Dykes on Mykes - York University

TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies
www.yorku.ca/topia
Editor: Jody Berland (York University).
Guest Editor: Peter van Wyck (Concordia University).
Book Review Editor: Kate Eichhorn (The New School).
Associate Book Review Editor: Peter van Wyck (Concordia University).
Assistant Editor: Mike R. Hunter (Cape Breton University).
Editorial Assistants: Margo Gouley, Steven Logan, Rob Kerford.
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Website: Roberta Buiani.
Advisory Board: Rober Babe (University of Western Ontario) Blake Fitzpatrick (Ryerson University), Barbara Godard
(York University), Kate Eichhorn (The New School), Bob Hanke (York University), Ilan Kapoor (York University), Shahnaz
Khan (Wilfrid Laurier University), Cate Sandilands (York University), Roger Simon (Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education), Peter van Wyck (Concordia University), Andrew Wernick (Trent University).
Editorial board: Charles R. Acland (Concordia University), Ien Ang (University of Western Sydney), Ian Angus (Simon
Fraser University), Robert Babe (University of Western Ontario), Bruce Barber (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design),
Darin Barney (McGill University), Alison Beale (Simon Fraser University), Nandi Bhatia (University of Western Ontario),
Bruce Braun (City University of New York), Marcus Breen (Northeastern University), Jenny Burman (McGill University),
Beverley Diamond (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Jill Didur (Concordia University), Michael Dorland (Carleton
University), Greg Elmer (Ryerson University), L. M. Findlay (University of Saskatchewan), Murray Forman (Northeastern
University), Michael Gardiner (University of Western Ontario), Noreen Golfman (Memorial University of Newfoundland),
Line Grenier (Université de Montreal), Lawrence Grossberg (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Alison Hearn
(University of Western Ontario), Lisa Henderson (University of Massachusetts), Audrey Kobayashi (Queen’s University,
Peter Kulchyski (University of Manitoba), Ian McKay (Queen’s University), Katherine McKittrick (Queen’s University),
Meaghan Morris (Lingnan University, Hong Kong), Liz Philipose (University of California Riverside), Christine Ramsay
(University of Regina), Sharon Rosenberg (University of Alberta), Kim Sawchuk (Concordia University), Bart Simon
(Concordia University), Jennifer Daryl Slack (Michigan Technological University), Jonathan Sterne (McGill University),
Will Straw (McGill University), Imre Szeman (McMaster University), Charlotte Townsend Gault (University of British
Columbia), Anne Whitelaw (University of Alberta), Handel Kashope Wright (University of British Columbia).
Cover: Krista Hansen, Eleven-seventeen.
Cover Image: The Winged Red Gopher of Prairie Socialism, 2005 by David Geary
2’x3’ inkjet banner print made from original 11”x17” mixed media artwork (see description page 4).
TOPIA is published in Canada by Wilfrid Laurier University Press and Cape Breton University Press.
The journal gratefully acknowledges assistance from the Faculty of Graduate Studies, the Graduate Program in
Communication and Culture, the Associate Vice President (Research and Innovation), Faculty of Environmental Studies
and Office of the Dean, Faculty of Arts, York University; CBU Press; and Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Communication and
Design, Graduate Studies and Associate VP Academic, Ryerson University.
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© 2008 TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies
Issue no. 20, Fall 2008
ISSN 1206-0143 (Print), ISSN 1916-0194 (Online)
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Number Twenty - Fall 2008
Articles
5
James F. Cosgrave and Patricia Cormack
Disenchanted Wonder: Collecting Canadian Identity through the CBC “Seven Wonders of Canada” Project
23
Lianne McTavish
The Cultural Production of Pregnancy:
Bodies and Embodiment at a New Brunswick Abortion Clinic
43
Robin Lathangue
George Grant and the Impulse to Carnival
65
Camille Hernandez-Ramdwar
Feteing as Cultural Resistance? The Soca Posse in the Caribbean Diaspora
93
Randy Innes
Contemporary Presents: The Canadian War Museum’s Afghanistan—A Glimpse of War and the Unfinished Business of Representation
109
Dina Georgis
Moving Past Ressentiment: War and the State of Feminist Freedom
129
Roddey Reid
Bullying in U.S. Public Culture: Or, Gothic Terror in the Full Light of Day
Feature Section: Activism in Archives
151
155
167
183
Kathy Garay and Christl Verduyn
Introduction
Aritha van Herk
Ardently Archiving
Anouk Lang
Creative Advocates: Art, Commitment and Canadian Literary History
Janice Gurney
Evidence of Activism in the Greg Curnoe Archives
199
Mél Hogan
Dykes on Mykes: Podcasting and the Activist Archive
Offering
217
Sharon Rosenberg
History, Memory and MtF Transsexual Activism:
A Review of Screaming Queens (and a retort to Margaret Wente)
Review Essay
225
Peter Conlin
The Pragmatics and the Promise of Working with and Not for: Policy and Canadian Artist-run Culture
Reviews
231
Joel McKim
Expressions of Memory in Canadian Photographic Art
235
Laura Ishiguro
Stories of Stories: Examining Ethnography through Biography
238
Nilanjana Deb
Of Wordarrows and Memory Wars
241
David Brian Howard
Bakhtin and Benjamin: Reforging Radical Politics and Ethics
244
Ian Mosby
History from the Bottomless Cup: The Culture of Donuts in Postwar Canada
247
Gabrielle Slowey
Manufacturing Consent? People and Policy-making in the Arctic
250
Jonathan Warren
This Little Comic Went to Market, This Little Comic Stayed Home
254
Darren Wershler
Fair Deal or No Deal
257
Notes on Contributors
TOPIA regrets the delay in publication of this issue, which is due to a labour dispute at
York University. Consult our website for missing abstracts or translations.
About the cover: The Winged Red Gopher of Prairie Socialism, 2005, is one of thirty-one original
poster images The Great Saskatchewan Socialist Utopia—that never was. This is a solo exhibition
by David Geary, A Mendel Gallery, Saskatoon, SK, exhibit travelling throughout Saskatchewan
until the end of 2010. The images were inspired by specific Soviet posters from the postrevolutionary period; they have been “cartoonized” and “Saskatchewanized” to comment on
modern-day regional political, environmental and social issues in a satirical way.
TOPIA 20 James F. Cosgrave and Patricia Cormack
Disenchanted Wonder: Collecting Canadian
Identity through the CBC “Seven Wonders
of Canada” Project
abstract
This paper examines the recent Seven Wonders of Canada project conducted by
Canada’s “official broadcaster,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).
This project sought to collect Canadian identity by inviting expert judges and its
audience to collect essentially Canadian “things.” By analyzing the unfolding of
the project, we found that while it was broadly successful in terms of participation,
it also generated audience resistance because it imposed a rational-legal and elitist
administration designed to socialize Canadian self-desire. Ultimately we found
that instead of generating “wonder,” the project generated disenchantment and
the ritual reinscription of CBC as official and appropriate object of Canadian
desire.
Résumé
Ce manuscrit se penche sur la compétition Seven Wonders of Canada [Les sept
merveilles du Canada], organisée par Radio-Canada, le radiodiffuseur public
national du Canada. En substance, un panel de juges et le grand public étaient
conviés à une quête de l’identité canadienne, à travers la recherche de lieux et
d’objets typiquement canadiens. Notre analyse montre qu’en dépit du succès de
participation de l’émission, le projet s’est butté à une résistance du public, en raison
du carcan rationnel-légal et élitiste choisi par les organisateurs, et de la socialisation
surplombante du désir de soi canadien qui lui est sous-jacente. En dernière analyse,
le projet a plutôt produit du désenchantement que de l’ « émerveillement »,
tout en menant à une ré-inscription rituelle du radiodiffuseur public comme
l’objet officiel et recommandé du désir canadien.
¤
A nation is an association of reasonable beings united in a peaceful sharing of
the things they cherish; therefore, to determine the quality of a nation, you must
consider what those things are....
Saint Augustine of Hippo, quoted at beginning of The Royal Commission of National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences or The Massey Report (1951)
TOPIA 20
[T]here is in the life of the collector a dialectical tension between the poles of
disorder and order.... For a true collector the whole background of an item adds up
to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.
Walter Benjamin (1968)
In the above passages, both Augustine and Benjamin raise the issue of what it
means to collect things. Saint Augustine is found (1,521 years after his death)
authorizing the 1951 Massey Report that recommended the Canadian state take
more direct responsibility for identifying and collecting the “cherished” cultural
objects and practices of the nation. In reflecting on unpacking his library, Benjamin
formulates the act of collecting as an impossible desire to impose order on our
world, one that projects onto its objects a metaphysical inevitability of belonging to
our collection. We bring these two speakers together here in order to examine the
recent Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) “Seven Wonders of Canada”
project that set out to collect Canada’s most essential “things” and thereby collect
(or re-collect) national identity. What is the nature of this national project of selfcollection and what does it say about the relation between CBC and its attempt
to order Canada’s identity? How does this ordering both repress the political,
historical reality of the nation state as the violent administration of people and
space, while offering its audience an entertaining and inspiring spectacle? How
did the audience respond to this project through contestation and the articulation
of its own collecting practices and conceptions of Canadian things?
The Seven Wonders of Canada project began in the summer of 2007 and was
broadcast on the English language CBC radio and television services. The project
was conceived in response to a New 7 Wonders of the World project (2007) and
invited Canadians (that is, those who listen to and watch English language CBC)
to participate in collecting and selecting Canada’s seven “most wonderful places”
(CBC 2008a). These “places” were to become broadly interpreted to include
“things” like the igloo, the canoe and the CN Tower. The rules and parameters of
the project were set out by CBC producers, and involved a panel of expert judges
as well as the participation of the CBC audience. As we will discuss, the initial
design, implementation and the framing of the results of the Seven Wonders
project reveal a set of tensions in CBC’s attempt to manage collective collecting
desire. While these contradictions threatened the coherence and authority of
the project (and even at times made it appear absurd), we suggest that they also
reinscribed the apparent necessity of managerial, expert and bureaucratic—what
Max Weber would call “disenchanted”—control over “official” Canadian identity.
For Weber, the rational-legal management of modern life by way of state and
bureaucracy functions to kill off all that is wondrous or mysterious because its
goal is calculated administration (Weber 1946). In other words, the sensuous
and magical desires that animate individual, private collecting as formulated by
Benjamin, run counter to the bureaucratic and rationalist formulations of national
identity invoked by the CBC producers who attempted to manage this project.
We will show that the CBC audience, while participating in the Seven Wonders
project in great numbers, both criticized and subverted the project by dismantling
TOPIA 20
Hence, we argue that while the Seven Wonders project aimed to invoke wonder,
it ultimately produced disenchantment and incoherence because the mechanisms
(the form) of management came to overshadow the sensuous and magical
practice of collecting (the content). In short, while the project’s stated goal was
to “encourage a national dialogue about our country,” it rather ritualistically
reaffirmed the administrative-symbolic role of CBC as necessary arbiter and
collector of things Canadian. Our paper thus points to and develops a Canadian
cultural dynamic: along with the creation of cherished things, statist-nationalist
attempts at enchantment and sacralization also produce popular cultural
consternation at, resistance to and mockery of such exercises. Consequently, the
statist-administrative projects of enchantment (e.g., creating culture or a people)
need to be constantly invoked. Recent invocations have borrowed generic features
from the popular reality-contest television genre, with the focus or objective being
the collecting and inventorying of Canadianness. In 2004, CBC sought to produce
Canadian charisma through its The Greatest Canadian project. In 2007, it began
to test the nation’s IQ in its various Test the Nation programs, utilizing a format
that was developed and first used in the Netherlands in 2001 and which has
become popular in many other countries. The programs aired have included: Test
the Nation (March 2007), Watch Your Language (September 2007), Trivia ( January
2008) and Test the Nation: Sports (May 2008). Along with the explicit nationaleducational objective, these projects attempt to produce Canadian culture and
(national) identity through the socializing of Canadian desire.
and displaying its disenchanting logic. Some audience members participated in
the project by questioning the authority of CBC as a legitimate organizer of their
own collective self-desire. We take this interest on their part as one that recognizes
an important historical reality—that because so much of Canadian identity has
been managed by the state since at least the 1950s, agents such as CBC should
be directly challenged in order to draw attention to a long taken-for-granted
aspect of living as a Canadian. The “wonder” these disruptions injected into the
discourse celebrated the excess, confusion and disorder that Benjamin identifies
as an inherent, but repressed, aspect of the practice of collecting. The disruptions
also demonstrate an aspect of Canadian popular culture that is often found in
comedy programs such as This Hour has 22 Minutes and The Royal Canadian Air
Farce (both of which air on the CBC), namely, mockery of Canadian officialdom
and the refusal to take mandated Canadianness too seriously.
TOPIA 20
As we take Canadianness to be an interpretive “thing,” we aim here to locate a
version of Canadianness by paying attention to the practices of making it visible:
as the Seven Wonders project itself attempted to make, among other things,
Canadian “wonders” visible, we treat the very project as a version, or performance,
of Canadianness. We also suggest that the modern nation-state be understood
as a practice of collecting. It is what Benedict Anderson famously described as
an “imagined community,” an abstract community that must continuously be
invoked—collected and recollected—in the imagination of its members in order
to survive. Following Benjamin, Anderson defines national self-identity as the
belief in the fated socio-political collecting and ordering of a people in a territory
and history: “It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny” (Anderson
1983: 19). Put another way, the things that the nation collects as its own cannot
seem arbitrary, but must appear as intrinsic and natural manifestations of a people.
If anything and everything may be collected under the rubric of “who we are,”
then identity has no meaning. But, what then makes a people a people? Clearly,
chance and disorder must somehow be transformed into destiny and order. Hence,
the interest in a question like “What is Canadian?” can only be asked by making
the assumption that there is already a “we” that might constitute something like
“collective Canadianness.” Further, the asking of such a question assumes an
Other or Others—those not us—to which our “we-ness” stands over and against,
but which “we” nevertheless require to buttress our sense of who we are. Our
“we-ness” then depends on the making and reaffirmation of symbolic boundaries.
Anthropologist Mary Douglas put it thus: “The idea of society is a powerful image.
It is potent in its own right to control or to stir men to action. This image has
form; it has external boundaries, margins, internal structure. Its outlines contain
power to reward conformity and repulse attack” (Douglas 1966: 141).
Douglas’s work reiterates Emile Durkheim’s structuralist assertion that all
collectives represent, reinscribe and indeed bring themselves into existence
through their particular practices of naming, collecting and ordering things.
However, collecting does more than ritualistically reinscribe the epistemological
and ontological assumptions of a collective. It is also a particular political practice
in itself. In other words, collecting does more than tell us about the how the
collective orders itself. It also tells us about the ongoing attempt to manage inherent
contradictions of order, desire and identity. Hence structures of classification
can be taken to arise as symptoms of these contradictions rather than as just
solving the problem of order, as Durkheim would have it. Scholars who discuss
collecting also locate control, order, even violence in this practice. Naomi Schor is
more explicit on this point than Benjamin: [A] collection is composed of objects
wrenched out of their context of origins and reconfigured into the self-contained,
self-referential context of the collection itself ” (Schor 1994: 256). To recognize
this political observation in reference to the nation-state is to recognize Weber’s
definition of the state as the legitimate site of the administration of violence—
both physical and symbolic (Weber 1946: 78). Pierre Bourdieu elaborates on this
point:
If the state is able to exert symbolic violence, it is because it incarnates
itself simultaneously in objectivity, in the form of specific organizational
structures and mechanisms, and in subjectivity in the form of mental
structures and categories of perception and thought. By realizing itself
in social structures and in the mental structures adapted to them, the
instituted institution makes us forget that it issues out of a long series of
acts of institution (in the active sense) and hence has all the appearances of
the natural. (Bourdieu 1999: 56-57)
TOPIA 20
These “collective representations” express “the ways in which the group thinks
of itself in its relationships with the objects which affect it” (Durkheim 1982:
40). Things that affect the group are what Augustine would refer to as cherished
things; for Durkheim these things are those which have been invested with
collective meaning and thereby sacralized (Durkheim 1965). For both Durkheim
and Douglas this also means that it is not just what collectives collect, but the
system of classification used that tells us how that collective thinks. The various
objects and symbols it collects must be considered within the logic of the system
of which they are a part. For members of any collective, this underlying logic of
classification becomes a taken-for-granted, common sense way of understanding
the world and hence is largely invisible to them. To follow up on this observation,
it can be assumed that the classification system used in an organization like CBC
will tell us about the taken-for-granted world view it promotes. Durkheim also
argued that collective representations, appearing in a variety of social institutions
and practices, do not survive if they are not ritually reaffirmed (Durkheim 1965).
Ritual does not support identity from the outside, as an epiphenomenal add-on,
but is constitutive of identity, necessary for its appearance and support. From
his point of view, the CBC’s Seven Wonders project should be studied as both a
system for organizing and constituting identity, and a ritual enactment of it.
TOPIA 20
10
Bourdieu invites us to recall that one cannot separate the real governing and
managing of people (collecting and organizing them in space, law, policies) from
the more abstract or symbolic collecting and organizing of national identity. In
other words, we cannot separate the “objective” historical practices of, for example,
“collecting” First Nations peoples into reservations or residential schools from the
“subjective”practices of collecting a notion of Canandianness—the latter functioning
as a taken-for-granted colonial ideology that justified the former. With the official
adoption of multiculturalism in the 1960s, the interplay between the concrete and
symbolic management of Canadians becomes far more subtle (relative to these
earlier practices), but no less “a long series of acts of institution” (ibid). Bourdieu
would remind us here that CBC is an administrative arm of the state. Like private
broadcasters with which it competes, CBC provides entertainment, sports and
other cultural fare to Canadian audiences. While it is not an organ or mouthpiece
of the government or government bureaucracy directly, its broadcasting mandate
issues directly from state cultural and administrative policy. Its declared purpose
is to protect, invoke and manage identity. The original Broadcasting Act of 1932
made this mandate explicit and it has been reiterated in all versions of the Act up
to and including the currently effective 1991 Broadcasting Act, which states that
CBC should, “be predominantly and distinctively Canadian,” “reflect Canada and
its regions to national and regional audiences,” “actively contribute to the flow
and exchange of cultural expression,” “be in English and in French,” “contribute
to shared national consciousness and identity,” and “reflect the multicultural and
multiracial nature of Canada” (Broadcasting Act, 1991).
The Seven Wonders project needs to be understood in direct relation to the
1991 Broadcasting Act. The goal of the project was to help generate “distinctively”
Canadian cultural objects, present all regions to the whole country (while preserving
regional difference), encourage debate, be multicultural and multiracial, yet also
preserve two distinct French and English systems. Oddly, CBC is to “contribute to
shared national consciousness and identity,” but it is to do so without inviting the
two official language groups to talk with each other. While the initial Broadcasting
Act had described a unified bilingual broadcasting system that would incorporate
both French and English, it was soon replaced by a system of “two solitudes”
whereby the two systems would function in complete isolation from each other
(Nesbitt-Larking 2007). Hence, the Seven Wonders project was to “encourage
a national dialogue about our country” without those Canadians who constitute
the sister francophone Radio-Canada audience. This issue of representing the
opinions of those not able to participate in the project arises again later when
CBC is forced to justify its use of three judges to assign the final seven wonders.
“Please stay tuned. We are experiencing technical difficulties”
As it was initially presented to the CBC audience, the project was to evoke nominations and pitches (justifications for each nomination from the nominator),
debate and voting from the audience. The list of the most popular fifty-two
nominations was then to be handed over to three judges who would make the
final choice of Canada’s seven wonders. The criteria for the nomination and pitch
of each of the wonders, the voting procedures and the panel of three judges were
all set out at the beginning with little justification or explanation about how this
structure came to be, other than its origin in the imagination of CBC producers.
Once underway the project became mired in its own workings, justification and
administration, and was quietly modified as it progressed toward its conclusion.
These ongoing changes were presented to the audience as necessitated by
inessential technical issues, rather than by the administrative assumptions of the
project itself.
TOPIA 20
The Seven Wonders project was initiated with an articulated goal of locating
and celebrating Canada’s seven wonders. It was run through both the (English
language) CBC radio show Sounds Like Canada and the (English language) CBC
television national news broadcast The National. Administering the project through
both the radio and television services not only expanded the potential audience
participation, it also shored up the authority of the project by linking it to the sober
and official national news (along with the iconic anchor and chief correspondent,
Peter Mansbridge). While the project was to be managed on Sounds Like Canada,
the final deliberation and decision of the judges was to be broadcast during The
National. The project itself was the brainchild of CBC producer Ian Clayton, who
explained that he came up with the idea after hearing about a New 7 Wonders
of the World project (N7W). He felt that Canada had so many wondrous things
that it deserved its own exclusive list (CBC 2008a). The CBC Seven Wonders
project was modelled on N7W, with a few notable exceptions. Both projects
invited popular participation to choose natural and artificial wonders. (In the
case of the N7W project, the natural and artificial contests were run separately,
whereas in the CBC project they were mixed.) In the N7W project, the criteria
for selection remained broad, while in the case of the CBC project, they were
more specific. Both involved a panel of expert judges, but in the case of N7W
the judges narrowed the nominations and then returned their list back to online
voters, while the CBC judges made the final decision. Indeed, it was a central part
of the N7W project that the people of the world would choose its wonders, with
the goal of overcoming regional and national boundaries. According to the N7W
website, the “citizens of the world” would participate in the “world’s first ever
global election” (N7W 2008). Unlike the CBC Seven Wonders project, N7W
final wonders were presented without ranking and as they depended on the
popular vote, could not be readjusted to ensure the “diversity of location.” The
issue of “diversity of location” would come to dog the CBC project.
11
The project began with the announcement of the names of the three judges and
the criteria governing the process for the selection of wonders. The criteria to be
used by the audience and by the judges were announced to the CBC audience and
posted on the website:
1. Essential Canadianness—historically significant, character filled, valued;
2. Originality/uniqueness of the pitch and place;
3. Spectacular physical site or amazing human creation;
4. Ability to inspire; and
5. Range within the final seven—diversity of location, type of wonder.
(CBC 2007a)
The three judges were announced as Ra McGuire, Roy MacGregor and Roberta
L. Jamieson. Since the criteria for choosing these judges are not stated, the CBC
audience implicitly is invited to turn to their CBC biographies as after-the-fact
justifications for the composition of this panel.
TOPIA 20
12
The presumed expertise of the judges is supported by the social and cultural
capital they have generated through their production of Canadian symbolic goods
(Bourdieu 1993); their achievements and identities within Canadian culture are
recognized and made official here through their designation as judges. CBC has
sanctioned them as arbiters and representatives of Canadianness.
McGuire is a musician and member of the rock band, Trooper. The short CBC
biography of McGuire implies, but does not argue, that his geographic experience
touring for three decades, and writing songs on the road, make him a good choice
as a Wonders judge. McGuire is framed by his participation in the production and
dissemination of Canadian popular culture and personal experience of Canada
through decades of touring. It is hinted that his extensive touring of every pocket
of the Canadian landscape has influenced his music. McGuire’s expertise rests, as
least in part, in the idea that his music is inherently Canadian, confirmed perhaps
by his penning the song “Real Canadians.” When placed in the context of North
American radio airplay in the late 1970’s and early 80’s, however, Trooper’s
music is largely indistinguishable from the generic brand of commercial rock
performed by American bands such as Foreigner. Presumably, his position on
the panel is justified by the CBC mandate to protect and encourage Canadian
culture. But this circular mandate serves Canadianness without having to define
what is Canadian about cultural practices other than their geographic origin,
the citizenship of its authors, self-referential titles and consumers. McGuire also
serves, somewhat ironically, to justify the expert administration of the popular.
But again, problems of legitimacy arise. If the popular is by definition that which
does not require expert mediation and sanction—the popular being simply what
the “people” like—McGuire’s authority becomes oddly arbitrary.
Finally, judge Roberta L. Jamieson is presented by way of the longest and most
formal list of qualifications. Unlike the two white men who precede her on the
website, she is identified first by her Mohawk ethnicity, followed by her long
and impressive list of political and intellectual accomplishments: Chief of the
Six Nations, Chief Executive Officer of the National Aboriginal Achievement
Foundation, Ombudsman for the Province of Ontario, a law degree, honourary
degrees and a Harvard degree. Peculiarly, while Jamieson would be placed first
in an alphabetical list of judges, she is at the end. From the point of view of a
reader, we move then from McGuire, the “lightest” judge (who represents the
popular and folksy), to MacGregor, the “middle weight” judge (the journalistic
expert on Canadianness), to the “heavyweight,” Jamieson. We see in this listing a
discursive framing of social positions, from the popular to the official. This buildup to the weighty Jamieson also helps protect from an interpretation that she is
a double token—both as a woman and as an aboriginal (i.e., as a hollow gesture
toward inclusiveness). She is, after all, not just any woman or aboriginal. She
is, apparently, a person of firsts: “the first woman ever to head Canada’s most
populous reserve,” “the first woman to hold” the position of Ontario Ombudsman,
“the first non-parliamentarian to be appointed ex-officio member of a Special
House of Commons Committee on Indian Self-Government,” and “the first
Canadian aboriginal woman to earn a law degree.”
TOPIA 20
The second judge, Roy MacGregor, is a newspaper journalist and author who
discusses Canada and Canadian identity. His status as expert is justified partly
by the long list of national newspapers he has written for, and also by individual
authorship. The CBC website explains: “His new book Canadian, sets out to
explain Canada to Canadians” (CBC 2007b). This justification helps shore up
the notion that the audience participants will have their ideas collected, but that
the ideas will be judged, sorted and that most nominations will be discarded by
someone who knows Canadianness better than they (regardless of the popular
vote). The idea that Canada needs explaining to Canadians is a persistent
theme in the Canadian cultural landscape that serves to perpetuate the “crisis”
of identity. It has become a commonplace notion that “national identity is the
quintessential Canadian issue” (Lipset 1990: 42), a topic found in the work of
Canadian journalists (such as MacGregor), academics (Cook 1977) and artists
(Atwood 1970). Persistent concerns with Quebec’s possible separation and recent
debates about multiculturalism also suggest that, whatever Canadian identity is,
it is also in crisis. Since Canadian identity is often posited as “unfinished” (Cohen
2007), or framed in the language of “crisis,” such concerns with identity become
naturalized, and hence culturally productive. Whole industries are committed
to highlighting the ironic, futile and absurd nature of the Canadian search for
identity. This helps put CBC in an authoritative position to “solve” our identity
issues where others cannot.
13
Indeed, Jamieson is presented as a heroic figure who has overcome institutional
barriers of discrimination to acquire administrative power herself. It follows, by
the tone of this discussion, that these various institutions are thereby improved
by her power as an official now within them. In other words, her gender and her
ethnicity serve ritualistically to purify the practices and administrative authority
of these institutions (and also radically sever them from their discriminatory past).
By extension, the weighty Jamieson serves to justify the administration of popular
opinion in the Seven Wonders project. To resist her authority as judge is to
question the very goodness and rightness of women and aboriginals as authorities,
and to silence two social groups who have long been voiceless. Moreover, any
audience member who suspects tokenism is thrown back on the question of who
could possibly better deserve this position. In short, Jamieson is presented by way
of a rhetorical hat-trick: a list of official qualifications, historical oppression and
deep institutional affiliation. To read this woman’s biography cynically is to risk
questioning the good faith of CBC.
TOPIA 20
14
CBC audience members enthusiastically took up the Seven Wonders project and
were far from passive participants. During the period of nominations, pitches and
debates, some questioned the grounds of the criteria they were given, for example,
asking why these criteria were not open to debate. As the project unfolded, and
citizen participation was closed down in order for the judges to begin their
deliberations, anger over the management of their choices became manifest. Many
complaints were posted on the CBC website, most were critical of the project’s
design and handling; they repeatedly raised the issue of the judges overriding the
popular vote, the perceived paternalistic agenda, and a feeling of futility. As one
blogger put it: “Pure CBC. Canadian opinions, thoughts, concerns, and votes only
count when they coincide with the corporation’s social agendas.” Another said:
“This is a travesty. A joke without humour” (CBC 2008b). Other participants
used unofficial sites to inject some sought-after humour into the project. One
blogger, for example, raised the possibility of famously busty Canadian-born
actress, Pamela Anderson, as a “natural wonder.” Responses included the question
of whether Anderson should be counted as one wonder or two, and whether she
should be classified as a natural or artificial wonder. The blogs offered a democratic
forum that allowed citizens not just the opportunity to participate, but to sidestep
the official voice of CBC and its judges. As frivolous as such examples might
appear to the earnest project of determining Canada’s seven wonders, they point to
the dynamic cultural responses of the “people” to power and authority, a mocking
and carnivalesque rejoinder to officialdom’s seriousness (Bakhtin 1984).
During the period of open discussion, nomination and on-air debate, the term
“geographic correctness” emerged to acknowledge an evolving consensus among
the producers and judges that criterion No. 5 (“Range within the final seven—
diversity of location, type of wonder”) would require the imposition of spatial
evenness and spread of wonders on the Canadian map. While the notion of an
imposed and enforced diversity was treated with embarrassment by the CBC
hosts, it was formulated as a necessary evil for the reproduction of a sense of
Canada and Canadianness. This meant that the map of Canada—which formed
the backdrop and working surface for the final decision of the judges, broadcast
on The National—came to represent a literal and symbolic version of CBC’s
mandate of national identity achieved through ethnic and cultural diversity.
“We Truly Regret that You are Disappointed”:
Failing to Conclude and Blaming the Audience
I wonder how they picked the Judges.
I wonder why our votes didn’t count.
I wonder if Canadians will accept the Judge’s decision instead of the popular vote.
Blogger’s poem (CBC 2008a)
As the CBC Seven Wonders project drew to its “conclusion”—a conclusion
that, as we shall see, became infinitely deferred—tensions and contradictions
TOPIA 20
What then were the fifty-two places/things short-listed by popular audience
vote? Twenty-eight were natural phenomena, rather than strictly “places” (from
very general things like caribou herds, the prairie sky and Northern Lights, to
specific natural objects like the Bay of Fundy and Niagara Falls). There were
twenty engineering technologies (CN Tower, igloo, canoe, highways, a rail
tunnel, bridges, buildings, settlements, whole cities, inuksuk). Finally, there were
two monuments/road-side curiosities (the Vimy Ridge memorial on Canadian
land in France, and the largest Easter egg in the world), one food item (Montreal
bagel), and one trophy (Stanley Cup). Interestingly, while the definition of “places”
had expanded to include animal herds, skies and settlements, it was not expanded
to include “peoples.” (The only exception to this pattern was the nomination of
Nonosobasut Rock by a grade two class in Newfoundland. They provocatively
argued that this rock should be treated as a symbol of lost Beothuk peoples who
were extinguished during colonial contact.) Indeed, instead of treating places
as historical and political symbols, the list contains mostly natural wonders and
technological ones. And while the inclusion of so many technological wonders
may seem to point toward a more historical and political discourse, they fit nicely
into what Maurice Charland identifies as the Canadian practice of “technological
nationalism,” which celebrates the mediation of space by communication and
transportation technologies as a form of identity (Charland 2004). Mary Vipond
similarly argues that Canadian identity is not built on communications, but on
the “myth” or story of communications (Vipond 1992: xiii). Of course, CBC is
itself a prime example of such a technology which symbolically binds its audience
into a national whole by instantaneously overcoming space. This tradition of
technological nationalism nicely positions CBC to make itself the ultimate
referent of the Seven Wonders project.
15
TOPIA 20
16
within the project were becoming evident. The project was in one sense very
successful: online voting was reported at more than one million, with more than
25,000 nominations cast. However, the project was also hampered by audience
complaints and questions about the nature and structure of the project. One
common complaint was the issue of handing their debate and decision-making
power over to the judges (even though this process was clearly set out at the
beginning of the project), as the popular vote had been used, and could seemingly
continue to be used, to narrow the choices. One response to this problem was
for CBC broadcasters to insist repeatedly that the project was only an “exercise”
in generating Canadian debate, recognition and celebration of their wonders.
In other words, the final list was to be treated as secondary to the process.
Audience members had presumably begun to miss the point of the project and
had mistakenly fetishized and naturalized the contingent wonders as essential
and necessary. As Benjamin suggests of individual collectors, they had begun to
treat these wonders as sensuous real objects that could be meaningfully collected.
Again, this rhetoric of “exercise” focused attention back on the process itself and
the issue of the legitimacy of the expert judges. If it is only an exercise, why retain
the judges? What are they ensuring or guarding? After the project concluded,
CBC’s response to the problem of the judges was to issue two lists of wonders—
the judges’ list and the voters’. Ultimately these two problems of judgement and
exercise were solved by generating many more lists, including curiously—given
the stated mandate of national identity—regional lists.
Since these various tensions had become evident by the time the project was
coming to its climax, the televised broadcast of the judges’ final deliberation and
decision was fraught with tension. The three judges clearly were anxious and
defensive, as evidenced by the discussion on air (CBC 2007b). One sentiment
expressed by the judges was sheer relief that they were soon to be finished with
what had become a frustrating and futile exercise in which their authority had
been roundly questioned. After they had agreed on the official seven wonders,
one judge unenthusiastically said “Well, that’s it. I can live with it.” Another
judge responded—“I’m sure there’ll be many who can’t. This is no fun. Reaching
a conclusion is not a happy moment. It’s a ridiculous notion to try to encapsulate
this country in seven notions.” He quickly recanted, saying “I’ve enjoyed every
second of it,” insisting that he had learned lots of “information” and that the project
was indeed “fun” and succeeded in “capturing the imagination of the country.”
Together the three judges insisted that they were overwhelmed with wonders
(“Starting with every individual who has chosen to make Canada their home,”
added the aboriginal judge without apparent irony); that they were impressed
with the level of participation (asserting, with gross inaccuracy, that it was higher
than many federal elections1); and that it “usually takes a crisis” to generate such
enthusiasm (unmistakably a reference to francophone Quebecers who had not
been invited to participate, but who represented an ongoing threat to national
unity). Ultimately, the judges and the hosts fell back on the cliché of the humble
Canadian, asserting that the project generated “bragging rights” for a population
hesitant to brag about itself (other than, of course, bragging about its humility)
and that the list represented a “classic Canadian compromise” (in other words, it
represented its process).
The actual televised exercise was, if not directly or manifestly, designed as a visual
lesson for its audience. Viewers were initially confronted with a blank map of
Canada, much like the blank chalk board students find in a classroom. The various
wonders were named and identified by visual images, contributing thereby to the
classification and ordering of Canadian things and places. The even placement of
the wonders on the map (over which the judges agonized, vacillated and traded
choices) served to instruct Canadians about the administered spatial uniformity
of the wonders, and visually reaffirmed the notion of Canada as a bounded place
(“this is where ‘we’ are”) containing these orderly wonders. Hence, the wonders
became anointed collective representations of orderly Canadianness. Bourdieu
explains the ritualistic importance of such official “mapping” thus:
Through its implicit teaching of geography, as well as a sanitized history,
the project made visible an accumulation, dissemination and recirculation of
informational capital. Put another way, the exercise was a didactic lesson in
constituting a “legitimate national culture” (Bourdieu 1999: 62). Richard Day
makes a similar point in his discussion of how cartography and geography are used
in the Canadian administration of multiculturalism, arguing that this ongoing
administration requires a concrete and visual “spatialization of the concept of
diversity” (Day 1998: 58) that “must be arranged according to a conspicuously
planned pattern” (60). From within this pedagogic and administrative context, the
judges’ seven wonders (carefully distributed evenly across the map to re-present
pre-existing imaginary geographic regions) were announced: the canoe (classified
as representative of Canada as a whole, but pinned onto the map in Ontario), the
igloo (the “North”), Niagara Falls (Ontario), Old Quebec City (Quebec), Pier 21
(Atlantic region), the prairie skies (the prairies or “West”) and the Rockies (the
west coast).
After the project had officially ended, CBC radio collected its collecting project
thus:
When we launched our quest for the Seven Wonders of Canada, we knew
it would be difficult to narrow the list to seven. It was even more difficult
TOPIA 20
The state concentrates, treats, and redistributes information and, most of
all effects a theoretical unification. Taking the vantage point of the Whole,
of society in its totality, the state claims responsibility for all operations
of totalization ... and of objectivation, through cartography (the unitary
representation of space from above).... (Bourdieu 1999: 61)
17
than we’d anticipated. The number and passion of your nominations was
overwhelming. As exciting and challenging as it’s been to name Seven
Wonders, more than anything we’re buoyed by the dialogue this campaign
has begun. On Sounds Like Canada and The National we plan to continue
this conversation about our country over the coming months. In the
meantime, we’ve compiled several alternative Canadian lists, inspired by
submissions. (CBC 2007c)
TOPIA 20
18
This raises a number of issues. There is no questioning of the design and administration of the project, which all raised important questions about CBC’s role
in generating and sustaining Canadian identity. The “difficulties” alluded to are
presented as technical (the number and passion of nominations), as if to suggest
that fewer nominations and less passionate ones would have solved the problems
inherent in the project. The website statement also says that “we’re buoyed by the
dialogue this campaign has begun.” The “we” in this statement could be read to
mean “we” as Canadians or “we” as CBC producers, but it seems to refer to the
latter, because in the rhetorical move of turning this dialogue back to Canadians
to pursue, the statement goes on to say that CBC will continue to mediate the
conversation. Unwittingly, this statement appears to articulate the point of the
project, which was to reinscribe CBC as a necessary institution itself. Finally, the
statement closes with the offering of more lists—wonders organized by provincial
and territorial boundaries, as well as animals, food and drink, people, roadside
attractions and views (i.e., an endless articulation of things, but as managed and
mediated by CBC).
The blog on The National website signed by executive producers for both the radio
and television shows, was even clearer that it should set the audience straight. It
read: “If you were disappointed with the Seven Wonders of Canada outcome,
please read on: We truly regret you are disappointed. In fact, that is the last thing
we wanted.” It goes on to explain that “what started as a modest project ... took
on a life of its own,” again appealing to the technical problem of managing the
sheer numbers of participants and voters. Quickly, however, the statement begins
to chide the audience for complaining about a process that it had implicitly condoned by its willing participation:
We had ... always made it clear the Seven Wonders ... would be decided by
our judges.... We think they did an excellent job at meeting key criteria of
this project, including creating a list that represents as many Canadians and
regions as possible. It’s why we felt we needed judges in the first place, to
try and level the playing field in a country with an uneven population base,
uneven internet access, and areas where a majority of Canadians don’t listen
or watch English radio or television and therefore wouldn’t be as likely to
participate.... We showed the judges grappling with their decisions. Anyone
who watched knows how difficult it was and how seriously they took their
responsibilities. (CBC 2008c)
Clearly the producers are arguing that they, CBC generally and the judges must
hold authority to vouchsafe representation, assuming the regional differences
will inevitably overshadow the capacity of conversation and dialogue to generate
extra-regional alliances. If conversation and the like cannot be trusted as methods
to generate identity and celebration of Canadianness, why were they invited in
the first place? Finally, the audience is characterized as childish, chauvinistic and
unappreciative of the hard work and goodwill of others. It concludes, by closing
with the same passive-aggressive tone in which it begins: “Having said all that, we
obviously feel terrible that such a project would lead, in some quarters, to anger.”
As Freud also argued, jokes are rooted in an infantile aggression toward social
order in general. Jokes are often indirectly aimed at institutions and organizations
that cannot be directly attacked due to their sacred status (702). There is
something childish about promoting Pamela Anderson as a Canadian wonder.
