opportunity costs of any given technological regime, a process that requires an eye to the history of technological and social forms, as well as a capacity to intuit those dimensions of the present that are crystallizing future modes of perception. According to McLuhan, the mechanical age—linked to the technology of writing and characterized by detachment—was being replaced by a digital one, linked to electric, televisual forms of communication and characterized by ecstasy, feeling, simultaneity, and connectedness. McLuhan’s work felt (and still does feel) prophetic, charged by an evocative urgency and scale; his ideas would influence figures as widely separated from each other as Jean Baudrillard and Pierre Trudeau, and would enter public culture in a way completely at odds with the traditional reach of Canadian academic work.

McLuhan is in many ways the methodological “father” of cultural studies in Canada. His interest in popular phenomena—slang, for example—called into question the text-centric, highly disciplined tendencies of the Leavisite New Criticism in which he was formally trained, without sacrificing the rigor and “seriousness” with which that tradition approached its objects. Highly muted in McLuhan—and in this he is 30 years ahead of his time—was the early twentieth-century literary tendency to denounce and degrade the popular as mere entertainment. His 1951 book The Mechanical Bride was probably the first text in Canadian history to engage in sustained close analyses of com-mercial texts and to do so with an eye to their inherent meaningfulness. In McLuhan, the most vapid commercial still functions as a vector for the production/reflection of social meaning and is in this sense interesting. He sees both high and low culture as equally meriting attention, and he shies away from overt Arnoldian moralizations. Employing a method that draws eclectically (sometimes awkwardly) from sources ranging from Shakespeare to Oswald Spengler, and from James Joyce to Henri Bergson, while at the same time heavily referencing contemporary forms of media, popular culture, and jour-nalism, McLuhan’s method anticipates the interdisciplinarity that characterizes institu-tionalized cultural studies, though in a manner that at times borders on indiscipline or whimsy.

While freed from classical textual criticism, McLuhan’s method is not properly soci-ology either: rather than systematic analysis of contemporary trends and patterns, he opts for a kind of broad cultural sampling—“a look around to see what is happening”—which throws into contiguity a whole range of phenomena located at disparate points and levels within the social whole (McLuhan, Medium 10). Though this will strike many as haphazard and unrigorous (allegations that continue to haunt the practice of cultural studies as a whole), this aggregative method, “a collide-oscope of interfaced situations” (10), is one that would later characterize the works of thinkers such as Fredric Jameson in their attempt to dialectically “take the temperature of the age” (Jameson xi). Eschewing




specialization for the way it carves the present mechanically into non-communicating fragments, McLuhan engenders a methodological expansiveness that will find its way into much of institutionalized cultural studies in Canada, even if the latter is much less feral and free in its modality. If McLuhan usually avoids or trivializes attempts to apply hysterical moral binaries to the study of culture, he nevertheless insists on sustaining a tone of politico-moral urgency: in this, too, he anticipates a cultural studies that refuses to separate knowledge from politics and which sees in the present (to echo Walter Benjamin) a state of emergency, an event in need of analysis, curation, and discursive critical investment.2 McLuhan does not call for a knee-jerk rejection of television (or today, the Internet), but encourages us to think through just what is lost and gained in a society saturated by its perceptual logics and habits.

In addition to the importance of McLuhan’s methodological habits, his interest to contemporary cultural studies also lies in the fact that he occasionally attempted to explicitly think of “Canada” as a symbolic space. McLuhan makes the effort to think through something like a Canadian cultural essence, which he links to the experience of the northern frontier, one that led Canadians to associate nature with warfare and strug-gle, and the home with protection and society. His search for what he called “Canadian borderlines”—distinctions that were at once physical, mental, and symbolic—also implies a certain constitutive solitariness, a taste for meandering and adventure that was built into the Canadian spirit via its history and experience. In all of this, McLuhan pre-sumes a category of homogenous national mentality founded on the explicit exclusion of Indigenous peoples and women, both of whom disrupt this masculine idyll of colo-nial adventurism.