Anderson has become a famous icon for challenging the accepted boundaries of
clothing, modesty and good taste, as well as those of nature and technology. We
can imagine, with juvenile delight, our hapless panel of judges trying to figure
out where to pin her disproportionate, pornographic and cybernetic image on the
map of Canada. Freud would suggest that the cathartic release induced by the
Anderson joke is a product of its juxtaposition with the earnest, pedantic project
of CBC, the joke’s ultimate target. As every schoolchild recognizes, those who
seem more concerned with defending their own institutionalized authority than
cultivating in their students a genuine wonder, are the first targets of mockery and
subversion in the form of the obscene and excessive.
TOPIA 20
On this note about the apparent anger of Canadians, let us return the issue of
humour and it subversive capacity. The joking nomination of Pamela Anderson
as a wonder—is she one wonder or two? Is she a natural or artificial wonder?—
clearly references both her famously large breasts and her further technologically
aided enhancement of them. So, what makes these jokes funny? Certainly there is
nothing inherently funny about nominating an eye-catching actress as a wonder.
This joke is funny partly because it is absurd considered within the confines of the
project’s stated criteria. Anderson is not a “place” or “thing” except in the highly
sexualized idea of her as a site or object of corporeal pleasure. There is then a level
of aggression in this treatment of Anderson. Her body has become a “democratic”
site of the visual, onanistic pleasure of the whole heterosexual male world via the
global popularity of her television show, Baywatch. As a site of pleasure, Anderson’s
body indiscriminately and unpatriotically exceeds the boundaries of the nation
state, and this Canadian joke jealously repatriates and reorders her as our exclusive
object. At a misogynistic level, the joke sexually disciplines Anderson. It is what
Freud identified as a “smutty joke” that acts as a “denudation of a person of the
opposite sex” (Freud 1938: 694) and also allows the listener to be “bribed by the
easy gratification of his own libido” (695-96).
19
Conclusion
Nothing could better demonstrate the thesis of our discussion than consideration
of these official and unofficial blog entries. Taken together they explain why
it was necessary ritualistically to exclude the popular, unmediated objects of
collective self-desire, while ritualistically re-asserting the rational-legal, expert
administration of desire and identity. Indeed, the CBC blog entry also helps make
sense of the offering of endless lists by CBC at the end of the project. It is a kind
of symbolic violence that punishes the audience with an “If-you-want-populismyou-can-have-populism-until-you-choke-on-it” gesture. It threatens to drown
the audience in a meaningless and bottomless exercise, and inverts Benjamin’s
formulation of collecting as a sensuous, magical appreciation of things in our
world.
TOPIA 20
20
We began this discussion by proposing that the rational-legal administration of
desire and identity in the Seven Wonders project would risk killing off wonder
and enhancement by way of administration—that the form of the project
would come to overshadow the content, or “things.” We have found that and
more. At least in the case we have discussed here, such administration requires
Canadian desire to desire administration in itself as a disciplinary good. What
Canadians presumably are to learn from CBC’s Seven Wonders project is that
proper Canadian desire desires the mediation of CBC, including the periodic
ritual reinscription of the good of CBC into the hearts of its submitting audience.
We thus return to our opening insights from Augustine and Benjamin. Between
the “poles of disorder and order,” CBC must perpetually institute the Canadian
“people”; in so doing it must naturalize its own symbolic violence in its effort to be
Canada’s most “cherished thing.” But, given that collecting also involves the lusty
“thrill of acquisition” (Benjamin 1968: 60), as demonstrated by the Anderson joke,
Canadians have loudly asserted that they want to guard their objects and their
collecting desires from such statist and bureaucratic mediation.
Notes
The authors wish to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
1. According to Statistics Canada there were more than 13 million ballots cast in the
2004 federal election.
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21
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TOPIA 20 23
Lianne McTavish
The Cultural Production of Pregnancy:
Bodies and Embodiment at a
New Brunswick Abortion Clinic
Abstract
This article examines the interactions that occur every Tuesday morning in
front of the Morgentaler Clinic in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Anti-abortion
protestors, volunteer clinic escorts, abortion-seeking women, and members of
the public engage in debate outside of the clinic building. Far more is at stake,
however, than the legal right to abortion. According to the author, a longtime
clinic escort, national health policies, representations of embodied experience,
provincial regulations, abstract conceptions of the female body, and regional
identities combine to create a theatrical space of visibility around the clinic. There
a range of identities—matron, Maritimer, warrior, victim and superhero—are
performed as part of the cultural production of pregnancy.
¤
“If it’s not a baby then you’re not pregnant!” a male anti-abortion protestor shouts
at a woman about to enter the Morgentaler Clinic in Fredericton, New Brunswick.
His rhetoric insists that the terms “baby” and “pregnant” are inseparable: one
cannot exist without the other. He nevertheless favours the term “baby,” for it
is the primary referent determining the secondary classification of “pregnant.”
Pregnancy is not a temporal or physical process that creates a baby; instead, a
baby makes a woman pregnant. Implying that his definition of pregnancy is both
unchanging and universal, the protestor assumes an authoritative role. He informs
the woman that she has misconstrued her corporeal identity and must accept the
fact that pregnancy is a condition determined not by her, but by another.
TOPIA 20
24
Pregnancy has not always been described in such concrete terms. Throughout
the early modern period in Europe, male medical practitioners hesitated before
declaring a woman pregnant. According to French surgeon and male midwife
Jacques Guillemeau in 1609, men would look ridiculous if the swollen wombs of
their apparently pregnant clients produced menses, water or wind instead of a child.
He and other medical men considered the interior of the female body a dark and
mysterious realm able to foster substances both natural and unnatural (Duval 1612:
111; Guillemeau 1609: 2; Huet 1993; Mauquest de La Motte 1729: 49; McClive
2002). Historian Barbara Duden argues that pregnancy was confirmed by early
modern women only when they felt “quickening” or movement inside their bodies
(1991). By interpreting their embodied experience, women were authorized to
name and announce publicly their condition. Duden contrasts this historical form
of female agency with the medical procedures that today have made pregnancy
an objective condition (1993). Even if a woman suspects that she is pregnant, she
does not know for certain until her hormone levels are measured by a pregnancy
test either purchased at a drug store or administered by her physician. She might
publicize her pregnancy only after being shown the interior of her body on the
screen of an ultrasound machine. According to Duden and other scholars, these
technologies alienate modern western women by transforming pregnancy into a
disembodied experience that is evaluated by experts (Duden 1993; Franklin 1991;
Givner 1994; Hartouni 1992; Squier 1996).
In this article I continue to examine the cultural construction of modern pregnancy;
unlike Duden however, I find a number of similarities between early modern
and modern understandings of pregnancy. In the past, pregnancy was difficult
to determine and subject to debate, acquiring meaning only within particular
historical, geographical and social locations. The situation is not entirely different
today. The protestor at the abortion clinic found it necessary to broadcast his
definition of pregnancy, suggesting that not everyone would agree with him. To
avoid generalizing modern pregnancy, I analyze one location in which its meaning
is contested, namely the space immediately outside of the Morgentaler Clinic in
Fredericton. Focusing on this case study, I consider how the past informs, but is
not merely replicated in, the present. I explore how pregnancy is produced and
reshaped in relation to national health policies, provincial regulations, regional
identities, representations of the female body and embodied exchanges between
protestors and abortion-seeking women. My discussion sheds light on the so-
called abortion debate, indicating that it does not exclusively concern the status
of the fetus or “unborn child.” More significant to this debate are the processes
by which women become recognized or misrecognized as pregnant, as well as the
ways in which they accept or reject that label.
My selection of this case study is not exclusively based on theoretical considerations;
it is also informed by my experiences as an escort at Fredericton’s Morgentaler
Clinic almost every Tuesday morning between 1999 and 2007. When I first noticed
anti-abortion protestors beginning to picket outside the clinic, I approached Judy
Burwell, then the clinic manager, offering to organize a group of volunteers to
greet and protect women as they entered the building.1 I had undertaken similar
work at Planned Parenthood in Rochester, New York, during the early 1990s
when I was a graduate student at the University of Rochester, and in Buffalo,
where I joined hundreds of other pro-choice feminists to prevent the extremist
anti-abortion group Operation Rescue from blockading clinics in 1992. My
commitment to reproductive rights was inspired by my specialization in the visual
culture of pregnancy and childbirth in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries
(McTavish 2005). I did not think, however, that my volunteer work outside the
TOPIA 20
Recent scholarship on abortion in Canada emphasizes issues of access, arguing
that women’s experiences vary according to the province or territory in which they
reside, while exploring the diverse reasons women seek abortions (Childbirth by
Choice Trust 1998; Palley 2006). My discussion draws on this important research
but departs from it, by concentrating on the mutually constitutive relationship
between bodies and spaces at one abortion clinic. It is primarily inspired by the
work of feminist cultural geographers such as Heidi J. Nast and Steve Pile, who
study the politics of “the ways in which bodies and places are understood, how
they are made and how they are interrelated, one to the other—because this is
how we live our lives—through places, through the body” (1998: 1). The literature
on “place” is itself vast, including considerations of how spaces become meaningful
places that contribute to the production of subjectivity, are embedded in power
relations and provide ways of understanding the world (Cresswell 2004: 1-14).
Feminists enrich this dialogue about place by highlighting the body, showing
how connections between bodies and places are continually renegotiated in, for
example, modern cities or a royal palace in Kano, Nigeria (Grosz 1998; Nast
1998). The approach of cultural geographer Robyn Longhurst is perhaps closest
to my own, for she investigates “the social and spatial processes that help make
mothers” by analyzing, among other things, the ways in which pregnant women are
encouraged to feel uncomfortable by the dress codes and spatial organization of a
particular shopping mall in Hamilton, New Zealand (1998; 2008: 4). In contrast
to Longhurst’s work my study features bodies that are not easily identified as
pregnant and considers how their meanings shift in conjunction with the unstable,
temporary place that is immediately outside of the Morgentaler Clinic in New
Brunswick.
25
clinic in Fredericton would produce research results or publications. Nevertheless
I found myself interpreting the interactions occurring there in historical and
cultural, as well as political terms. Part of the evidence for my arguments below
thus stems from personal experience, a loaded category sometimes valourized
within the disciplines of women’s studies and history but also denounced as
inevitably leading to essentialism or unreflective assertions of authority. According
to historian Joan Scott, experience is an indispensable concept except when it is
assumed that individuals simply have experiences rather than being constituted
through them (1991). In keeping with her arguments, I refer to my own embodied
understanding of the space around the clinic in the discussion that follows,
avoiding claims of neutrality by noting how I simultaneously participated in and
was transformed by debates about the cultural definition of pregnancy.
Abortion Politics and the Formation of Regional Identities
TOPIA 20
26
The small city of Fredericton—in 2006 its population was a little more than
50,000—is located along the banks of the Saint John River in New Brunswick,
one of three Maritime Provinces on the east coast of Canada. As the provincial
capital, Fredericton hosts two universities and contains a mixture of social
conservatives and liberals, as well as a sizeable francophone population composed
mainly of Acadians. When the abortion rights crusader Dr. Henry Morgentaler
first opened a clinic in Fredericton in 1994, the conservative contingent of the city
responded negatively, calling for it to be banned. With unusual haste, the provincial
government enacted legislation prohibiting doctors from performing abortions
outside of hospitals, though it was overturned in subsequent legal proceedings
(Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada 2005). Despite being unable to prevent
the clinic from operating, the government of New Brunswick has consistently
refused to fund the abortions performed there. Provincial governments are
responsible for the administration and delivery of health services, having some
leeway in such decisions as where to locate hospitals and how much money to
expend. The provinces must, however, adhere to the Canada Health Act, passed in
1984, to receive transfer payments from the federal government. This Act includes
principles designed to ensure that Canadians have equal access to “medically
required” services administered publicly on a not-for-profit basis (Government
of Canada 2005). Although all provinces have recognized abortion as a medically
required service, the government of New Brunswick has created policies that
restrict access to it.
In order to qualify for a funded hospital abortion in New Brunswick, women
must obtain the written approval of one physician and one gynecologist. Known
as Regulation 84-20, this policy is at odds with the Supreme Court ruling of
1988, which struck down Canada’s abortion regulations as discriminatory, arguing
that they violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as the principles of
fundamental justice (Supreme Court of Canada Decisions 1988). Women must
make haste to receive the two approvals, because the provincial government further
limits coverage to the termination of pregnancies under twelve weeks’ gestation.
Since 2006, only two hospitals in the province have provided these abortion
services, performing about twenty procedures per month (Hagerman 2002a;
2002b; Llewellyn 2006a). Because of New Brunswick’s regulations—nothing
similar exists anywhere else in Canada—women are routinely denied hospital
abortions, especially in the predominantly Roman Catholic Saint John region.
Every year more than 600 women pay out-of-pocket for abortions obtained at the
Morgentaler Clinic in Fredericton (Burwell pers. comm.).
The situation in Quebec indicates that the governments of other provinces have
not always adhered fully to the Canada Health Act with respect to the provision
of abortion services. Until recently Quebec women had to pay part of the cost
of private clinic abortions unless they could prove they had been unable to
obtain the procedures within the public system (Radio-Canada 2007). While the
2006 judgement required a mass refund, it was not until January 2008 that the
provincial government decided to cover the full cost of all abortions (Leduc 2008).
Though the province of Manitoba now similarly pays for abortions performed
both in clinics and hospitals, it arrived at this point earlier and by different means.
TOPIA 20
Many political activists and federal officials attempting to address this have noted
that New Brunswick is not complying with the Canada Health Act. In 2001, the
federal government began insisting that New Brunswick fully fund abortion
services, but was slow to take official steps toward remedying the situation. It has
never withheld transfer payments from New Brunswick for its violation of the
Act (Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada 2005). In April 2005, then Federal
Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh began a dispute avoidance resolution process with
the government of New Brunswick, but it lost momentum with the election of
a Conservative government; Federal Health Minister Tony Clement has decided
not to pursue it (Morrison 2006). Even before that process was started, however,
Dr. Morgentaler had launched a lawsuit to force the government of New
Brunswick to cover abortions in clinics as well as hospitals (Hagerman 2002a).
The provincial government declared that it was already providing adequate
access to abortion in the two hospitals, ignoring the hundreds of women that
continued to rely on the Morgentaler Clinic for services. The New Brunswick
government has succeeded in slowing down the legal proceedings, with a ruling
on Dr. Morgentaler’s standing in this case still pending as of June 2008. Dr.
Morgentaler’s supporters nevertheless have reason to believe that New Brunswick
will eventually be required to fund clinic abortions. In August 2006, a court
judgement ordered the government of Quebec to refund 13 million dollars to
the approximately 45,000 women who had paid some fees for their abortions in
women’s health centres and private clinics between 1999 and 2006 (Carroll and
Dougherty 2006).
27
Initially the Manitoba government refused to finance abortions undertaken at
the privately owned Morgentaler Clinic in Winnipeg. However, in July 2004 the
clinic was purchased by a group of women who reorganized it as a not-for-profit
institution and then launched a successful lawsuit obliging the government to
cover the costs of all therapeutic abortions (CBC News 2004). The government of
Alberta finally agreed to fund abortion under yet another set of circumstances. In
1995, the federal government ordered Alberta to pay for all medically necessary
services performed in private clinics, withholding substantial transfer payments.
At this point the provincial government asked the Alberta Medical Association
and the College of Physicians and Surgeons to define “medically required” as
it related to abortion services, but both bodies refused to produce restricting
categories (Arthur 2003). In these cases and in most other provinces, governments
resisted paying for abortions, particularly those performed in private clinics, but
were ultimately forced to do so after protracted negotiations, punitive measures or
definitive court cases. The only province that does not offer any abortion services
is Prince Edward Island. However, if equipped with a doctor’s referral, women can
get funded abortions in hospitals outside the province and they usually go to the
Victoria General Hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
TOPIA 20
28
Scholars often compare the abortion policies of provincial governments, questioning why they have developed differently despite an apparently unifying Canada
Health Act (Arthur 1999; Eggerston 2001; Erdman 2007). In his 2006 survey of
Canadian abortion policy, sociologist Howard A. Palley argues that the refusal
of provinces such as New Brunswick to comply with federal abortion policies
“illustrates a situation where cooperative federalism—that is, the ability of federal,
provincial, and territorial governments to act cooperatively, with some federal
authority being exercised—has failed in Canada” (2006: 568). Palley alludes to
the ways this struggle between federal and provincial governments reveals the
fiction of a unified Canada. His article also suggests that these power dynamics,
while seemingly unrelated to the abortion debate, affect access to abortion. There
are many reasons various provincial governments have refused to deliver adequate
abortion services, including their desire to avoid raising a controversial subject and
jeopardizing re-election, the timing of the construction of private abortion clinics
and the personal beliefs of individuals acting as health ministers or serving on
other regulating bodies. The resistance to funding abortion has additionally been
influenced by the particular forms of anti-abortion activity in each province, which
have included picketing at selected clinics and which have sometimes become
violent. In 1997, Winnipeg obstetrician and gynecologist Dr. Jack Fainman was
shot; in 1996 the Morgentaler clinic in Edmonton was attacked with toxic butyric
acid (Arthur 1999).
Refusing to fund abortion has also become part of the negotiation of regional
identities, particularly in such provinces as New Brunswick. Various interlocutors
have linked the provincial government’s abortion policies to the image of New
Brunswick itself. In May 2005, the editors of The Daily Gleaner, Fredericton’s
only daily newspaper, criticized Ottawa for “flexing its muscles” by initiating the
dispute resolution process. Though the paper is owned by the Irving conglomerate,
which has a virtual monopoly of print media in the province, the editors claimed
to speak on behalf of the “little guy,” asking “Surely we [New Brunswickers]
can make our own decision on this matter without interference from the feds?”
(Daily Gleaner 2005). Local anti-abortion activists have also spoken for all New
Brunswick residents. In 2002 Peter Ryan, executive director of New Brunswick
Right to Life, asserted that New Brunswick should “stand its ground” in the
dispute between Ottawa and Fredericton, while noting that “New Brunswickers
do not think that [abortion on demand] is health care” (Abortion Panel 2002).
According to him and others opposed to legal abortion, New Brunswick is a
conservative province that, in distinction from much of the rest of Canada,
remains devoted to “traditional family values.”
This continuing battle over abortion policies and regional identities has encouraged demonstrations at the Morgentaler Clinic in Fredericton. When the
clinic first opened its doors in 1994 there was a large number of protestors which
soon dwindled. A mere handful of picketers was present when Dr. Morgentaler
reopened his clinic in a new downtown location in 1998. Protestors began
picketing the clinic more often after the funding debate received media attention,
especially in June 1999, when Conservative premier Bernard Lord reaffirmed that
the government would not finance abortions done at the clinic (Porter 1999).
Anti-abortion protestors might have felt, perhaps correctly, that they had the
support of the government. A number of picketers carried signs reading “Not
with my tax dollars,” keeping the funding dispute in the public eye. When an
anti-abortion centre—first known as The Mother and Child Welcome House and
TOPIA 20
Other voices have disputed this image of the region, arguing that the abortion
policies of the provincial government misrepresent New Brunswick. In 2006
Allison Brewer, then leader of the provincial New Democratic Party, asserted
that Regulation 84-20 made New Brunswick look “backwoods,” even though
residents of the province were likely no more conservative than those living in
other parts of Canada (Llewellyn 2006b). When several anti-abortion advocates
insisted that Acadians—who comprise about 30 per cent of the population—
were especially opposed to abortion rights, a group of Moncton-based Acadian
women took offence. Acting as the group’s spokesperson, Université de Moncton
law professor Michèle Caron announced that if the Health Minister refused to
reconsider the province’s restrictive abortion regulations, she and others would
initiate legal action (Robichaud 2007). Her statements responded not only to
those who claimed to represent her, but also to the image of New Brunswick as a
province unified in its acceptance of the status quo. The abortion policies of New
Brunswick involve much more than the issue of abortion. They both inform and
are informed by the divergent understandings of the province’s identity.
29
later as the Women’s Care Centre—opened next door to the Morgentaler Clinic
in 2001, the protesting became more regular; between three and ten picketers
were present every Tuesday morning. While some of them held signs and rosaries,
others approached women, attempting to lead them into the anti-abortion centre
for “counselling.” The clinic escorts, who also started working in greater numbers,
greeted the women and guided them past the protestors and into the clinic. A
complex array of issues has encouraged picketing at the Morgentaler Clinic in
Fredericton long after similar demonstrations have diminished in the rest of
Canada. In order to arrive at a fuller comprehension of this situation, it is worth
considering how bodies and spaces become meaningful in the contested zone
outside the clinic.
Embodiment and the Female Body
TOPIA 20
30
Escorts at the Morgentaler Clinic work in pairs, standing at both the front and
back doors while looking attentively for women who might be approaching. Most
clients live in New Brunswick and are driving from diverse parts of the province,
particularly the Saint John region. A small number travel from Prince Edward
Island, deciding to pay for the procedure in Fredericton because it requires a
single visit instead of multiple hospital appointments (Burwell pers. comm.).
Clinic escorts strive to provide these women with a reassuring welcome before
the protestors begin either shouting at them or directing them into the antiabortion centre. Escorts encourage the women and their companions to ignore
the protestors, a task that is not always easy. When I worked at the clinic, I would
typically initiate a conversation about the weather, a form of social ritual designed
to normalize an otherwise unpleasant situation. We would discuss the cold and
potential for snow storms while being screamed at by anti-abortion protestors.
According to cultural theorist Jody Berland, representations of the weather are
far from neutral. Canadians continually comment on the weather to create both a
shared sense of identity and what she calls “the pleasure of the located body” (1993:
223). Berland argues that discourses about the weather attempt both to control and
deny its significance. They reveal a contradictory ethos of the body that strives for
pleasure—understood primarily in terms of sunshine on the weather channel—in
the face of the often unpleasant climactic conditions that are central to regional
identities (209). My conversations about the weather in New Brunswick were
indeed ambivalent: I attempted to bond with those entering the clinic by joking
about the highways they had just driven, particularly the treacherous Route 7
which stretches between Saint John and Fredericton and is typically covered in
ice as well as moose during the winter months. We employed narratives about
the weather to create what historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg calls the fantasy
of a coherent body politic, achieving “a sense of homogeneity in an otherwise
diverse populace” (1999: 171). This activity held particular significance outside the
clinic, for it established an immediate sense of community between escorts and
abortion-seeking women—groups that in reality may have had little in common.
In front of the Morgentaler Clinic, we confirmed our status as vigourous and
good-humoured Maritimers able to overcome the natural elements, a collective
identity not entirely unique to the region, though we insist that our roads are
worse. This temporary and in many ways fictional identity—I am, for example,
originally from Ontario—allowed me and other escorts to show concern for the
well-being of incoming women, signalling respect for their decision to have an
abortion without invading their privacy.
This commentary on the cold (or sometimes extremely hot) weather reinforced
a rather commonplace image of embodiment, but it also led to discussions of
particular bodies. Without any prompting on my part, the women coming to the
clinic regularly remarked on their physical exhaustion after getting up at 5:00 a.m.
to drive from the north shore, or on their bladders which were uncomfortably full
in preparation for the ultrasounds to be performed inside the clinic. When they
requested permission to relieve this pressure, staff inside the clinic would suggest
that the women half-empty their bladders, a physical challenge most had not
previously contemplated.
Whether part of a deliberate strategy or not, these statements worked to counteract
the abstract and essentialist understanding of the female body promoted by the
protestors. Some of the protestors repeatedly yelled “it’s a baby,” and “you are
already a mother” in order to assert their own understanding of pregnancy. They
attempted to stabilize the meaning of both pregnancy and the bodies of the women
either entering the abortion clinic or smoking outside of it. Several protestors
carried signs featuring enlarged images of fetuses. The use of fetal imagery by
TOPIA 20
I also spoke with the women who periodically came outside to smoke cigarettes. I
interpreted this activity as both the women’s desire for nicotine and their defiant
insistence on bodily pleasure in the face of the protestors. Some women felt
vulnerable outside the clinic, wondering if they would be physically attacked by
the protestors. Other women were adamantly certain of their right to have an
abortion and shouted right back at the protestors while shivering in the smoking
area. Many of these women explained their reasons for having an abortion, telling
me that at sixteen years old they were too young to have a child, that their preexisting medical conditions would be exacerbated by a pregnancy, that they had
been raped, or that they already had more children than they could support.
A surprising number of women shared the intimate details of their lives. One
distraught Acadian woman described in French how her initial happiness at being
pregnant was destroyed when her boyfriend’s ongoing infidelities were revealed.
Her tale was punctuated by the angry interjections of her parents, both of whom
supported her decision and had accompanied her on the voyage from northern
New Brunswick.
31
the anti-abortion movement has been studied in detail by a number of feminist
scholars, but the groundbreaking work of political scientist Rosalind Petchesky,
first published in 1987, remains influential. She argued that images of fetuses
shown floating against a celestial backdrop suggest that they are autonomous
individuals able to exist apart from the female body (57-80). By separating the
fetus from the maternal body, such representations erase women’s crucial role in
parturition. They encourage viewers to identify with the fetus as a masculine figure
in need of protection from an aggressive and dangerous female body.
TOPIA 20
32
Literary critic N. Katherine Hayles distinguishes such generalized representations
of the body from the lived experiences of material bodies. According to her, “the
body” is an abstraction attempting to be universal in its scope. Embodiment,
on the other hand, is “contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time,
physiology, and culture” (1999: 196). Yet the two categories are not polar opposites.
Hayles notes that abstract understandings of the body both continually inform
and are informed by the concrete experiences of embodiment. At the same time,
the two exist in a state of tension because embodied experiences are usually not
congruent with universalizing representations of the body. Hayles argues that
exploring this tension can heighten the perception of disparity between the body
and embodiment, potentially transforming them both.
In many ways, feminists who study abortion have already exploited the tension
described by Hayles, though without using her terminology. Foregrounding the
voices of individual women, they have examined the stories told by Canadian
women about their efforts to access illegal abortion during the early 20th century,
the mostly social reasons given by Yoruba women to explain their attainment of
illegal abortions in Nigeria and the unexpectedly diverse ways in which Chinese
women comprehend the fetus, even as most of them accept as necessary the
national policies designed to limit population growth (Childbirth by Choice
Trust 1998; Koster 2003; Jing-Bao 2005). In an especially interesting case study,
anthropologist Elaine Gale Gerber collected data during the late 1990s at a
reproductive health clinic just outside of Lille, France. She noted how French
women narrated their experiences of early terminations enacted by RU-486,
sometimes called the “abortion pill,” though it involves the ingestion of two
synthetic hormones (mifepristone and misoprostol). Gerber found that French
women did not reify the embryo, but often described what they expelled from their
bodies as an “egg” (1999: 137). Instead of viewing pregnancy as a definite medical
condition, they saw it as a continuum that could develop differently. Explaining
that they did not feel pregnant, the women receiving RU-486 distinguished the
current state of their bodies from what they called their real pregnancies, namely
the earlier ones that had resulted in children. Gerber discovered that like the early
modern women described by Duden, modern French women confidently decided
whether or not they were pregnant, using medical technology to confirm rather
than determine their perceptions.
The interactions occurring every Tuesday morning at the Morgentaler Clinic
similarly reveal the distinction between abstract evaluations of the pregnant body
and women’s lived bodily experiences, albeit in a context far removed from Lille.
The anti-abortion protestors at the clinic in Fredericton promote an abstract
vision of the female body as either a passive host whose meaning is predetermined
(it is “already a mother”) or a silent absence erased by the presence of the fetus.
In contrast to these images, women arriving at the Morgentaler Clinic often
emphasize what Hayles refers to as embodiment by recounting their individual
stories, unique bodily perceptions and even by smoking, an activity considered
irresponsible during pregnancy. The space around the clinic is thus not simply
oppressive. Government policies force women to travel to the clinic and face
protestors attempting to instill their particular understandings of the pregnant
body. Yet the women can also assert themselves, speaking of their embodied
experiences in ways that could be both empowering and transformative.
The Performance of Pregnancy
Nevertheless, women who are actually coming to the Morgentaler Clinic are
publicly exposed once they enter the zone of surveillance around the building.
The clinic building, completed in 1998, is a modest one-storey yellow brick
edifice in the modernist style. To a certain extent the building is responsible for
demarcating the significance of place in the perimeter outside of it, because as a
freestanding abortion clinic it houses staff who provide counselling, contraceptive
TOPIA 20
The processes through which women become identified as pregnant, or identify
themselves as pregnant, are not strictly medical. Even today, when childbirth
is understood by means of technology throughout the Western world, the
determination of pregnancy also occurs in particular geographical and social
spaces, including the area outside of the Morgentaler Clinic in Fredericton. Any
woman between the ages of fifteen and fifty who comes within a one-block radius
of the clinic is assumed to be pregnant by the protestors and is approached by
them. The identification of these women as pregnant is produced both by their
proximity to the clinic and by the protestors’ essentialist view of the female
body as either potentially or actually pregnant. It is not always easy, however, to
recognize an abortion-seeking woman, for none of them is visibly pregnant. The
protestors often approach women who are there to support their friends, or are
simply passing by on their way to work. These women respond with puzzlement,
laughter, anger or fear. Even as the protestors insist on the immutable status of
pregnancy, these exchanges reveal that pregnancy is far from obvious. They also
indicate that women can have a kind of bodily knowledge that others lack, a
standard belief during the early modern period, when even medical men respected
women’s comprehension of the female body as both intrinsic and authoritative
(McTavish 2005: 143-71).
33
TOPIA 20
34
advice and abortions. Women usually enter the building for abortion-related
reasons, making them vulnerable to the protestors, yet the spatial dynamics of the
building’s location may also facilitate protest. When Dr. Morgentaler first opened
a clinic in Fredericton it was located on a secluded street on the north side of
the city, in a reconditioned home with an adequate parking lot. Protestors had
little physical access to people entering the clinic. When the clinic was moved to
its current site downtown, the number of protestors steadily increased. The new
location has many advantages, for it is served by city bus routes, near the SMT bus
terminal and arguably easier to find than the previous building. At the same time,
the building is situated on a small lot, in close proximity to public sidewalks at
both its front and right side, and equipped with a parking lot that accommodates
few cars. Clients must park in a public garage across from the clinic and walk
across the street to enter the building. Not only do the protestors regularly try to
intercept clients during this short walk, but they also use the nearby sidewalks to
shout at people passing through the clinic doors. A strikingly different situation
is described by Karen Dean, former security worker at the Everywoman’s Health
Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia, where abortions are fully funded by
the provincial government and a “bubble zone” prohibits protesting within fifty
metres of abortion clinics. She claims that the number of protestors dramatically
decreased after the organization moved from a freestanding, street-level location
into a multi-storey building with private businesses, offering anti-abortion activists
a more challenging target (Bohn 2007).
The significance of the Morgentaler Clinic in Fredericton is nevertheless determined in large part by the protestors and escorts outside of it. Their activities draw
people’s attention to the clinic, often for the first time. Members of the public have
remarked that they had not even noticed the building before seeing the protestors.
The space outside the clinic is nondescript, consisting of concrete sidewalks, paved
streets and a standard multi-level parking garage across the street. This perimeter
is usually unoccupied, becoming a zone of visibility only on Tuesday mornings
when abortions are performed. On those days protestors and escorts occupy the
space and various people pass through it, either to enter the clinic or on their way
to some other place. While much literature on the production of place focuses on
the locations and practices of human dwelling, this particular space becomes a
place only temporarily, at repeated intervals (Karjalainen 1995). However, it is not
the mere presence of human actors near the clinic that transforms this space into
a meaningful place, but the embodied interactions between them.
Many abortion-seeking women are more concerned with their privacy than the
medical procedure they are about to undergo. Since New Brunswick is a relatively
small province, it is not unheard of for a woman to drive a long distance to the
clinic only to discover that an acquaintance is in the waiting area. The protestors
exacerbate this situation by running to intercept, interrogate and shout at the women
outside the clinic. They create a spectacle meant to reveal the women’s “secrets,”
making them public by both creating and participating in a space of exposure. This
process is not unprecedented. It recalls the early modern confrontations described
by historian Laura Gowing in her book about women’s bodies in 16th- and 17thcentury England. Gowing argues that when unmarried women were suspected of
being secretly pregnant, they were subjected to “the investigating eyes and hands”
of a group of matrons—older, married women with children—who would search
their bodies for signs of pregnancy or squeeze their breasts to see if they produced
milk (2003: 78). Although the women about to enter the Morgentaler Clinic are
appraised visually rather than manually, the power dynamics are in some ways
similar to those that occurred in early modern England. Most of the protestors
outside the clinic in Fredericton are men, but those who question women to see
if they are pregnant are exclusively older married women who proudly identify
themselves as mothers. The women they investigate are always younger and often
of lower economic status. These modern-day matrons strive to enforce morality by
creating a punitive space designed to make pregnancy public.
The pro-choice clinic escorts generally have rather different ideas about what
women should do with their bodies, embracing the vision of a liberal subject who
can shape her own future and is not duty-bound to obey moral strictures. When
I worked as an escort, I was attuned to any indication that a woman was merely
obeying another, perhaps her mother or male partner, by having an abortion,
TOPIA 20
Yet the similarities between the past and the present should not be exaggerated.
During the early modern period, older matrons were allowed to determine
pregnancy in order to do more than denounce illicit sexual behaviour.They could also
question unmarried pregnant women about paternity, in order to assign financial
responsibility for potential children to particular men rather than have it provided
by the local parish. Authorities also feared that single pregnant women would be
tempted to commit infanticide to evade social censure, depriving newborns of
either baptism or a proper burial ( Jackson 2002). In contrast, modern-day matrons
focus exclusively on women without mentioning men, even though male partners
regularly accompany women to the clinic. The protestors affirm the responsibility
of women to remain pregnant and give birth, decrying what they consider the
abortion-seekers’ selfish consideration of their own needs rather than those of
another. Modern-day matrons insist that younger women accept maternity as
their predetermined feminine role, assuming that all women naturally want to
have children. They make motherly pronouncements, warning those about to
enter the clinic that: “You might never be able to have another baby. I could only
have one.” Despite such assertions, female protestors at the Morgentaler Clinic
in Fredericton are not considered authoritative and abortion-seeking women
regularly advise them to “mind their own business.” These contested discourses
about proper femininity, which include considerations of who or what has the
right to make claims on the female body, contribute to the sense of place created
outside the clinic, underpinning the activities occurring there.
35
something also considered by staff inside the clinic. As a matter of policy, no
procedures are performed on women apparently coerced into having an abortion.
Protecting each woman’s personal rights is of primary concern. In keeping
with this approach, I held a particular respect for women who displayed their
individuality and steadfastly proclaimed what they wanted, whether it was to have
an abortion or to continue with a pregnancy, something a handful decided to do
once inside the clinic. Other clinic escorts expressed views that similarly valorized
female agency and rejected calls for female subservience, but I am reluctant to
generalize about this group because studies by such scholars as Andrea Lee Press
and Elizabeth R. Cole show that pro-choice views vary widely according to the
class identifications of particular individuals, among other things (1999). At the
same time, the contested space outside the Morgentaler Clinic challenges any
simple insistence on women’s free will by revealing that women inevitably make
decisions within the context of governmental policies, particular places and the
opinions of others.
TOPIA 20
36
Pro-choice clinic escorts strive to counteract the public exposure produced outside
the clinic. While protestors attempt to impede women who might be heading into
the clinic, escorts endeavour to identify these women first, in order to welcome
them and explain the situation. Instead of assuming that all women are pregnant,
however, they read the female body for particular signs. If women near the clinic
are carrying water bottles and a bag, escorts suppose that they are preparing to
have ultrasounds and change into comfortable clothing once inside the clinic.
Volunteers have the advantage of knowing how many women have appointments
on a given day and approximately when they will be arriving. All the same, clinic
escorts participate in creating a zone of surveillance that can oppress women. They
produce an alternative but equally abstract image of the female body, unwittingly
reinforcing the public identification of pregnancy. They furthermore risk invading
the privacy of the women coming to the clinic. During my years as an escort,
for example, I encountered women known to me, including some of my own
students and colleagues at the University of New Brunswick, where I worked as
a professor.
In keeping with philosopher Michel Foucault’s arguments about the productivity
of power, my identity as an escort was created within the power relations that I
simultaneously contested (1978: 95-96). Escorts were (and still are) taught to be
alert and to move quickly but calmly to greet women and their families as they
approached the clinic. We would typically go in pairs and situate ourselves on
either side of the woman whom we assumed was pregnant, acting as her protector.
She was often extremely grateful for our presence. For me this interaction created
an image of my body as strong and sturdy, able to withstand both freezing weather
and the assaults of the anti-abortionists. Other escorts had similar reactions and
one young volunteer even wore a spandex superhero costume during her shift.
Her playful performance made light of the confrontational situation at the clinic
while amusing the women who were arriving for their appointments. Yet our
heroic stance may have reproduced the stereotype of the fragile woman in need of
protection and of pregnancy as a time of vulnerability rather than empowerment
for women. On the other hand, by publicly supporting women’s efforts to enter
the clinic, we displayed faith in their ability to make their own decisions (Lemire,
pers. comm.).2
Both anti-abortion protestors and pro-choice clinic escorts try to manage how the
place outside the Morgentaler Clinic will be understood by the public as well as
the women who traverse it in order to enter the building. A particularly concrete
example of this battle to determine the meaning of place is the location of an
anti-abortion centre in an adjacent building only a few feet from the left side of
the clinic. According to its supporters, this centre offers women an “alternative”
to abortion; however, in terms of spatial politics it is an aggressive assertion of
one particular definition of pregnancy. This anti-abortion strategy is standard;
similar “crisis pregnancy centres” have been constructed near abortion clinics
across Canada and the United States. Those opposed to legal abortion hope that
abortion-seeking women will mistakenly enter these centres, but the buildings
are also designed to enact a kind of spatial intimidation that continues even in
the absence of protestors. In the end, neither anti-abortion protestors nor prochoice escorts are really in control of the space around the Morgentaler Clinic in
Fredericton, partly because unexpected events, such as the appearance of a man
with a lightsabre, regularly occur.
TOPIA 20
Very few of the women arriving at the clinic desire the visibility that is conferred
on them, but both the escorts and the protestors seek it. Escorts wear blue aprons
emblazoned with the words “Clinic Escort” to broadcast their identity to the
women coming to the clinic; clients have been advised by clinic staff to look for
the escorts as their “helpers.” This uniform furthermore lends a sense of group
identity to the escorts, encouraging them to bond in a shared sense of purpose
as they undertake volunteer work that is challenging as well as rewarding. The
protestors are also intent on displaying themselves and their large signs, which
they carefully direct toward the passing traffic. This opportunity for public
visibility is yet another reason for the increasing number of protestors since the
Fredericton Morgentaler Clinic relocated to the downtown. Some of the drivers
passing by honk in support of the protestors while others give them the thumbs
down. It is not unusual for members of the public to stop and speak with the
protestors, urging them to cease their activities. During the summer of 2007, an
unknown young man arrived with a mock light sabre in hand, ready to “battle” the
anti-abortion demonstrators. Recognizing the theatricality of the space outside
the clinic, he played the role of a jedi warrior fighting for justice. At the same
time, his actions revealed as performative the identities of everyone occupying the
same space.
37
The activities outside the clinic produce another unexpected result, one that antiabortion protestors would no doubt find objectionable. The presence of protestors
shapes the meaning of the interior of the clinic, encouraging many abortionseeking women to rush toward the building and breathe a sigh of relief once
they are inside. Though the protestors try to demonize the clinic, they actually
transform it into a kind of refuge for women. In contrast to the shouting and signwielding protestors outside, the clinic workers inside appear to be calm, friendly
and rational. The Morgentaler Clinic is indeed staffed by sympathetic feminists
who try to recognize female embodiment rather than the female body alone. All
the same, I do not want to romanticize the clinic, for once inside women are
subject to the medicalization of their bodies by means of such technologies as the
ultrasound machine, operated by an authority figure who interprets and measures
the female body. This person informs the abortion-seeking woman that she is nine
weeks pregnant, or that she has had a miscarriage and is no longer pregnant, or
that she is past the clinic’s gestational limit of sixteen weeks and can no longer
acquire an abortion in New Brunswick. Inside the clinic, abstract understandings
of the female body continue to exist in tension with diverse expressions of female
embodiment.
TOPIA 20
38
Conclusions
In some ways it is obvious to say that the space outside of the Morgentaler Clinic
in Fredericton is contested. Yet the interactions occurring there on Tuesday
mornings concern far more than whether or not women should have the legal
right to abortion. The temporary activity outside the clinic participates in the
social production of pregnancy, the female body, embodiment, regional identity
and place. The theatrical space created on Tuesdays produces the identities of
all who enter it, whether they are matrons attempting to enforce their morality,
escort superheroes surviving both the harsh weather and the protestors, abortionseeking women discussing their embodied experience in the face of images that
erase it, or passersby engaging in heated political debate before continuing on their
way to work. It is clear that the interactions outside of the Morgentaler Clinic in
Fredericton create particular kinds of bodies even as those bodies produce the
spaces both outside and inside the clinic. These mutually informing bodies and
spaces are involved in a struggle over meaning, most immediately concerning who
has the authority to define and regulate pregnancy.
This case study of the Morgentaler Clinic in Fredericton confirms that Western
women continue to experience pregnancy in subjective and intimate ways. There
are surprising links between early modern and modern conceptions of pregnancy.
Even today pregnancy can remain difficult to ascertain and can be a “secret”
condition that women wish to conceal. The women who come to the clinic in
Fredericton are singled out by those who strive to make their bodies public, but
they are not simply victims. Most of the women resist the efforts to classify their
bodies by giving voice to their embodied knowledge and none of them turns
back. Even as the female body is medicalized both outside and inside the clinic,
abortion-seeking women participate in determining its meaning, refusing to see
it as fully defined by an other. By insisting on their embodiment, they reveal that
the body is experienced differently depending on time and place, even within the
same country.
Notes
1. Personal communication. Judy Burwell, director of the Morgentaler Clinic in Fredericton (1999-2005), 2007. She now volunteers at the clinic.
2. Personal communication. Shannon Lemire, a nursing graduate student originally from
New Brunswick, 2007.
TOPIA 20
In this article, I have tried to show how national health policies, representations
of embodiment, provincial regulations, abstract conceptions of the female body
and particular spaces and identities are intertwined, without privileging one
factor over another. I have nevertheless been involved in political lobbying efforts
designed to change the situation outside the Morgentaler Clinic in Fredericton.
I have participated in demonstrations, letter writing campaigns and meetings
with the provincial Health Minister calling for an end to Regulation 84-20 and
for greater access to funded abortion in New Brunswick, whether in hospitals
or clinics. More recently, other political activists have requested a “bubble zone”
of protection around the clinic in Fredericton, so that protestors can no longer
impede or harass the women attempting to enter the clinic (Abortion Rights
Coalition of Canada 2007). This kind of legislation has been enforced elsewhere
in Canada. While highly desirable, this zone would not bring New Brunswick
“into line” with such provinces as British Columbia, a position that assumes New
Brunswick is simply less progressive than other parts of Canada. My analysis
insists on a more complex understanding of the way that particular conceptions
of regional identity and place inform the current abortion policies of the New
Brunswick government. At the same time many of the interactions I have
described above occur at other abortion clinics, especially in the United States,
yet their circumstances differ significantly. My own experiences of escorting
outside of clinics in New York State indicate that the meanings produced at each
site vary according to distinctive spatial dynamics, local governments, forms of
media coverage, racial politics and the presence or absence of representatives
from the American Civil Liberties Union, among many other things. My study
of the cultural production of pregnancy in relation to a single Canadian abortion
clinic stresses the uniqueness of the Morgentaler Clinic in Fredericton; it could,
however, be compared and contrasted with abortion-related demonstrations
occurring elsewhere, which would likely enrich our understanding of the mutual
construction of bodies and places.
39
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TOPIA 20 43
Robin Lathangue
George Grant and the Impulse to Carnival
Abstract
George Grant’s eloquence as a writer and speaker has seldom been the focus of
his interpreters and critics. This essay addresses that gap by drawing on the literary
theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, especially the category of carnival. It argues that in his
carnivalesque rhetoric Grant finds another way to sustain his spirited critique of
modernity. The discussion concludes with an assessment of the limitations facing
the transposition of Bakhtin’s ideas into the contexts surrounding Grant.
RÉSUMÉ
L’éloquence de George Grant comme écrivain et orateur a rarement été le point
central de ses interprètes et critiques. Ce texte s’intéresse à ce vide en s’appuyant
sur la théorie littéraire de Mikail Bakhtin, spécialement la catégorie du carnaval.
Il soutient que dans sa rhétorique carnavalesque, Grant trouve une autre façon
de maintenir son esprit critique de la modernité. La discussion conclut avec
une évaluation des limites visant la transposition des idées de Bakhtin dans les
contextes qui entourent Grant.
¤
Academic discourse, and perhaps American university discourse in particular,
possesses an extraordinary ability to absorb, digest, and neutralize all of the key,
radical, dramatic moments of thought, particularly, a fortiori, of contemporary
thought.
Julia Kristeva (1983)
TOPIA 20
44
Academic studies of George Grant tend to focus on questions of philosophic
identity and pedigree: Was he a Heideggerian? To what degree was he a follower
of Plato, Hegel or Leo Strauss? How deep is the influence of Jacques Ellul,
Philip Sherrard, or Simone Weil? Recent scholarship has focused on Luther’s
“theology of the cross” as a kind of Rosetta Stone for Grant’s philisophical
projects (Athanasiadis 2001). His eloquence as a speaker and writer is generally
ignored and, when it has registered, the results have not always been salubrious.
In 1979, the head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto,
David Gauthier, could observe that Grant’s disinclination to use the language and
methods of current philosophical analysis was a problem: “If he will not speak
with the current philosophical tongue, then they [other teachers of philosophy]
will not listen to his lamentation” (qtd in Angus 1989: 141-42). In 1981, shortly
after he had moved back to Dalhousie University, a letter addressed to Grant
was inadvertently sent to the Department of Philosophy. It was forwarded to
political science, but not before someone had written on the envelope “[n]ot in
philosophy—not in the slightest” (Christian 1993: 341). One is reminded of the
inscription on the tablet in memory of Grant’s mentor at Oxford, A. D. Lindsay,
installed in the chapel wall at Balliol College: inter homines philosophus inter
philosophos homo, “among men a philosopher, among philosophers a man.”
In much of the professional philosophy of Grant’s day, practitioners hoped to
express themselves so directly and clearly that they would avoid the complications
of poetry and style altogether. The aim of analytic philosophy, according to some
observers, was to transfer ideas straight onto paper; the domain of meaning was
deemed to be independent of the vicissitudes of experience (Larmore 1996: 4;
Rée 1987: 1-4). But philosophy can also be defined in terms of a special kind
of experience available to us when we are alert to the sheer arbitrariness of our
habits of thought and feeling which carry us from one day to the next. One way
of evaluating the quality of philosophical writing is the degree to which it draws
us, through its use of concept and metaphor, into a position where these habits of
thought are observed and assessed. At this craft, Grant was especially good.
I take as a starting point a certain pattern of imagery and form of expression that
emerged in the furor surrounding the publication of Grant’s Lament for a Nation
in 1968. Here is Grant on CBC radio:
Diefenbaker did have and did represent a kind of solid residual nationalism
that existed in the country districts and small towns of this country, and he
really believed in it. And the thing about Diefenbaker is, when he makes
me mad and he seems stupid, he makes such great enemies. The slick, the
wealthy, the greedy, the cosy little journalists on the Globe and Mail, hate
him. I find it often hard to see the good in him, but when I see his enemies, I
like him, because his enemies are so revolting. (Qtd. in Cayley 1986: 2)
Grant’s family had deep roots in the Loyalism of the Canadian Maritimes, so
it is not surprising that he and the Progressive Conservative leader should be
on common ground in regards to certain loathsome enemies, the Liberals, who
would sever the British connection: “The Conservatives handled the machine
of state capitalism less skillfully than had the Liberal smoothies” (Grant 1965:
15). The parochial and conservative country districts (“poor old Canada”)
were up against the liberalism of the cosmopolitan cities (Grant 1986: 100).
Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives had lost an election to the citified and
powerful Liberals and Grant registers his protest by effectively suspending the
official rhetorical norms and prohibitions that form part of the decorum of public
political commentary. Again, on public radio, he says:
In his “Introduction” to the Carleton Library Series edition of Lament, Grant still
smells something nasty. America and its industrial cities are dangerous, introducing
contaminants into Canadian environments (including the cultural) that cause
instability, harm and discomfort: “In 1963 we could swim or go fishing in Lake
Erie without cleaning off the excrement. Today nobody can forget Cleveland”
(Grant 1965: vii). Even Shakespeare’s treatment of Aeneas in Troilus and Cressida
is described in a peculiarly vulgar way: “At a lower level, Aeneas is certainly more
than a bit of a shit, and yet the work holds us by the sense of the purpose he sees
himself fulfilling” (Grant 1996: 35).
What are we to make of this language? Analysis of Grant’s style at this point
can fork in two directions. The first, as regards the United States, leads back to a
tradition of Tory satire that includes Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke, which
in Canada can be found in the satiric tendency of the Loyalist tradition:
The Tories, representing the wealthiest and most aristocratic families of
the Thirteen Colonies, looked with scorn on the plebeian instigators of
rebellion. Political satire was thus based on class distinctions. Hatred of
gentlemen like Washington who associated themselves with the radical
movement was more intense because their championship implied a kind
of disloyalty to their caste. (Baker 1979: 108)
TOPIA 20
I think one has to remember the degree of pressure that Kennedy put on....
Now, I just see Diefenbaker rather as e.e. cummings’s Big Olaf. You know,
in his agony, Big Olaf cries out, “There is some shit I will not eat.” (Qtd. in
Cayley 1986: 2)
45
On the second analytical path, there is more to Grant’s style than political satire
can hold—in particular, certain affirmations of the materiality of politics and being
that only come into view through the prism of the critical theory developed by
Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin developed conceptual tools that have
become important in the fields of critical theory, literary studies, anthropology,
history, philosophy and linguistics. The vastness of the secondary literature that
has emerged around his work is a testament to its interdisciplinarity. The first
part of this discussion addresses the opportunities furnished by Bakhtin’s account
of carnival for reframing Grant’s critique of modernity. Certain tendencies
in Grant’s oeuvre acquire new significance when situated in relation to the
carnivalesque as Bakhtin understood it. While Bakhtin’s theory leads us to a new
and deeper appreciation of the relations between body, language and political
practice in Grant’s life and work, I also consider the limits of this transposition
of Bakhtin’s carnival for Grant scholarship. Finally, it is important to point out
that I am deliberately leaving aside certain important aspects of Bakhtin’s work
such as dialogism and heteroglossia and focusing instead on his concept of the
carnivalesque. The text in which he explores this theme, Rabelais and His World,
has been influential and productive in its own right.
TOPIA 20
46
For Bakhtin, “scatological liberties” as found in Grant played an important role
in carnivals, where they served to draw attention to the lower bodily stratum
(Bakhtin 1968: 147). To besmirch with excrement and urine is “a very ancient
gesture,” and the source of the modern euphemism “mudslinging” (Bakhtin 1968:
147). Such gestures and expressions not only point to “destruction” and “the grave,”
but also through them to something more complicated:
[T]he lower stratum is not only a bodily grave but also the area of the
genital organs, the fertilizing and generating stratum. Therefore, in the
images of urine and excrement is presented the essential link with birth,
fertility, renewal, welfare. (Bakhtin 1968: 148)
From a Bakhtinian perspective, Grant’s revulsion, whatever his conscious intention, is also an expression of “marketplace” styles of expression, which include
the carnivalesque and grotesque realism. The only obligation of the carnival,
as Bakhtin describes it, is to parody. The carnival is the people’s “second life,”
organized “on the basis of laughter” (Bakhtin 1968: 8). Using the literary theory
of Mikhail Bakhtin, I intend to show how Grant’s use of the “carnivalesque” in
his modes of writing and speaking serve as important and effective expressions of
his moral and conceptual arsenal.
Before turning to Grant’s writing directly, however, some criteria for endorsing
such a strategy should be adopted: Why Bakhtin? What are his strengths? Why he
and not any number of other critical theorists as a way into Grant’s writing? Both
Bakhtin and Grant shared a profound interest in the communication of ideas.
Grant frames his concern theologically: “In Christian terms, a morality which
does not care about its own communication is condemned at its heart, because it
contradicts it own first principle, charity” (Grant 1966a: 101). Bakhtin’s motives
are more aesthetic; what we need to notice about Bakhtin are his fundamental
ideas about the context and ontology of art: “‘Form’ in art ... is particularly active
in expressing and conveying a system of values, a function that follows from
the very nature of its communication as an exchange of meaningful messages”
(Pomorska 1984: viii). Bakhtin “recognizes the duality of every sign in art, where
all content is formal and every form exists because of its content.” In other words,
“form” is an indispensable active ingredient in any structure, and “a specific aspect
of message” (ibid.).
This raises important conceptual issues for understanding the purpose of what
follows. Grant’s very mode of expression constitutes a rejection of what he saw
as the sterility of modern academic and political discourse. I am not suggesting
Grant knew directly that his language held these overtones. Quite apart from
his conscious intentions, I am arguing that Grant nonetheless achieves certain
emancipatory purposes, which are complementary to and reinforce in powerful
ways his intended arguments. This suggests a new way of thinking about Grant
as a critic of modernity.
Grant developed a large repertoire of critiques during his life. Some are
compatible with one another and some are not. The only feature they have
in common is the fact that they are critiques of modernity.... As Grant
discovered and appropriated each critique, he was compelled to integrate
it with those he already accepted. None was ever abandoned entirely. Any
paradoxes that arose during this process of appropriation and integration
were either allowed to stand, or glossed briefly, or passed over in silence.
The manner in which Grant orchestrated the growing number of his
critiques became increasingly subtle over the years. Grant made each his
own in some way. And the force of his character provided the polyphony
with its unity. (Planinc 1992: 27)
Planinc borrows the concept of polyphony from an essay on poetic cadence by
Dennis Lee—a poet, friend and publisher, through House of Anansi Press, of
many of Grant’s essays—but polyphony is a critical component of Bakhtin’s
theory as well. As Theodore Scheckels puts it: “In literature, Bakhtin’s key term
is polyphony, and his key assumption is that the richest writing features created
identities ... free to voice their views to others and to themselves” (2000: 15). The
word “free,” for Scheckels, suggests that the views expressed may be heterodox
in the face of accepted norms of U.S. Congressional discourse (his particular
application of Bakhtin). Grant’s polyphonic critique of modernity has its own
TOPIA 20
As Zdravko Planinc points out, it is common for scholars to identify distinct
periods in Grant’s work. But I share Planinc’s skepticism in regards to such an
interpretive strategy and agree that Grant’s account of modernity is polyphonic:
47
distinctive content and form and arises primarily from his thought about the
soul’s relation to the divine ground of being. As Planinc notes, “its content is
spiritual and meditative; its form is the orchestration of a plurality of voices that
best expresses such content” (Planinc 1992: 27).
Grant’s polyphonic critique of modernity is given form in rhetoric that thrums
whenever he writes and speaks through metaphors of abundance, embodiment,
virility and fecundity. Bakhtin, in Rabelais and His World, analyzes the French
Renaissance writer’s “non-literary” nature—the non-conformity of his images to
the literary norms and canons of the day. These images have a nonofficial nature
which Bakhtin calls “carnivalesque,” “grotesque realism” and “the language of the
marketplace.” Grant developed his own version of these techniques in the various
debates that drew his attention, including questions of Canadian sovereignty,
citizenship, the Vietnam War, abortion, euthanasia and the nature of the modern
university.
TOPIA 20
48
The language of the marketplace found in carnival is about extra-territoriality.
According to Bakhtin, it is a reservoir in which various speech patterns, including
insulting words or expressions excluded from official domains and official
discourses, can gather. There is also a grotesque realism to this genre, the central
principle of which is degradation: the lowering of all that is considered to be high,
the transfer of the lofty to the “sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity”
(Bakhtin 1968: 19-20). To degrade, according to Bakhtin, is to concern oneself
with the lower bodily stratum. Yet this kind of focus, even when exaggerated,
has an assertive, reconstructive, even positive function. The themes—laughter,
fertility, growth and overflowing abundance—are revealing of Grant’s convictions
regarding embodiment as a fundamental good and fecundity as a resistance to
modernity.
William Christian has observed that “no matter how discouraged Grant seems,
there is an indefinable quality about his argument, or perhaps about his rhetoric,
that leads many readers to hope and not to despair” (1983: 354). Christian here
senses something deeply generative about Grant’s writing and speaking. For
Canadian nationalist and politician James Laxer:
Lament for a Nation is the most important book I ever read in my life. Here
was a crazy old philosopher of religion at McMaster and he woke up half
our generation. He was saying Canada is dead, and by saying it he was
creating the country. (Qtd. in Christian 1993: 271)
Similarly, Grant’s essays were catalysts that helped transition the poet Dennis Lee
out of years of writer’s block:
I recognize all the bleakness for which Grant is often criticised. But only
with my head; for months after I read his essays I felt a surge of release and
exhilaration. To find one’s tongue-tied sense of civil loss and bafflement
given words at last, to hear one’s own most inarticulate hunches out loud,
because most immediate in the bloodstream—and not prettied up, and in
prose like a fastidious groundswell—was to stand erect at last in one’s own
space. (Lee 1974: 161)
This helps to identify what we might call his “signature”: his use of metaphor and
his rhetoric. Grant’s apparent bleakness is laced with the carnivalesque, revealing
an undercurrent of embodied good humour and faith in precisely those places
where his anger and negativity are most extraverted.
Yet another Bakhtinian aspect emerges when we take into consideration, as Planinc
suggests, the singularity of Grant’s character. George Grant was a large and untidy
man, full of appetites: for thought, conversation, teaching, Mozart, cigarettes, food
and drink. He and Sheila Grant were married for 41 years; together they produced
a large family, raising six children. He was a prodigious writer and his many essays
are littered with references to personal neuroses and the body. When focused
through Bakhtin’s theory, these come into view as participative and universalizing
affirmations of embodiment. We can see how Grant turns to fecundity as a
resistance to modernity, especially as it is experienced in universities.
The humanities research which is being realized in Canada is not to be
identified with the traditional university. It comes forth from intercourse
between two very untraditional partners: the post-Nietzschean nineteenthcentury German university which mounted American capitalism. The
mating of the German model of the university with American capitalism
produced in the fifties its Chicagos and Berkeleys and Yales. Now in
the 1970s we are producing our imitations of these in English-speaking
Canada. Poor old Canada is enthusiastically taking on the American wave
in its decadence. (Grant 1986: 100)
The irony is that the more he denigrated them, the more these same institutions
placed laurels on Grant’s head. He was made a member of the Order of Canada
and the Royal Society of Canada, and he was the recipient of numerous honorary
degrees. Perhaps the awards indicate that Canadians had acclimatized to his
raillery: isn’t the preceding quote precisely the sort of comment that one expected
from Grant? Even the “intercourse” reference reads innocuously until one sees
“untraditional partners” and then “mounted” in reference to “German university”
and “American capitalism.” Through the physicality of the images in play, the
criticism morphs into invective and reinforces in an alarmingly palpable way the
TOPIA 20
There is no shortage of concern about the state of higher education in Canada today.
The furious debate over the methods and legitimacy of the Maclean’s magazine
university rankings is a reminder of the pivotal nature of these institutions for
Canadian life. Grant came to see Canadian institutions of higher learning as
hopelessly derivative, especially in the liberal arts:
49
argument about what has gone wrong with higher education in Canada. What
Grant brings into view through the metaphor of sexual congress is a point about
how cultures reproduce themselves, or not:
The young humanities professor must be productive in the industry he
is part of; but he must teach students who are not often held by the
museum research which the professor must turn out for his promotion. If
the teacher is at all bright, he probably wants more from life than to be
a junior executive in “the past” industry. For this reason all across North
America those of the clearest minds and noblest imaginations are leaving
the humanities in droves. They leave the field more and more free to the
technicians who have narrow but intense ambitions to build careers in this
industry. (Grant 1986: 101)
This dismay about the industrialization of liberal arts scholarship connects us to a
sharp line of attack concerning moral vacuity initiated by Grant in the 1960s. In
his essay “Tyranny and Wisdom,” he comments:
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50
There is every reason to be suspicious of the trappings of scholarship
these days. There is nothing phonier in our present universities than the
exaltation of scholarship as if it were an end in itself. To be neuter before
the question of good leads to that boasted neutrality in the multiversity
which denies itself in its service of the modern state. Antiquarianism in
the humanities has often been a means to cloak the fact that these studies
have nothing significant to say about living in the technological era. (Grant
1969: 81)
When dominated by the spirit of industry and technology, scholarship is
meretricious, ignoring the things that ought to be known but “cannot be known
by research”:
[T]he point is to know the truth of the Gospels, and when the means
become the end, as they have in the university—you know, they have gone
over the Bible word for word, and I’m not terribly sorry about that. But
it has happened at a time when the truth of the Bible gets less and less
important to people, and I think there is some connection between the two.
(1986: 18)
This is not an argument about Christian triumphalism, but a question about
openness to the teachings and purposes of sacred texts. In their “busy and well-paid
decadence,” modern scholars in the industry abnegate the spiritual nourishment
offered in the Gospels, the Psalms, the Vedanta or the Koran, while for Grant the
existential pull of questions of devotion and felt conviction is irresistible (Grant
1986b: 101). The required understanding cannot be achieved just by proving
another theorem or conducting another experiment:
[T]here is little encouragement to what might transcend the technically
competent, and what is called “philosophy” is generally little more than
analytical competence. Analytical logistics plus historicist scholarship
plus even rigorous science do not when added up equal philosophy. When
added together they are not capable of producing that thought which is
required if justice is to be taken out of the darkness which surrounds it in
the technological era. (Grant 1998: 89)
What Grant has in mind as an alternative to philosophy-as-analytic-instrumentality is captured in Aristotle’s dictum en te aisthesei he krisis. The moment
of judgement (krisis), which is also the moment of recognition, of the sudden
feeling of really understanding something, lies literally within (en) our sensory,
imaginative and moral apprehension of it (aesthesis) (Haines 1998: 28). Grant
desires an apprehension that is a union of fact and value, or a moral vocabulary
that sees this distinction as representing false alternatives. As Stanley Cavell puts
it, “both statements of fact and judgements of value rest upon the same capacities
of human nature. [...] Only a creature that can judge of value can state a fact” (qtd.
in Haines 1998: 28).
It was clearly and fully intelligible, being immediately present to the
rational powers of his mind; it was composed fundamentally of, and was
intelligible through, those qualities which were most vivid and intense
in his own immediate experience—colour, sound, beauty, joy, heat, cold,
fragrance, and its plasticity to purpose and ideal. (Burtt 2003: 123-24)
The cumulative effect of Descartes, Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler, however, was
to produce the “objective” description of the universe, the primary qualities of
which rendered it as an infinite, rather monotonous mathematical machine. The
TOPIA 20
For example, in his 1986 essay “Faith and the Multiversity,” Grant remembers
taking in a craggy shoreline along the coast of Nova Scotia while travelling with
the Arctic explorer and ethnologist, Vilhjalmur Stefansson. “A hard country,
but beautiful,” Grant said (1986: 39-40). Here, the descriptor “beautiful” comes
bound up with an implicit prescriptive judgement of the scene described. If
something is beautiful, we ought to respond to it out of devotion or reverence.
Sensing this, Stefansson proceeds to lecture Grant on how it is misleading to use
such “subjective language” about nature and terrain; one should instead approach
such matters dispassionately and scientifically. The background to Stefansson’s
remarks is an epistemology originating in the early scientific revolution. The
universe of matter, extending infinitely through space, was then defined as distinct
from the universe of mind, in thrall to the confused deceitful media of the senses
and locked away from the independent and extended realm of nature in a petty
and insignificant series of locations inside of the human subject. The pre-modern
scientist had looked out upon the world of nature and found it to be a “sociable
and human world”:
51
very substance of the pre-modern epistemology—the things, in Burtt’s words,
that made the physical world “alive and lovely and spiritual”—had been demoted,
compressed, and lumped together into the less valid secondary qualities of human
subjectivity.
From these developments has come the habitual tendency to divide language
into two components: A clean, perfectly formed, so-called objective and scientific
part, which we believe precisely describes the non-evaluative world of science and
reason; and a messy, ungainly part which imprecisely takes a stab at everything
else. Whenever we are invited to judge with our hearts, despite our heads—or,
conversely, when we are asked to be analytical no matter what we feel—we are in
the grip of the divisional thinking that Stefansson assumes and Grant seeks to
criticize.
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52
Grant’s thinking is compelling in this way because it asks us to undo the modern
tendency to place reason and justice in the head, as the seat of computation and
analysis. Grant does not accept that the rest of ourselves—emotions, feelings,
hopes and desires—should be stuffed into the heart, on the basis of which we are
supposed to make judgements and evaluations. Grant’s rejection of this divisional
thinking can be seen in his controversial admiration for Louis-Ferdinand Céline,1
whose apprehension of being bombed by Allied airplanes in the Second World
War comes through a fusion of fact and value:
...I’m not saying a word, but my mouth is full of blood ... Felipe says it was
a brick ... Ah, I don’t want to talk about my head! ... an adapter, that’s what
I needed! ... and right away! ... all full of memories! grotesque memories ...
in snatches! ...you can’t have grandiose melodies without counterpoint!
Terrible pain from temple to temple! ... in never stops! forgive me! ... I
won’t complain ... my shirt was clinging to my back ... right! I didn’t mean
to talk about it ... such dramatics! this “me me” chronicle ... Europe’s falling
to pieces? my shirt! the ridge of my back! me! wheeng! wheee! wheee! sirens
still blowing somewhere ... I’m imitating the music ... too bad I have no
talent! ... wheeesh! listen! ... I need another ear, the one I have left is no
use at all ... maybe at the piano, groping ... from key to key ... later in
Copenhagen up there, two years in the clink, I had time ... I composed
grandiose melodies for myself, still in memory of Hanover, symphonies
so to speak, and hummed them to myself ... like this, inside my mouth
... boom! ... wham! ... wheee! I was alone, I wasn’t bothering anybody ...
the guards were used to it ... my time in the clink, two years, Pavilion K,
Vesterfangsel ... seeing I was in Denmark they had to put me someplace....
Oh, you say to yourself: this old fool, what a bore he is! ... all right, I admit
it, I’m talking too much ... back to my three notes ... quick! I’m not putting
on ... but you see ... I need them for my Hanover panorama! ... before that
brick hit me and scrambled my brains, I hadn’t a care in life ... I let my head
buzz any way it liked, without order or pretention ... I let it trumpet any old
way, I didn’t bother about the music ... but now, like it or not, I’ve got to! ...
I’d even call it a melody ... can you imagine? untrained, untalented, forced
to bumble snatches of melody ... but something else! my canes! ... lost them
both in that fool explosion ... when everything fell down on us, well anyway,
the house front ... I think, I’m not sure.... (Céline 1975: 142-45)
The bizarre, unsteady, almost incomprehensible language of hallucination is
precisely what is called for if the significance of this experience is not to be filtered
out. For Grant, any interpretive strategy which plays down or ignores the insanity
produced by bombing and being bombed is wrong:
When at the height of the highest of the three books, Rigadoon, he is in the
midst of destruction of Hanover by the flying fortresses, we are present in
his hallucinations when he is hit by a brick. But is this madness? How can
one better tell what it is like to be in the middle of saturation bombing?
(1983: 806)
The theme of madness is important for Grant because it makes people look at the
world with eyes not dimmed by routine normality and platitudes. Madness is a
parody of official reason and the narrow seriousness of official truth. Of himself
he once wrote, “[I]t has taken the battering of a lifetime of madness to begin to
grasp even dimly that which has been inevitably lost in being North American”
(1969: 36). These are:
[T]hings more deeply in the stuff of everyday living which remain long
after they can no longer be thought: public and private virtues having
their point beyond what can in any sense by [sic] called socially useful;
commitments to love and to friendship which lie rooted in a realm outside
the calculable; a partaking in the beautiful not seen as the product of
human creativity; amusements and ecstasies not seen as the enemies of
reason. (1969: 36)
In describing everyday life, Grant turns to metaphors that resemble Bakhtin’s
grotesque as they are participative and universalizing affirmations of embodiment.
For Grant, as for Bakhtin, the body is a corridor to things “more deeply in life”:
In grotesque realism, the bodily element is deeply positive. It is not presented
in a private, egotistic form, severed from the other spheres of life, but as
something universal, representing all people. As such it is opposed to severance
from the material and bodily roots of the world. (Bakhtin 1968: 19)
TOPIA 20
In the same essay, Grant exclaims: “If I were to use a colloquial title for this
writing it would be ‘Up Yours, Matthew Arnold’” (ibid.). Arnold’s posterior stands
in for the “well-heeled bourgeois” critics who would isolate Céline by accusing
him of unsteadiness and madness. Grant reacts by saying that “there is something
wrong about people who are not mad in this era” (Grant 1996: 42).
53
This rhetoric, while exaggerating and hyperbolic, is for Bakhtin precisely what
keeps us in touch with powers as inclusive as they are fecund:
[T]he body and bodily life have here a cosmic and at the same time an allpeople’s character.... The material bodily principle is contained not in the
biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people who are
continually growing and renewed.... The leading themes of these images of
bodily life are fertility, growth, and a brimming-over abundance. (Bakhtin
1968: 19)
The images that signify resilience in Bakhtin furnish lenses that are revelatory
for Grant’s work. In this light, the socratic dimensions of Grant’s career, where
he demonstrates that philosophy is not some lofty, specialist enterprise immured
from the outside world, take on new significance. It is relatively easy to see in Grant
suspensions of hierarchical precedence redolent of carnival celebration. Louise
Greenspan was a student of Grant’s at Dalhousie University in the 1950s:
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54
You met the professors, or your classroom was really three places. This
was so with George. First it was the classroom itself. It was also the Lord
Nelson tavern where we drank beer and talked philosophy. And then it
was in Sheila and George’s home, you know, which was a kind of salon for
philosophy students and so on. And I marvel to this day, they had six young
children, and still whenever people came into the house, long conversations
about philosophy in which they would both participate.... And another
thing that was different was the numbers of people from practical life who
were in the classroom. You know, there were politicians who would attend
George’s seminar at night. (Qtd. in Cayley 1986: 5)
For Matt Cohen, a student of Grant’s at McMaster in the 1960s:
His whole method of teaching and discourse was ... much more in his own
inimitable fashion, a sort of Greek approach to things, where he believed
that people should lead themselves to this.... To him the business of living
and the business of philosophy were the same thing. And I think that that
was one of the things that made him so attractive to students, because they
felt that in a sense he was saying to them that the most important thing
you’ve got is your life and how you live it. (Qtd. in Cayley 1986: 8)
This simultaneity of life and philosophy in Grant is carnivalesque. According to
Bakhtin, official feasts were “a consecration of inequality,” whereas during carnival
all were considered equal:
Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned
among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property,
profession and age.... [S]uch free, familiar contacts were deeply felt and
formed an essential element of the carnival spirit. People were, so to speak,
reborn for new, purely human relations. These truly human relations were
not only a fruit of imagination or abstract thought; they were experienced.
(Bakhtin 1968: 10)
Philosophy, which Grant seeks to apply rather than embalm, is both portable
and participative. It does not know footlights and reckons no distinction between
actors and spectators. What Bakhtin says of carnival, Grant would say about
philosophy: “Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and
everyone participates” (Bakhtin 1968: 7).
Vernacular elements, such as “etc., etc.,” together with the language of the
marketplace and abusive language (such as profanities and oaths) can be found
throughout his work from the 1960s to the 1980s. In the transcripts of an
interview with Gad Horowitz published in 1969, for example, Grant exclaims
that “anybody must be a son of a bitch who doesn’t want to overcome suffering”
(Grant 1969-70: 19). Bakhtin’s work help to explain Grant’s apparent solecism,
which otherwise remains quite odd, as due to a kind of carnival familiarity:
[W]hen two persons establish friendly relations, the form of their verbal
intercourse also changes abruptly; they address each other informally....
Verbal etiquette and discipline are relaxed and indecent words and
expressions may be used (Bakhtin 1968: 16).
Finally, in a keynote address to the Sixth International Conference on the Unity of
the Sciences at San Francisco in 1977, Grant said: “I do not much like to criticize
Christianity in public these days when every Tom, Dick and Harry makes cracks
at it” (Grant 1978: 193). Grant could have said that contempt of the Christian
faith is de rigeur in the technological state and its institutions, required by protocol
or fashion. He does all that, of course, but it is through a degrading insult directed
at “nobodies.” The significance of this revilement is not its historical veracity but
the possibility that there is more to these sorts of expressions than bare cynicism:
As Bakhtin puts it, “a vague memory of past carnival liberties and carnival truth
still slumbers in these modern forms of abuse” (Bakhtin 1968: 28).
TOPIA 20
By word and by deed, then, Grant attracted and held the attention of some,
while repelling others—not least among these are the professionals. His apparent
contempt for colleagues is perhaps where Grant took the most risks with carnival
genres. As we have seen, he argued not only that certain scholars are incapable
of reproducing the culture they have inherited, but that they “have gained their
unassailable status of mastery and self-justification by surrendering their power
to speak about questions of immediate and ultimate meaning” (Grant 1969: 126).
In search of this meaning, Grant rejects the concept of neutrality in regards to
his own and other scholarship, as his language refuses to be drained of natural
textures and stress patterns.
55
The university is not for Grant the only locus of sterility in modernity. Similar
marketplace strategies come into play when Grant seems to contradict his more
positive embrace of the culture outside of universities, and instead expresses a
deep cynicism about diversity in contemporary North America:
As for pluralism, differences in the technological state are able to exist only
in private activities: how we eat; how we mate; how we practice ceremonies.
Some like pizza, some like steaks; some like girls, some like boys; some
like synagogue, some like the mass. But we all do it in churches, motels,
restaurants indistinguishable from the Atlantic to the Pacific. (Grant
1986b: 26)
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56
This sizzling fragment combines all manner of appetites—pizza, steaks, girls,
boys, together with a blurring of domains—synagogue, mass, churches, motels
and restaurants. It calls to mind a canvas by Heironymus Bosch. However diverse
the items consumed, the act of consumption under global capitalism is utterly
homogeneous: we are all “doing it” in a mash-up of homogeneous consumption.
However, Bakhtin suggests that we can find a regenerating ambivalence in those
bodily appetites: “Grotesque realism knows no other lower level; it is the fruitful
earth and the womb. It is always conceiving” (Bakhtin 1968: 21). The lowest
level is where conception takes place. When his rhetoric reaches this level, Grant
evokes the untamed and procreative powers of the sun, earth and body. These
are powers that one might feel after several shots of single malt whisky. When
Grant says of the Loyalist settlers of Upper Canada that they were made up of
“that extraordinary concoction, straight Locke with a dash of Anglicanism,” we
may well question the technical accuracy of the claim as it pertains to Canadian
history, but note also that the conception is rendered in a confectionary way
(Grant 1986: 68). This image of drink contains the spirit of a popular banquet
or a pub; according to Bakhtin, such metaphors serve as a bodily and popular
corrective to spiritual pretence (Bakhtin 1968: 22).
Despite Grant’s ominous and somewhat depressing focus on sterility and homogeneity, then, we find connections to chthonic and generative powers:
To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring
forth something more and better…. To degrade an object does not imply
merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction,
but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which
conception and a new birth take place. (Bakhtin 1968: 21)
On this basis, we can conclude that the lines of attack and degradation which
are easily identifiable in Grant’s work, and that some say constitute its bleakness,
are not moments of bare negation, whatever his overt intentions. What comes
into view, instead, is a subversion of modernity that is accomplished in subtle,
ultimately regenerative ways.
Grant said to David Cayley in 1986:
When the practical life of their society is not possible for people, that is a
terrible loss. I was talking earlier about the polis. This is what was meant,
that everybody in the society should have a chance to take authentic
action, that is activity that really matters. And in great empires like the
North American and the Russian, one loses it. And this is surely a great
condemnation of the modern, isn’t it? It belongs to human beings as human
beings to take part in the life of their society. (Qtd. in Cayley 1986: 6)
For all the opportunities created by Bakhtin’s account of carnival, however, there
are also problems. Even if no more than an analogy is drawn between the spirit of
Grant’s writing and Rabelais, there is a danger of ignoring the historical element in
the arguments about carnival which, according to Dentith “is not a transhistorical
phenomenon” (71). Bakhtin wrote Rabelais and his World in ignorance of much
of 20th-century Rabelaisian scholarship, writes Dentith, and “[i]t may be that he
gives a one-sided account of Rabelais” (73). As a “mixed blessing,” carnival can be
used to overturn symbolically communal hierarchies, but also to provide a space
in which they might be underlined. This is partly because carnival space was not
limited to the peasantry:
The evidence gathered by modern historians of early modern European
culture does not run strongly in Bakhtin’s favour. One initial and important
point that needs to be made is that popular-festive forms were not only
the cultural property of the “people” in the narrow modern sense, but were
shared and used by all ranks in society before the seventeenth century.
(Dentith 1995: 74)
TOPIA 20
Michael Holquist has argued that Rabelais and His World enacts a peculiarly open
sense of the text; it is about “the subversive openness of the Rabelaisian novel, but
it is also a subversively open book itself.” Bakhtin attempted to show the ways
in which the Russian revolution had lost touch with its roots and to bring the
folk “with its corrosive laughter” back into the work of politics (Holquist 1984:
xvi; xxii). According to Simon Dentith, the whole of Rabelais and his World is
best seen as a coded attack on the cultural situation of Russia in the 1930s under
Stalin (Dentith 1995: 70-71). It is “a hidden polemic” against the regime’s cultural
politics, the policies of which tightened significantly after 1934 when “socialist
realism” was officially enforced as the only permissible aesthetic for the novel.
Much of Bakhtin’s account of grotesque realism, with its attempt to mobilize
conceptually the “rumbustious popular life of the carnival against the official but
murderous pieties of Church and State in Renaissance Europe” may be seen as
a rejoinder to cultural life under Stalinism (Dentith 1995: 71). I hope that the
analogy between this and the official pieties of Grant’s milieu is compelling: To
encounter the chthonian impulse to carnival in his work is to have opened up new
possibilities in the relations between body, language and political practice.