Though the content of McLuhan’s research—his interest in popular culture, technol-ogy, new media, and globalization avant la lettre—all properly locate him (proleptically) in the tradition of Canadian cultural studies, some aspects of his work strike a discordant note. Within that tradition today, there is little left of his taste for broad anthropological or metaphysical generalization about the structure or direction of the present. This is an ambiguous difference: precisely what makes McLuhan interesting is this scope of obser-vation, the sense he creates of a time arriving at the doorstep of a new order or future. At the same time, McLuhan is also side-stepped today for what many see as a position bordering on technological determinism—the emphasis he places on a historical pro-cess disproportionately driven by technical innovation and change. This emphasis has of late been supplemented by more nuanced maps of historical causality that emphasize decentralized, unequally distributed forms of agency, institutional pluralism, and dis-continuous leaps between historical moments and modes. Closely associated with this shift is the tendency to associate McLuhan’s work with a techno-utopianism to which few contemporary theorists of new media would subscribe. McLuhan’s insistence on the fact that the new era of electric connectedness would force injustice into the light has been replaced by much more measured empirical assessments of the simultane-ously promising and retarding political potentialities of the Internet or social media in Canada. Finally, notwithstanding the remarks made above, McLuhan generally showed little scholarly interest in the cultural specificity of Canada, an effect, no doubt, of the




emphasis he placed on the universality of technology, but also of his astute intuition that its proximity to America—then the epicentre of a burgeoning worldwide capitalist culture—rendered any such specific interest myopic.

In contrast with McLuhan, the work of George Grant represents an extended engage-ment with the specificity of Canada. Grant was an anti-capitalist conservative whose work is perhaps best understood today as a telling symptom of mid-century Canadian political fantasy and culture, but which also continues to effectively problematize many of the structuring platitudes used to reproduce contemporary Canadian liberal-ism. Pairing a classical philosophical orientation with a passionate sense for what he saw as the specificity and preciousness of the Canadian experience, Grant was able to articulate a powerful (sometimes slightly ornery) critique of postwar American hege-mony. For Grant, American “state capitalism” was a homogenizing force that threatened to institutionalize the domination of technological imperatives over properly human activities and functions (9). Not only did American capitalism replace culture, thought, and experience with mere technique, it did so imperialistically through explicit acts of political aggression (e.g., Vietnam) or via direct (often militarized) control and exploi-tation of other countries’ resources. According to Grant, the origins of a standardized North America characterized by a consumerist erosion of stable moral criteria could be traced to modern liberalism’s focus on the sovereignty and natural equality of the rights-bearing individual. Away from every conception of stable or meaningful social order, bourgeois individualism envisions a good inseparable from absolute (or nega-tive) freedom, an abstract liberty without limits or standards of any kind, which leads to the breakdown of all discernible “common intention” (67). At stake for Grant was the very essence of Canada, an entity whose roots in communitarian British and French traditions—traditions imbued by a “public conception of virtue”—placed it closer in spirit to Plato’s well-ordered kallipolis than to John Locke’s individualist commonwealth (which generates wealth and “liberty” at the expense of social meaning and value). For Grant, the early Canadians fled revolutionary America, and sustained the experiment called Canada, on the basis of a passionate contempt for “freedom-loving” American republicanism and a deep commitment to the formation of a society grounded in “order and restraint” (68).

Much of Grant’s work remains very far from the content and spirit of contempo-rary cultural studies. His interest in the possibility of an ideal human function—a life characterized by the pursuit of truth and virtue, one revelatory of our very essence as children of God—places him firmly (and, for most, unworkably) within the tradition of Christian and/or Platonic idealism. His conception of a lost or possible Canadian essence fits uncomfortably with the presence of identities incommensurate with (or even openly hostile to) the ethnic and moral content of his idealized rural polis. Cultural studies, of course, is today predominantly historicist, historical material-ist, and/or anti-essentialist; it posits its project not as a restitution of origins, but as an enterprise of infinite (unfinishable) critique. However, what remains salient in Grant is his critique of liberal modernity. Though this critique of liberal modernity was not a new one—much of this is already discernible in Joseph de Maistre and Edmund




Burke—Grant’s conservative critique of “progress” bears scrutiny for its sophistication and for the way in which it resonates with the prerogatives of a dominated (and of course etiolated) Canadian sociality. Grant’s critique of the universality of technology—its hostility toward clearly and holistically conceived human ends, as much as its deifica-tion of thoughtless convenience—places him into territory unevenly shared by Martin Heidegger and Baudrillard alike. Most saliently, Grant keenly perceived the tension between capitalist social relations and the preservation of local cultures, though there is no small irony in the fact that the “indigenous societies” he saw as threatened in Canada were the dominant traditions of the British and French, rather than the First Nations cultures that preceded them (74).