57
Because there is evidence of widespread participation by the nobility in carnival
(including some who wrote plays, songs and farces) it is now a matter of record
that real-life carnival rituals—although perhaps fun for the short term—were not
necessarily cheerful and carefree. Caryl Emerson points out that:
In its function as society’s safety valve, as a scheduled event that worked
to domesticate conflict by temporarily sanctioning victimization, medieval
carnival in practice could be more repressive than liberating. Bakhtin’s
reluctance to highlight the crucial role of violence during carnival baffled
many of his readers. (1997: 164-65)
Is carnival to be equated with creative potential in general or merely with
sanctioned ritual inversion? Dentith turns to Olivia’s defence of Feste in Twelfth
Night in this context: “There is no slander in an allow’d fool, though he does
nothing but rail” (Dentith 1995: 73). Can Grant’s efforts to subvert modernity
through the energies of carnival be deflected by seeing them as the antics of an
“allow’d fool”? As Dentith puts it:
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[i]t is hard to accede to a version of carnival which stresses its capacity
to invert hierarchies and undermine boundaries, without at the same
time recalling that many carnival and carnival-like degradations clearly
functioned to reinforce communal and hierarchical norms. (74)
Michael André Bernstein gives the point a darker twist when he argues that “the
literature of the past two centuries offers numerous examples of a ‘wise fool’ who
understands clearly the terms—and latent authority—of his archetypal role and
yet, because he is genuinely mad, can only manage to enact that role in a hysterical
mode” (1986: 115). It is interesting that Bernstein cites Céline in precisely this
regard.
Doubts about commensurability also emerge over the question of whether the
underside of carnival laughter and behaviour may be intolerably unnerving,
especially for Grant, whose political and religious instincts are conservative. As
Emerson notes: “Bakhtin’s version of the public square—for all its excellence as
the site of carnival—is a place of monosyllabic obscenities and hawkers’ cries,
more suited to a Dionysian book burning that to sedate book reading. (Is the
carnival body even literate?)” (1997: 167). Moreover, certain kinds of laughter do
not have the generative force that Bakhtin ascribes to carnival laughter, but are
rather produced, as Dentith points out, “in a sardonic and negative key” (1995:
72). Indeed, Bernstein locates a twisted and bitter strand at the core of carnival.
In his reading of Bakhtin, any trust in the transcendent power of carnival laughter
is misplaced: “[W]hat emerges is the image of a carnivalization of values during
which it is no longer a question of breaking down ossified hierarchies and stale
judgements but rather of being denied any vantage point from which a value can
still be affirmed” (Bernstein 1986: 100). According to Renate Lachmann, carnival
culture has no telos: “The rationality of Bakhtin’s carnival is decentered; i.e., it is
not oriented towards the definition, the one truth” (Lachmann 1988: 135). The
skepticism of these darker readings of carnival extend Bakhtin’s formulation in
directions Grant would have viewed only with distress.
The limits of carnival’s transposability to the contexts and convictions of George
Grant are further exposed when carnival laughter is reckoned by Bakhtin as
containing the possibility of a complete withdrawal from the present order
(Bakhtin 1968: 275). Lachmann argues that in the carnivalesque game of inverting
official values, Bakhtin “sees the anticipation of another, utopian world in which
anti-hierarchism, relativity of values, questioning of authority, openness, joyous
anarchy, and the ridiculing of all dogmas holds sway, a world in which syncretism
and a myriad of differing perspectives are permitted” (1988: 118). Here, Grant’s
connection to Vietnam War protests and the Student’s Union for Peace Action
(SUPA) is particularly revealing. Early in 1966, Grant met with SUPA leaders to
write a pamphlet denouncing Canadian collaboration in the American war effort.
According to Grant’s biographer, they prepared a petition and planned a silent
vigil for forty-eight hours in front of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. As
Grant explained to Kenneth McNaught:
In Grant’s absence, however, the SUPA leadership decided on a change in plans:
they intended to disrupt Parliament with civil disobedience. When he heard the
announcement Grant felt betrayed. Civil disobedience, despite features redolent
of carnival, was a doctrine from which he wished to distance himself:
It is both foolish and irresponsible to propose civil disobedience as a
threat to a government with which one wants to hold rational discussions
TOPIA 20
The reasons for doing this seem to me something like the following:
(1) For whatever motives, it seems to me that the U.S. has got into a
position where it is massacring masses of Vietnamese. Canada is more
and more implicated in this, and the thought of us being implicated in
a long and growing war between Asia and North America is too terrible
to contemplate. (2) I think it is important that those of us of the older
generation who are Canadian nationalists should join these young people
and show them that there are some older people in this country who are
willing to speak about this matter—and not simply the older radicals. This
joint effort means that the document will be a compromise, as it already
is. The older generation joining this will also mean that it can work within
constitutional government. The students concerned wished to start out with
civil disobedience, and they have now agreed to have a silent and legal vigil.
I am not convinced that this action will accomplish much in the present
ferocious circumstances, but I do not see how a Canadian nationalist
cannot express himself on this matter at the moment. (Qtd. in Christian
1993: 258-59)
59
to persuade it to change its policies.... I should have made clear much
sooner the fact that there is a vast gap between those who think there is no
alternative to action within the operations of constitutional government
... and those who are essentially revolutionaries. (Qtd. in Christian 1993:
259-60)
The point about revolution introduces a question of utopias, the nature of which
adds another layer of dissonance between Bakhtin and Grant. Critics have
found in Bakhtin utopian aspirations because of what they see as his “excessively
indulgent account of popular culture” (Dentith 1995: 76). Bakhtin’s use of the
“utopian,” writes Dentith, does not look forward to some distant prospect of social
perfection, but looks back nostalgically with the idea that carnival has in some way
already actualized utopia. Carnival becomes a time outside of time, “a second life
of the people, who for a time entered the utopian realm of community, freedom,
equality, and abundance” (Dentith 1995: 76; Bakhtin 1968: 9). In contrast, Grant,
at teach-ins across the country in the 1960s, punctures all balloons of unrealistic
expectation:
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60
How can a conservative not feel sympathy with the outrage of the new
left against the emptiness and dehumanization that this society produces?
When the new left speaks, however, of overcoming these conditions by
protest, I think they are indulging in dreams. The moral fervour that
accompanies such dreams is too valuable to be wasted on anything but
reality. When they speak as if it were possible by marching and sitting
to turn North American society away from being an empire ... I do not
understand the source of their hope. When some of them speak as if the
empires of the east were not moving in much the same social direction
as the United States I think they are deluding themselves. When they
propose that our modern universities can be turned into human sources of
enlightenment, I do not think they understand the role that the universities
play in the imperial, technological system. I think they have not looked at
our society closely enough.
Their politics of hope and Utopia ... seems to me a kind of dream from
which analysis should awaken them. (1966b: 123)
Dentith suggests that Bakhtin’s feel for the utopian forms of the pre- and early
modern world, rather than the utopias of the enlightenment, involves a powerful
nostalgia for the world of carnival and some dismay at the forces of modernity,
rationality and enlightenment which displaced it (1995: 77). While Grant shares
this dismay, there are limits to the lengths he will go, practically and theoretically,
in constructing an alternative. Forms of carnival and populist protest that are not
officially sanctioned and temporally circumscribed are unacceptable.
Some of Grant’s more recent interpreters have located the source of his steadfast
attention to reality in Christian theology, particularly a “theology of the cross,” and
“[O]nly in terms of the theologia crucis is any adequate theodicy possible.
Only in the contemplation of the Cross in sincerity of feeling and the
following of it in faithfulness in action can men affirm that God is Love,
and make that affirmation without denying their own capacity for sin, or
closing down their imaginations upon the suffering of the world. (2000:
281)
The difficulty with Athanasiadis’s approach is that we are not told how to connect
the obsession with the indicative mood required by the theology of the cross
with Grant’s evident gift for metaphor and poetry. As we saw earlier, Grant was
able to situate Canadian politics within the wider context of Western civilization
(specifically, its literature) by saying on public radio that Canadian Prime Minister
John Diefenbaker reminded him of e.e. cummings’s Great Olaf: “There is some
shit I will not eat!” Grant’s rhetoric at this and other junctures was laced with the
language of the marketplace. It is also significant that early in his career Grant
published poetry and that he went on to be deeply impressed by poetical thinkers
such as Heidegger and Plato. Finally, and perhaps most strange, Grant seemed
at home with that most postmodern of artifacts, the sound bite. How does this
facility for poetry and rhetoric cohere with the critical imperative to say “what it
actually is (quod res est)” (Athanasiadis 2001: 34)?
For numerous critics, described by Emerson as “redeemers and integraters,”
Bakhtin’s notion of carnival is “a direct expression of an affirmative value system
that nevertheless required a degree of camouflage during the Soviet years” (1997:
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it is interesting to note a similar determination amongst Bakhtinian scholarship
to interpret him theologically. In what remains of this discussion I will explore the
potential for affinity between Grant and Bakhtin on these grounds. In his groundbreaking 2001 study, George Grant and the Theology of the Cross: The Christian
Foundations of His Thought, Harris Athanasiadis argues that Grant’s unflinching
realism introduces a serious concern about the credibility of religiously informed
social criticism. It is important that Grant is able to say in his peculiar translation
of the twenty-first thesis of Martin Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation that “the
thing is as it is” (Athanasiadis 2001: 33-54). The theologian of the cross recognizes
reality as it truly is and this is what sets Grant apart. He has access to the real
because he comprehends the visible and manifest things through the lenses of
suffering and the Cross. Grant can therefore analyze the technological society “as
it is,” and understand the technological era as it is without the equivocation that
calls evil good and good evil. Thus the value of Grant’s criticism derives from his
aversion to hypocrisy: It is his uncompromised report from the perspective of the
living God, crucified, wherein the world is a realm of blood and shit and sperm
and tears, that makes Grant credible. His understanding of the theology of the
cross demands that one see meaning in all its inhuman horror and grotesquerie.
As Grant put it in his doctoral thesis:
61
172). This value system includes the embodied word, the grotesque body, the
legitimacy and redeemability of matter and interpersonal contact as definitive of
life. In his 1991 essay entitled, “Carnival and Incarnation: Bakhtin and Orthodox
Theology,” Charles Lock argues that the Eastern Orthodox reverence for matter
points not to the Cross, but to the Incarnation:
Commentators have often noted that theological and Christian discourse
are markedly absent from Bakhtin’s texts after the early 1930s. What at this
date becomes insistently present is the body. Far from evincing Bakhtin’s
acceptance of Marxism, the phenomenon may suggest that Bakhtin’s
writing can afford to be less explicitly Christian (and deliberately less
metaphysical) the more it relies upon and elaborates the paradigm of the
Incarnation. (Lock 1991: 72)
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62
To the degree that a theology of Incarnation rejects any sharp division between the
material and the spiritual, its implication in carnival appears to hold out the hope
of re-sacralization to a hopelessly flattened world of matter: “One cannot divide
the material from the immaterial, nor deem some matter good, some bad. There
can be no privileging within matter, for even the excremental can be sacramental:
consider all of Christ’s paradoxical parables of ‘the least’” (73).
Lock’s argument is not without merit and has been taken seriously in various
quarters of Bakhtinian scholarship. If excrement is sacrament, however, then
what we have here might well contradict Grant’s theology of the cross in which,
presumably, dung really is dung. True, Christian theology in some way informs
the work of both Grant and Bakhtin, but it is difficult to see much value in what a
theological comparison between them yields. Bakhtin’s dialogism teaches us that
there can be no last word. What I have shown here, I hope, is that the category of
carnival is stubbornly revelatory: Despite limits to its transposability, carnival is a
persistent and meaningful impulse in Grant’s critique of modernity.
Note
1. Controversial because of Céline’s anti-Semitism. See A. Davis, ed., George Grant and
the Subversion of Modernity: Art, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, and Education (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1996.), chapters 2-4.
References
Angus, Ian. 1989. For a Canadian Philosophy: George Grant. Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory XIII (1-2): 140-43.
Athanasiadis, Harris. 2001. George Grant and the Theology of the Cross. Toronto, ON:
University of Toronto Press.
Baker. Ray Palmer. 1979. Thomas Chandler Haliburton and the Loyalist Tradition in the
Development of American Humour. In On Thomas Chandler Haliburton, edited by R. A.
Davies, 96-119. Ottawa, ON: The Tecumseh Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1968. Rabelais and His World. Trans. H. Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA:
M.I.T. Press.
Bernstein, Michael André. 1986. When Carnival Turns Bitter: Preliminary Reflections
Upon the Abject Hero. In Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work, edited by G. S.
Morson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Burtt, Edwin. A. 2003. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. Mineola, NY:
Dover Publications.
Cayley, David. 1986. The Moving Image of Eternity. Toronto, ON: Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation Multimedia Transcripts.
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. 1975. Rigadoon. Trans. R. Manheim. New York and Baltimore:
Penguin.
Christian, William. 1983. George Grant and Love: A Comment on Ian Box’s “George
Grant and the Embrace of Technology,” Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, XVI(2): 349-54.
———. 1993. George Grant, A Biography. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.
Davis, Arthur, ed. 1996. George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity: Art, Philosophy,
Politics, Religion, and Education. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.
Dentith, Simon. 1995. Bakhtinian Thought. London and New York: Routledge.
Emerson, Caryl. 1997. The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 1966a. Philosophy in the Mass Age. Toronto, ON: Copp Clark.
———. 1966b. Protest and Technology. In Revolution and Response, edited by C. Hanly.
Toronto, ON: McClelland and Stewart.
———. 1969. Technology and Empire. Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press.
———. 1969-70. Horowitz and Grant Talk. Canadian Dimension 6(Dec/Jan): 18-20.
———. 1978. Faith and the Multiversity. The Search For Absolute Values in a Changing
World, Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences Vol. 1.
New York: The International Cultural Foundation Press.
———. 1983. Céline: Art and Politics. Queen’s Quarterly 90(3): 801-13.
———. 1986. Technology and Justice. Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press.
———. 1996. Céline’s Trilogy. George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity: Art, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, and Education, edited by A. Davis. Toronto, ON: University of
Toronto Press.
———. 1998. English-Speaking Justice. Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press.
———. 2000. Collected Works, Volume 1, edited by A. Davis and P. Emberley. Toronto,
ON: University of Toronto Press.
Haines, Simon. 1998. Deepening the Self: The Language of Ethics and the Language
of Literature. In Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory, edited by Jane
Adamson, Richard Freadman and David Parker, 21-38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Holquist, Michael. 1984. Prologue. In Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. Trans.
H. Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.
Humphrey, Chris. 2000. Bakhtin and the Study of Popular Culture: Re-thinking Carni-
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Grant, G. P. 1965. Lament for a Nation. Ottawa, ON: Carleton University Press.
63
val as a Historical and Analytical Concept. In Materializing Bakhtin: The Bakhtin Circle
and Social Theory, edited by Craig Brandist and Galin Tihanov, 164-72. New York: St.
Martin’s Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 1983. Psychoanalysis and the Polis. In The Politics of Interpretation, edited
by W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Larmore, Charles. 1996. The Morals of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Lachmann, Renate. 1988. Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture. Trans. R.
Eshelman and M. Davis. Cultural Critique 11(Winter): 115-52.
Lee, Dennis. 1974. Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in Colonial Space. Boundary
2(3): 151-68.
Lock, Charles. 1991. Carnival and Incarnation: Bakhtin and Orthodox Theology. Journal
of Literature and Theology 5(1): 68-82.
Planinc, Zdravko. 1992. Paradox and Polyphony in Grant’s Critique of Modernity. In
George Grant and the Future of Canada, edited by Y. K. Umar, 17-45. Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press.
Pomorska, Krystyna. 1984. Foreword to Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. Trans.
H. Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.
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64
Rée, J. 1987. Philosophical Tales: An Essay on Philosophy and Literature. London and New
York: Methuen.
Scheckels, Theodore F. 2000. When Congress Debates: A Bakhtinian Paradigm. Westport,
CT: Praeger Publishers.
TOPIA 20 65
Camille Hernandez-Ramdwar
Feteing as Cultural Resistance?
The Soca Posse in the Caribbean Diaspora
ABSTRACT
Diasporic cultural forms such as music are continually transforming and under
contestation. Soca music from the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago has
migrated to the Caribbean diaspora where it is attracting a growing audience,
some of whom belong to the second generation Caribbean population. It is
within the soca fetes, the large parties or shows that often coincide with Carnivalstyle celebrations, that the significance of soca as a site of cultural resistance can
be contested. Drawing on research conducted in Toronto, Canada, which has a
large Caribbean diasporic community, this paper examines the ways in which a
Trinidadian identity is foregrounded and replicated by the second generation in
the soca fete. It also looks at other accompanying tensions between Caribbean
identities within a diasporic locale.
RÉSUMÉ
Diasporique formes culturelles telles que la musique ne cessent de transformer et
en vertu de la contestation. Soca musique de la nation des Caraïbes de Trinitéet-Tobago a migré vers la diaspora des Caraïbes où il attire un public de plus en
plus, dont certains appartiennent à la deuxième génération Caraïbes population.
C’est dans les fêtes de soca, les grands partis ou montre que coïncident souvent
avec Carnaval de style célébrations, que l’importance de soca comme un site
culturel de la résistance peut être contestée. S’appuyant sur les recherches menées
à Toronto, au Canada, qui a une grande communauté diasporique Caraïbes, le
présent document examine la manière dont une identité Trinidadien occupe le
premier plan et reproduites par la deuxième génération dans la soca fête. Il se
penche également sur d’autres accompagnant les tensions entre identités dans les
Caraïbes une diaspora locale.
¤
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66
Through its association with Carnival, Soca music is arguably the most wellknown music originating from the island of Trinidad. Said to be an abbreviation
of “soul-calypso,” soca developed in the 1970s as a combination of traditional
calypso, Indo-Caribbean influences and American soul and disco, which were
popular in Trinidad at the time. An Atlantic Records press release described
soca as “an expression of Trinidad and Tobago’s African and Indian ethnic mix,
incorporating dance-oriented East Indian percussive and musical elements
into traditional calypso to create an energetic irresistible party music” ( Joseph
2004). Unlike calypso, the main attraction of soca is not the lyrics but the upbeat
rhythm and fast tempo designed to raise the energy of party people and Carnival
masqueraders.
Since the 1980s, the influence of Jamaican dancehall music on Trinidadian musical
culture has become more noticeable, which has resulted in some cultural purists
asserting what is considered to be “real” Trinidadian identity: a nationalistic
adherence to the performance of calypso and steelband.1 The linking of specific
ethnic, racial, class and national identities with popular cultural forms, in this
case music and dancing, is not only being contested in the Caribbean region,
but in the diaspora as well. One of the premiere sites for examining the cultural
expression of second generation Caribbean identities are soca fetes—the large
parties or shows at which soca music is played, usually with performances by soca
bands, well-known singers and DJs. Through an examination of one diasporic
locale in Toronto, Canada, and through participant observation2 and interviews,
I show the ways in which the soca fete and members of the Trinidadian second
generation3 “soca posse” identify with and utilize soca as a site of identity and
cultural resistance. I argue that the soca fete has become a space of resistance
not only to other musical forms, but to the increasingly negative characteristics,
stereotypes, behaviours, messages and identities associated with Caribbean and/or
black diasporic communities.4 While the soca posse and soca fete operate as sites
of resistance, they can at times also reinforce replications of neocolonialism in the
diaspora.
The Caribbean Diaspora and Musical Scenes
According to Straw, a musical scene is a “cultural space in which a range of
musical practices coexist, interacting with each other within a variety of processes
of differentiation, and according to widely varying trajectories of change and
cross-fertilization” (Straw 1991: 373). Whether in Trinidad or the diaspora, the
soca scene reflects far-reaching trends in Caribbean and transnational cultural
expression. In a city like Toronto, however, two of the more prominent musical
scenes, especially among Caribbean youth, are hip hop and dancehall.
raw and raucous testimony—in language intentionally offensive in its
blunt vulgarity and brutal sexist diction—from those who laugh at the idea
that rappers should be role models.... Like badman boasts and trickster
narratives dating back to at least the 1940s, N.W.A.’s lyrics broadcast
the will to meet a violent world with alluring, shocking fast talk and, if
necessary, with hard fists and bullets. (2004: 10)
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Although the popularity of hip hop among youth internationally has been
documented (Ross and Rose 1994), the proximity of Toronto to New York, the
birthplace of hip hop, and the overwhelming imposition of American culture on
Canadian culture has certainly been a factor in hip hop’s Toronto following since
the 1990s (Haines 1999). Within genres of music such as hip hop, dancehall
and soca, there exist subgenres; for example, within hip hop are the subgenres of
gangsta rap and conscious hip hop. Increasingly, the hip hop scene in Toronto
is multiracial, with a large number of white youth engaging in the music and
the style. Hip hop has become mainstream (Blackburn 2004) and is played in
almost every downtown club in Toronto. Even in the “alternative” arena of the hip
hop underground where the subgenre of conscious hip hop is played—espousing
lyrics of political resistance, social critique and themes of black consciousness,
empowerment and revolution—and where there is a definite attempt to reclaim
the roots of hip hop from its mainstream commercial stance, one finds a large
number of white, suburban youth. One also finds a growing numbers of Latinos,
Asians, Aboriginal and other racialized youth present in Toronto’s hip hop
scene. In contrast, gangsta rap is largely a reflection of the urban street reality
for many marginalized African Americans; it glorifies gun violence, conspicuous
consumption or a “fascination with ‘bling’” (Ralph 2006: 61), and “misogyny,
nihilism and excessive use of profanity” (Kubrin 2006: 435). The attitudes
associated with gangsta rap have become increasingly mainstream, glorifying the
image, posturing and lifestyle of the gangsta, thug, pimp, ho and bitch (Adams
and Fuller 2006; Kubrin 2005; Ralph 2006). These stereotypical images, portrayed
particularly through music videos, are reproduced and appropriated faithfully by
many hip hop fans. In her description of N.W.A., one of the first gangsta rap
groups, Blackburn writes that “gangsta rap” offers
67
Unfortunately these aggressive, materialistic and callously sexual overtones are
picked up by youth in the hip hop scene, some of whom attempt to replicate
their heroes even when they have no direct knowledge of the kind of hardships
experienced in communities from which this music originates. Haines notes that
“it was no coincidence that the rise in popularity of gangsta rap was paralleled by
a huge increase in white consumption of rap music” (1999: 60) since this subgenre
was seen as especially attractive due to its offensive, violent and misogynistic
content. The desire to imitate what is being rapped about in the songs often results
in incidences of violence, the presence and use of guns and weapons in some hip
hop scenes and an overall preoccupation with money, cars, clothes and jewelry.
The messages in the songs become reflected in the crowd.
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68
Dancehall’s large and loyal following is predominantly linked to the Jamaican
Canadian community. According to the 2006 Canadian census, people identifying
as Jamaican far outnumbered all those who identified themselves as belonging
to other Caribbean, African Canadian or continental African groups, both in
Toronto and Canada as a whole (Statistics Canada 2008). Like gangsta rap, the
lyrics in dancehall music reflect the harsh lived realities of many impoverished
urban Jamaicans. In the dancehall scene there is an emphasis on toughness,
rudeness, materialism, frank sexuality and homophobia. Hope states that:
Based on the sociopolitical and economic conditions in contemporary
Jamaica, the dancehall has become an arena for the creation, recreation
and dissemination of symbols that serve to legitimize and reinforce this
lived existence and is characterized by strong links to extra-legal and illegal
actors and/or activities.... (It) include(s) negotiations of gendered structures
of power; heavy emphasis on sexuality and sex-play; and deep linkages with
political garrisons, “donmanship,” illegal drug culture, gun culture and (gun)
violence in Jamaica. (2004: 107)
Dancehall, like gangsta rap, has often been accused of being overtly misogynistic
and homophobic ( Julien 1994; Gutzmore 2004). In fact, in October 2007 major
dancehall artists Elephant Man and Sizzla were banned from performing in
Toronto due to protests by a group called Stop Murder Music, who argued that
the artists’s lyrics advocated for the killing of gays and lesbians (Rau 2007). The
“conscious” subgenre of dancehall “combine(s) the militancy of the Rasta rebel and
the gangster rude boy” (Stolzhoff 2000: 113), criticizing neocolonial structures,
the police and politicians. However, conscious dancehall, although strongly
influenced by Rastafarian beliefs, differs significantly from the earlier subgenre
of conscious “roots” reggae à la Bob Marley; conscious dancehall artists such as
Sizzla and Capleton have no quarrel with advocating for violence.
Unlike either hip hop or soca, participants in dancehall are for the most part of
Jamaican descent, and black. Douglas, one of the second generation Trinidadians
I interviewed,5 works in the Toronto Caribbean music promotion industry. He
described his impression of the dancehall scene thusly:
Dancehall people will only go to dancehall. They not going in the soca fete.
They’re not going to a zouk or parang ... it’s like everybody else will attempt
a soca or a pan or a zouk or whatever and check it out. Dancehall people
only go to dancehall. And you may even get the occasional other people,
other islands’ soca people going to a dancehall thing, but dancehall people
don’t care for anything else other than dancehall. Judging on the size ... it’s
hard to break a dent in the dancehall scene. Reggae’s in the [mainstream]
clubs to a certain extent but you never get the hardcore dancehall stuff, it
won’t be that “bad” cause people need to sort of understand it, or sort of like
the melody-type thing, or think they understand it.
Trinidadians are known for adapting, mixing, blending and reinventing culturally,
which is largely due to the cultural and ethnic diversity found on the island.
Roughly speaking, in a nation of 1.2 million, the population is equally divided
between people of African and Indian descent, while approximately 20 per cent
of the population claim mixed ancestry. There have been tensions and rivalries
between Trinidad and Jamaica in the Caribbean and their diasporas for generations.
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What Douglas is commenting on is the apparent insularity of Jamaican dancehall
patrons, something which has also been linked to a particularly Jamaican characteristic: the scorning of what is culturally different, unusual or unfamiliar,
whether it be music, food, dance or language, unless it is “from foreign”—
“foreign” representing the colonial or neocolonial superpower, formerly Britain
and now the United States. According to Cooper, “the cultural products of the
small island state of Jamaica, particularly reggae music, articulate a profound
sense of self-centredness and cultural autonomy” (1993: 192-93). This cultural
insularity is partially due to the long and lengthy imposition of colonialism and
neocolonialism in the country; it is also due to the relative lack of ethnic diversity
in Jamaica. Unlike Trinidad, at least 90 per cent of the population are of African
descent, and the fundamental ethnic currents in the society are of West African
and British origin. The more prominent tensions in Jamaica are those between
class/colour, rather than race/ethnicity and are generally referred to as the clash
between uptown and downtown (Stolzhoff 2000; Paul 2003). The use of Jamaican
patois ( Jamaican creole language) in dancehall, is very deliberate and is a way of
keeping outsiders out, and of offending the “powers that be.” Dancehall is clearly
addressing and representing a specific constituency (the black urban underclass),
therefore “attracting the contempt and reprobation of so-called polite society”
(Paul 2003: 119). This is what Douglas means when he says that you don’t get
hardcore dancehall in mainstream clubs: “people (i.e., anyone not from the
dancehall ‘massive’) need to sort of understand it.” The dancehall scene remains
an insular one; this is one of its techniques of survival and resistance to the type
of co-optation that has happened to hip hop.
69
Negative attitudes are passed on from first to second generation. A number of the
people I interviewed commented on this: Samantha, who spent many years in the
Toronto dancehall scene even though she is a second generation Trinidadian, had
this to say about her experience and understanding of Jamaicans:
My closest friends are Trinidadian ... we have an underlying dislike of
Jamaican ways. [We are] all with Jamaicans [in relationships], but dislike
them for their ways. If your child does something: “Is de Jamaican in yuh!”
...Throughout my teens and twenties I was embedded in the Jamaican
community. Reason number one was I was with a Jamaican man. I was
more exposed to the culture, the food. I was put down for not being a
Jamaican so I had to prove myself. I was already light-skin with light-eyes.
The Trinidadian twang [accent] was not as intimidating as the Jamaican
twang. So as a form of self-defense a lot of young Trinidadians had to
be able to present themselves with the same aggression as people from
Jamaica. With friends, I speak with the Jamaican twang when angry, but
when joking around, I speak with the Trini twang.
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70
Samantha touches on the specific ways that she felt as an outsider within the
Jamaican community, specifically her appearance, the way she spoke and her
less aggressive demeanor. She felt that she needed to adapt to Jamaican culture,
as there was no acceptance of a Trinidadian identity within that sphere. Like
many Caribbean youth in Toronto who are not of Jamaican descent, the overall
dominance of Jamaican people and culture can either result in resistance through
a stronger identification with one’s own roots, in this case Trinidadian, or as a
method of adaptation or assimilation into the Jamaican majority.
Onika, another interviewee, had experiences with the Jamaican community that
differed from Samantha’s:
I remember certain people in my family saying “don’t trust Jamaicans,”
and everything associated with being a Jamaican was demonic, was bad,
you know “they tief, they lie, they loud, they cheat,” and for a long time
I really didn’t have Jamaican friends, and now interestingly enough, and
I tell people this, the people who’ve had the most influence on me, the
closest people in my life, have been Jamaican, born in Jamaica, some of
them raised, some of them weren’t.... So my identity has definitely shifted
in terms of a race politic and understanding how racism affects your
perception of who you are and your identity so much so that you try to go
in accordance with what the European beauty standards are. How you try
to have that insular culture in terms of you’re Trinidadian and you’re better
and ... excluding all the other cultures such as Jamaican.
Part of what Onika is describing is the way in which Trinidadians view themselves
as a cosmopolitan people who are culturally and often racially mixed. For Onika,
the negative messages she heard about Jamaicans are related to their perceived
ethnoracial homogeneity, something she had to overcome once she moved into a
pan-Africanist worldview.
On yet another level, Kerry described his parents as “very strong Creole, very
strong Trinidadian,” Creole in this case meaning that his parents adhered to an
Afro-Euro mixed culture in Trinidad even though both are of Indian descent.
Kerry explained what it means to be Trinidadian Creole in Canada:
not only does that mean not Indian or not exclusively Indian, but it also
means not Jamaican. Definitely not Jamaican! Here’s a strong inter-island
rivalry as well.... ‘Cause you know when you come here you’re either
Trinidadian or Jamaican because you’re Jamaican if you call yourself
Caribbean, right?”
Again we see reference to the way that all Caribbean people in Canada are
immediately assumed by the dominant society to be Jamaican, and how there is
a strong resistance to the homogenization of this very diverse group of people.
Trinidadians, being perhaps the most diverse people in the Caribbean, are
therefore often offended by this.
...those downtown parties tend to be a little rougher, it’s a different crowd,
because they tend to tie in the hip hop crowd, and that’s the difference and
a lot of West Indians don’t ... well that’s the thing, they’ll [the dominant
society] say “black people black people” but it’s not. Caribbean people is
different ... that hip hop attitude coming doesn’t mix with the Caribbean
culture. Hence the arguments with Caribana that it shouldn’t have hip hop
in Caribana.
The “hip hop attitude” to which Douglas refers is a particularly competitive one,
evident in both dancehall as well as hip hop, in which participants try to “out-do”
each other, whether it is in clothing, style, dancing or ability to attract the opposite
sex, and to be “the baddest”—the most threatening, aggressive or dangerous. These
attitudes produce a particular aggressiveness on the scene, which may or may not
erupt into violence; but it appears that the threat of violence is present and very
real. For this reason, many of the people I spoke with expressed a desire to avoid
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These differences between the dancehall, hip hop and soca scenes are worth
addressing, both in the research and on a wider political level. In each scene, one
finds particular attitudes. Gangsta rap and hardcore dancehall attract followers
and aficionados who are moved by the lyrical content as well as the music, and
will often exhibit and/or imitate behaviour talked about in the songs. For this
reason, many in Toronto’s Caribbean community have decried hip hop and
dancehall events as dangerous, attracting guns and violence. The criminalization
of Jamaicans, black youth and young black males in Toronto (Benjamin 2003) has
led to a general association of both hip hop and dancehall with gun violence and
gang activity. Douglas states:
71
both hip hop and dancehall events for fear of violence. People from the soca scene
also expressed a dislike of the overall hostile and aggressive attitude found in the
dancehall and hip hop clubs, an attitude people said was absent from the soca
scene. I found that within the soca scene, particularly in big, multigenerational
events, there was an air of friendliness, of courtesy and consideration. Nobody
was angry if you stepped on their toe, people would say “sorry” and “excuse me,”
smiles were everywhere and the vibe was generally positive. This was markedly
different from the general feeling in the hip hop or dancehall scene, in which a
guardedness, suspiciousness and simmering hostility were often in play.
The Soca Scene and Cultural Resistance
Despite the negative press that hip hop and dancehall get, both genres have been
noted as important scenes of cultural resistance, both in their places of genesis
(the urban American ghettos and urban Jamaican ghettos respectively) and within
diasporic spaces. Haines states in her examination of the Canadian hip hop scene
that:
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black Canadian youth have appropriated Hip-Hop as a form of cultural
expression and articulation of their marginalization in Canadian society ...
rap music can be an important mechanism by which black youth in Canada
educate themselves and others about issues pertaining to their community.
(1999: 55-56)
Cooper’s seminal work on dancehall argued that slackness, the use of profanity
and sexually explicit lyrics in dancehall, “is potentially a politics of subversion
.... Slackness is a metaphorical revolt against law and order; an undermining of
consensual standards of decency” (1993: 141). In contrast, soca’s main theme to
date has been partying, which is in line with the Trinidadian Carnival; overall
the main focus in soca music is not lyrical. How, then, can soca also be a site of
resistance?
Three issues must be addressed here. Firstly, as with Carnival itself, an analysis of
soca needs to go beyond the obvious party line. Do people just go simply to have
a good time, or is there more going on? Soca music’s link to Carnival results in
a lyrical content and style of musical construction that functions to express and
expend energy. Unlike both hip hop and dancehall, the lyrical content of soca
music has traditionally been associated with expressions of “freeing up,” partying,
joy, humour and sexuality (Dudley 1996; Leu 2000). Leu describes the subgenre
of soca known as “party soca” as “immensely popular at fetes with a furiously
fast pace” (2000: 48). Other subgenres of soca include ragga soca, influenced by
Jamaican dancehall and often espousing more political themes and chutney soca,
an Indo-Caribbean crossover. The expectation in a soca fete is one of freedom,
both of body and mind, reflecting the vibe of Carnival, which is considered to be
a time of exuberance, catharsis and celebration. To paraphrase the lyrics found in
many soca songs, soca fetes and Carnival are a time and place for “leggo [let go],
freeing up, getting on bad and going down to the ground” (Dikobe 2004), all of
which can refer to behaviours found in soca fetes or “on the road” Carnival day.
This is cultural resistance; this “freeing up” is an important re-claiming of the
Caribbean body, particularly the racialized body, from a long history of abuse,
subjugation and exoticization. For women in the soca fete, the re-claiming of the
body can be especially empowering (Dikobe 2004; Guilbault 2007). It can also be
argued that soca, due to its link with Carnival, acts as a pressure valve by inducing
a catharsis that actually allows people to survive oppression and stress. Soca can be
a healing force, especially for people who face daily racism, hardship and a sense of
exclusion and alienation from the Canadian mainstream.
Given the differences in content between soca music and dancehall or hip hop,
what are the implications of this for second generation Caribbeans in the diaspora?
The soca fete is often utilized as a space to construct a quasi-nationalistic, albeit
diasporic, Trinidadian identity6 (or another Eastern Caribbean identity) and to
distinguish oneself from an increasingly criminalized and demonized Jamaican
identity. This is an important way that cultural resistance is enacted by a specific
group: the second generation within the Caribbean diasporic space.
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This leads to my second point: the way that people connect with their Caribbean
roots, their culture, their sense of self and their history in the soca fete, and the way
that Caribbean people exhibit pride in themselves and their beauty in the soca
fete, is an act of resistance. The maintenance and representation of the diversity
of Caribbean culture is a factor that cannot be dismissed. No matter what one’s
racial or ethnic origin, gender or sexuality, colour or class, place of birth, body size
or age, everybody “gettin on in de fete.” For the most part, once a really good fete
reaches a certain level of energy, “nobody studyin nuthin.” In other words, people
go to soca fetes to really let loose, to leggo, to feel free to do what they want and
not to care what others think. In the diaspora, this is an essential exercise, as so
many Caribbean people feel under continual surveillance due to racial profiling,
structural racism and other forms of everyday discrimination. My third point
is that soca, like all cultural forms, is evolving. Newer genres of soca like ragga
soca are bringing elements into the soca fete that cannot be ignored, including a
greater emphasis on lyrics, which cannot be attributed solely to dancehall, but also
a re-claiming of Trinidad’s calypso roots (Hernandez-Ramdwar 2008). Although
many people may ignore lyrical content and focus on dancing, there are other
participants in the soca scene who do pay attention to the lyrics of artists who
address serious issues in their music, such as Bunji Garlin.
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The T.O. Soca Posse
One used to be hard pressed to find soca music in Toronto outside Caribana, the
annual Carnival-style celebration held each year in August, but since the 1990s
there has been an increase in its presence on the city’s music scene. Fete attendees
are intent on hearing the latest offerings from Trinidad’s Carnival, as well as other
popular soca songs from Barbados, St. Vincent or Grenada. One can now listen
and dance to soca year round in Toronto; there has been a proliferation of clubs,
fetes, DJs, promoters, more radio coverage and the establishment of websites and
television programs. Most of these sites appeal to and draw a younger crowd,
including a large number of second generation Trinidadians. While Toronto’s
soca scene is not comprised exclusively of Trinidadians, my primary focus will be
on the members of this group who are Trinidadian by birth or descent.
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Increasingly, the soca scene in Toronto is promoted not only as a musical form to
be enjoyed, but as a way of life, aimed specifically at the under twenty-five crowd.
It is this generation—ostensibly with a disposable income—that has adopted soca
feteing as a lifestyle. There are several possible reasons for this. One reason could
be a change in the community’s demographics after the significant migration from
Trinidad in the1980s, including those who migrated as children.7 Another reason
this scene has grown is that it is an alternative to other scenes largely patronized
by Caribbean and/or black youth, such as reggae/dancehall and hip hop. One also
finds smaller numbers of participants from non-Caribbean communities, such as
South Asian.
For decades, youth in Toronto, especially black youth, imitated Jamaican style
and language. Certainly the predominance of Jamaicans numerically above all
other groups ensures their cultural dominance as well. Caribbean youth of all
backgrounds have utilized a Jamaican identity as a form of resistance by adopting
the stance of the demonized Other (this is especially true for young black males),
but also because Jamaican culture and music has been seen as “cool” and has been
popular internationally for generations, from 1970s reggae and Bob Marley to
today’s dancehall music. Now, however, there are non-Trinidadian youth adopting
Trini style and slang. It seems that Trini style is also becoming “cool,” but in ways
significantly different from Jamaican style. Trinidadians’s reputation as a party
people with a Carnival mentality,8 and the sexualization of Trinidadian women, in
particular through images of scantily-clad Carnival and Caribana masqueraders,
adds to this. Douglas has noted this trend. He also had something to say about
the gender politics that have arisen from different cultures attempting to adopt
Trini style:
To some people it’s cool to be [Caribbean] even if they weren’t, to be
associated with it ... with soca and so ... I’ve seen people go overboard. I’m
not being racial but it’s just that I’ve seen it from Sri Lankans and I’ve seen
it from Somalians ... I’ve seen it at my sister’s school ... there’s a lot of Sri
In Douglas’s experience, violence in the soca scene is a reality; however, it is
specifically related to non-Caribbean people “misinterpreting” Caribbean culture
in regards to the treatment of women. Douglas relates specific instances in which
Caribbean women are viewed as “loose” and promiscuous. This image has haunted
Caribbean women for centuries, coming out of a long history of sexual exploitation
and brutalization in which images and stereotypes of “oversexed” women allowed
colonial men to rape with impunity. Myths attached to the “hot-blooded” mulatta
and mixed-race woman, evolving out of colonial discourses of racial impurity
and sexual deviance, exacerbate this (Ford-Smith 1995; Hernandez-Ramdwar
1995).9
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Lankans there and these guys were outfitted in clothes that said “Trinidad”
and “Guyana” all the time, right? Because they associate themselves, well
most everyone does, that most Indians in the Caribbean are from Trinidad
and Guyana. But I can tell they’re not from Trinidad, they don’t look it,
they obviously don’t sound like it ... and then they find themselves going
into all these clubs ... and they cause a lot of problems too. There’s a whole
set of violence going on because their attitude towards women was quite
archaic, and seeing West Indian women dance and move the way they do
they figure they’re loose, they can get what they want right? So they go in
there, just grab a man’s woman right in front of them, and next thing fight
break out. So either they get thrown out, man get chop, shoot, all kinda
thing, right? ... Now I see a lot of Somalians now coming, well they identify
with the African side now ... so it’s cool to be down with the West Indian
people, with the soca and the reggae and the stuff like that, and Somalians
have a bit of the same attitude that Sri Lankans came in, there’s fights
breaking out on that side.... [T]heir culture, their country carries a bit of
an old fashioned archaic attitude towards women, and their women are
all wrapped up and quiet and conservative, right? And so they can’t—the
women first of all ent behavin like our women, and ... not to say our women
behavin ... our women behave fine, right? ... they’re [Somali women] not
being outgoing and dressing the way [the way our women do] in a West
Indian fete. Mind you, the attitude ... when I went to school with these
guys they would always tell me how lucky I am because I’m Trinidadian,
right? And [that] their women are like this.... [A]t first, anytime I see them
try to pick up a girl, they’re like “Are you Guyanese, are you Trinidadian?”
That’s their pick up line! But the thing is their attitude was what kill them
because it was the attitude that they gave to their own women is what
they gave to them [Caribbean women], and their own women will take it
because that’s what they’re [used to] and no West Indian woman’s gonna
take that.
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Who is the Soca Posse?
One of the main features of the soca scene is that it is a cultural space where
Trinidadian identity reigns supreme. Because the majority of soca artists are
Trinidadian, and because the majority of the popular songs come out of Trinidad
Carnival, the prominence of Trinidad is unmistakable. This is most notable during
the “roll call,” a practice in which almost every soca performer engages, and which
invariably goes like this:
“ANYBODY FROM GRENADA?!” [all Grenadians in the crowd scream,
yell, wave Grenada flags, rags, hands...]
“ANYBODY FROM ST. LUCIA?!” [all St. Lucians scream, yell, wave,
etc.]
“ANYBODY FROM ANTIGUA?! GUYANA?! JAMAICA?!
BARBADOS?! [etc., as many Anglophone Caribbean nations as the
performer can recall, with appropriate crowd response]
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“SOMEBODY MISSIN!! SOMEBODY MISSIN!! ANYBODY FROM
TNT?!!!! [Crowd goes into a complete uproar as all PROUD Trinidadians
and Tobagonians, and all Trinbagonian imposters, erupt in a frenzy].
Trinidadian artist Naya George responded to the practice of roll call by
complaining in song that he didn’t like performers “callin out Trinidad last.” His
2002 tune “Trinidad” includes the phrase “where my people?” (George 2002)
which is designed to elicit a strong response from the Trinidadian members of
the audience. Onika framed it thusly:
I think part of the aspect of leaving us last is ... to affirm that ... when you
think of Carnival you think of Trinidad next to Rio de Janeiro. But you
think of Trinidad if you’re looking at the Caribbean as the place, as the root
of it. And I am proud of that yeah! That is the thing. And I think that’s
when my islandism comes out the most!
Interestingly, I have been in many soca fetes watching people who I know have
no connection to Trinidad and Tobago waving Trinbagonian flags and responding
as Trinidadians to the call and response. It is, I believe, due to the desire to be
included in the most privileged and revered identity in that setting. Just as
Jamaican identity is more desirable and respected in the reggae/dancehall scene,
so it is with Trinidadian identity on the soca scene. For this reason, one has to ask
if the proclamation and performance of a Trinidadian identity in the diasporic
soca environ is about identification with “the homeland,” “the nation”—or perhaps
“the transnation” to use Scher’s term (Scher 2003)—or none of the above.10 Is
it the desire of participants to belong to their group of choice? Certainly not
everyone waving a red, white and black flag in a soca fete is Trinidadian; I have
heard reports of people buying a flag because they like the colour, not even aware
that it is connected to a nation. For the most part, however, people do like to
identify with their Caribbean nation of origin in the soca fete and interestingly,
in my more than twenty years of attending Toronto soca fetes, I have yet to see
a Canadian flag being waved or even on sale at a fete. This is significant in that
even if you are a second generation individual, born in Canada, or perhaps nonCaribbean and identifying as a Canadian, this form of identification is not an
option within this space. You must identify with the Caribbean, with a particular
Caribbean nation, and most preferably with Trinidad. Even Tobago, the smaller
half of the twin-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago, gets ignored in the general
exaltation of Trinidadian identity. For Caribbean Canadian people who may feel
excluded by Canadian society, the moment of identification with an “imagined
community” in a soca fete reinforces a sense of belonging, of finding “home”
within the “homeland.” This is one way in which the soca posse enacts cultural
resistance in the diaspora (Anderson 1991).
The soca scene differs from the reggae/dancehall scene, which is heavily influenced
by an Afrocentric sensibility, or the chutney scene, which is aimed at an exclusively
Indo-Caribbean audience. According to Leu, one of “the biggest impacts of soca
upon Trinidad’s music scene is how it has opened up the field of participation in
terms of race, class and gender, which accounts in part for its speedy development
and the current diversity of new directions” (2000: 51). Guilbault, in her book
Governing Sound: The Cultural Politics of Trinidad’s Carnival Musics, addresses
the importance of ideas of unity in diversity to well-known soca artist Machel
Montano. Guilbault describes Montano’s ideal nation: “utopian, multicultural,
egalitarian.... [It is] from [this] which Montano draws not only his inspiration
but his sense of multiple belongings” (Guilbault 2007: 223). Here too, we see
cultural resistance; in the soca fete there is a rejection of Caribbean colonial and
neocolonial notions of divide and rule, pitting African against Indian, but at the
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Another increasingly evident feature in Toronto soca fetes is the preponderance
of Indo-Caribbean youth. This demographic is in many ways reflective of the
demographic of Trinidad itself, in which roughly half the population is of Indian
origin. The Guyanese population in Toronto, many of whom are Indo-Caribbean,
is second in size only to Jamaicans; this is another reason for the large numbers of
Indo-Caribbean fetegoers.11 Depending on the specific fete, you will find attendees
who are of Caribbean Chinese, European, mixed and other non-African origins.
For many who are of second generation Caribbean descent, but not of African
descent, the soca scene is a space in which they can express their Caribbean identity
in a way that is not challenged by the general perception of what it means to be
Caribbean in Canada; that is, black and/or Jamaican. Because of its association
with Trinidad, which prides itself on being the most cosmopolitan nation in the
Caribbean, soca is arguably a more open space for the expression of Caribbean
ethnoracial diversity and unity within that diversity, particularly between Afroand Indo-Caribbean people.12
77
same time the soca posse does not entirely embrace an assimilationist notion of
Canadian multiculturalism in which differences are glossed over and/or exoticized
for the white gaze.
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This is not to say that pride in an African identity and ancestry is not expressed
in the soca fete. For those who are of Afro-Caribbean descent, soca can reflect
a strong pride in Afro-Trinidadian roots: calypso, steelband and Carnival. Soca
evolved out of this Afro-Creole stream of Trinidadian culture, which holds rank
as “national” Trinidadian culture (Ryan 1999). Many soca songs attest to this and
the majority of soca performers are of African/mixed descent. The influence of
Jamaican dancehall music in soca, resulting in the subgenre of ragga soca, reflects
and celebrates the struggles and triumphs of marginalized youth, predominantly
those of African descent living in urban poverty. Dreadlocked performers such as
Bunji Garlin and Maximus Dan have a specific following in both Trinidad and
the diaspora; largely black, urban and marginalized youth who adhere to a specific
style and attitude that is reflective of conscious dancehall culture and in which
themes of violence, poverty, struggle, oppression and a redemptive spirituality are
predominant. One Trinidadian soca performer who has used the more positive
side of conscious dancehall in his music is Bunji Garlin. Garlin has a very strong
following in Toronto and is particularly popular with Toronto’s “ghetto youth,”
ostensibly because he sings about issues that are relevant to their experiences.
Explicit, yet conscious lyrics “tell it like it is” in songs such as “From de Ghetto”
and “Dignity”:
if you never sell your body just to make some money well hands up lemme
see
true you never sell out your soul neither lend out your hole to achieve piece
of gold
true you keep your dignity your pride and integrity well hands up lemme
see
well believe it or not some of them achieve their trends because they get
their bottom hole clog up
even some gyal who greedy for all they get all their gold cause their clitoris
mash up
some not no work they’d rather be a jerk they’d rather get all of their body
part touch up
rather get touch up, rather get smash up, imagine this....
(Garlin 2003)
These kinds of lyrics are a far cry from the “party” lyrics with which soca is most
often associated. Lyrically, ragga soca follows the dancehall tradition of blunt,
upfront content, evading the traditional calypso styles of double entendre and
metaphor (Rohlehr 2004). The influence of dancehall music in Trinidad, as well
as increasingly harsh circumstances in the nation, especially for youth, provides
Garlin and others with a ready audience. Increased crime, poverty, unemployment,
overpolicing, drug use and hidden factors such as increases in sexual abuse
and incest are becoming daily realities for more and more Trinidadian youth
(Hernandez-Ramdwar 2007). These same realities, referenced by songs like
“Dignity,” are not unknown in the diaspora, Yet the influence of ragga soca in
the soca fete is creating a new vibe, a different kind of soca experience. Douglas
explains the changing trends:
CHR:What’s the soca atitude?
Ragga soca, like dancehall, evokes the harshest, most brutal realities of marginalized
youth, predominantly black, poor and urban youth in the roughest areas of the
Caribbean. Ragga soca in a fete provides a space for these youth to be centre stage
and to expend much of the frustration created by their lived realties. Although
at times the ragga soca fete can become rough and rambunctious, the emphasis
once again is on jumping, waving, moving, grinding, winding, leggo and display.
It is really the lyrical content of ragga soca that represents its place as a form of
cultural resistance. As in both hip hop and dancehall, the lived realities, pretty or
not, of ghetto people are being expressed, where as in many other aspects of their
lives black and Caribbean youth from marginalized circumstances are largely
silenced and/or chastized for speaking out.
Shades of Neocolonialism: Replication of the Colour/Class Hierarchy
For many second generation Caribbean people, adhering to a specific identity
of origin is necessary in order to define themselves in a multicultural landscape,
or to assert an oppositional identity to the dominant culture. In the case of the
Trinidadian second generation, some members have been directly and positively
influenced by parents and extended family who are strongly involved in Trinidadian
culture, especially the Carnival culture of maskmakers, players, pannists, etc.13 For
some second generation people, participating in soca culture is a natural extension
of everything else “Trini” in their lives. However, the passing of culture from first
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Douglas: It’s not rough like hip hop. It’s still fun. I mean that’s why I still
like it, it’s still fun. I don’t know, maybe it’s partially cause the music has
changed too. The music is a little more rough and jump up than it was
before. There was never anything as ... as ... I don’t want to say “as violent,”
as energetic as “Toro Toro” [a song performed by Machel Montano in 1999
that was notorious for its aggressive crowd response].... Like you inside
there you see a crowd moving you want to move. So back then there was
nothing like that.
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to second generation can also mean passing on values and attitudes which replicate
divisions of colour and class. The history of Carnival in Trinidad has been a journey
from a largely Afro-Trinidadian working and underclass oppositional culture, in
which white elites were both mocked and excluded, to one of mainstream and
national culture, in which white and light-skinned elites are participants and
sponsors. Indo-Trinidadians, until around the 1980s, were largely excluded and/or
absent from Carnival. Since the 1950s and 1960s, when Carnival culture began to
be foregrounded as national culture, and corporate sponsorship became a given for
masquerade bands, Carnival culture—especially playing mas14—has increasingly
become an activity of middle class, light-skinned and elite Trinidadians, including
those in the diaspora. As Van Koningsbruggen states:
...the carnival festival was gradually incorporated in what the middle class
came to regard as its own cultural heritage.... After World War II, typical
middle-class virtues such as concern for respectability and order and the
imitation of West European but above all North American, show elements,
were added to carnival, both in the organization and the content. (1997:
89-90)
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The concern is that Carnival has become increasingly middle class, if not elitist,
that it has lost its original mandate of resistance and that mas itself has been
transformed from storytelling and an arena in which to criticize and mock elites
(an arena of cultural resistance), to one of bikini bands, exaltation of flesh, overt
sexuality and sheer vanity dominated by social and economic elites. Within
the realm of masqueraders, this concern is validated by the prevalence of lightcomplexioned and well-heeled masqueraders, especially in some of the largest and
most popular bands. The cost of playing mas in Trinidad denotes specific class
participation as only certain Trinidadians can afford the upwards of US$500 for
a costume. Mas bands are increasingly reflective of a middle class, monied, lightcomplexioned and Caribbean (especially diasporic Caribbean) elite.
In Toronto, certain aspects of the soca scene appear to be increasingly reflective of
this trend. For example, soca fetes that are sponsored by particular mas bands tend
to draw specific crowds in terms of colour, age, ethnicity and class, replicating the
boundaries of colour and class existing in Trinidad. It is not a case of people being
blatantly denied entry to a specific fete due to colour, race or age, as was the case
in the Trinidad nightclub scandal of the 1990s (McCree 1997), but rather that
people tend to gravitate to where they feel most comfortable, where they already
know people and/or are among people “like” themselves. It also seems evident
from my observations, as both participant and interviewer, that the first generation
maintain these boundaries and pass on these desires and prejudices to the second
generation. Just as people “know their place” in Trinidad, despite the “all o’ we is
one” multicultural party line, a harsher reality persists. McCree has noted that
social exclusivity based on ethnoracial background and colour is a historical legacy
of colonialism in Trinidad and that social clubs based on gradations of colour and
ethnicity evolved in the 1940s. In the 1990s a public scandal erupted over race and
class exclusions being exercised at Trinidadian nightclubs:
At certain clubs, certain nights were set aside for particular ethnic groups
and the music it was believed they liked or preferred most. [In the case of
Indians, this music was thought to be rock music and in the case of blacks,
this music was thought to be dance hall, calypso music and rap]. The night
set aside for Indians was known as “dhal night” or “coconut oil night,”
while the night set aside for blacks was known as gollywog night or “black
night.” And the nights reserved for members was known as “white night”
or “members night” since whites formed the bulk of the membership.
(McCree 1997: 1-2)
In Toronto, divisions of class and colour are found in places where certain
groups of Trinidadians congregate, such as mas camps, alumni associations and
the fetes linked to both of these. I have witnessed fetes in which particular hues
and ethnicities of people predominate (i.e., almost exclusively African, almost
exclusively Indian, light-skinned mixed-race people only, etc.). Historically, colour
and class have been synonymous in Trinidad and all Caribbean societies; one can
therefore assume that in settings where particular shades of colour predominate
there is usually an accompanying class consistency to the crowd as well. I have
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Black and Indian patrons complained they were being denied entry to specific
clubs on specific nights because they were too dark complexioned and/or assumed
to be of an undesirable class. The white management of these clubs argued that
they had a “members only” policy and were only excluding non-members from
the club, not practising racist/classist policies (in Trinidad the category “white”
can include light-skinned people of mixed racial ancestry, as well as Trinidadians
of European, Chinese and Middle Eastern descent). As McCree notes, however,
the African and Indian youths who were only allowed admittance on “their”
nights were “middle class,” but “while they may have had the class, they did not
have the colour” (1997: 34). The controversy drove home the painful point to
many Trinidadians that despite having passed thorough the Black Power era
in the 1970s, and despite greater equality for blacks and Indians in Trinidadian
society, racism and colourism were alive and well in the country. On a similar note,
many of the large Carnival fetes in Trinidad are advertised as “all-inclusive.” That
is, patrons pay a large ticket price to enjoy not only music, but unlimited food
and drink. The all-inclusive fetes are arguably designed to keep out a specifically
“undesirable” class of people—poor, black, urban—by charging an exorbitant entry
price. These are attempts, and not always successful ones, to maintain race, colour
and class segregation in Trinidadian society which continues to this day. Within
the microcosm of Trinidadian society, or the macrocosm of the Trinidadian
diaspora, issues of power and inequality based on colour and class persist.
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also observed the behaviour of different crowds based on these demographics and
found that in certain fetes the behaviour is much more conservative than in others.
That is, one may find the majority of people in the “white” fetes (i.e., the fetes
with a predominance of light-skinned, “red,” “mixed,” “brown,” “white Indian,”
“French Creole,” “Spanish,” “Syrian” and “Chinese” people)15 standing around, not
dancing, sweating and so on, thereby exhibiting historically entrenched notions
which associate colour with “respectability.” In this equation, the closer one is in
appearance to the white colonizer, the greater the degree of comportment and
reserve required in public (Segal 1993). In contrast, there are other fetes in which
people are “carrying on,” enjoying themselves in ways that the more conservative
crowds would probably label vulgar and rude. These fetes are historically linked
to the tradition of the “jamette Carnival,” the true root of today’s carnival, in
which the black working and underclass took over the streets. The fact that these
colour and class boundaries continue to be asserted in the diaspora without being
officially enforced suggests that ideas about one’s placement in a community are
both migratory and inherited by the second generation. For example, a second
generation person will often choose a fete based on a recommendation or because
their family and/or friends are in attendance. Therefore social groupings similar
to the ones that exist in Trinidad are recreated in the diaspora. The cost of
participation in the soca posse lifestyle should also be noted. The average fete
costs a minimum of $30-$40—more during Caribana season. Add to this the cost
of drinks, transport, clothes, etc., and it can easily be seen that to participate on a
regular basis requires a disposable income. One informant who participates in this
lifestyle confessed that she easily spent more than $1000 on feteing alone during
Caribana season. This does not, however, assume an entirely middle-class crowd,
as a disposable income can be earned through both legal and illegal means.
Colour/class divisions are also replicated on soca websites. The images of soca
goers posted on these sites tend to reflect certain ethnicities and complexions
of the soca posse.16 Most notable is the strong presence of Indo-Caribbean
women on the websites, (until the 1990s the presence of Indo-Caribbeans in
Toronto soca fetes was marginal) as well as the more traditional image of the
“ideal” Trinidadian woman—mixed race, light-skinned, long hair—the kind of
women used extensively in advertisements in Trinidad. Some of these websites
also promote the objectification of women through the use of hidden cameras
in soca fetes, after which digital images of women’s bodies are posted on the site
without their consent.
What is the Mandate of the Soca Posse?
Generally, people who come out on a regular basis to enjoy soca music do so
out of a love for the music and the scene itself. But beyond a love for the music,
what are some of the other reasons for attending? Is there a group identity being
promoted in soca fetes? Do the promoters and artists encourage participants
to think of themselves as part of a larger “something?” Are they promoting a
particular mandate? As the majority of the soca posse are of Trinidadian descent
( Jackson 2005), one could argue that part of the mandate of the soca posse is to
promote and preserve a particular Trinidadian identity in Canada. It could also
be to assert a unique aspect of Caribbean and/or black identity, one that is not
affiliated with a Jamaican identity. Fatimah Jackson, in her research on the use
of the flag/rag at Toronto soca fetes to symbolize one’s connection to a specific
Caribbean nation, interviewed a number of participants and found that while
many attendees proudly waved their specific “colours” in the fete, adhering to
a single national identity, the idea of a collective Caribbean identity was also
operative:
...the concern is not where you are born or where you currently reside, but
how the individual chooses to identify as a doubly diasporic Caribbean
person ... the multi-dimensional nature of Caribbean people in the
diaspora. Self-identification is a power that is harnessed by the soca
jam attendee who may wear red, white and black even if he/she is from
Martinique. ( Jackson 2005: 10-11)
I analyzed several of the flyers that advertise soca fetes to see if there were
common themes used to entice people to attend. Promotion occurs via four
TOPIA 20
Another reason people attend soca fetes could be to promote a distinct lifestyle,
that of “limer boyz and girlz,” a term found on the popular website TorontoLime.
com. Liming refers to the practice of hanging out, relaxing with friends, “chilling”
in North American parlance. The soca lifestyle being promoted here is one in
which feters live for the next party, the next lime (a Carnival mentality17), and
it follows that one must have a disposable income as well as a personal means
of transportation to carry one from fete to fete, since many of the soca fetes are
held in the suburbs of Toronto, areas with limited public transit. Many of the
members of the soca posse also participate in what one informant referred to as
“global liming,” attending other annual diasporic events as well as Trinidadian
Carnival. Like their Trinidadian/Caribbean middle class counterparts, those with
a large enough disposable income are able to travel to one or more destinations on
the Carnival circuit: Trinidad Carnival in February/March, Orange ( Jamaican)
Carnival in April, or Cropover (Barbados) in July/August, Notting Hill (London)
in late August, Labour Day (Brooklyn) in September, Miami Carnival in October,
and any number of smaller regional Carnivals interspersed in between. In order
to facilitate this, several mas bands now maintain international sections, in which
one can play the same mas in a number of different locales during the year. In
Toronto, Caribana masqueraders are encouraged to play mas not only in Toronto
on Caribana weekend, but also in other Canadian carnivals taking place in nearby
cities such as Hamilton and Ottawa.
83
media: print flyers, radio, community newspapers and websites. Usually after a
soca fete, one is accosted by any number of individuals handing out glossy flyers
advertising upcoming soca events. These often have a theme such as “Unite de
Nations,” ”Flag Party,” “Short Pants Party,” or “Official Tax Break Party” and
invariably have pictures of any featured artists; many also have pictures of scantily
clad women in provocative poses. Flyers may also advertise the expectation of
the prospective attendee: one flyer had a traffic sign on it declaring “Winahs
Only” (“The Official Las Lap” 2003). Another stated: “Represent your country
bring or wear Flag. Which country will have the biggest turn-out???” (“Flag Fete”
2004). Another incited “Trust me when I say we Drunk and Disorderly with we
friends and family inside the EXCLUSIVE ALL INCLUSIVE MEMOIRS
PARTY” (“Memoirs of Soca VII,” 2003). 18 Another four inch by four inch flyer
was extremely detailed:
We Have Immediate Openings Available For The Following Positions:
Sexy Bubblers, Ruff Winers, Body Brukkers, Stamina Daddies, Tantalizing
Winers & Rubber Waist Professionals
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84
Technical Requirements:
*Extensive knowledge of Soca and Reggae
*Ability to wuk while under pressure
*Ability to wine with multiple partners
*Proven tantalizing skills to motivate any man/woman
*Knowledge and experience in Kock Back and Roll a MUST
*In-depth understanding of hard Wine, Slow Wine & Bumper Rolling
Out of Time Winers need NOT Apply!!
We’ll be photographing for future Limer Boyz and Girlz, so DO Dress 2
Impress! (“Winer’s Wanted!!!” 2003).
Certainly the impetus is for people to come and dance, and not in just any style,
but to really “get on,” “wuk,” “bubble,” etc.19 There is a particular emphasis on
wining, a body movement in which Trinidadians specialize, but do not exclusively
“own.” However, because wining, soca and Carnival are all interrelated, and
because these three elements are most closely associated with Trinidad, it seems
that there is a specific Trinidadian pride being foregrounded here. The themes of
national pride (bring your flag) and gallerying (being/looking sexy, dressing well,
being photogenic) are also evident. Guilbault notes that since soca’s inception
in Trinidad, this has been a part of the soca scene: “this musical era involved a
transformation of the audience in terms of age [younger people], class [including
people of high society], outreach [new fans], and look [greater emphasis on wearing
sexy clothes or, to put it differently, on exhibiting ‘sexiness’]” (2007: 207).
Site of Resistance—Site of Affirmation
The soca scene in Toronto acts as a site of resistance in the following ways: firstly,
the soca posse represents resistance against mainstream Canadian culture and in
particular, racist attitudes and structures in Canadian society by celebrating an
alternative identity; one that is Caribbean but not exclusively black. Secondly,
the soca posse is Caribbean/black/Indian/mixed, but not violent or linked to
criminality, thereby challenging racial profiling and stereotyping of Caribbean
and/or black people in Canada. Thirdly, the soca posse is a site that is CaribbeanCanadian but not Jamaican. Therefore, the soca scene has become an alternative
to other scenes predominantly patronized by Caribbean and/or black people in
Toronto, scenes that have, over the years, become increasingly stigmatized and
criminalized. Since the 1990s, the hip hop and reggae/dancehall scenes in Toronto
have received negative attention, most notably for the prevalence of shootings and
other violent acts which have ostensibly occurred in relation to them. Both sites
are ones in which it is assumed that violence, gangs and gun play predominate.
Among the number of people I spoke with on this subject, I found differing levels
of reluctance to attend both dancehall and hip hop functions, largely due to safety
issues as well as a dislike for the emphasis on “slackness,” sexual explicitness in
lyrics to the point of being pornographic, of dancehall lyrics in particular.
Some informants also decried the materialistic values extolled in both dancehall
and hip hop. Although some elements of this are now being found in contemporary
TOPIA 20
Over the last decade participants at soca fetes appear to be younger, larger in
numbers, more diverse in racial and ethnic composition and involve more second
and even third generation participants. What was once a scene primarily comprised
of the Afro-Trinidadian/Caribbean working class and first generation migrants
now appears to be largely dominated by a multiracial, under twenty-five crowd,
many of whom have never set foot in the Caribbean. Because these fetes are
now occurring with much more frequency, are more expensive to enter and occur
over a much wider geographic territory, there is also an economic factor involved.
Class allegiances within soca, promoted on flyers and websites, are reminiscent of
Trinidad’s class and colour hierarchies, especially as it operates during Carnival
season in the promotion of all-inclusive (exclusive?) fetes. However, the bias might
more accurately be described as an income bias, as marginalized youth may also
be able to access the funding to fete, albeit sometimes through illegal means. As
has become common in Trinidad, attempts to exclude a particularly undesirable
class of people by raising ticket prices has failed. Youth may even be encouraged
to participate in illegal activities in order to acquire the income necessary to
participate in leisure activities that are important to them, as well as to be able
to purchase the necessary accoutrements, such as cellphones, clothes, shoes and
jewellery which project the desired image (Hernandez-Ramdwar 2007).
85
soca, particularly ragga soca, there is an evident de-emphasis of violent, misogynist
and homophobic content in comparison to dancehall and hip hop. The attitude of
the soca crowd is reflected in the relative lack of conflict and violence in the soca
fete and, consequently, a decidedly reduced police presence. In Toronto the soca
scene is not as associated with violence, although it is still seen by outsiders as a
site of blackness and therefore potential criminality.20 Furthermore, although the
policing and security presence at soca fetes has certainly increased over the years,
it in no way compares to the heavy police and security presence and measures
enacted at reggae/dancehall or hip hop events. Soca as a musical form promotes
partying and celebration, high-energy fun, but people in the fete are encouraged
to wave their “rags,” and not, as is heard in some dancehall and hip hop songs,
their guns.
Conclusions
TOPIA 20
86
The soca posse is an arena in which those of Trinidadian and other Caribbean
descents, including the second generation, can assert an identity outside of the
Canadian “norm.” It is also a space where people can assert an identity that is
inclusively and diversely Caribbean and not exclusively black/African. The soca
posse asserts an identity that is predominantly non-white, but not representative
of African-American culture and not associated with hip hop. It also asserts a
Caribbean identity that is non-Jamaican and not associated exclusively with
dancehall. These four factors describe a space in which certain kinds of difference
are not only expressed but celebrated. That the soca scene even exists, and that it
is growing, is a testament to the fact that it provides some elements that other
scenes do not, and that more people are seeking out what the soca posse has
to offer. In my estimation, this has much to do with both the realities and the
negative portrayal of other Caribbean and/or black Toronto scenes. Shootings at
downtown clubs are becoming common place. House fetes in private residences,
a popular venue for soca lovers in earlier days, are now virtually non-existent
among the younger generations for security reasons. On a more problematic level,
a replication of class/colour divisions appear to be evolving in Toronto’s soca scene.
A desire to have a “respectable” and “middle class” atmosphere in which to party,
which distances itself from demonized and criminalized portrayals of blackness,
is on the rise. For the most part, though, soca is still associated with fun, safety,
pleasure and enjoyment, at least for the time being.
Notes
1. Steel bands are orchestras of steel drums; the steel drum was invented in the 1940s in
Trinidad. Made out of discarded oil drums, steelband was at first associated with gangs,
violence and the marginal society; after Trinidad and Tobago’s independence in 1962 it
was hailed as part of national culture and quickly came under government and corporate
sponsorship and, therefore, to a certain extent it was co-opted. For more on the history
of steelband, see Steumpfle (1995).
2. Besides being a participant/observer researcher, I am also an insider/outsider to the
soca fete and Trinidadian-Canadian community as a second generation Trinidadian (see
note 3 below), and as a person who has researched the Caribbean-Canadian community on a number of levels (see Hernandez-Ramdwar 1995; 2006; 2008). I feel that this
provides me with the ability to understand specific cultural nuances that an outsider to
these communities and scenes may not be able to interpret. For more on the merits of
the insider/outsider perspective see Butterfield (2004) and Atorki and El-Solh (1988).
3. Second generation refers to people born to immigrant parents who were either born in
the diaspora or who arrived there at a relatively young age.
4. I use the phrase “Caribbean and/or black” at times to signify the way in which Caribbean identities in Canada often become subsumed in larger “black” identities and vice
versa (e.g., the common perception that all Caribbean people are of African descent and,
conversely, that all people of African descent are from the Caribbean). In this regard—
negative characteristics, stereotypes, behaviours, etc.—there is much evidence to suggest
that these kinds of perceptions regarding race, ethnicity and region of origin operate in
Canadian society, particularly in the media, judicial system and educational institutions.
For more on this, see Shadd (2001); Benjamin (2003) and Roswell (2008).
6. In other work I have discussed the characteristics commonly thought to represent
Trinidadian identity, such as having a Carnival mentality, being cosmopolitan, diverse,
lyrically skillful, tricky and capable of deceit, and being boastful (Hernandez-Ramdwar
2006). The Carnival mentality is “a mindset that is focused on the next Carnival, the next
fete, the next lime; basically pleasure-seeking and living for the pleasures of the moment,
with no thought for the morrow, (i.e., a grasshopper-versus-ant mentality)” (61).
7. According to the 2006 Canadian census, out of a total of 121,635 people who claimed
Caribbean origin in Toronto, 30,905 defined themselves as second generation Caribbean.
8. See note 6.
9. As a professor in Caribbean Studies, I have overheard comments of non-Caribbean
male students regarding their female classmates—that they’re sluts, that they’re good
for sex but not to marry, particularly if the commentators come out of cultures in which
chastity is very important. It has been one of the difficult tasks of teaching Caribbean
Studies to contextualize these over-eroticized images of Caribbean women (and men) to
people with no knowledge of Caribbean history, and to redeem the status of our forbears
who were often forcibly prostituted, impregnated, abused and “put to stud” or “bred” like
livestock.
10. According to Philip Scher, the transnation is “a group in diaspora that imagines itself
as a collectivity with a specific history and a body of quantifiable traits and characteristics
in relation to a nation or nation-state that exists in the present in a putative homeland”
(2003: 1).
11. The 2006 Canadian census states that in Toronto 160,210 people reported being of
Jamaican ethnic origin, while 44,720 reported being of Guyanese origin. As well, 34,890
reported being of Trinidadian/Tobagonian origin. However, there was no distinction
made between Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean.
TOPIA 20
5. I conducted a series of interviews in Toronto between 2000 and 2004, four of which
are referred to in this article. All participants are referred to by a singular pseudonym.
The four participants included here and the dates of the interviews are as follows: Onika
(December 12, 2000); Kerry (December 19, 2000); Samantha (February 27, 2004) and
Douglas (March 31, 2004).
87
12. Unity between people of African and Indian descent is important in places like
Trinidad and Guyana because of the long histories of racial tensions, violence and political rivalries between the two groups.
13. A pannist is one who plays steel pan.
14. “Playing Mas” refers to the act of playing a masquerade or playing in a mas (masquerade) band.
15. These are all common usage terms in Trinidad to describe the certain “look” of a person, whether or not the ethnoracial description accurately reflects full or partial ancestry
of that group. For more on this subject see Hernandez-Ramdwar (1997); Khan (1993);
and Segal (1993).
16. Some of the more poplar websites, which periodically update their galleries of the
latest fetes, include: Toronto-Lime.com (http://www.toronto-lime.com/); Wuk Up Nuff
(http://www.wukupnuff.com/) and Fete Net (http://www.fetenet.com/home.tpl). Webpages dedicated to mas bands, who also put on their own fetes and other events, include:
Louis Saldenah Mas-K Club (http://www.saldenahcarnival.com/); Toronto Revellers
(http://www.torontorevellers.com/); Carnival Nationz (http://www.carnivalnationz
.com/) and Callaloo (http://www.callaloo.net/).
17. See note 6.
18. “Drunk and Disorderly” is the title of the 1972 award-winning calypso song by The
Mighty Sparrow.
TOPIA 20
88
19. “Wukking,” “wining” and “bubbling” all refer to specific movement of the waist and
hips. “Wining” is the term most often used in reference to the Trinidadian figure-eight
“winding” of the waist to soca music (medium to fast movement). “Wukking” (“working”) generally refers to fast and vigorous hip rotation and sometimes pelvic thrusting.
The term “bubbling” comes out of Jamaican dancehall culture; it refers to “tight pelvic
circling” (Stolzhoff 2000: 110) to the much slower tempo of reggae, dub or dancehall
music.
20. Outside of Caribana, the police presence at soca events has been minimal, and some
promoters hire their own security instead. However, two recent events have raised concern: at one soca fete I was quite amazed to see a more obvious than usual police presence and the fete was shut down promptly at 3:00 a.m. by police due to an alleged noise
complaint, after which partygoers exiting the fete were subjected to a police helicopter
with searchlight circling the parking lot to ensure patrons cleared the area. This was, to
me, unusual, unprecedented and highly unnecessary given that the crowd was exceptionally tame that evening. In a similar incident, a soca fete was shut down so early by the
police that Bajan performer Rupee had to complete his set with all the lights turned
on and police encouraging the crowd to exit the venue. The police’s excuse was that the
early closure was due to the “type” of people present (although what type they meant was
never fully defined).
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Randy Innes
Contemporary Presents: The Canadian War
Museum’s Afghanistan—A Glimpse of War
and the Unfinished Business
of Representation
Abstract
As an exhibition organized and presented by a national cultural institution whose
mandate is to educate the public on the reasons, reactions, mechanisms and
impacts of war, Afghanistan: A Glimpse of War at the Canadian War Museum had
the opportunity to address the conflict that has shaped contemporary Afghanistan
and the nature of the current war in which Canada is an active participant. As
such, the appearance and effect of this exhibition must be evaluated not only in
terms of its place in relation to historical and archival records, but also in terms of
the knowledge and perceptions it generated in the present. I attend to the choice
of objects and to the narrative they introduce, and question the institutional claim
to an apolitical and elliptical exhibition strategy. While a museum exhibition can
never bring the totality of the subject to which its artifacts and objects refer into the
space of representation, it is nonetheless the cumulative result of a set of decisions,
practices and strategies that are directed towards a specific end. I investigate the
effects that the idea of “contemporary history” had on the exhibition as a whole,
and ask whether the subject of the exhibition would have been better addressed
as a contemporary present.
¤
Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential
modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half ’s
worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003: 18)
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94
Afghanistan: A Glimpse of War was the first in-house exhibition developed by The
Canadian War Museum. On display from February 9, 2007 to April 27, 2008,
it offered a picture of Canada’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan and in
the “war on terror,” a “glimpse” of the Canadian military’s efforts to help rebuild
Afghanistan and an assessment of the war’s impact both in Afghanistan and on
Canadian soldiers and their families. The exhibition’s “glimpse at the unfinished
history of this conflict” (Canadian War Museum 2008) relied extensively on the
photographs of journalist Stephen Thorne, and on film excerpts by documentary
journalist Garth Pritchard. Curated by the museum’s post-1945 historian Andrew
Burtch, the exhibition also included extensive representations of documents from
the mass media, as well as a familiar presentation of museological artifacts.
What exactly was the nature of the glimpse that Afghanistan purported to offer
of this particular multinational military campaign (a campaign that has now run
longer than the Second World War)? As an exhibition organized and presented
by a national cultural institution—with a mandate to educate the public on the
reasons, reactions, mechanisms and impacts of war—Afghanistan had a unique
opportunity to address how the conflict shapes contemporary Afghanistan, and the
nature of the war in which Canada is an active participant. As such, the appearance
and effect of this exhibition must be evaluated not only in terms of its place in
relation to historical and archival records, but also in terms of the knowledge and
perceptions it generated in the present. While a museum exhibition can never
bring the totality of the subject to which its artifacts and objects refer into the
space of representation, it is nonetheless the cumulative result of a set of decisions,
practices and strategies that are complete and strategic in themselves. While the
distant present of the war in Afghanistan differs from the present of the museum’s
galleries, they are nevertheless both contemporary presents.
Despite the museographical reminders that the war in Afghanistan is unfinished,
and despite the identification of the structural difficulties involved in developing
a historiographic knowledge of the present, Afghanistan was organized around an
explicit objective and a determined set of objects. This exhibition sought to account
for “contemporary history” (Burtch, pers. comm.),1 a notion that causes the present
to differ from itself and to defer to the discourse of history. The formulation
“contemporary history” introduces the present as an effect of the archive and confers
on it a passive and aesthetic demeanour; the present is constituted according to its
passage into the historical record. Dean Oliver, director of exhibitions at the War
Museum, suggests that rather than taking sides in a political debate, rather than
offering “a period in the sentence,” Afghanistan offered a “colon or … ellipses.”
What is the significance of an elliptical and inconclusive methodological strategy
when addressing an ongoing military conflict in a museum exhibition? What is
the nature of the experience and knowledge that can be had in an exhibition that
anxiously awaits and deposits evidence of “other significant stories should they
occur” (Oliver 2008)?