One final significant antecedent to the practice of cultural studies in Canada was Harold Innis. Innis was an important Canadian political economist and communica-tions theorist who directly influenced the work of Marshall McLuhan; the latter’s expres-sive extravagance has in many ways unfairly eclipsed the legacy of Innis’s less jubilant, but equally eccentric, oeuvre. Innis’s primary concern was to understand the ways in which technology, especially modes of communication and transportation, have influ-enced the development of culture. This was an interest embedded in a civilizational rhetoric inherited from figures like Arthur Toynbee and Spengler, one that conceived of cultures as world-historical wholes characterized by dominant personalities (subject to “birth” and “decline”), rather than as webs of practices constituted by difference (the approach more commonly accepted today). Innis’s early work was characterized by a series of concrete investigations into the emplaced cultural effects of geographically spe-cific networks of trade and technology: his dissertation on the history of the railway in Canada (A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway, 1923) was followed by books on the Canadian fur trade (The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History, 1930) and on the international historico-political economy of cod fisheries (The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy, 1940). This early work played an essential role in clarifying Canada’s location within the world economic system: not only did the export commodities on which Canada relied for its growth structurally mandate its underdeveloped position vis-à-vis the industrial cores of Britain and the United States, the articulation of these resource-based economies within Canada itself stabilized the regional differences and inequalities that intimately conditioned the con-figuration of social life in these regions.

As Innis shifted his attention away from transportation and trade networks and toward communication systems (in his influential Empire and Communications [1950] and The Bias of Communication [1951]), he came to believe that the latter were char-acterized inherently by “bias,” that is, by a constitutive inner logic that simultaneously engendered and repressed particular forms of epistemic and social organization. Innis, then, places Mesopotamian clay and cuneiform into the same techno-historical conver-sation as radio and television. This bias can be oriented toward space or time, the for-mer characterized by portability and prone to spatial extension, the latter characterized by durability and centralization. Undergirding this work is a materialist historiography that emphasizes relations between geography, materials, and the structured distribution




of knowledges, as well as the various configurations of power and disempowerment that subtend, but also emerge from, such arrangements. This is a philosophy of history not wholly forgetful of class relations (Innis keenly understands the relation between what he calls “monopolies of power” and knowledge, for example), but one which nev-ertheless largely ignores a more recognizable Marxist position grounded in the history of productive relations and classes. Equally bracketed by Innis is a Hegelian division of history into the forms of consciousness that organize a society’s self-understanding; Innis instead chooses to replace the history of ideas with a history of assemblages and concrete material aggregations.

Of course, what is neglected here are precisely the strengths of the above two posi-tions (Marxist and Hegelian), each of which will find their way into later cultural stud-ies practice in Canada. Marxism’s attention to the dynamic inequalities and divisions that undergird (and dialectically engender) societies could be seen by some to offset an Innisian position that has problems locating the points of agency and change in history. Moreover, Hegel’s emphasis on the role played by the Idea within history has also been taken up by post-Gramscian cultural studies (albeit supplemented by his-torical materialism itself). That said, Innis’s work today can be seen to retrospectively anticipate the new materialist and object-oriented philosophies—initiated, respec-tively, by Gilles Deleuze and Graham Harman—that are slowly filtering their way into the Canadian academe, including the work of cultural studies scholars. Also of signifi-cance today is Innis’s prophetic insistence on registering our own culture’s particular “bias”: though this was sequestered to questions of space and time rather than iden-tity, this injunction to reflect upon and challenge our own inherited cultural limits and points of blindness is an important part of the politics of contemporary cultural studies. Like Grant, Innis associated the United States with a form of technological imperialism, and even went so far as to echo the former’s conservatism by advocating that Canada resist this influence through a return to “common law traditions” and the “cultural heritage of Europe” (Empire 195). According to Innis, “mass produc-tion and standardization” endangered the very existence of “the West” because their constitutive bias threatened to destroy the basis upon which societies rely for life and energy—culture itself. Though there is an echo here from Grant’s crypto-authoritarian call to “order and restraint,” it should be borne in mind that Innis’s own bias toward “the vitality of the oral tradition” and his insistence on its indispensability to the pos-sibility of a renewed “West” had to do with the way the spoken word and a plurality of interlocutors could be seen to call into question the antidemocratic and hierarchical tendencies of a clerically curated system of writing. Just as they do in both Grant and McLuhan’s work, these calls to a renewed or protected national cultural essence get bogged down in an obvious Eurocentrism (as well as dubious historiography), though the sheer strangeness of Innis’s position—the difficulty one has placing it on the tra-ditional political spectrum—ensures that these moments in his thought continue to warrant our close attention.