A Glance at the Glimpse
Rather than presenting a glimpse, each of these objects contributes to a synecdochic aesthetic whose referent is the conflict in Afghanistan. While a
metonymic display of artifacts elevates the absent referent, synecdoche reduces
the singular value of its referent, pointing to an idea—without, however, effacing
the local conditions in which it is produced and encountered (Bann 1984: 8687). The presentation of material objects, artifacts and matériel worked in such a
way that their appearance in the exhibition was not confused with their previous
incarnation in the war in Afghanistan. Objects displayed in a museum may have
been removed from the context that made them exemplary, but this does not
mean that they or the image they provide is incomplete. The presence of a vehicle
damaged by a bomb gives the visitor an impression of the physical dangers of war
without bringing those dangers into the space of the museum. The production and
mediation of this difference is the museum’s technical achievement: the cordon
that marks the boundary between a vehicle recovered from a war zone. The object
TOPIA 20
Along with a concentration of images extracted from mass media sources—
Thorne’s and Pritchard’s images were preceded by a series of enlarged and
laminated newspaper front pages—Afghanistan included a selection of material
objects that were presented in the “archaeological” or “artifactual” disposition
that has informed museum exhibition practices for the past two centuries. The
exhibition included: a weapon, supplied by the Canadian Department of National
Defence; objects circulated in Afghanistan by members of the “coalition,” such as
matchbooks distributed by the U.S. Department of Justice announcing a reward
of up to five million dollars for the arrest of Osama bin Laden; the remains of a
military vehicle damaged by an improvised explosive device; charred notebooks
recovered from a school bombed by the Taliban on which the stamp indicating their
joint U.S./Afghan publication remains visible; and a U.N. Assistance Mission to
Afghanistan board game called “Road to Peace” that rewards constructive activity
while penalizing criminal and violent actions such as growing opium poppies or
attacking aid workers.
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as it has been presented by the museum in conjunction with the space of the
visitor, draws attention to the difference between an exhibition’s referent and the
present of the exhibition space, and thus to the fact that it has been organized as
something whose principle objective is to be seen.
The pedagogical potential of Afghanistan was similarly in evidence when the
exhibition delivered specific facts. Developing a “complete” understanding of the
history of Afghanistan and of the impact that conflict has had on that country
would be difficult to achieve in a restricted temporary exhibition space. However,
several textual panels provided a brief introduction without claiming (or needing)
to be comprehensive. Several displays that cited specific facts and figures relating
to Canadian aid projects in Afghanistan also contributed to an understanding of
the nature of the developments that have come about in Afghanistan.
TOPIA 20
96
Had this approach been thoroughly pursued and expanded, Afghanistan would
have increased its educational and civic mandate within the broader context of
the Canadian War Museum. The exhibition might have included a presentation
of the arguments for and against going to Afghanistan that have taken place in
Canada. More attention may have been given to the composition and logic of the
military force as a whole, a consideration of the highly charged climate in which
decisions regarding how to engage Afghanistan were made, and the presentation
of objects, tools, resources or programs that are contributing positively to the
condition of the people of Afghanistan. The differences and intersections between
military and aid operations might also have been highlighted.
Instead of this, however, the exhibition elevated the role and significance of personal
experience, individual testimony and media documents as principle sources of
information and meaning. In addition to their images, Thorne and Pritchard
supplied the museum with many of the objects included in the exhibition, and
introduced to the museum a number of individuals who had involvement with
the conflict (Oliver 2008). For Burtch, the turn to personal stories was a solution
to a deficiency in primary and secondary historical sources (Burtch 2007: 44).
However, what becomes depleted in the absence of primary resources and the
turn towards personal experiences is precisely an understanding of the museum
exhibition itself as a place that organizes and produces meaning. Afghanistan
works to efface its effects by assigning its objects a meaning that is greater than
these objects’ status as signs.2 The strategic turn away from the collective present
and toward personal recollection also informs the role of the media documents,
illuminating the significance of the visitor response stations and the ritual act of
mourning that concluded the exhibition. We shall return to these below.
Personal experience became a constitutive mnemonic and aesthetic experience
in the exhibition’s first two galleries. Since the topic of this exhibition was an
ongoing military conflict—that is being waged by states that represent the
interests of the majority of the exhibition’s visitors—it is important to understand
how Afghanistan imagined its constituency, and how this constituency was invited
to imagine itself. Susan Sontag observed that while there is, strictly speaking,
no such thing as collective memory, there is, however, collective instruction, a
stipulating that elevates the importance of one thing over another (2003: 85).
What kind of instruction did Afghanistan provide?
The Opening Gambit
Afghanistan opened by creating a context in which the visitor was invited to
uncritically recall a series of events from the past through a highly affective
arrangement of objects. Upon entering Afghanistan, the visitor encountered
three museum plinths dramatically lit from above. The first presented a stack of
damaged Canadian bank notes that had been recovered following the destruction
of the World Trade Center. Still bound together, this currency had clearly suffered
an impact. Returned to the Bank of Canada “for replacement,” it is now the
property of the Canadian Currency Museum. Rather than sustaining an abstract
idea of monetary value, these ruined bills have entered a different economy of
representation and cultural exchange; like circulating currency, their value becomes
deposited in a unitary and idealized concept that exceeds the thing itself. This
stack of bills is now a function of an archive, and thus performs the parochial
function of introducing a name into this exhibition’s economy of representation.
The circulation of “Canada” between the ruins of Ground Zero, Afghanistan and
Afghanistan elevates the symbolic value of this name at the expense of attention
to the specific material circumstances of the object.
The middle plinth replayed audio recordings of voices that recalled the experiences
of the terrorist attacks on the United States. The voice is an ideal document:
its apparent similarity to an individual witness assigns it a privileged authority.
However, Susan Crane suggests that an exhibition that elevates the aesthetic effect
TOPIA 20
Foremost among images that have contributed to the impression of a unified
support for a war on terrorism are the images of the destruction of the World
Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The effect of these images extends well
beyond that which they purport to document. It is now widely acknowledged
that the repetition of images of the attacks on the World Trade Center played
a significant role in creating a permissive atmosphere in which military and
political actions could proceed unquestioned—from disputed detention tactics,
to the unconsidered passage of oppressive and repressive laws, to the invasion of
a third country (Heller 2005). While Afghanistan differentiated Canadian from
American actions, the museum station that explained these differences occupied
a small area that followed the first two galleries. In the space of these first two
galleries, the attacks of 9/11 were presented in a stylized and highly aesthetic
manner, introducing the museological technique that informed the remainder of
the exhibition.
97
of testimony at the expense of its significance as a document risks compromising
the pedagogical effectiveness of an exhibition (Crane 1997: 62). While a confusion
of recorded voices might be employed to convey a particular effect (panic, fear,
etc.), the repetition of this effect in Afghanistan confuses the objectives of this
exhibition. Instead of bringing testimony into relation with historical analysis,
instead of clarifying the specific circumstances in which witnessing occurs and
the witness document is produced and reproduced, the introduction of voices in
this opening gallery sought to recall to the present the effects of a moment from
the past.
A third plinth presented a fragment of fuselage from one of the aircraft that
was flown into the World Trade Center. This fragment is one of hundreds of
objects that have been donated to the New York State Museum (NYSM) and
that are now a part of an exhibition called The World Trade Center: Rescue Recovery
Response. Unlike Afghanistan, that exhibition is concerned with accounting for
specific events and responses, and turns to a surplus of material objects as a way
of identifying, narrating and clarifying the events and activities of September 11
and its aftermath. While loss figures centrally, the objective of this object-based
exhibition is documentary and not aesthetic.3
TOPIA 20
98
The fragment of fuselage on loan to the War Museum, just a few square centimetres in size, was called “The Weapon.” Accompanied by its name, this jagged
fragment loomed monumentally within its museological container. However,
rather than referencing the whole to which it once belonged, and rather than
being presented in relation to the site from which it was recovered, this fragment
acquired a name and an identity of its own. While this fragment might have
contributed to a discussion about the force of impact and the processes through
which it was recovered and collected (e.g., the NYSM exhibition includes an
extensive collection of objects that were used in the recovery process, offering
historical and local context to its fragments), its melodramatic isolation and
museographical elevation in in the context of an exhibition at a national museum
ties this piece of fuselage to a system that is, in the words of Jonathan Bordo,
“outside the domain of its operation as sign” (1996: 187).
Together, these three fragments evoked an idea that transcended their specific
material and local dispositions. The visitor’s encounter with these fragments
then became an exercise in looking beyond the status of the artifacts as material
objects—collected and represented by a museum—and toward the question of
how the meaning of these objects is to be determined within the space of the
museum. The work of the exhibition will be to constitute the domains that lie
beyond an object’s operation as sign.
While the fullness of the event to which these fragments referred was deferred
in this gallery, the structure through which it will be recalled to memory was
nevertheless introduced. The front pages of two Canadian newspapers hung
perpendicular to these three fragments under the banner “Yesterday’s News.”
They had been printed the morning of September 11, 2001, before the attacks on
the United States. They faced the exhibition route and not the approaching visitor,
and were thus noticed only after the three fragments had made their impact.
As the curator pointed out, each of these pages contained references to terrorism,
and especially to terrorism in the air (Burtch, pers. comm.). These citations refer to
the inquiry into the Air India bombing, which began in 2006 and was frequently
front page news. The fact that these references cite the Air India bombing should
be understood as coincidental in relation to the attacks of 9/11. The only valid
association between these events concerns the similar impact of state and media
management of such events, and the degree to which such management has
restricted or modified the information provided to the public.
The oscillation between a nostalgia for “yesterday’s news,” and the desire for a
complete image was resolved in the second gallery through the display of several
front pages published on September 12, 2001. Each of these papers featured full
page photographs of the World Trade Center during the attacks. The lasting
significance of these images, their role in the production of knowledge, and their
association with a news media whose transparency and impartiality was not
questioned, is a deserving topic that has elsewhere received more critical attention
than it was given in Afghanistan.
It is questionable whether an exhibition that sought to address Canada’s current
involvement in the war in Afghanistan needed to be prefaced in this way at all.
September 11 might have been better treated less dramatically and less exotically
TOPIA 20
Situating newspapers and archaeological fragments side-by-side introduces the
function of the media document as a legitimate witness to an idea of history. While
the papers isolate a moment in time and thereby project an order of other possible
moments, the artifactual fragments gave substance to one specific moment along
this chain. The opening gallery introduced the conflicting temporal conditions
that museum exhibitions have to navigate. However, between what Wolfgang
Ernst calls an exhibition’s “narrative emplotments,” and its accompanying
“museographical dramaturgy,” there is a risk of blurring the differences between
an exhibition’s historical and archaeological articulations (2000: 33-34). In the
opening gallery of Afghanistan, the newspapers operated less as providers of relevant
content than as gestures that visualize a certain idea of time, making it possible
to locate other possible moments in time and expand this time’s succession. The
order to which these pages refer makes it possible to provide a degree of precision
to the three fragments, to make their visibility intersect with the aesthetic order
of history. Narrative here becomes an effect of strategic dramaturgy. Rather than
attending to these newspaper pages, as the visitor oscillated between the effect
provided by the artifacts and the visual activation of a temporal succession, the
present became a moment formed through observation and recollection.
99
in a display further along the exhibition route. Images of the World Trade Center
collapsing might either have been omitted, reduced in size and significance or
framed differently. Perhaps more importantly, they might have been discussed
in relation to the framing effects of commercial mass media organizations rather
than represented as elements of the museum’s archive. Such an approach would
not reduce the reality of this event, but would have reduced the aesthetic impact
of this image as one produced and shaped by the media.
The elevation of the visual presence and effects of photojournalistic images in the
opening galleries significantly informs and limits the kind of understanding that
could take place. Greenberg suggests that in wartime there is a turn away from the
kind of understanding advanced by critical and pedagogic museum exhibitions
that pose difficult questions, and a turn towards exhibitions that elevate values and
distract the public from posing difficult questions (2007: 111-12). In the opening
galleries of Afghanistan, the photojournalistic image was uncritically introduced
as an ideal and transparent witness document, as an index of an idea of time, and
as a memorial device.
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100
The Spectre of the Present and the Promise of the Archive
Afghanistan began with a presentation that asked the visitor to recall the visual
conditions in which the public became informed of the events of 9/11. Central
to this exhibition was the question of how the present was located in relation to
the past, and to the structure that produces the past as meaningful. Museums
establish authoritative and unified representations through the presentation of
visual objects, which refer to those events the museum has decided its visitors will
recall. What happens when one of the stated objectives is to make incompletion
and absence a constitutive presence?
From the outset of Afghanistan, the disaster was presented as having already
occurred. Visitors became aware of their presence during a time that had been
situated in relation to a historical archive. The visitor was present after the attacks
on the United States, which were aestehticized again in a dramatic, mnemonic
exercise. We were present after the impact of the improvised explosive device on
the military vehicle, and after Thorne and Pritchard’s travels with the military;
we were present after the deaths of the Canadian soldiers; and we were present
after the deaths of Afghan civilians, whose number is rarely cited. A three-ringed
binder called “Today in Afghanistan” was included along the exhibition route, and
could be updated as needed with newspaper clippings, marking the passage of the
present into the museum’s (and history’s) archive. The final gallery in the exhibition
included a photographic display of Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, and
of the families that survive them. This station could also be added to as required;
the pathos of this room is addressed below. The present of the exhibition was
always just a bit late, yet monuments to the passage of the present into the past
nevertheless gathered around the visitor’s feet.
A didactic wall panel called “A Glimpse of History” argued that in preparing an
exhibition on a contemporary subject, “special challenges applied.” An interactive
table allowed visitors to uncover the nature of these challenges. While Prime
Ministerial papers and government documents remained inaccessible, eyewitness
accounts, journalists’ reports and information derived from artifacts were available.
The curator notes that due to the international composition of the military body
in Afghanistan, and to the differing national regulations on releasing information
and documents, it is impossible to predict when it might be possible to compile a
complete record of this war (Burtch 2007: 44). On one hand, the significance of
that which is available to the museum is elevated; on the other hand, this material
is presented uncritically as a set of consolation documents, as ruins whose integral
meaning cannot be found. Completion, as such, is deferred by the condition of
the archive as a whole.
While Afghanistan was faced with producing an exhibition that addressed
an ongoing war, the exhibition produced the present as a fallen moment, as
incomplete or ruinous in relation to the promised fullness of the historical record.
Stated limitations in the historiography of the conflict and the historical record
functioned as constitutive absences: we watch as the event engulfs us and passes
us by. The solution to a perception of an absence of documentation was to turn to
a force that perennially eludes the hegemony of history: personal testimony, the
witness. “The exhibition would not be a detailed interpretation of the conflict or
a chronology of Canadian involvement (few exhibitions are) but would instead
TOPIA 20
If the declared incompletion of the historical record created the perception
of incompletion, this exhibition also provided experiences that reinforced this
perception. Afghanistan included several visitor response stations. Opinions and
reactions to the war were left in significant numbers and were collected each day by
museum staff. It was suggested that these might at some point form an exhibition
of their own (Burtch, pers. comm.). However, ordering and classifying public
opinion in this way contributes nothing to the substance of the exhibition, or to
an understanding of the decisions and actions taken by the Canadian government,
or indeed to the context in which they were taken. Graham and Yasin suggest that
this kind of public, taxonomic treatment of the museum visitor is an extension
of both a colonial model of museological representation, and of the museum’s
late capitalist market approaches to the public sphere (2007: 164). While such
stations introduce the possibility of an infinity of possible responses (and thus
the incomplete), this infinity is figured as a product of museum representation.
The deposition of responses in the archive is a gesture that promises their future
meaningful interpretation. Such and act, to recall Derrida’s analysis, fulfils the
archive’s dual institutive and conservative conditions (Derrida 1996: 7).
101
highlight personal experiences of war” (Burtch 2007: 44). The identification and
isolation of “highly personal experiences” introduces the role of the subject-witness
as constitutive of the exhibition’s meaning, while also marking it as inaccessible
to interpretation and analysis. As fragments, these experiences testify not to the
presence of other experiences, but to the order that has introduced them as such.
This order has withdrawn, however: the success of the archaeological dig effaces
the archive (Derrida 1996: 92).
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102
The unity of purpose that characterized the post-9/11 period in which this
exhibition clearly locates itself led to a number of questionable decisions—often
taken without public consultation or legal grounds—by the Canadian and other
governments (Roach 2003). Many of these decisions are a matter of public record,
even if the specific directives may not be. To be sure, a good deal of information
has yet to emerge, and some will likely remain hidden from the public. The
“Glimpse of History” that introduces the promise of a fullness of meaning in the
future is not an admission, however, of the complexities of either representation
or the military conflict. Instead, it defers attention away from both. The danger of
such a representation of an ongoing military conflict is that, as Benjamin observes,
the present will remain unable to recognize itself as such (1968: 255). Like war,
representation has the potential to have a fatal effect in and on the present.
In Afghanistan, the visitor was left to peer at the unfolding of this important
engagement from a strangely isolated point of view.
The extent to which the effects of an exhibition are designed in advance to isolate
this point of view is apparent in the poster for Afghanistan.4 The upper half of
the poster includes a photograph showing a soldier, automatic weapon in hand,
engaged in an activity that is difficult to make out. His face is covered and several
other soldiers are visible in the background. Sunlight refracts through clouds of
dust and sand in the foreground and the background, creating an effect of activity
and depth. The brown border marking the limit between the photograph and
the lower, textual portion of the poster extends upward in a jagged plume along
the photograph’s edge, as if the ink roller had come off the rails. The name of the
exhibition is listed below this flourish. This is an ambiguous but enticing image
that avoids projecting any overtly violent or offensive references. Afghanistan was
involved from the beginning in maximizing the potential relationship between an
idealized consumer and an appealing product.5 While there is nothing surprising
about a museum turning to a marketing firm to increase its exhibition’s viability,
the need to both create public interest and moderate expectations indicates a
perceived need to sanitize and neutralize the exhibit. The success of such an
equation reduces the significance of what the exhibition fails to address.
The challenge for the late modern museum, as Pollock proposes, will be to address
the temporal structure of its representations: “Like gleaners, we must follow
behind the reapers of history, haunted by the persistent affects of that trauma’s
belatedness, unable to transcend the past” (2007: 31). Despite its conscious effort
to reduce this belatedness, and despite reflecting on its own condition and inviting
the present into the museum’s archive, Afghanistan nevertheless (or indeed for
these very reasons) preserved and reproduced this idea of the whole as a resolution
that is still to come. “After” is the name of modernity’s cultural consciousness, of
the filter through which the present comes to be known, only in retrospect, as a
memory (Pollock 2007: 31). The status of the present—the present of the visitor,
of the presence that witnesses the exhibition—remains undefined and different
from the work of the exhibition as such. In such a setting, then, it was not a great
surprise to be repeatedly invited to engage in memory work and in the work of
mourning.
The Embodied Witness
Thorne’s photographs document a variety of Canadian forces activities in
Afghanistan, ranging from military combat, to the recovery of evidence, to
reconstruction and aid efforts. Pictures indicate the military’s combat role, show
soldiers involved with a variety of tasks, and emphasize the contrasts between
the heavily equipped Western military, and a poorly clothed and vulnerable local
population. Soldiers are shown contending with the dust and heat of the local
landscape. Pritchard’s films perform a similar documentary work. One excerpt
follows Canadian troops as they arrive in Afghanistan in Operation Apollo
in 2001, and shows the processes and actions of the military as it arrived and
set to work. Another film follows soldiers as they raid a house and uncover a
large weapons cache while local residents look on. These images gave visitors an
impression of what Canadian soldiers are doing in Afghanistan and of what their
jobs are like. They show us how Afghans react to the actions and presence of a
foreign military.
Also included were several images of the photojournalists themselves among
soldiers in Afghanistan. In addition to fulfilling the curatorial decision to focus
on personal testimony, these portraits introduced the character of the seasoned
TOPIA 20
If photojournalistic images were the basis for the glimpse of war produced by
Afghanistan, it is necessary to attend to not only the conditions in which this
glimpse is framed in the exhibition, but also to the conditions and context of a
photograph’s production and reproduction. Unlike the images of September 11
and 12, 2001, Thorne’s and Pritchard’s images were presented independently of
the media bias in which they were produced. Removed from the visual context
in which this kind of imagery typically appears, they gained visual and formal
autonomy. The intersection of this elevated visual presence with their status as
records of personal experiences obscures the complex commercial and military
conditions in which these photographs were made, as well as their place in this
museographical dramaturgy.
103
journalist and war tourist on the ground with the military in Afghanistan. This
character has been part of the repertoire of war imagery since the Crimean
War (Brandon 2007; Sontag 2003). Thorne and Pritchard are characterized as
“veteran journalists” (Burtch 2007: 45), creating a further association between the
war correspondent and the soldier. Indeed it might be asked to what degree the
experiences of the embedded photojournalist are personal at all, and not products
of a specific collective experience.
TOPIA 20
104
Photographs, Sontag notes, tend to distract us from inquiring into what is not
being shown (2003: 14). The selection of a few photographs from more than
one hundred that Thorne provided to the museum cannot be separated from the
exhibition’s temporal configuration, its concern to elevate personal experiences,
and its desire to give the impression of incompletion. As such, the visual effect of
these images has the potential to eclipse their content. Rather than referring to
the war in Afghanistan, the referent of these photographs is personal experience,
and the experience we are asked to recall is that of the photographer. Furthermore,
Thorne himself notes the potential for a picture’s meaning to be modified: he
suggests that an exhibition that emphasizes reconstruction efforts reduces the
realities of the combat that must take place before most of these more palatable
projects can unfold (Geddes 2007).
A brief comparison between the Canadian War Museum’s treatment of photographic and filmic images of the war in Afghanistan, and the British Imperial War
Museum’s (IWM) approach to images of this war suggests a difference between
the elevation of the value of an image as a personal testimonial, and the elevation
of the work’s capacity to produce an effect in the present. In 2002, the IWM
commissioned two visual projects on Afghanistan. Rather than documents, the
IMW sought images produced in the context of art practices. Hidden, photographer
Paul Seawright’s collection of photographs of Afghanistan, present that country’s
landscape as empty, scarred and deserted. Valley draws attention to what has been
eliminated from, and haunts, the landscape, rather than documenting military
actions or local conditions. Valley references The Valley of the Shadow of Death,
Roger Fenton’s 1855 picture of a valley in which a British cavalry brigade was
attacked by Russian artillery during the Crimean War. Fenton’s picture evokes
the violence of war by showing its remains: while the dead soldiers are gone,
the valley in which the attack took place is littered (by Fenton’s own hand) with
cannon balls. Seawright’s Valley raises the conflict in Afghanistan, along with the
complications that accompany the representation of war, without making a claim
to documentary accuracy or asking the viewer to recall a specific event or another’s
distant experience. This image draws the viewer into the work of asking how we
arrive at understanding in our present.
In The House of Osama bin Laden, Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell used still and
video cameras to record military and public sites in Afghanistan, including a
house in which Osama bin Laden once lived. The end result is an interactive
video display in which the viewer is able to navigate empty spaces. Laura Brandon
observes that the vacant house “acted as a metaphor for Bin Laden’s continued
existence but non-presence, while the virtual exhibition symbolized his virtual
reality in the form of videotaped messages” (Brandon 2007: 102). Shortlisted
for the 2004 Turner Prize, this work placed visitors in the position of occupying
spaces that have attained mythological status in the Western imagination, thereby
helping to diffuse elements of this same status. We are not invited to account for
our own location in the face of the representation of Thorne’s and Pritchard’s
images in Afghanistan.
A Backwards Glimpse
In her evaluation of the intent and reception of Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/
Recent Art, held at the Jewish Museum in New York in 2002, Greenberg explains
that while the last rooms of Holocaust museums often include video testimony
from survivors, the last room of Mirroring Evil referenced, but modified, this
convention. Mirroring Evil included works of contemporary art that variously
incorporated or addressed German National Socialist imagery. The final room
used the visual testimony strategy to display public responses to this exhibition.
Like several other works in the exhibition, this display was meant to emphasize
the difficulty involved in bridging the gap between the present and the past, of
bringing the past meaningfully but critically into the consciousness of the present
(Greenberg 2007).
While Oliver claims that the display of dead soldiers and their surviving families is
“utterly unique” in Canada, the final room in Afghanistan can be situated in relation
to an established convention of museum displays that address the importance
of the work of memory, mourning and commemoration. In Mirroring Evil, the
objective was to make the museum visitor aware of the complex exchanges between
presence and witnessing as a way of emphasizing that memory is produced in
and through a set of present relations. In the American Holocaust Museum, as
Crane observes, the ongoing negotiations of remembrance, historical work and
TOPIA 20
While the semiological operations that opened Afghanistan introduced memory
and recollection as constitutive of the exhibition’s technique as a whole, the
concluding gallery modified the work of memory to a work of commemorative
mourning. In this last room, a slide show displayed photographs of Canadian
soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Also included were images of the soldiers as
children and youth, and of their families and friends. Benches invited visitors to
sit, but did not inhibit passage toward the exit. To the side was another station at
which visitors could deposit personal responses or reactions, and experience the
passage of their present into the archive.
105
museological representation are brought to the public “by actively depicting the
relationship between survivor testimony and historical analysis” (Crane 1997: 62).
In both cases, memory work is placed in relation to the processes that produce
knowledge in the hopes of activating critical thinking in the present.
The memorial chapel at the end of Afghanistan invited acts of private recollection,
making this private, isolated act a condition of presence in the public exhibition
space. Yet, as the visitor privately contemplated the deaths of others, the war
continued. Afghanistan compromised the ability to critically apprehend the present
as a meaningful time, as the visitor was invited to watch the present pass into
representation. Geddes concludes that Afghanistan “may be inoculated against
criticism by the way it pays tribute to the more than 40 Canadian soldiers who
have died in Afghanistan” (Geddes 2007).6 Such a conclusion suggests that in
Afghanistan, museum aesthetics achieved a degree of unity that belies its declared
incompletion.
TOPIA 20
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Leaving the final gallery, the visitor could catch a parting, backwards glimpse
of the exhibition’s opening fragments. As the ends intruded upon origins in the
exhibition’s circuitous path, the visitor was left with the strange impression that
the work of mourning will be repeated, that there will be more to come. The
archive—as historical and museological—offers the promise of meaning in the
future, but this promise involves an absenting of the present from the space of
representation. In this way Afghanistan revealed the melancholia of museological
aesthetics: the economy that organizes the museum exhibition’s representations
has already determined the conditions and limits of their reception as products
of culture.
Notes
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who supported the argument as it was
proposed in an early incarnation of this paper. My PhD dissertation in the Visual and
Cultural Studies Department at the University of Rochester, On the Limits of the Work of
Art: The Fragment in Visual Culture, addresses the core set of issues raised here as they develop in the museum culture of the 18th and 19th centuries. This article benefited from
my involvement in teaching with Jonathan Bordo at Trent University’s Cultural Studies
Department in 2007-2008. I had the opportunity to tour Afghanistan: A Glimpse of War
with a group of students from Trent and benefited from discussions I had with them.
1. Personal communication. Andrew Burtch, Ottawa, 18 April 2007.
2. This formulation derives from Jonathan Bordo’s analysis of The Aboriginal Memorial at
the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (1996: 187-88).
3. Images and the rationale behind this exhibition can be accessed at http://www.nysm
.nysed.gov/wtc. Accessed 26 July 2008.
4. The poster was nominated for an award in the Posters division of the 2007 American
Museum Association’s Publications Design Competition.
5. HBS Marketing states that its role in the preparation of the poster and publicity
material included “enticing visitors to attend while managing their expectations,” and
in effecting a rapprochement between the visitor and the public sphere. http://www
.hbsmarketing.com. Accessed 26 July 2008.
6. The death toll of Canadians from this conflict stood at ninety-seven, as of September
8, 2008.
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Brandon, Laura. 2007. Art and War. London and New York: I. B. Tauris.
Burtch, Andrew. 2007. Afghanistan: A Glimpse of War. Contemporary History at the
Canadian War Museum. Canadian Military History 16(3): 43-52.
Canadian War Museum. 2008. http://www.warmuseum.ca/cwm/afghanistan/
afghanistane.html. Accessed 26 July 2008.
Crane, Susan A. 1997. Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum. History and
Theory 36(4): 44-63.
Ernst, Wolfgang. 2000. Archi(ve)textures of Museology. In Museums and Memory, edited
by Susan A. Crane, 17-34. Stanford: Stanford Univerity Press.
Geddes, John. 2007. Will this show become a war zone? Maclean’s, 12 February 2007.
Graham, Janna and Shadya Yasin. 2007. Reframing Participation in the Museum: A
Syncopated Discussion. In Museums After Modernism: Strategies of Engagement, edited by
Griselda Pollock and Joyce Zemans, 157-72. Malden, MA, and Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell.
Greenberg, Reesa. 2007. Mirroring Evil, Evil Mirrored: Timing, Trauma, and Temporary
Exhibitions. In Museums After Modernism: Strategies of Engagement, edited by Griselda
Pollock and Joyce Zemans, 104-18. Malden, MA, and Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell.
Heller, Dana, ed. 2005. The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity.
New York: Palgrave.
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July 2008.
Pollock, Griselda. 2007. Un-Framing the Modern: Critical Space/Public Possibility. In
Museums After Modernism: Strategies of Engagement, edited by Griselda Pollock and
Joyce Zemans, 1-39. Malden, MA, and Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell.
Roach, Kent. 2003. September 11: Consequences for Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queens
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Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Strauss and
Giroux.
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Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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TOPIA 20 109
Dina Georgis
Moving Past Ressentiment:
War and the State of Feminist Freedom
Abstract
This paper works with Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment because it offers important insights into the implications of anachronistic feminist epistemologies
of freedom that are built on, as Wendy Brown argues, attachments to wounded
identities. Injured by power, second and third-wave feminism’s response to loss
is to assert the right to power and empowerment. As this strategy forecloses loss
and human vulnerability, it renders feminism unable to respond adequately to war
and contemporary political conflict. Drawing on postcolonial questions of loss
and suffering in conversation with ressentiment, I suggest that feminism can begin
to unlearn what Stuart Hall has called “our habits of mind.” To elucidate what a
new feminism that is “touched by loss” might look like, I turn to Joss Whedon’s
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and post-9/11 responses to advance the politics of grief
and mourning.
résumé
Cet article travaille autour du concept nietzschéen de ressentiment. Ce concept
est utilisé parce qu’il permet d’apercevoir les implications d’épistémologies
féministes anachroniques de la liberté qui sont fondées sur ce que Wendy Brown a
identifié comme des attachements à des identités blessées. Blessées par le pouvoir,
la réponse des deuxième et troisième vagues du féminisme à la question de la perte
est d’affirmer le droit au pouvoir et l’empowerment. Puisque cette stratégie occulte
la perte et la vulnérabilité humaine, elle rend le féminisme incapable de répondre
adéquatement à la guerre et aux conflits politiques contemporains. S’inspirant des
problématiques postcoloniales de la perte et de la souffrance en dialogue avec le
ressentiment, Georgis avance que le féminisme peut commencer à désapprendre
ce que Stuart Hall a appellé « nos habitudes de pensée ». Pour apercevoir ce à quoi
un nouveau féminisme qui serait « touché par la perte » ressemblerait, l’auteure se
tourne vers Buffy the Vampire Slayer de Joss Whedon ainsi que vers des réponses
post 9/11 pour faire avancer la politique du chagrin et du deuil.
¤
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Consider the familiar slogans of second wave feminism such as “Freedom of
choice,” “Keep men’s laws off women’s bodies” and “Patriarchy fuck off!” While
slogans do not provide a comprehensive estimation of feminist history, they
certainly invoke its spirit. These slogans assert feminism’s fundamental precept
that social, cultural and political paradigms discriminate against women. But they
do more than that; they give insight into the fantasmatic spaces of the feminist
movement and the meanings and strategies that have arisen from its emotional
landscape. These slogans tell us a story about what it has meant to fight for
women’s freedom.
If we were to read “Resist the patriarchy” as the dream of feminism, what might
this dream tell us about feminism’s unwitting desire? Since dreams are tricky
affairs, the underlying wish might not be as obvious as the desire to end patriarchy.
The wish might be, as Nietzsche put it, for “the will to power” and the unspoken
pleasure that comes with resistance and opposition in the face of domination.
Indeed, I have to wonder if freedom has aligned itself with “power.” Consider
slogans such as “Sisterhood is powerful,” or the more contemporary and sexier
permutation to “Grrrrl Power,” which seems to suggest that ultimate power is not
in the collective but in the self and that women have the means to fight and resist
the forces of domination individually. So perhaps the dream of feminism has
been about the wish not to be vulnerable, to be an “Amazon in Training.” Indeed,
younger feminisms speak from the site of agency: “Girls Can Do Anything,”
we’re told. Social constraints and limitations are scoffed at with much girl pride in
slogans such as “I got kicked out of Girl Guides for eating a Brownie.”1
My concern with feminism’s prevailing relationship to freedom is that a freedom articulated in opposition to unfreedom or subjugation might not allow us to
consider what it would mean to imagine freedom beyond escape from oppression.
As Wendy Brown (1995) has argued by drawing on Nietzsche’s conceptualization
of ressentiment, this freedom has kept the political Left invested, ironically, in
wounded identities and in perpetual envy of power. Nietzsche (1887) describes
ressentiment as a reactionary expression to the “master morality,” by which he
means the morality of the ruling class, and as such renders individuals beholden
to it. Ressentiment is the revolt of the oppressed, but since it always occurs in
opposition to the ruling class, its values are generated from within its terms.
Brown insists that we scrutinize our values for the very reason that they resonate
with the values of the group to which we are opposed. She warns that feminist and
contemporary Left identity is deeply committed to a politic that has organized
itself in relation to opposition to domination and the right to power, and that this
relationship keeps us perversely entangled with the Right. For me, ressentiment
is an acting out of historic injuries. Unable to grieve for these injuries, it has
failed to recognize its political positions as affective responses to loss. In so doing,
feminism has compromised its ability to historicize its political responses and to
adapt its strategies to the changing world in which we live.
To do this, I draw on postcolonial theory to illuminate the limits of the politics
of resistance and on psychoanalytic theories of loss and melancholia to attend to
the psychic injuries of domination and oppression on political identities. While
Brown’s critique of feminism and Left politics alerts us to the cost of not grieving
political life and therefore not making new political attachments, it does not offer
us a way to think about the work of mourning loss and injury and how we might
“learn to love again” (Timothy Raynor qtd. in Brown et al. 2006: 32). What her
argument fails to recognize is that though political identities stuck on injury are
no longer tenable for the future of feminism and Left politics, the fact remains
that the wounds of identity are not easily healed. Indeed, by reflecting on the space
of human vulnerability in political identities and the ways in which we refuse it
or defend ourselves against it, this paper will map out an emotional topography
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This paper argues that prevailing feminisms are invested in a politic of ressentiment.
This is certainly true of second-wave feminisms, whose solution to powerlessness
was to secure more rights and entitlements for women; but it is also true of thirdwave feminists who have, for the most part, not been successful in transcending
ressentiment because of their investments in feminine power and empowerment.
By elaborating on Brown’s argument on the limits of contemporary political
freedom and by working with the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, popular
among young feminists, my objective here is to examine feminism’s resistance to
mourning the past and its failure to disentangle itself from power, which has kept
it in a psychic space of colonization. For me, Nietzsche’s ressentiment provides an
analytic from which we can burrow deeper into the emotional space of feminism’s
political positions. These positions, I argue, have become naturalized in the sense
that we have stopped asking ourselves what the value of opposition and resistance
is to political renewal and human freedom. I think it is incumbent upon us to
re-visit this political space, especially now, since a politic of ressentiment, which is
ultimately a politic of revenge, is unfit to address the cycles of wars in post-9/11
culture.
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of Nietzsche’s insights into the relations of power. In this way, I bring an affective
reading to conceptualizations of feminist politics of freedom, which leads to me to
consider how the politics of resistance share an affective similarity to that which
propels the cycles of war. I do this in the hope that feminism might not act out
anachronistically to new historical conditions and contexts. An affective lens for
the history of feminism may lead us to ask interesting questions about the future
of feminism with the intention that we can imagine new feminist responses to
political conflict and war.
The “State” of Feminist Politics
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While it is not customary to consider the state of politics in terms of psychic states,
Jacqueline Rose (1996) positions fantasy at the heart of political nation “states,”
while Wendy Brown (1995) articulates political identities as “injured states.” Both
feminist theorists ask us to consider the entrenched investments we have in our
politics. We are invited to think about the spaces we have created beyond our
articulated positions to reflect on what psychic tensions might have propelled
them. If we are to take their bid seriously, how might we think of the investments
and concerns imbedded in feminist conflicts? What losses has feminism faced
and how has feminism dealt with loss? Brown suggests that late modern subjects
have had to face the failures and limitations of the liberal promise of freedom
and protection, “humiliating them in their attachment” (1995: 52) and injuring
their identity. If this is true, might feminism be suffering from the same loss
but struggling, as Sharon Rosenberg (2004) argues, to remember and face the
loss adequately? What fantasies have we constructed to keep ourselves, in Patti
Lather’s terminology, from “getting lost” (Rosenberg 2004: 210). For Rosenberg,
getting lost is a way of “introducing hesitancy to knowledge” (210). It reminds
us that we have no mastery over knowledge and that knowledge is an intelligible
elaboration made from the dark corners of the past’s losses. In hesitancy, we might
then be spared from “being tied to [the past] as an origin that holds within its
grasp the present and future” (210).
In order to think through why the contemporary political Left has brought on
its own “weak, fragmented and disoriented” (Brown 2001: 461) state, Brown, in
her more recent work reads Walter Benjamin with Stuart Hall’s “The Hard Road
to Renewal” (1988) and argues that we have melancholically fossilized the past
by holding on to anachronistic political positions. This attachment is to a lost
political moment imagined through unified mobilization, solidarity and socialist
regimes. As this past continues to live as a lost feeling, much like the loss of a
love object from which we stubbornly refuse to recover, we have become loyal to
a relationship that has been rendered “thinglike and frozen” (Brown 2001: 460),
arresting us from moving forward and from making new political attachments.
In Refashioning Futures, David Scott (1999) makes a similar argument in his
critique of postcolonial studies. He argues that intellectual movements are often
committed to claims that were invoked by the concerns of a specific moment
in time but are no longer relevant nor reflective of new stakes. Also drawing
on Stuart Hall’s insight, Scott points out that sometimes we take our positions
too seriously, to the point where we forget about the questions that gave rise to
those positions in the first place. His project is not to dismiss the question, but
to actually return to it and to examine the contexts that propelled the questions
forward. Scott, however, does not address the challenges of moving forward.2
This is an important piece to consider because the responses we have made to
real contexts and traumatic events are fantasmatic elaborations for how we have
learned to survive difficult conditions. And since fantasies reside in psychic space
and time, they require some work to undo.
For Brown, we are not simply “stuck in the past,” we are wedged in the psychic
space of ressentiment. Karyn Ball points out that ressentiment has a threatening
genealogy which can be traced from the psychic remains that live on from an
unsettled past: “a kind of compost heap bearing the residues of those injustices
and failures that generate ressentiment and overdetermines its irruption in the
future” (Ball 2002: 241). Feminism, I think, has not processed its relationship
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What are the fantasies of feminism and what is the work of undoing them?