The emphases given by Grant, Innis, and other Canadian intellectuals to the necessi-ties of national culture and national self-determination in the period following World




War II ensured that the attractions and deficits of the nation remained central to social and cultural criticism in Canada through to the end of the 1980s (if not beyond).3

Even as literary and cultural theory was infused by new modes of continental thought (starting in the early 1960s with the structuralism associated with figures such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel Foucault), the multiple nations within Canada—francophone, anglophone, and First Nations—meant that the already unstable idea of national-ism and national self-identity that Grant probed in his work had to be continually addressed, alongside related concepts such as belated modernity, economic and cul-tural dependency, and Canada’s colonial legacy (both as a colony itself and the internal colonialism practiced on its Aboriginal populations). The ways in which early forms of post–World War II Canadian cultural studies address this legacy was vexed. On the one hand, there has been ongoing critical recognition of the ways in which nationalism pro-duces domination, exclusion, and violence based on the repression of difference. But simultaneously, because of the inevitable link of culture to nation in the modern period, and especially within fields of cultural analysis within universities (where cultural study is divided into distinct national spaces), the desire of a thinker like Grant to establish canons and foster homegrown cultural production—indexes of a successful, mature state—haunted (and continues to haunt) contemporary cultural criticism. In his writ-ing on Canada’s struggle with the conceptual and political demands of Canada’s belated modernity, Imre Szeman has drawn attention to the largely unacknowledged class politics at work in the desire for local, “native” cultural production (“Literature on the Periphery”). Drawing on the work of Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz, who discusses a similar dynamic in his own postcolonial nation, Szeman argues that those who desire a distinct national culture are those for whom the cultural capital it would generate means the most—not working classes or even the moneyed elite, but cultural workers such as university professors. The best work on nationalism and nationalist culture in Canada has been careful to uncover the tricky ways in which it operates as both problem and possibility, and has tried to address the reality of the creation of the Canadian nation without ossifying it, but by looking at “Canada” as a sociopolitical formation whose log-ics need to be better understood in order to undo the disempowerment that remains a feature of social life under capitalism.

If one essential feature of the work of an earlier Canadian criticism was its nostalgia for an “indigenous” culture believed to be lost or possible, much contemporary cul-tural studies deals with a working through of the tropes and repetitions that produce and re-produce the symbolic consensus of Canadian social life. From the 1960s to the 1990s, work in cultural studies in Canada took place primarily within three intersecting streams of inquiry: nationalism and national culture; race, difference, and multicultur-alism; and the electronic signs and communication systems addressed by McLuhan and Innis, which are so important to the constitution of a nation with so small a popu-lation in such a large geographical space. Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader (edited by Sourayan Mookerjea, Szeman, and Gail Faurschou) is divided roughly into these categories, and includes work by some of the most important critics and theorists working in cultural studies during these years, including Ian Angus, Himani Bannerji,




Jody Berland, Maurice Charland, Ioan Davies, Len Findlay, and Will Straw. While these scholars represent a diverse range of theoretical approaches and thematic inter-ests, each explores the specificities of the Canadian national-cultural situation, draw-ing on the work of McLuhan, Grant, and Innis, as well as on the ideas of the founding figures of British cultural studies (such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall), and, to a lesser extent, that of the Frankfurt School as well. As in the work of Innis and Grant, much of this research continued to be shaped by the specific social, cultural, and politi-cal circumstances of living next to “the United States, the undisputed hegemon of the past century,” and the role of its “empire of electronic signals and the economies-of-scale might of its cultural industries” (Mookerjea et al. 10). Berland’s North of Empire (2009), which collects her wide-ranging and important writing on the Canadian media landscape, offers a particularly insightful interrogation of the challenges faced by a set-tler nation in trying to shape the space of its own nation while having to contend with the onslaught of sounds, images, and ideas from its neighbour to the south. In large measure due to the significance of media technologies in defining subjectivities and shaping political possibilities in the postwar era, the major site of writing in cultural studies between the work of its early progenitors and the contemporary moment has been in the field of communication studies—a particularly rich and fruitful site of cul-tural analysis in Canada.