Young feminists often profess that their predecessors are “stuck in the past.” These
comments are often in reference to the ways in which modern/Marxist feminism
invokes woman as a stable category to the point that even when this fantasy
has been shaken by identity groups it has marginalized, as Rosenberg (2004)
points out, it has simply expanded its terms to include identity categories such
as race, class and sexual orientation. Of course, as many feminists on race have
identified, when feminism expands itself rather than trouble itself, it assimilates
rather than embraces difference. In her landmark article “Under Western Eyes”
Chandra Mohanty (1991) identifies this very problem when she argues that
Western feminism universalizes oppression but then produces raced women as
its exemplary victims. In Politics Out of History (2001), Brown provides, if you
will, the psychic topography of feminism’s re-description of itself as incorporating
race. In claims such as “a woman is being raped every six seconds in this country”
and “in the time that it takes you to read this paragraph, ten children will die of
hunger” (2003: 57), Brown argues that second-wave feminist politics re-enacts
figurations of injury to affirm its identity. She cites these claims not because
she undermines the significance of human injury on history but because these
fantasies actually defend us from our own injuries while they project and objectify
the Other as the “real” victim. Brown is asking us to check our psychic investments
in the subjects we defend. Her reading of Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten” is a
compelling argument for how what underlies our construction of the injured is
sado-masochistic; in brief, she makes a case for how we prefer to be spectators of
suffering rather than work through our own injured identities.
113
with the past. Over the years, it has reacted to social injury by attempting to
change the conditions that have produced it; but, as Brown points out, it has not
addressed the failures that have come with those efforts. As such, injury has overdetermined the history of feminism in the sense that it reacts to it as the thing
from which it must protect women. And though second-wave feminism has been
right to fight for such protections, it seems to me that this has happened at the
expense of not moving from the place of injury.
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114
Realized on the heels of anti-slavery, anti-colonial resistance and the civil
rights movements, feminism, much like these movements, staged our political
consciousness, our agency and our “power.” The rise of these movements, however,
also inaugurated, Brown writes, “initial figurations of freedom [which] are
inevitably reactionary in the sense of emerging in reaction to perceived injuries”
(1995: 7) and as such “[entailed] an atomistic ontology, a metaphysic of separation,
an ethos of defensiveness, and an abstract equality” (6), a dynamic that is akin
to what many postcolonial theorists have named as the Manichean allegory in
anti-colonial literature. In The Genealogy of Morality (1994), where Nietzsche
writes most extensively on ressentiment, he defends the necessity of the politics
of opposition, but not its ontological entrenchment. The trouble with ressentiment
is that it is an unconscious identity formation. It is the fantasmatic projection of
injury: an internalization of resentment through the reclamations of oppression
and inferiority from which we paradoxically gain power. Hence, ressentiment is not
only the state of opposition towards the perceived perpetrator, it is also a belief
that we are righteous because we suffer. It is indeed Christianity’s legacy to secular
moralism. Christianity’s influence, Nietzsche elaborates that ressentiment “is not
retribution, but ‘the triumph of justice’” (1994: 31). For Brown, ressentiment in
contemporary politics is “the moralizing revenge of the powerless” (1995: 67). The
psychic gain from this dynamic, explains Brown, is that “in its attempt to displace
its suffering, identity structured by ressentiment at the same time becomes invested
in its own subjection” (70). Invested, or “stuck,” in it own subjection, feminism
demands a politics of opposition and in so doing compromises freedom, even
when, in my view, narratives of empowerment and freedom are invoked.
In reaction to such formulations of feminism, postmodern feminism, and its
incarnation in third-wave feminism, has shied away from reifying patriarchal
injuries and is more interested in thinking about how women are powerful and
subversive. Young feminists are often visibly anti-establishment while celebrating
their identities; indeed, femininity is not regarded as inherently oppressive but
as a weapon for fighting sexism, which is performed with much sexual pleasure
and irony. Third wave feminism refuses stable collective identities and maintains
difference among women; paradoxically, its strategies, in Irene Karras’ view, are
more integrationist and imagine men as potential allies and not the enemy. She
also points out that it imagines social transformation through modelling and
representation by “sending the message to society that women are powerful” (2002:
par.15) and making interventions in popular culture and cultural production in
general.
Consider popular culture texts such as TV series Xena: The Warrior Princess and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Hollywood feature films such as Charlie’s Angels and
D.E.B.S. All these texts represent young women fighting against evil of various
kinds through their own individual powers: namely the power of their personal
identities which, it would seem, has much to do with their invincible bodies and
extraordinary sexual agency. Indeed, it would seem that the only way that girls
can reach beyond the dictates of their gender is by beating men at their own
game: outsmarting and outpowering men with lethal charm, wit and strength.
Among these texts, only Joss Whedon’s Buffy troubles the fantasy of power and
invincibility. For me, it troubles third-wave idealizations of empowerment and
does the work of beginning to address women’s suffering and oppression beyond
the narcissism of wounded attachments to injury and beyond the naive solution
of feminine power.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer revolutionized what is possible on TV. The extended form
of narrative of this seven-year long series (1997 to 2003) allowed fans to witness
a group of teenagers come of age, almost in real time.3 In Buffy, Whedon gave
us a glimpse at the subterranean and not-so-subterranean horror of high school
life. Here the cheerleaders are the monsters and the nerds have untapped powers.
Whedon subverted the Hollywood horror genre formula of “little blond girl gets
killed in a dark alley” by making the cute blond do the killing. The pleasure of
female power is certainly the premise of the production, but it is disrupted by
ambivalence. Buffy, the story goes, is the one “chosen” from among other girls in
her generation to be the vampire slayer, the most powerful girl in the work who
must save the world from evil. At first she takes on her calling begrudgingly, and
then dogmatically. Indeed, as hard as Buffy tries to become the superhero and
“take back the night” from the monsters, she fails because evil becomes harder and
harder to eliminate. After each rendezvous with evil over the seven seasons (town
mayor, powerful female God called Glory, emasculated techie boys), she bounces
back stronger, but it would seem more monstrous. As she slowly abandons trust in
her loyal friends (lovingly referred to as the Scooby Gang) and puts more faith in
her individual capacity to fight evil, her character becomes more unreflective.
Buffy, among many other things, is a critique of the problematic tenets of third
wave feminism, but not a rejection of it. Whedon is able to communicate our
affective longing for power—for what woman doesn’t want to walk in dark alleys
knowing she can slay predators—all the while undoing the dangerous fantasies
of individual triumph and suggesting that the real triumph has to do with facing
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The Challenges of Taking Back the Night
115
your inner monsters. For me, Buffy is less about girlhood struggles and more about
our inclinations as humans to externalize and project our inner monsters. If Buffy
is a hero, it is because she finally realizes that she must face and learn to live
with her monsters. In Buffy, Whedon makes this point perfectly clear in the final
season when the face of evil has graduated to “the First” embodied in a man
called Caleb, also known as “the preacher,” a character more misogynist and more
hideous than any permutation of evil so far represented in the show. The preacher’s
special ability is to immobilize people by tapping into their unconscious fears.
“From beneath you it devours,” was the First’s message to his victims. Gathering
up an army of potential slayers she has tutored, the mature Buffy plans war to
defend humanity from this evil. At this time Whedon has his heroine engaging
in George W. Bush-speak with lines that evoke Bush’s “you are either with us or
against us” rhetoric. As she sets her army on Caleb in battle, a few potential slayers
tragically lose their lives and Xander, her most loyal friend, loses his eye in one of
the most devastating scenes in Buffy.
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116
Buffy does in the end change her strategies to become the hero she was destined
to be, but I will get to that later. As a critique of the logic of “girl power,”
it historicizes its location in relation to former feminisms. Buffy’s mother,
Joyce, in Karras’s view, symbolically occupies that time of second-wave feminism
because “she came of age in the 1960s, participated in the civil and women’s rights
movements, worked full-time and divorced Buffy’s father” (Karras 2002: par. 8).
Before finally learning of Buffy’s special powers, Joyce pedantically misinterprets
Buffy’s troubles in school as lazy or misdirected. Manichean in her view of evil
and stubbornly out of touch with what was going on around her, Joyce struggles
with Buffy’s haughty independence. For Karras, this is not unlike how secondwave feminists accuse the third-wave of political apathy. Despite this dynamic
between mother and daughter, when Joyce dies, Buffy is completely broken by
this. Indeed, Joyce remains a spectre, both literally and figuratively, in Buffy’s life
after her death.
Spectres are the residues and fragments of the past that remain unassimilated and
therefore have an afterlife. In Deborah Britzman’s terms, they are “interferences,”
which have “a volatile and organizing dynamic” (1998: 1). The past haunts us
when we are not finished with it but do not know how or even that we are not
done with it. The forgetting constructs the meanings we do make and in this way
the narratives of the third-wave might express an attachment to the past, even as
they articulate a separation from it. It articulates itself in terms of a separation, all
the while acknowledging its indebtedness to earlier feminisms.
Joyce’s legacy to Buffy is her relationship to evil, metonymically her relationship
to injury and violence. Though occupying a different affective relationship to
monsters in that she has weakness for sexy vampires, Buffy continues to view
monsters as the perpetrators of violence and she as their victim. Stuck in a
“state of injury,” as Brown would have it, Buffy continues to see vampires and
monsters as her victimizers: as things that lurk in the night outside of herself
which she must defend against rather than something within herself. It is not
until the last episodes of the series that we see Buffy moving in the direction of
attending to her vulnerability and to her susceptibility to “evil” and loss, which is
to say her humanness. For much of the seven seasons, Buffy reflects her mother’s
Manichaeanism and spends much of the last days of the series desperately holding
on to, but also mourning, the fantasy of a clear line between good and evil. So
while it would seem that the third-wave has moved on from the past, it is still
haunted by it.
But this representation of women is naive, especially for feminist writers on
colonialism such as Ella Shohat (1991), who, in her critique of postcolonial studies,
argues that such renditions of resistance render violence a fait accompli. In her
view, the anti-essentialist thesis of ontological resistance to domination has gone
too far because it fails to regard seriously the impact of violence and the human
impulse for resistance by way of asserting and protecting community and identity.
While I agree with Shohat, her critique misses the fact that identities organized
around the idea of ontological resistance offer the same affective safety as those
organized around group identities. Indeed, for Scott (1999; 2004), who also writes
against the anti-essentialist logic, resistance itself has become dogmatic. Given the
colonial context, the anti-essentialist viewpoint on identities was the historically
necessary response to naturalized and violently racist representations of colonized
people. These strategies restored power and agency to the colonized and rendered
resistance to colonial representation and power a central feature of postcolonial
studies. While he believes that the emphasis on resistance is a necessary defence
against the violence of dominant representations, he challenges the prevalence of the
present day message of agency, which has become: “something like an epistemological
law that cultures are not pure and homogeneous ... that the boundaries of communities
are not given but constructed; and so on” (Scott 1999: 9).
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How then are we to understand this ambivalence? And what in theoretical terms
might be feminism’s legacy to third-wave feminism? Since the third-wave seems
to be conceived in relation to the second-wave, the second-wave’s legacy might
be found in how the third-wave produces itself in opposition to the second-wave,
another ressentiment. Influenced by postmodern thought and its anti-essentialist
position, third-wave feminism marks its difference by hailing women as subjects
with agency. While, as I have suggested, it refuses to view women as victims, it
does not step out of the dualistic paradigm of victimization. It reacts to modern
feminism’s devotion to women’s powerlessness by invoking women’s resistance
and freedom from patriarchal representations, suggesting that women cannot be
subsumed by the discourses that colonize them.
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118
Is it possible to think of freedom and resistance outside the “epistemological laws”
of the past? How might we think about human struggles with power and violence
without retreating to solutions that suggest freedom from domination comes with
surmounting it? Must the problem of power be solved from the site of strength
and power? In Audre Lorde’s (1984) famous words, are we deploying the “master’s
tools to dismantle the master’s house?” On the question of how to dismantle
power, I think divergent feminisms, much like the relationship between Marxist
anti-colonial and postcolonial politics, are in agreement. Power is imagined as
something that must be overcome. This is the Left’s logic and its raison d’être.
Indeed, feminism’s evolution from the emphasis on Marxist elaborations of
fighting power to the postmodern critique of power places the fight against
power at the centre of its stakes. So while second- and third-wave feminisms
suggest different articulations of power, with the former emphasizing solidarity
against the persistence of economic and structural inequity and disempowerment
and the latter celebrating women’s resistance and productive power, neither
framework moves us past the premise that the solution to powerlessness is
power. Indeed, when women’s freedom from power is articulated through the
framework of opposition—be it critical opposition, which promises an experience
of empowerment, or opposition to power structures for making institutional
change, earning more rights etc., which promises a state of empowerment—what
remains intact is the power that injury has over the self. Such a state is melancholic
because in holding on to the possibility of freedom from power structures, it must
reproduce the very injury or loss from which it wants freedom.
On Being Touched By Loss
Concerned with how the Left has only encouraged political responses to injustice
and sanctioned individuals with the “right” to make legislative grievances against
injury, Anne Anlin Cheng, in the The Melancholy of Race (2001) writes: “How
does a person go from being a subject of grief to being a subject of grievance?
What political and psychical gains or losses transpire in the process?” (3). Cheng’s
question foregrounds the complex tension between psychic life and politics by
making a fresh distinction between grief, the melancholic response from suffering
injury such as discrimination, exclusion and dehumanization, and grievance, the
act of speaking out against injury. Cheng, who specifically takes up the politics
of race in the United States, is concerned with the gains that have been achieved
from the struggle “to translate racial grief into social claims” (3).
While neither I nor, I think, Cheng want to undermine the achievements of the
last few decades, these successes have had a psychic and social cost. Providing
us with instruments and avenues for redressing social discrimination, grievance
and resistance have unfortunately covered over grief with solutions that have
been focused on punishing and censoring the perpetrators or making material
reparations for injury. The rise of such solutions, in the case of racial politics,
Cheng explains, was born, ironically, by recognizing racial grief. This recognition
was, however, conceived by quantifying grief and by “the translation of so-called
scientific data into social meaning” (4). As these strategies naturalized injury in the
identities of racialized subjects and were conveniently deployed for racist agendas,
more contemporary solutions have instead made reclamations such as black beauty
and black power without addressing racial grief. For Cheng, both solutions are
disturbing because the connection between subjectivity and social damage needs,
as she says, “to be formulated in terms more complicated than either resigning
people to the irrevocability of ‘self-hatred’ or denying racism’s profound, lasting
effects” (7). Cheng’s formulation maps onto my critique of feminism in the sense
that feminism similarly either resigns itself to the irrevocability of patriarchy or
denies the profound lasting effects of misogyny. An example of this can be found
in idealizations of girl power, which, at least when it occurs in the mainstream,
seem to foreclose the existence of the traumatic residues of history.
Despite the reception Butler describes, many critics have challenged the
consequences of globalization and imperialism on the non-Western world and
the renewed authoritarianism post 9/ll (Baudrillard 2002; Giroux 2005; Mirzeoff
2005; Puar 2007; Žižek 2002). Many of these accounts are important and
compelling studies of post-9/11 culture that speak out against U.S. politics and
serve to undo the discourses of hate that U.S. media spread. But because they do
not account for the trauma or the injury that fuel the new regimes of power, they
do not help us to think about what conditions are necessary for mourning injury.
Of course there is no easy method for how this might happen on a mass scale, but
we might begin by thinking about the ways in which we are all vulnerable to one
another. September 11 invoked that vulnerability. It rendered America injured and
TOPIA 20
Divided along these lines, feminism has not taught us how to mourn injury and thus
has not moved us beyond the psychic space of ressentiment. The implication of this
is worth considering, especially in the wake of 9/11 and Bush’s reactionary war on
Iraq which was fortified on a politic of injury, security and moral righteousness—
in essence, a politic of ressentiment. I would like us to consider what we can learn
from resisting our compulsion to act out melancholically from injury and from
being prepared, instead, to be touched by injury. Brown’s critique of Left politics
alerts us to the cost of not grieving political life, but it does not offer us a way to
think about the work of mourning loss. The traumatic political events in recent
history have rendered the cost of not grieving that much more critical. Unable
to invoke its familiar strategies, the Left’s opposition to the discourses of terror
resulting from 9/11 is more subdued. Indeed, we are living in a cultural context
that has made speaking out against U.S. foreign policy very difficult because, as
Judith Butler points out in Precarious Lives, hearing what critics have to say about
the terrorist attacks is precluded by the experience of the event which produces all
insights “as explanation or as exoneration” (2004a: 4).
119
enraged at being wounded and wide open before the world. Though U.S. foreign
policies are motivated by oil and economic power, its solutions to loss are in the order
of refused grief, as Cheng would put it, and empowerment of a more psychic nature.
Indeed, for Cheng, it is not only racial subjects and women that live in melancholy,
but also white America. This is so because the history of racial exclusion is a loss
which the U.S. as a nation state has not mourned. Indeed, hatred, Cheng argues
is a melancholic response. Rejected but not quite abandoned, racialized others are
incorporated in the American identity as lost objects.4 When loss is melancholically
incorporated into the psyche but not mourned, mastery, hatred and, in this case,
racism, disguise and defend the melancholic from the actual loss.
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The spheres of human affect have not typically entered the spaces of Left politics
and activism. But if ordinary affects, as Kathleen Stewart writes, are not only
about the stuff of intimate lives but of “public feelings that begin and end in
broad circulation” (2007: 2)—and if, as I have argued, human injury underpins
our political identities—then our responses to political events must consider
the force of emotional reality on all human relations. September 11 has made
this abundantly clear by demonstrating the implications of a nation not coming
to terms with the vulnerability resulting from a traumatic event. But, unable to
address or recognize the touch of this wound, the U.S. state has instead sealed it
with even more heightened strategies for mastery: mastery over national security
and mastery over the nations that “harbour” terrorists. If nations do have psychic
“states of fantasy” as Rose (1996) argues, then 9/11 tore through the fantasy of
magnanimity and safety, only to be displaced by the fantasy of persecution and
injury. Though the War on Terror, as we know, is an act of revenge and hatred
against the terrorists and Islam, in bona fide ressentiment fashion, the American
nation state’s rhetoric of justice and democracy covers over, albeit thinly, its
hostility and violent aggression toward Islamic people.
For Karen Engle, the work of mourning an event like 9/11 begins with “a refusal
to engage in the quest for mastery and power which has preoccupied the West
for as long as it has existed” (2007: 63). While I agree with Engle, power is
not easily relinquished because it offers security, or a perceived security, from
harm and further loss. Exploring what it might mean to be transformed by loss
(rather than act out from loss), Butler, as others have done (cf. Cavarero 2000;
Cheng 2001; Kristeva 2000), invites us to consider the ontological significance
of loss on human subjectivity as a way to begin to imagine the work of political
mourning. Notwithstanding our fantasies of individual autonomy, the human is
fundamentally relational. The self, which is inaugurated by a primary attachment
to the other and to the threat of being cut off, instates the necessity of having to
learn how to live with the vulnerability that inhabits all relations. Since working
through loss is lifelong, we are never finished with it. Indeed, Butler argues, we are
constantly being “undone by each other” because “our relations with others hold
us” (2004a: 23). Loss and vulnerability toward the primary other, and then toward
the social, constitute our selfhoods. She writes: “we are constituted politically in
part by virtue of the social vulnerability; we are constituted as fields of desire
and physical vulnerability, at once publicly assertive and vulnerable” (2004b: 18).
Riddled with the threat of loss and injury, “[l]oss has made a tenuous ‘we’ of us
all” (Butler 2004a: 20).
In Search of a New Feminist Response to War
In view of the value of paying attention to how we are touched by loss, I would
like to consider an alternate feminist response to war. If loss has made a tenuous
“we” of us all, what is our ethical relation to that vulnerability? How might we
attend to this vulnerability as we reinvent our political positionalities?
Of course, Chesler does not represent all feminists of her generation. Her book
demonstrates the problem with feminism’s inability to let go of its anachronistic
ties to political ideals of oppression and freedom. Pushed to the extreme, such a
model can lose the spirit of its origins of justice; in Chesler’s case, it has permitted
her to produce women as helpless victims of Muslim men, heedless of the harmful
legacies of colonialism and neocolonialism on the region. Her caricature of
postmodern feminism is self-serving; nonetheless, I do agree, as I have argued,
that prevailing young feminisms foreclose injury and loss. Indeed, the rhetoric
TOPIA 20
Typically, when speaking of war, feminists talk about the impact of war on women:
how they become the transmitters of nation in political conflict, how they become
symbols of loss of homeland, and how their bodies become sites of battle and
conquest when they are assaulted and raped.5 While it is unquestionable that
women are injured and exploited by war, feminisms that only see their role as
freeing women from war might become, especially now, complicit in perpetuating
war. Consider the war in Afghanistan. The U.S. and Canada frame their role as
liberating women from the Taliban and have deployed this rationale to defend the
war. Indeed, second-wave feminist Phyllis Chesler explicitly defends this war as a
means of saving feminism. She argues that the turn to postmodern idealizations of
gender has brought on The Death of Feminism, the title of her recent book (2006).
Chesler’s main point is that feminism has abandoned women. Its most dramatic
manifestation is in feminist disregard of the plight of Muslim women under
“Islamist barbarism” (9). University feminists, in her view, are far away from how
feminism was originally imagined in the 60s and 70s. Allegiance to the academic
anti-colonial Left in the 21st century has rendered feminists guilty of “politically
correct passivity” (3) and provoked naive criticism of George W. Bush’s post-9/11
politics. Also, with its focus on subjectivity, the body and sexuality, elaborated
in “the feminist-created cult of the vagina” (4), Western feminists are ironically
indifferent to women on the other side of the world “being horribly disfigured
by acid attacks and by facial and bodily mutilation, including genital mutilation”
(5)—what she calls a gender apartheid in the Muslim world.
121
of empowerment cannot address tragedy and devastated lives because it is more
concerned with representing women as resistant.
How might we then imagine a feminism that neither negates loss and injury, nor
react to it in ressentiment? I would like to return briefly to Buffy. In my view, it
teaches us how we might address loss (gendered and political) outside the familiar
solutions of both second- and third-wave feminisms. It does not model answers
for devastated lives, but offers an alternate politic. Refusing both the politic of
saving people from power and the logic of empowerment, it offers a new response
to loss—the relinquishing of power—as the site from which change can happen.
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122
When Whedon wrote the last season of Buffy, Bush had declared war on Iraq.
His response to this was a plea to put an end to the cycle of revenge. After seven
years of being the “chosen one,” Buffy finally dethrones herself and gives up her
unmitigated slayer power and to share it among the other potential slayers. She
opens herself up to feeling powerless and risks danger and injury. The battle against
evil, at that point, shifts from a place of self-defence and might against the Other
to a place of personal vulnerability in the face of the Other. It is also at this time
that Buffy is able to tell Spike, a deadly vampire turned good, that she loves him.
This came after repeated sexually electric encounters with him that had previously
rendered her feeling ugly and monstrous, especially after Spike attempted to
rape her. Unable to view him as anything but a monster, Buffy saw herself as his
victim and from this subject position, she felt justified in her cruelty to him. But
it is not cruelty that turns Spike around from being a monster, but love. Indeed,
Spike chooses to get his soul back, which in the “Buffyverse” means reinstating
human feelings of pain, loss and remorse. His decision to live as a human means
relinquishing the fantasy that he could win her love by convincing (or terrorizing)
her into believing that she is “really” in love with him; being human for Spike
ultimately meant making the choice to change himself. For me, this is the work of
mourning: giving up our defences implies we can learn how to live with loss.
Over the years we have seen a great deal of change made through battles. So
perhaps it is now time to abandon ourselves to loss and mourn what in the past
may have felt too dangerous. For Butler, mourning means that we are ready to
allow ourselves, not to change, but to be changed by loss. Mourning, she writes,
has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one
should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one
cannot know in advance. There is losing, as we know, but there is also
the transformative effect of loss, and this latter cannot be charted or
planned. One can try to choose it, but it may be that this experience of
transformation deconstitutes choice at some level. (Butler 2004a: 21)
While it may seem that I am suggesting that social change is not as important as
being changed, my concern is that if we do not open ourselves up to being changed,
we may not achieve meaningful social change. In the case of world politics, I think
we can no longer afford to imagine social change without considering how we
must attend to the interior spaces of our political identities, and those of our
nation-states. Indeed, for Buffy, the power she gave up in her love life and the
power she gave up “politically” were relinquished simultaneously. In that final
episode, she along with her team of friends and potential slayers, did end up
saving the world, though there were some losses. The ending is suggestive of the
hope that can come with re-imagining the fight under new terms. This is a politic
that looks inward to change our “selves” rather than outward to save the Other.
From that changed place, our relations to the Other might also change because
we will have become more in touch with loss.
In a critique of traditional humanism, but also in recognition that anti-humanism is not getting us very far in making sense of the collective traumas we
have experienced, several significant contemporary postcolonial theorists are
suggesting a new humanism and a new commonality for challenging the cycle of
hatred. For Paul Gilroy, this is simply a “humanism capable of comprehending the
universality of our elemental vulnerability to the wrongs we visit upon each other”
(Gilroy 2005: 4). The universality that Gilroy foregrounds is not concerned with
understanding “universal common experience” but with “centering subjectivity
on suffering rather than sovereignty or autonomy” (74). “Transgressively licensed
by a critique of racial hierarchy and the infrahuman life [traditional humanism]
creates” (xv), Gilroy’s humanism is the work of renewing and re-exposing the
very brutality of the civilizing mission for the suffering in which it was complicit.
Similarly, Edward Said’s last book, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004),
invokes self-knowledge as the humanist ideal made from historicizing our
encounters with the other in self-criticism. What these thinkers are beckoning
us to do is reimagine the human across difference and history. For feminism,
this also might mean that we historicize the gendered wrongs we have visited
upon each other and examine what new questions we need to ask. Indeed, if we
shift our stakes from power and rights, and turn our thoughts on the grief of
TOPIA 20
Feminism has the potential to make important interventions at this level because
all of us who have an attachment to feminism have lost, be it to AIDS, to racism,
to transphobia, to sexual violence. On this point, Butler makes an important
distinction between “insisting on a ‘common’ corporal vulnerability” (2004a: 43)
and “producing a homogenous conception of who they [third world women] are
and what they want” (2004a: 47). In other words, rather than turning injury into
an ontological grid, as Chesler seems to do, where women stand as the oppressed
and the men the oppressors, and where Muslim women are her exemplary victims
and Muslim men her exemplary victimizers, might we not just think of our
commonality simply in terms of the universality of loss and suffering? While we
humans seem to find consolation in the commonalities of the “ways” we suffer and
the “hows” of repairing it, loss and its affects are heterogeneous singularities.
123
gender, we might want to think about the injuries of masculinity. Attention to the
constituent losses of masculinity might help us address the wrongs of masculinity.
But that is the work of another paper.
While it would seem that I have argued against a politic of opposition, my concern
is only to be wary of turning opposition into a kind of law without reflecting on
why it has come to mean so much. Resistance, which prevails as the only way
to struggle against domination and power, has lingered in our political cultural
memory. Third-wave and postmodern feminism, I have argued, also speaks from
the logic of oppositional politics because its invocation of empowerment and
resistance is a reaction to modernist idealizations of gaining power. In this sense,
it cannot abandon or forget the past; but simultaneously, even though it re-enacts
the past, it cannot remember how it became invested in it in the first place. Indeed,
its discourses of empowerment may be an attempt to recuperate loss and refuse
the melancholia of second-wave feminism.
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124
Theoretical and political frameworks elaborate our concerns, but they generally
do not articulate our historically located psychic attachments to them or our
anxieties when those attachments are troubled. It is these anxieties that I have
attempted to make transparent in this paper. So, while Scott asks us to move
forward by historicizing our political strategies and look beyond, in Brown’s terms,
our melancholic attachments to the past, I think it is difficult to do so without
considering the emotional realities that are embedded in these attachments.
Ressentiment is, as Brown puts it, the “the wounded character of politicized
identity’s desire” (1995: 55) or the emotional response to being injured. It is, I
think, anti-colonialism’s legacy on the political Left and on feminism, by which I
think feminism has been deeply influenced. If we’re stuck in the past, it is because
we’re stuck in the emotional investments we have made through ressentiment. That
we come to identify with any movement’s solutions—the freedom it promises and
so on—might be what is at stake for our survival because it provides the answers
for the losses and injuries we have suffered. We have, in other words, turned
what is or feels like a psychic necessity into a “habit of the mind.” The problem
with this particular habit of mind is that it has not taken us farther along in our
understanding of how individuals do not simply respond to domination as victims
or in opposition to victimization but as humans who are vulnerable to each other’s
wrongs and have the difficult task of working through and mourning conflict.
For me, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a cultural text that speaks profoundly to the
concerns I’ve raised in this paper. For those of us cynical about feminism, it
provides the conditions to “learn to love again.” Seemingly an unlikely site in
which to find the seeds of change, Buffy takes feminism to a challenging place
by troubling its entrenched psychic and socio-cultural strategies of surviving the
traumas of growing up, the horrors of education, political tyrants, militarism,
xenophobia, moral conservativism, homophobia and the brutal misogyny that
informs all these things. It refuses power as the solution to power, all the while
recognizing its seduction as emotional consolation; ultimately it demonstrates its
indefensibility for a humane world.
Buffy’s message is simple but difficult: killing monsters won’t make them go away.
They have to be mourned. We have to face them, reflect on their historic origin,
and therefore power, and then take them down. Buffy also insists on our right to
be human: the freedom to fumble, to fall and to break down, which is the freedom
to change and to be something other than what we’ve been.
Notes
1. Some of these slogans were found in a collection compiled by Michael Flood on the
following website: “Slogans for banners, graffiti etc.,” XY. January 2002. http://www
.xyonline.net/ slogansandgraffiti.shtml.
3. Buffy’s success spawned other products such as games, novels and comics. Whedon
also created Angel, a spin-off of Buffy, which ran alongside it. Buffy is a universe with a
significant fandom and its own “Buffyverse.” It has captured the imagination of academic
study which led to the publication of several books, hundreds of articles and an online
journal (The Online Academic Journal of Buffy Studies).
4. Fundamentally, Cheng suggests that racialized subjects are melancholic objects of loss
necessary for the American nation. Rejected but not quite abandoned, racial Others are
incorporated in American identity as lost objects. Cheng suggests that the national ideal
is achieved by the double movement of excluding and retaining the “foreigner.” What
this means, in Cheng’s words, is that “the racial other is in fact “assimilated” into—or,
more accurately, most uneasily digested by—American nationality” (10, emphasis added).
For Cheng, melancholic incorporation is like eating. Expanding on Freud’s observation that the method of incorporation of the melancholic involves a cannibalistic stage
whereby the ego devours the lost object, Cheng suggests that feeding on the racial other
reproduces the American psyche melancholically, not because it has lost something but
because it feeds on and introjects that which it reviles.
5. Since 9/11, many feminists have made significant critiques of the war. It is not the
scope of this short paper to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of feminist responses
to 9/11, suffice to say that the responses of academics and commentators such as Sunera
Thobani, Nahla Abdo and Cynthia Enloe are important perspectives that deconstruct
the narratives of 9/11 in thoughtful critiques of westernization, of masculinist militarization of colonialism, of the plight of women and of the co-optation of feminist discourse
for the purpose of advancing the war on terror. Such feminist critiques are found in the
following collections: Hunt and Rygiel (2006) and Hawthorne and Winter (2003).
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2. David Scott’s more recent book, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial
Enlightenment (2004), suggests tragedy, the literary device of Greek mythology, as a new
narrative lens to rewrite postcolonial history. While I think that tragedy is a valuable narrative lens, his strategy is a conceptual challenge to postcolonial study that falls short of
thinking through the human aspects of living with devastation and loss.
125
References
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NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 2001. Politics Out of History. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
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———. 2004b. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.
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Grief. New York: Oxford Press.
Chesler, Phyllis. 2006. The Death of Feminism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Feminist Perspectives. Vancouver: Raincoast Books.
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TOPIA 20 129
Roddey Reid
Bullying in U.S. Public Culture:
Or, Gothic Terror in the Full Light of Day
abstract
This article expands the conventional analysis of bullying and intimidation in U.S.
daily life beyond family, household and school dynamics to the workplace, the
media, and the world of politics. Although a universal problem, bullying enjoys
a virulence and prevalence in contemporary U.S. culture virtually unmatched
anywhere else in terms of its reach, depth, and legitimacy. Unlike in many
European nations and Canada it is not illegal, and although a subject of endless
commentary in the U.S. press it is little studied and consequently little understood
as a politics of abject subjecthood consisting in the practice of humiliating others,
primarily in terms of stigmatizing gender and sexual stereotypes. What
is singular in the current reign of the bully is that the multiple contexts
of the return of violent sovereignty in daily life and politics, neoliberal
economic policies, and the War on Terror can convert the temporary experience
of unwanted acts of aggression into a one of a permanent sense of weakness,
self-loathing, and a perpetual fear of potential psychological or physical assaults
resulting in political paralysis.
The world into which one was precipitated was terrible, yes, but also indecipherable:
it did not conform to any model; the enemy was all around but also inside, the “we”
lost its limits, the contenders were not two, one could not discern a single frontier but
rather many confused, perhaps innumerable frontiers, which separated each of us.
Primo Levi, “The Gray Zone” (1988: 38)
¤
We think we know who they are: they cut you off on the highway, they taunt
you to your face, mock you behind your back and smirk at you from the TV
screen, standing always beyond reach. They are everywhere and anywhere, from
the schoolyard to the boardroom, the office cubical to your local bar. They come
unbidden visiting violence upon the unsuspecting and the fearful alike. Even at
home you can’t get away from the pervasive climate of intimidation and disrespect:
you turn on the TV and there they are shouting down any guest who dares to break
with the media’s conservative consensus. Requiring little or no provocation, they
are poised to strike at the first sign of weakness—or courage. For they tolerate no
one, no one but their own kind—belligerent bullies ready to declare who is fit to
speak, to listen, and to submit.
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130
Few are called but even fewer are chosen to join the violent circle of sovereign
subjects. That can be figured out only in the assault, the shout, the smear. Even
so, the game of intimidation never seems to stop and nothing is ever guaranteed:
from one day to the next, those within may fall out, and those without may work
themselves within as circumstance and events warrant.
However, the inevitable question constantly arises: When did this all start?
They Meant It
We Americans should have seen it coming. It’s not like there wasn’t ample
warning. But few of us wanted to believe them—that they meant what they
said. So much macho bluster. Strutting around, talking tough. But following
close behind came the actions: fire-bombings of abortion clinics, serial capital
executions, gay bashings—not to mention “three-strikes” laws and mandatory
sentencing that send citizens off to long prison terms for petty drug offenses,
tripling the U.S. prison population within twenty years. Next to come in for
brutal treatment were the schools and workplaces: from the presence of police
in hallways and zero-tolerance drug tests to factory closings and the downsizing
of middle-management, to the cutting and privatization of public services and
government programs. Even the Post Office became a “profit centre of excellence”
meant to compete with private sector enterprises; it also became a centre of
workplace violence and shootings (Neuman and Baron 1998; Wacquant 1999;
Windle and Bader 2001).
Our wilful disbelief persisted during the impeachment of Bill Clinton, which
was followed the next year by the stolen presidential elections of 2000: political
thuggery in full view of TV cameras. As the Florida vote recount proceeded and
reports of physical assaults of poll workers by Republican operatives came in,
the air became thick with the threat of political violence. Al Gore and old guard
Democrats hesitated and relented as if haunted and paralyzed by the unspoken
traumatic memory of multiple political assassinations in the 1960s—from civil
rights workers in the South and John F. and Robert Kennedy to Martin Luther
King, Malcolm X and gay rights politician Harvey Milk. Gothic terror in the full
light of day. When the Supreme Court put a stop to the recount, Democratic
politicians woke up to find themselves ejected from the political arena by a coup
d’état and did not muster the courage to say so to the nation (Kellner 2001).
The Event, or Strange Intimacy
The violence, the intimidation, you think you’re ready—perhaps you’ve experienced
it before—still, when it happens, especially to you, your person, your body, the
body politic, then its sheer power, speed and intensity bypass whatever defences
you have. From the edges of consciousness, the bullies rush up attacking and
screaming in your face, “You’re nothing but...” scum, a bitch, a faggot, a liberal, a
feminist, a Muslim, an immigrant, a veteran, a Democrat, a traitor, an anti-Semite,
a Naderite, a loser. Bewildered, we’re thrown off-balance; we can’t believe it is
happening, be it again or for the first time, it seems to make no difference. The
hormonal response wells up: fight or flight—but it’s already too late; something
has slipped under our skin, wormed its way to the core of our being and taken
over. Disoriented and at a loss for words, we have the creeping realization that we
can never retrieve again whatever we were before. We are beyond our own reach.
Something else is there—intimately there—and we sense it is now forever also
who we are. A power, and a weakness, that we can’t control. From now on we lead
a compromised existence.
The unthinkable has happened, and we feel betrayed by both the bullies and
ourselves: “How did they dare?” “How did I let it happen?” and there begins the
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Meanwhile, Washington, DC, political insiders—what the French call la classe
politique—told everyone to go back to work and get on with their lives. But of
course what had happened was that the “CEO President”-elect and his party had
just fired the U.S. electorate as so many redundant employees whose functions
were now reassigned once-and-for-all to the business sector, its media outlets and
the well-funded political action committees. Within a few years, the U.N. and its
fact-based reality inspection teams would receive their pink slips as well, as the
U.S. staged its shock-and-awe invasion of Iraq to cow the Iraqis and recalcitrant
allies into submission. There was no stopping them then and—so we are led to
believe—there is no stopping them now.1
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search for answers and the cycle of grievance and redress addressed at once to
the aggressor and to ourselves, but to no end and to no use. We are prisoners of
that new, injured, transformed self and of the agents of that transformation upon
whom we are forever dependent; they have declared with violence, “This is who
you are, nothing more, nothing less,” and we want to and have to say “no” back to
them and no one else. Now, however, we need those bullies, for the conversation
so brutally commenced can no longer stop, at least until the question, “How did
this happen to us?” is answered. And there is the haunting fear—and fascinated
horror—that the bullies were right: that they saw something in us which we had
disavowed; or at least they saw the potential—the target of their vehemence. They
have made us what they say we are: a lesser being. We have become Other at the
end of a gun. From now on “every possibility is a fact” (Taussig 1989: 20). Captive
of our potential weakness and their potential violence we have entered into the
infinite, fearful regress and fact of future threat.2
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Knowing that from now on they have you, you belong to them, they now whisper
the parent’s or the lover’s threat, “Without me you’re nothing.”They have made you
and they can unmake you. With or without them, we are indeed nothing. Present
or absent they possess us. If there wasn’t a relationship before, there is one now,
unbreakable even as it breaks us. Thanks to bullying we end up resigning ourselves
to a life divided between what we are—or rather, what we have become—and
a former sovereign self that the bullies have persuaded us we’ve lost. Thus, the
enemy is now within us; as a result we find ourselves in Primo Levi’s gray zone
of endless regression and violence. And, like a vampire’s newly bitten victims,
ravenous for fresh blood and anxious to recover our former (fantasized) selves, we
begin our new careers—bullying others. Or in the case of the extreme distress of
isolated young U.S. males, taking a gun and shooting down teachers and students
in classrooms and hallways before dispatching their abject selves to oblivion
(Goldstein 1999; Herbert 2007; Human Rights Watch 2001a; 2001b).
During the last fifteen years there has emerged in the U.S. an identity politics
of degraded subjecthood in which fear of deviating from gender and sexual
norms has become the very “ground of all existence” in individual and collective
life, a veritable “way of life” (Massumi 2005: 41; 44-47) to the point that it now
dominates the way the U.S. media frame politicians and their policies (see below).