By comparison with this interest in the complex dimensions of nationalism and national culture, work in cultural studies in Canada today is extremely diverse. Despite the considerable legacy of the early progenitors of cultural studies and the work of critics of the generation of Berland and Straw, there is no single dominant tendency or trend in contemporary work. Researchers draw on a range of theoretical traditions—though, it has to be said, more on American and continental thinkers and theories than on the work of McLuhan and the others who first gave shape to cultural studies in Canada—and address topics and issues across the spectrum of the humanities and social sciences. Nor can it be said that the primary topics of analysis are Canadian themes and issues. The practice of cultural studies in Canada has over time become more formalized and institutionalized, and is anchored by a number of professional associations (e.g., the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies, which has been based at various times in Hamilton, Edmonton, Montreal, and Waterloo), graduate programs (e.g., Cultural Studies and Critical Theory at McMaster and Queen’s University’s recently developed PhD in Cultural Studies), book series (e.g., the University of Toronto Press’s Cultural Spaces and the Cultural Studies and Environmental Humanities series at Wilfrid Laurier University Press), and journals (e.g., Mosaic and the online Reviews in Cultural Theory). Of the latter, the most significant venue for the circulation and promotion of research in cultural studies has been Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Founded in 1997, Topia has consistently published work by Canadian scholars in the field, with a strong (though not exclusive) focus on topics related to Canadian culture, society, and poli-tics, including a recent series of special issues devoted to a range of pressing social and political issues (recent issues have explored the fate of the university, militarization, and environmental studies).




Though it is difficult to establish a distinct set of concerns within Canadian cultural studies today, there are nevertheless a number of critical, conceptual, and political issues to which a significant amount of attention is paid and to which Canadian scholars have devoted unique insights as a result of the intellectual milieux in which they work. As in other spaces and sites where research in cultural studies is carried out, a key dimension of work in the field in Canada has been a broad assessment of the institutions of knowl-edge production and legitimation in the country. The critical function of this work has been to examine the role played by these institutions—which range from government agencies to universities and from television to advertising—in producing and managing social consent in Canada. Though it might appear to the world at large to be an uncom-plicated liberal democratic state, Canada is riven by divisions that have necessitated the production of institutions and practices of social consent. In many ways, these practices reflect the political dramas and conflicts of the globalized world. For this reason, even scholarship devoted explicitly to Canada has been of value to researchers engaged in the analysis of hegemony around the world.

One of the key forms through which state power has been exercised in Canada has been through multiculturalism, both as an official policy and as an unofficial, increas-ingly widely accepted social principle. The crucial work carried out in the 1970s and 1980s on multiculturalism as a form of governmentality (for which Eva Mackey’s The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada [1998] acts as a capstone) has over the past decade expanded into a broader interrogation of the mul-tiple ways in which the state uses difference for social management and control. In Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada (2007), Sunera Thobani engages in a historically wide-ranging analysis of race and difference in Canada in which multiculturalism is but one step in an ongoing social process of control over the course of the nation’s historical development. She ends with an assessment of race and nationalism in the context of the war on terror, a subject also explored in depth in Sherene Razack’s influential Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (2008). When researchers such as Sourayan Mookerjea look at specific develop-ments in race and ethnicity in Canada, such as the anti-immigrant policies developed by the city of Hérouxville, Quebec, in 2007, the references go beyond forms of state control specific to Canada to an analysis of forces of globalization and neoliberalism that have shaped state policies around the world since the end of the Cold War.

This shift from interrogations of Canadian multiculturalism to the operations of neoliberalism, governmentality, and biopower exemplifies a general move in cultural studies in Canada away from older modes of thinking about Canada to an engage-ment with the broad set of ideas constituting contemporary global social and cultural theory. Though research on the specificity of the Canadian national situation, with attention to nationalism, national institutions, and icons, as well as to ongoing develop-ments in Canadian politics, remains important, the sense of the overall significance of national-cultural self-definition has faded away from the centre of critical conscious-ness in much the same way that it has tended to disappear more generally from public consciousness in the global era. The sense of cultural belatedness that haunted Canadian




scholars and policy-makers alike in the decades following World War II, beginning with the work of figures such as Innis and Grant, and which provided such fruitful terrain for critical research in both literary and cultural studies, has given way to a confident isochronic—that is to say, a world in which advanced and belated spaces have given way to a shared temporal terrain—cultural narrative: Canada no longer has to play cultural catch-up, because the whole world now occupies the same global terrain. Some crit-ics have warned against the retirement of the narrative of national belatedness and a too-quick and too-easy adoption of the global present as the new landscape in which analyses of Canada take place (Szeman, “Isochronic”). Stephen Crocker, for example, has challenged the notion of Canadian synchronicity by focusing on the various time signatures and developmental statuses still operative within Canada itself. His work on Newfoundland traces out the consequences of this “belatedness” but moves away from any claims about the purity or special legitimacy of local cultural autonomy. Others have replaced a nostalgia for a “lost” Canadian culture with tactical inquiries into how a kind of minor, local Canadianness is always already in the process of producing and repro-ducing itself. Such critics are uninterested in pursuing a homogeneous national mythol-ogy, but seek out and describe localities that are at once within and beyond any working definition of what it means to “be” Canadian. Ioan Davies, for example, has attempted to think the specificity of Toronto as a unique interweaving of particular architectural and political histories, in order to propose a criticism that finds its way into the especially challenging and fragmented totality of the contemporary city. Lily Cho’s cultural his-tory of small-town Chinese-Canadian food also bears mentioning here as an exemplary attempt to weave the particular and the universal within the space-time of a national (but in no way homogenous) locality. In its best forms, what cultural critics are hoping to achieve through their work is no longer the production of a distinct Canadian culture, but to challenge the mechanisms through which culture is used, whether in conjunction with nationalism or not, to sustain configurations of power that undergird globaliza-tion’s expansion of social and economic divisions and the production of precarity across the globe.

In addition to the above, three areas stand out in which Canadians are making espe-cially significant contributions to the study of culture today. The first is in the study of popular culture in Canada, an area of research exemplified by Susie O’Brien and Szeman’s Popular Culture: A User’s Guide (3rd ed., 2013), which has been widely used in introductory cultural studies classes across the country. O’Brien and Szeman offer an overview of theories and concepts important to the analysis of contemporary cul-ture, drawing on Canadian films (e.g., Waydowntown), television advertising (e.g., the Molson’s “Rant” ad), music (e.g., the class politics of Céline Dion’s music), and cul-tural practices (how and why people visit Tim Hortons or Starbucks). Other impor-tant works on Canadian popular culture include Geoff Pevere and Greig Dymond’s Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey (1996), Lynne van Luven and Priscilla Walton’s Pop Can: Popular Culture in Canada (1999), Joan Nicks and Jeannette Sloniowski’s Slippery Pastimes: Reading the Popular in Canadian Culture (2002), and Garry Sherbert, Annie Gérin, and Sheila Petty’s Canadian Cultural Poesis: Essays on

AQ: Please revise the sentence by avoiding repetition of words “ have given way”.




Canadian Culture (2006). While television viewing practices have undergone signifi-cant shifts that might have undercut their national bases, there have nevertheless been a number of recent studies focused on Canadian television, including Serra Tinic’s On Location: Canada’s Television Industry in a Global Market (2005), a study of television production in Vancouver in the context of globalization, Marusya Bociurkiw’s Feeling Canadian: Television, Nationalism, and Affect (2011), an assessment of affect and nation-alism on the small screen, and Michele Byers’s Growing Up DeGrassi: Television, Identity and Youth Cultures (2005), on the DeGrassi series, one of the country’s most successful TV exports. While the study of Canadian cinema has generally remained within the traditions of film studies, the Canadian Cinemas book series, edited by Bart Beaty and Will Straw, has allowed cultural studies scholars to offer their own pointed and original analyses of specific films in the Canadian canon (e.g., Darren Wershler on Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg and Johanne Sloan on Joyce Wieland’s The Far Shore).

A second area in which Canadian cultural studies researchers have distinguished themselves is in the examination of the politics of literary institutions and the status and function of literature at the present time. One of the key institutions for this work has been the University of Guelph’s TransCanada Institute (2007–13), founded by Smaro Kamboureli. The goal of the Institute was “to initiate, facilitate, and produce collabora-tive research on the institutional and disciplinary structures, methodologies, peda-gogies, and contexts that shape the production and study of Canadian literature and culture in Canada, as well as globally” (TransCanada Institute); research from the team of scholars associated with TransCanada include Kit Dobson and Kamboureli’s edited volume Producing Canadian Literature (2013). Julie Rak’s ongoing work on the com-plex politics of autobiography in Canada, starting with the collection Auto/biography in Canada: Critical Directions (2005), has resulted most recently in Boom!: Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (2013), a monograph that treats contemporary memoir as a consumer product generated by the publishing industry.4 Finally, Sarah Brouillette, in Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2011), has explored the trade in postcolonial literature and the careers of its most prominent authors. The primary way in which these approaches can be differentiated from treatments of similar themes in literary studies is the much closer attention to the production, reception, and circula-tion of texts; such analyses understand literature as belonging to a cultural market that continues to expand in scope and scale.

There have also been strong and unique contributions in the broad area of cultural theory, including Eric Cazdyn’s The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness (2012), Peter Ives’s award-winning Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School (2006), Ian Angus’s Identity and Justice (2008), Davide Panagia’s The Political Life of Sensation (2009), and Matthew Flisfeder’s The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Zizek’s Theory of Film (2012), among many oth-ers. What characterizes the strongest contributions of Canadian researchers to areas of theory that draw on and relate to cultural studies is the analysis of the links between power, politics, and culture in the period of neoliberal globalization. Cultural studies scholars have interrogated the specific contributions made by contemporary visual




arts to the political challenges to globalization, as reflected in J. Keri Cronin and Kirsty Robertson’s collection, Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture and Activism in Canada (2011), and Dobson and Áine McGlynn’s Transnationalism, Activism, Art (2013). They have also engaged in a broad examination of the causes and consequences of global-ization, from Nick Dyer-Witheford’s Cyber-Marx (1999) to Catriona Sandilands’s The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (1999), which explores gender, sexuality, and environmental politics. The new directions in which cul-tural studies in Canada is heading includes the work of the Petrocultures research group at the University of Alberta, which addresses the significance of oil, energy, and natural resources for contemporary practices of social and cultural life—a return after a long detour to the analyses of resource cultures, initiated in the work of Innis.

Cultural studies in Canada remains a vibrant and expanding field, despite a number of institutional limits embedded within the Canadian university system. The first of these is the result of the current funding crisis, which has blocked the creation or expansion of cultural studies programs. There also remains a stubborn divide between research in anglophone and francophone communities, a gap that is difficult to bridge, even though there have been attempts to do so (for example, the collection Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader [Mookerjea et al.] explicitly puts research on French and English Canada into dialogue with each other, as did a special session at the 2009 Canadian Association of Cultural Studies conference). Whether this gap is something that can be overcome in the near future—along with an increased engagement with First Nations issues, ideas, and cultural objects—remains to be seen; at present, there is (for instance) almost no incentive or professional reward for anglophone scholars to plunge into work published in Québécois journals. Finally, if too great a focus on the nation was once a worry, the gradual disappearance of the nation as a key element of cultural studies research in Canada is equally troubling. In their call for a “critical international cultural studies,” Akbar Abbas and John Nguyet Erni suggest that an important task for research-ers in the field is to “render visible the nationalist assumptions behind nation-based and area-based work” (2), whether one works in the metropole or the periphery. However, they also argue for the need to engage in an “intervention into a state of unevenness in the flow and impact of knowledge” (10). In recent years, research in cultural studies in Canada may have grown too comfortable with the power of American, British, German, and French academic industries to define the terms of debate. Even in the global era, for contemporary scholars it is perhaps worth revisiting some of the energies that defined earlier work in Canadian cultural studies in order once again to animate the field and to give it new critical and political direction and purpose.

Notes

1. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham—what became known as “The Birmingham School”—was founded in 1964, and is frequently referenced as the birthplace of academic cultural studies. Founded by




Richard Hoggart, some of the most important thinkers in cultural studies have been asso-ciated with the CCCS at various points in its life, including Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Angela McRobbie, and Jackie Stacey.

2. The reference here is to Benjamin’s provocative claim in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule” (257).

3. For example, in Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant (1984), Arthur Kroker identifies a unique modality of Canadian cultural discourse (a response to tech-nological change that is marked by an oscillation between celebration and restraint) that emerges in the work of these theorists.

4. See Chapter 5 by Wunker, and Chapter 43 by Rak in this volume.

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Cultural Studies in Canada: Past, Present and Future

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