The contemporary culture of bullying in the U.S. exceeds traditional practices of
aggression. For what is singular in the current reign of the bully is that people’s
contemporary diminished ability to respond to episodes of intimidation in the
context of the return of violent sovereignty to daily life and politics, can convert
the experience of unwanted acts of aggression into one of a permanent sense of
abject subjecthood coded as feminine, and a downward spiral of fear of future
episodes of bullying that in other contexts and times would have been countered
and even dispelled by successful acts of defiance and resistance.3
Beyond the Schoolyard
Perhaps it is time to ask collectively the same question we ask ourselves when we
are bullied: “How did this happen?” and “Why us?” In an age dominated by the
gospel of the free market, let us turn to the private sector for answers.8
The year was 1980. It was the end of the Carter Administration and for some time
the U.S. had been convulsed by a wave of hyperinflation, which prompted the
Federal Reserve to increase brutally the lending rate to 21.5 per cent. U.S. banks
began to offer well-to-do clients certificates of deposit (minimum: $10,000) that
exceeded the inflation rate of 14 per cent. Finance capital got a taste of something
new: unheard of returns on fixed income investments. As cash poured in from
overseas, the dollar rocketed to new highs against foreign currencies in the years
that followed. Powerful shareholders (mutual funds) and Wall Street, desperate
to maintain stock prices, put pressure on companies to equal the performance.
The 20 per cent return was born and with it the go-go 1980s of junk bonds,
corporate raiders, leveraged-buy-outs and merger mania (Bing 1992: 59-70), as
well as the selling off of newly acquired companies’ profitable divisions, factory
closings, massive layoffs of workers and the downsizing of middle management to
pay off leveraged debt in a climate of relentless international competition driven
by a strong dollar and by Japanese steel and automobile industries. With all this
came short-term management and a new creature: the bullying boss.
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Bullying is hardly new and scarcely restricted to the United States. Most accounts
place its origins in family household dynamics and in the rough and tumble play
of the schoolyard. It goes into remission only to return with a vengeance in the
workplace, where as adults we spend the majority of our waking hours (Smith et
al. 2003). Of universal origin, it goes by many names: ijime in Japan, mobbing in
Scandinavia, bullying in the U.K. and Commonwealth countries, psychological
intimidation and harassment in French and Spanish-speaking countries (le
harcèlement moral; el acoso moral), psychological terror (psychoterror) in Germany
and harassment, emotional abuse and bullying in the U.S.4 Yet, there’s a virulence
and prevalence of bullying in the U.S. virtually unmatched anywhere else in terms
of its reach, depth and legitimacy.5 Foreign observers note this and commonly
refer to it as the American culture of bullying. Telltale symptoms: in the U.S.
it is not illegal6 and it is little studied.7 Still, the practice of verbal and physical
intimidation is a common topic in public and private discussions; indeed, it is
frequently in the news (Barry 2008; Carey 2004; Parker-Pope 2008). With the
exception of educational institutions, however, little or nothing is being done to
stop it; even as bullying is decried in the political world and the workplace, an
undercurrent of awe toward the bully persists. Meanwhile, observers note that
new communications technologies—email, anonymous listservs and blogs—have
multiplied the opportunities for verbal bullying and have become the means of
choice for intimidating others (Baruch 2004; Tedeschi 2008).
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This latest avatar in CEO personae was announced with great fanfare on April
21, 1980, in Fortune Magazine’s cover story, “America’s Toughest Bosses.” Halfcritical, half-admiring, the article started a tradition of surveys repeated in the
1980s and 1990s in Fortune’s pages every four or five years. They chronicled the
ascendancy of this new American corporate figure that radicalized the older
militarized corporate management model of autocratic command-and-control
inherited from the Second World War (Wajcman 1996: 345). The older model was
embodied by the cool, rational Cold War bureaucratic style of Robert McNamara,
CEO of Ford Motor Co. and Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy
and Johnson. During the self-doubting 1970s, it was briefly discredited in the
business world by Theory Y Management techniques and sensitivity training,
and no sooner were they gone than the older model returned in the form of
the aloof yet mercurial CEO, manipulative, abusive, arbitrary and vindictive. The
original Fortune article quoted one chief executive’s management philosophy
thus: “Leadership is demonstrated when the ability to inflict pain is confirmed”
(Menzies 1980: 63). A later survey would characterize these men as “outstanding
taskmasters” who were “demanding and hard to please” and with a “penchant
for psychological oppression” in whose presences an atmosphere of fear abounds
(Nulty and Nickel 1989).
The Bullying Boss
By the early 1990s the U.S. business press had christened this new figure the
“bullying boss” and followed with admiring nicknames such as “Chainsaw” (Byrne
1999; Nulty and Nickel 1989). Employees and executive staff added a few of their
own: “loose canon,” “old blood and guts,” “Rambo in pinstripes,” “Jack the Ripper”
and “Prince of Darkness” (Nulty and Nickel 1989). Perhaps the most colourful
epithet for this male personality type was BSD or “Big Swinging Dick,” which,
when mouthed ironically by female workers, possessed an unexpected double
edge. Many of the earliest names that surfaced are still with us: Donald Rumsfeld
(CEO of G. D. Searle Pharmaceuticals), Steve Jobs (NEXT Computing), Andrew
Grove (Intel) and Harvey and Robert Weinstein (Miramax Films). As the U.S.
business columnist and gadfly Stanley Bing wrote in the early 1990s:
So it is today, where bullying behavior is encouraged and rewarded in a
range of business enterprises. The style itself is applauded in boardrooms
and in house organs like Business Week as “tough,” “no nonsense,” “hard as
nails.” When you see these code words, you know you’re dealing with the
bully boss ... thanks to the admiration in which bully management is held
in the American business establishment, the fledgling who studies under
the heads of the successful bully masters the techniques and becomes one,
too. (1992: 103)
In the U.S. the public theater of firing employees quickly became a well-rehearsed
one in offices, especially as security concerns mounted with the spread of
computers to all employees. After receiving the pink slip, hapless workers are
relieved of their company IDs, their passwords cancelled, and are escorted to their
desk where, under the watchful eye of armed security guards, they are ordered to
clear out their personal effects before being marched out of the building in front
of astonished co-workers.10 Firing became even the stuff of TV melodrama as in
The Apprentice, starring finance and real estate mogul Donald Trump who plays
the role of a boss much feared and admired by his young staffers who compete
to be retained by him. The climax of every narrative cycle is sealed by the CEO
informing one unhappy assistant: “You’re fired!” (Rich 2004).
By the 1990s a system of “short-term greed and long-term insecurity” (Bing
1992: 72) was well in place and it represented the latest avatar in the corporate
workplace of what U.S. sociologist C. Wright Mills termed long ago “the
American system of organized irresponsibility” (qtd. in Bing 1992: 85). As Bing
puts it, the workplace is “the only kind of family that pays you to be a member and
can terminate you without cause” (54). There are even companies that regularly
fire 10 to 15 per cent of their workforce every nine to twelve months in order to
create a climate of uncertainty and fear deemed by management to be effective
in enforcing employee submissiveness and discipline. This violent extension of
a management method invented by Jack Welch, Jr., the very aggressive former
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In the business press and workplace, stories and anecdotes of public humiliations
and even physical fear proliferated, as if the mythically high-handed, intimidating
methods of the noisy factory floor had been transferred to the quieter cubicles
and offices of middle and upper management, where twelve- to fourteen-hour
days in some companies became the norm. Even private life wasn’t safe from
the depredations of bosses: one female CEO reportedly called a senior manager
thirty-one times over one Thanksgiving weekend; another chief executive insisted
on speaking to a female manager for twenty minutes as she underwent labour;
and the owner/manager of a large family business physically threatened his
wife and daughter before terminating them (Dumaine 1993). The introduction
of performance-related pay and the promise of stock options in the 1980s and
1990s intensified further the focus on the bottom line and helped recruit uppermanagement to the task of downsizing their less senior colleagues by whetting
their greed and buying executive tolerance of CEOs’ abusive methods (Vega
and Comer 2005). Office workers found themselves caught between the drive
for short-term profits and the much vaunted discipline of the marketplace; as a
result, accusations of poor work performance became a smokescreen for deflecting
employees’ radical response to unacceptable behaviours and to the unfair firing
of employees.9 In a climate of fear, and for executives short on ideas about how
to run their businesses, bullying had the advantage of passing as an effective
management method (Larkin 2005; Lee 2000).
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CEO of General Electric, goes by the name “forced ranking” (Grote 2005). The
pressures—and excuses—for bullying in the workplace were even worse in the
public sector, as Republican and Democratic politicians in the U.S. slashed budgets
for public services and imposed “marketplace philosophies in an under-resourced”
environment (Lee 2000: 599-600). In the end, the word bullying both names the
problem and obscures it: the bullying personality of the abusive boss turns the event
of unwanted aggression—and its interpretation—into a clash of personalities in
which structural and material factors tend to vanish in favour of purely personal
and psychological ones. This is replicated by the grievance system—if one exists at
all in the workplace—that reduces everything to the level of individual complaint.
In such an environment, targets of bullying are often perceived to be the problem
and deemed scapegoats whose removal by human resources departments is the
most expedient response by management (Vanderkerckhove and Commers 2003:
43-45; Wajcman 1996).
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Little is said in the U.S. media or public discussion about how the continuing
obsession with short-term profits and the awarding of exorbitant executive pay lay
the foundation for a surge in abusive behaviour in the workplace to begin with, let
alone how the introduction of best-practices of flexible employment, outsourcing of
traditional company tasks, and the recourse to workers reclassified as “independent
contractors” have opened the door to “management by terror” (Bing 1992: 100-101).
These changes compounded worker vulnerability in those workplaces already left
to the tender mercies of “at-will employment,” a workplace regime dating from the
19th century and unique to the U.S. in which from one day to the next employees
never know who could lose their livelihood and access to medical insurance. This
regime has undergone several changes at the state level in which some protection
has been granted against unchecked firings (Muhl 2001).
The Public Media Sphere, or Grandma Was Right
Meanwhile, outside the workplace and the schoolyard, a new culture of intimidation
began to emerge in U.S. mass culture. In the 1970s, macho populism arose in the
figures of Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris
(and followed by Michael Douglas in the 1980s), creatures of male injury and
ressentiment, who in action and sexual avenger films reclaimed American male
honour and prerogative lost in the aftermath of the women’s movement, defeat in
Vietnam and early globalization’s massive deindustrialization of the U.S. economy
(Faludi 1999; Goldstein 2003; Jeffords 1989, 1994). This marked the beginning
of the instrumentalization of a troubled masculinity by the media and politicians.
Then, in the following decade a new tone and style of public discourse broke
through over the airwaves. Radio and TV talk shows hosted by Howard Stern,
Morton Downey Jr. (1986-1992) and later Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Chris
Matthews and Bill Maher (in the 1900s) provoked and channelled audiences’
pent-up (male) rage against women, people of colour, liberals, leftists, gays and
immigrants, thereby smashing the last remnants of decorum and respectful
speech in the old broadcast public media sphere. Speaking over and shouting
down liberal guests were commonplace and even physical assault in the case of
Downey and O’Reilly was not to be ruled out (Alterman 1999).
The pleasures of the spectacle of bullying could not be denied.11 So whoever
thought that our grandmothers’ futile protests against the violent excesses of the
media, to which we turned a deaf ear, would come back to haunt us?
It didn’t take long for the methods and tactics perfected during the culture wars
to be applied to leading politicians and their families. Bill Clinton had scarcely
occupied the White House in January 1993 when Republican leaders launched
personal attacks on First Lady Hilary Clinton, with violence which had never
been seen in Washington political life. Five years later, Bill had a turn at the hands
of rogue prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who abandoned his charge of investigating
political corruption to launch a persecutory inquest into Bill Clinton’s sexual life,
provoking a constitutional crisis. Astonished citizens watched as political life
seemed to spin slowly out of control. This unsettling spectacle was fuelled by the
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The long “remasculinization” ( Jeffords 1989) of the public media sphere had
begun and the strident backlash against feminism, the civil rights and Chicano
movements, and their progressive supporters led straight to the so-called culture
wars that roiled U.S. educational and cultural institutions (1985-1999) in
struggles over definitions of national culture, U.S. history, civil and sexual rights,
artistic freedom and censorship, HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns, affirmative
action, laws targeting discrimination and harassment in the workplace, and the
material protections afforded by the welfare state (Reid 1997). A new televised
male spectacle emerged in political talk shows such as The Capitol Gang and The
McClaughlin Report followed later by Hannity and Colmes and Hard Ball, featuring
political personalities such as Newt Gingrich (former Republican Speaker of the
House), James Carville (former advisor to Bill Clinton), Pat Buchanan (former
aide to Richard Nixon) and David Horowitz (ex-Marxist neoconservative writer
and activist) (cf. “The Arrival of Shouting Heads” 2001). At this juncture aging
or former New Leftists, liberals and feminists such as Todd Gitlin, Paul Berman,
Christopher Hitchens, Katha Politt, Michael Ignatieff and Maureen Dowd joined
the fray to denounce multiculturalism, anti-foundational French philosophy
(Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze), “political correctness” and, in some cases
after 9/11, to announce their fervent support of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
They more than matched the casual disrespect and destructive aggressiveness of
their neoconservative sisters like Lynne Cheney, Camille Paglia and Ann Coulter,
and in so doing reminded us that bullying had no strict ideological or gender
allegiance and that its roots extended back to the 1960s, the very period reviled
by so many talking heads.
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spectre of unchecked government and citizen-sponsored armed violence in Waco,
Texas. There a drama unfolded that would result in the largest terrorist bombing
on American soil in the 20th century: in April 1993, the FBI attacked the Branch
Davidian cult’s compound with gas grenades and armored personnel carriers, and
the ensuing fires wiped out all the residents. In 1995 white supremacists Timothy
McVeigh and Terry Nichols retaliated by blowing up the Federal Building in
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 people.
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So bullying as a style of political discourse had been brewing for some time.
Begun most famously in the U.K. in the 1970s by then Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher—the Iron Lady—against old guard Tories and the Labour Party, and
continued by Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, it has its most recent devotee in the new
mercurial President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy. Bullying had its homegrown U.S.
versions in the figure of Ronald Reagan, as when, in an unprecedented act, he
summarily fired the entire workforce of eleven thousand striking U.S. air-traffic
controllers in 1981; more recently, Rudolph Giuliani brought the bare-knuckled
tactics he was known for as U.S. Attorney for New York, to the mayor’s office
during the 1990s (1993-2001). Through spectacular arrests of criminals and
innocent civilians alike, and the brutal removal of the homeless from the streets
of New York, Giuliani installed a climate of fear and intimidation. Perfecting the
art of punitive threats and retaliation, he cowed dissident city administrators into
silence by smearing reputations of his critics and sending the police to rough up
citizens. He even went so far as to declare all citizens to be so many “law-breakers
in waiting,” thereby edging a climate of fear towards one of terror: no one, high
or low, was safe from the long arm of the mayor’s office or the NYPD (Herbert
1999, 2000; Tomasky 1999).
However, even New Yorkers, whose developed instinct for pushing back they like
to see reflected in their politicians, grew weary of Giuliani’s thuggish behavior
during his second term, especially when it extended to his wife during nasty
divorce proceedings. Nationally, a tolerance for political thuggery seemed to be on
the wane in the aftermath of documented Republican physical intimidation of poll
workers in Florida during the recount of ballots of the 2000 Presidential elections.
The success of the Republicans’ tactics provoked, in January 2001, the turnout of
thousands of protestors who greeted George W. Bush’s inauguration motorcade
with rotten eggs and signs reading “Hail to the Thief!” (largely unreported by
media outlets). The thralldom of political bullying in which public opinion was
held seemed to be poised to lift. Then came the terrorist attacks in September
2001.
The Return of Manly Men
That day countless reports of (white) male heroism and sacrifice spawned,
in the words of a New York Times headline, “the return of manly men” in the
popular imagination, those “new John Waynes”—6 feet, 200 lbs—whose physical
prowess elbowed aside the masculinity embodied by Leonardo DiCaprio-types,
“the vaguely feminized natural child-man of the 1990s” (P. Brown 2001: 4). In
one stroke, despite the fact that the unpopular mayor’s negligence to replace
flawed police and firemen’s radios cost hundreds of lives, Giuliani’s stirring news
conference after the attacks transformed him into “America’s mayor” in the eyes
of grateful New Yorkers and the national press.
In destroying the World Trade Center, Al Q’aida’s Saudi sympathizers exceeded
neoconservatives’ long wished-for dream of a national crisis to unite the U.S.
behind the common purpose of restoring U.S. military and economic hegemony
abroad and completing the neoliberal revolution at home (Klein 2007; Project
2000). September 11 delivered into the hands of the Republican Party a
traumatized nation, and our new masters put Americans through the political
equivalent of a collective military boot camp; torn from the familiar surroundings
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Superimposed upon the widely broadcast video clip of George Bush’s paralyzed
reaction to the news of the attacks were new images of the President ordering
Special Operations forces to Afghanistan to bring Bin Laden back dead-or-alive,
which sent his fragile approval ratings to dizzying heights. This heralded what
was to come: a presidential masculinity not in the traditional sense of effective
competence and protection, but rather as a hyperbolic contrived image. We have
been served up many photo-ops of a fearless President confronting fundamentalist
Islam’s alleged primitive masculinity, its will to death and its tyranny through
terror. An image it was indeed: we later learned from the retired President of
Mexico Vicente Fox that the cowboy crusader against the infidels is afraid of
horses (Fox Quesada 2007: 139). Not to be left out, U.S. politicians and media
commentators welcomed the prospect of national renewal through war and called
for strong interrogation tactics of those taken prisoner in the “War on Terror” that
the White House had just launched (Robin 2004: 155-58). TV studios rushed to
start new TV series like Fox Television’s 24 whose chief protagonist leads a police
anti-terrorist unit that in each episode employs torture and extrajudicial killings
as regular tools of the trade. The series has been both a critical and popular success
(Purdum 2003) and, according to investigative journalist Jane Mayer, the Pentagon
in turn drew inspiration from the TV series for pursuing its techniques of torture
which always seemed to work on the small screen (Mayer 2008: 196). It was as if
viewers and the media arrogated for themselves the right over life and death of
the old punitive sovereignty (as Michel Foucault would say) which, according to
Hobbes, had been mythically left to the absolute sovereign in exchange for civil
peace and protection; in the U.S. this reassertion of the old right arguably began
in the 1970s with the reinstatement of the death penalty (now commonly viewed
as barbaric by the international community) in which the State served as the
instrument of personal vengeance for grieving families and afflicted communities
(Agamben 1998: 106; Butler 2004: 50-100; Thurschwell 2008).12
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of safety and home, we found ourselves stripped of our old identity. Allegiance to
the old public virtues—respect of the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Conventions and
the rule of domestic and international law—was mocked and dismissed as quaint
and soft by our new drill sergeants. From then on a state of emergency replaced
the rule of law and set itself up as the norm (Agamben 1998, 2005; Butler 2004;
Dayan 2008).13 We were pressured to submit by leaders who claimed to protect
us through politically expedient Code Orange terrorist attack warnings, and
harassed and threatened us if we so much as voiced doubts concerning their new
policies ( Jehl and Johnson 2004). It would appear that the hope was to induce in
the U.S. population “an infantile dread, an uncanny awe—and great expectations,”
an attitude of surrender followed by transfiguration (Shatan 1977: 600). Even
military chiefs-of-staff and long-standing allies weren’t spared: in the rush to
invade Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld and his civilian deputies humiliated and removed
reluctant generals who questioned the wisdom of going to war unprepared14 while
Colin Powell bullied hesitant allies.15 As Richard Goldstein, reprising the slang
of gansta rap, put it in his essay titled, “Neo-Macho Man,” Bush, Rumsfeld and
Powell were “the men,” and the military and we civilians alike were their “bitches”
(Goldstein 2003).
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Political machismo was once again the order of the day, and campaigns were
launched against enemies on all sides whose manliness was relentlessly questioned
(Goldstein 2004). For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of California,
denounced Democratic politicians as “girlie men” before the assembled delegates
of the 2004 Republican national convention in New York. Later that fall Karl
Rove organized an unprecedented media smear of decorated veterans such as John
Kerry and Max Cleland (a triple amputee no less) whose sacrifices and actions
his henchmen belittled and mocked and whose patriotism they questioned. This
should have not surprised us, for the Bush campaign targeted rival Republican
John McCain during the 2000 presidential primaries by launching a rumour
suggesting that he had a bi-racial love-child and that his Vietnam War experience
of imprisonment and torture unmanned him and rendered him mentally unstable.
The attacks left voters stunned; however, with U.S. public opinion and the media
obsessively focused on issues of “character,” the virus of doubt spread quickly,
infecting large numbers of mass viewers (Zernike 2008).
In order to work, campaigns of fear and intimidation must constantly surpass
their existing limits to keep potential victims off-balance, and thus they forever
seek out new targets to feminize and degrade. For example, at the time of this
writing (September 2008) these types of attacks have been replicated ad nauseam
in the current U.S. presidential campaign and even within the Democratic party:
during much of the primary season Hillary Clinton underscored her qualifications
to be commander-in-chief and to deal with the threat of Islamic terrorism at the
expense of her rival Barack Obama, whom she characterized as being indecisive
and soft.16 Later that fall, it was Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s
turn to discredit Obama as a mere celebrity in ads comparing him to Paris Hilton
and Brtiney Spears. And things have reached such a pass that political bullies
switched targets from military heroes to the handicapped and the injured tout
court, as when Rush Limbaugh mocked Michael J. Fox, suffering from Parkinson’s
disease, as faking the symptoms of his illness, or when Bill O’Reilly claimed that
an adolescent kidnap victim, who had been sequestered and sexually abused for
a year, actually enjoyed it. They seemed to express radical hatred of weakness and
infirmity that was bent on cleansing them from the public media sphere (CBS
News 2006).17 This gratuitous verbal violence echoes the vastly more programmed
and violent versions practiced in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, where it
would appear that in the words of critic Kathy Philips, “manliness no longer
means protecting the weak but torturing the randomly rounded up, a ‘harder’,
more manly position” (2006: 200).
Bullying Language
Of course facts were never simply facts any more than ballots simply ballots or words
simply words. Protocols of empirical testing, deliberation and interpretation have
always been a matter of conventions that emerge in fields of force and discourse.
Yet what Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush have tried to do with their War on Terror is
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As in the workplace, so it is in politics and the media: under a regime of fear
and terror, the fact or evidence of injury or hurt invalidates the speech of those
who have suffered assaults and silences them. In the current return of violent
sovereignty in national life the rule of terror is quite deliberately extended to
words themselves: not only are the instruments of intimidation and fear in the
hands of political and media bullies who rule out of order the speech of everyone
else, but also time and again we witness that our very words are the targets of
their aggression. In the current juncture we have the jarring realization that
words—spoken or unspoken—simply do not matter any more than facts, truth
or ballots. Language and facts are bullied and terrorized along with the rest of us.
It’s not so much that language has been debased, emptied of content, and stolen
(as George Orwell or Roland Barthes would have it) or simply suppressed (as
under authoritarian regimes), but rather that speech does not matter. It carries no
weight. It is made to look irrelevant and as powerless as those who speak it. The
presumably normative world of words and facts is reduced to nothing. What little
mental and physical protections it used to afford us have been stripped away. This
is driven home by Bush’s unwavering policies in the face of military, political and
economic disasters they have provoked and the mind-numbing repetition of his
claim that Saddam Hussein and Al Q’aida were allies. In his over-the-top macho
world, he and his cabinet are never wrong. Failure is written out of the bully script
as fact or speech. There is no empirical or linguistic accountability. Those in power
aren’t held to their words or deeds.
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install a new regime of factuality and truth as instruments of government through
fear in which, according to Brian Massumi (forthcoming), “assumptions about
character and intent that cannot be empirically grounded with any certainty,” but
are based on “the felt reality of threat,” trump everything else.18 He captures the
new counterfactual logic of truth in the following way: “Bush did what he did
because Saddam could have done what he did not do [if he had had the means].”
Like the bullying of persons, the bullying of language creates an open-ended field
of pre-emptive aggression and terror based on a logic “not subject to the same
rules of non-contradiction as normative logic” (Massumi, forthcoming; cf. 2007).
Under this regime, there’s no talking back and no going back either. It’s perhaps
within this context that the meteoric rise of Obama’s candidacy is best grasped:
his speeches preaching political reconciliation have both set off an enthusiastic
response among young voters and baffled established political commentators.
One of the reasons for his success surely lies in his explicit rejection of divisive,
fear-based politics (even as he lends his political prestige to repressive legislation
authorizing the expansive surveillance of citizens, the individual right to own
handguns and the death penalty for rapists of children). Whether Obama’s
election can bring to a close this cycle of public bullying without first modifying
the legal and administrative structures in the workplace, schools, media, military
and government that underwrite it, is open to doubt. Still, a sea change in public
sensibility may indeed be in the offing.
Notes
The following essay would not have been possible without the early research of Susan
Jeffords and the patient chronicling of the contemporary rise of the culture of bullying in the U.S. by two journalists, Richard Goldstein and Bob Herbert. I wish to thank
colleagues near and far whose comments on drafts helped shape this essay: Jody Berland,
Lisa Bloom, Linda Brodkey, Lynn Chancer, David Halperin, Marcel Hénaff, Dagmar
Herzog, Jorge Mariscal, Brian Massumi, Muriel Molinié, Eileen Myles, Jackie Orr,
Christel Pesme, Gershon Shafir, Steve Shaviro, Sharon Traweek, Elissa Weinstein and
Mark Weintraub.
1. For the related longer history of neoliberalism and its exploitation of natural and social
catastrophes in order to impose its radical restructuralization, see Klein (2007).
2. In this way, bullying in daily life would appear to follow what Brian Massumi calls in
the context of military operations the logic of pre-emption as “positively contributing to
provoking the condition for its own exercise” (Massumi, forthcoming). For an extended
political analysis of linguistic vulnerability, the performative force of language and the
sovereign power attributed to hate speech in particular, see Butler (1997: 1-41, 72-82).
3. In other words, I’d argue that much current bullying in the U.S. operates on one
hand, through the humiliating reduction of the targeted victim to a simple question of
a gendered identity defined in the most crude fashion (this reduction often underlies
even racial, ethnic and national slurs). On the other hand is the belittling of that same
assigned identity as less than masculine or as merely feminine and as one that is permanent and irredeemable. In this fashion bullying seeks to induce in subjects a nostalgia
for a very gendered but mythical sovereign self that they may never have embodied in
the first place but that now stands as the very measure of their diminished sense of self.
Bullying seeks to dominate by creating weak, abject subjects who are forced into a state
of self-loathing—or at least self-doubt—and who remain in perpetual fear of potential
psychological or physical assaults.
4. There is a growing scholarly and legal literature on the topic. For Europe see Einarsen,
et al. (2003: 3-30) and Council of Europe (1996: 15). For France, consult Hirigoyen
(2000), Dejours (1998); Gaulejac (2005), Loi no. 2002-73 (2002) and Le Goff (2003).
For Germany see Leyman and Tallgren (1993) and for Spain, José Edreira (2003). For
Japan, consult Meek (2004). Finally, for a comparative analysis of U.S. and European
laws see Friedman and Whitman (2003).
6. One reason may be the fact that protections extended in the U.S. workplace follow civil rights law based on classes of persons (going back to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights
Act) and less on specific actions, in contrast with Europe where workplace relations are
governed by labour law. Sexual harassment follows the same logic as other legislation
banning discrimination, but not so bullying, which is not covered by existing law unless
the victim is targeted in terms of his or her belonging to a protected class of persons
(national origin, sex, religion, age, physical infirmity, political opinion and marital status);
see Yamada (2000). The absence of workplace protections against bullying is also connected to the American tradition of freedom of expression. It enjoys exceptional status
in the arena of international law by virtue of its great tolerance of racist and fascist public
discourse, either oral or printed, which would incur the full penalty of the law in the
European Union, Australia, Canada, India, Israel and South Africa. In the wake of the
interpretive tradition of the First Amendment that goes back to Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes’s opinions in the early 20th century, all speech, however hateful and injurious it
may be, is protected by U.S. law unless it leads immediately to acts of physical violence;
see Schauer (2005). That said, it must be noted that educational institutions are beginning to adopt anti-bullying policies directed at teachers, students and parents.
7. See Keashly and Jagatic (2003) and Glendinning (2001). It so happens that the first
studies were conducted in the U.S. in 1976 by Caroll M. Brodsky in The Harassed Worker,
TOPIA 20
5. Doubtless, proper understanding of this phenomenon would begin by placing it in the
context of the United States’ long tradition of violence going back to its origins as a European settler colony, the subsequent genocide of Native Americans and the slave trade,
the more recent history of Jim Crow in former slave states that witnessed more than
4,700 lynchings of blacks between 1882 and 1968, and the waves of political repression
in the 1920s, 1950s and 1970s. See Graham and Gurr (1979). To this must be added
two other related factors: first, the longstanding conservative political tradition which,
according to Cory Robin, often frames the democratic promise of America as that of
the possibility of being not only one’s own master, but also that of others (beginning
with the opportunity to own slaves in the case of white men); see Robin (2008). Second,
Wendy Brown has argued that the slow desacralization of the law and the replacement
of democratic proceduralism with the norms of management by contemporary practices
of neoliberal political rationality in the U.S. have helped produce a new illiberal political culture, which in turn has paved the way for neoconservatism’s successful advocacy
of a return to the practices of violent sovereignty in daily and political life (Brown 2003;
2006). Finally, for an analysis of current U.S. society as one which has forgotten the horrors of war due to its lack of historical experience of combat on its own soil, and whose
government remains the sole major power to claim war as a reasonable and legitimate
option in pursuit of its foreign policy objectives, consult Judt (2008). His article appeared
in late spring 2008 when the White House, the Washington political establishment
and the Likud Party in Israel began to call for a military strike against Iran in order to
destroy its small nuclear power program. In June 2008, rumours circulated that U.S.
President George W. Bush would order an attack on Tehran to foil Barack Obama’s
chances for victory in the presidential elections in the fall.
143
but were followed up by no other studies until 1990. See, for example: Hornstein (1996);
Baron and Neuman (1998); Namie and Namie (2003); Davenport, Schwartz and Elliot
(2002); and Sutton (2007).
8. Cory Robin is one of the few U.S.-based scholars to see a direct tie between the current political culture of fear and the U.S. workplace. See Robin (2004: 115-19; 227-48).
9. Workers also find themselves caught in the jarring contradiction between human resources’ rhetoric of teamwork that promises informal, cooperative relationships
(underscored by the insistence on first-name modes of address) and promotes the value
of interpersonal skills, and the day-to-day experience of bullying that either reinforces
hierarchies of authority and status or seeks to introduce them in settings where they are
not visibly acknowledged (Wajcman 1996: 344).
10. This practice has spread in the U.S. to even non-profit organizations such as the San
Diego Heritage Society, where, when it let several employees go in March 2008, a physically intimidating guard showed up at their desks and forced them to exit the building
immediately.
11. This phenomenon should be understood in the context of the rise of shock television
in the U.S., whose shows stage a veritable theatre of humiliation at the expense of participants and invited guests, sometimes with quite violent consequences. See for example
Cohen (2008).
TOPIA 20
144
12. As of August 15, 2008 there have been 1,119 capital executions in the U.S. since
1977, and currently 3,262 prisoners sit on “death row” awaiting execution (Death Penalty
2008). On the distinct concepts of revenge in traditional and modern societies see Hénaff (2008).
13. It must be noted, however, that the suspension of the constitutional protections
of due process, probable cause and safeguards against cruel and unusual punishment
in the current state of exception was long in the making, not only through the gradual
de-democratization of U.S. society by neoliberal policies, as Wendy Brown has shown
(2003; 2006), but also by the quite legal state disciplinary measures in immigration and
domestic incarceration such as indefinite detention in solitary confinement of prisoners in “supermax” prisons. The inhumane treatment and designation of prisoners as gang
members—like that of Guantánamo Bay prisoners as “unlawful enemy combatants”—
has been exempt of judicial review and resulted in what Colin Dayan has called the
“radical substitution of penal for civil life” (Dayan 2008: 495-501). See also Butler (2004:
50-100), Matlin (2007) and Hussain (2007). The domestic supermax prisons were one of
the models for Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.
14. Disrespectful treatment of senior officers had already been a part of the culture wars
in the 1990s, as when former Marine captain and Assistant Secretary of the Navy under
Reagan and now U.S. Senator James Webb (D-Virginia), publicly humiliated Admiral
Jerry “Mike” Boorda at the U.S. Naval Academy in terms that could be read as tacitly
homophobic and anti-Semitic (Burke 2004: 125-46). Shortly afterwards, in the wake of
further public attacks, Boorda committed suicide.
15. All this is repeated today as political leaders prepare to lead the U.S. into a war with
Iran.
16. In May 2008 Clinton went so far as to evoke the possibility of Obama’s political
assassination, a scenario that was repeated by Fox News journalist Liz Trotta, who then
joked about the advantage of having both Clinton and Obama assassinated. She received
no reprimand from her employers and still works at Fox News (Feldman 2008).
17. It is interesting to note that the two rival discourses—those of victimization and
bullying—tend to share a common assumption that the identity of bullies and victims
always remains legible and stable, and thus also tend to reinforce each other’s positions.
This goes somewhat against the grain of commonly observed practice: that bullies, when
they are criticized or stymied, are quick to portray themselves as innocent victims (for
example, Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin) or that victims have often
become bullies in their own right. In fact, Cory Robin (2008) argues that conservatives
have long trafficked in the claims of victimhood as part of their sense of entitlement
and that the latter may even be understood as one of the hallmarks of modern conservatism and the justification for its very aggressive political programs. Finally, as historian
Dagmar Herzog reminded me (personal communication), the current struggle between
the discourses of victimization and bullying as rival forms of private and public authority
entails a history that goes back to the 1960s and even to the Second World War, but that
would be the subject of another essay.
18. On the hostile, declarative mode characteristic of verbal statements in neoconservative discourse based on inner conviction that preempts questions of veracity or facticity,
see W. Brown (2006: 707-708).
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149
TOPIA 20 151
FEATURE SECTION
ACTIVISM IN ARCHIVES
Kathy Garay and Christl Verduyn
Introduction
The essays that form the following suite in this issue of TOPIA are part of the
scholarship produced by a conference series devoted to archives and archival
research in Canada. The biennial “Archives in Canada Conference Series” (ACCS),
conceived and developed by Kathleen Garay and Christl Verduyn, began in 2005
with a conference at McMaster University on the topic of archives and Canadian
literature. The papers from that first conference, “Turning the Knobs on Writers’
Closets,” appeared in 2006 as a special issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies
(40:2), guest edited by Garay and Verduyn. With the support and collaboration
of Library and Archives Canada, the series continued in 2007 with a conference
in Ottawa on the archives of cultural activists. Papers from “Taking a Stand: a
Conference on Activism in Canadian Cultural Archives” were selected and
organized into two groups for publication as separate suites—one with the journal
Archivaria, and the other with TOPIA—an approach reflecting both the multidisciplinary nature of the topic, and the desire for even wider dissemination of the
research. As series editors, Garay and Verduyn are very grateful to the editorial
teams at TOPIA and Archivaria and would like to take this opportunity to thank
them for their collaboration and collegiality.
The aim of the “Archives in Canada Conference Series” is to bring researchers
from the academic community as well as from the general public together with
archivists, librarians and other professionals to exchange ideas about issues and
topics relevant to archives in Canada. The archives and archival work of Canadian
cultural activists provide an excellent illustration of this objective. The four essays
that follow offer ample evidence of the relevance of archives to the lives and work
of such figures as Greg Curnoe and F. R. Scott, as well to as the artists, writers and
researchers who write about them. Janice Gurney, Aritha van Herk, Anouk Lang,
and Mel Hogan have each engaged in the lively exchange of ideas about archives
that the ACCS series aims to foster.
TOPIA 20
152
In her lively and lusciously literary contribution, “Ardently Archiving,” novelist
and archival researcher Aritha van Herk introduces not only two fascinating
Canadian cultural archives but also the notion of the activist archive itself. “Most
archives do not sit cosily in their acid-free boxes, glowing with a sepia nostalgia,”
van Herk comments. “They perform, declare, argue and shout; they speak a record
of change and movement, discovery and revision.” Among the many intriguing
cultural archives van Herk mentions in her essay, she chooses two for more
in-depth examination. The first, which she encountered in Calgary’s Glenbow
Museum archives, is the photographic archive of Lena and Thomas Gushul,
Ukrainian immigrants to Canada in the early 1900s. Gushul’s documentation of
Canada’s coal mining communities and their disasters and strikes is a remarkable
record that van Herk reads as an “activist archive, resonant with unspoken power.”
Recalling Foucault, van Herk suggests that the activist archive “recites what is
quotidian and human, inescapable in its determination of dread necessity, a part
of ‘formation and transformation of statements” (Foucault 1972: 130). Suggesting
further that it is in the daily necessity that the archive can become its most
activist, van Herk turns to the topic of laundry. She argues that “laundry performs
a paradigm of Derrida’s nomological principle; nothing ‘acts’ more powerfully
than the impression of such an activity” (Derrida 1996: 16), and with her tongue
only partly in her cheek, enjoins readers to imagine the archival potential and
potency of laundry.
A similar sense of the import of the daily and the human arises in Janice Gurney’s
essay on the archives of Greg Curnoe (1936-1992), the London, Ontario artist
whose significance as a cultural activist has far outstripped his foreshortened life.1
A “radical regionalist” for whom the local was critical, Curnoe’s work was “both
art and archival document,” Gurney states, and his activism was embedded in
his work and in place. He was a forerunner in raising awareness that the land
he lived on, and that society at large occupies, was once the place of Canada’s
Aboriginal people. Gurney documents the extent to which Curnoe’s archive is
related to his research into the history of the land upon which his house was
built. Historical documents and information about land claims and treaties that
Curnoe uncovered form an archive within an archive, and anticipate two of his
posthumous works: Deeds/Abstracts (1995), which investigates the ownership of
the land on which his house and studio were located; and Deeds/Nation (1996),
a list from 1750-1850 of every First Nations individual to have signed treaties
ceding the London, Ontario, area to Europeans. Curnoe’s archive work served
both as a way of responding to the world and as a continuous resource for his
art—that is, it served as “an archive of the self,” as Gurney puts it. His art and
archival research into local history were themselves forms of activism, producing
material which was then available to other researchers, in particular to Aboriginal
researchers. Curnoe saw making connections with other artists as a crucial form
of activism, Gurney notes, adding that this is a dimension often overlooked in
the written histories of art in Canada. If he was a “disorderly archivist,” Gurney
comments, archiving was nevertheless for Curnoe “a way to order thoughts and
record time,” documenting but not interpreting raw data, interrogating history and
the ways that we investigate and record it. A life of collecting and researching—
letters, magazine articles, panel presentations, petitions, book reviews, lists, scraps
of paper clutter his archive—attest to Curnoe’s involvement in local and national
issues of importance to Canadian culture and artists’ rights.
New and important perspectives on archiving appear in Mel Hogan’s essay Dykes
on Mykes. Hogan draws attention to the rapidly developing reality of online
archives in today’s increasingly digital environments, and to the challenges these
TOPIA 20
Where Curnoe intentionally and consciously conjoined art and activism, F. R.
Scott, in his formal writing, deliberately separated aesthetics and politics, as
Anouk Lang shows in “Creative Advocates: Art, Commitment and Canadian
Literary history.” Lang looks to archives for the fuller picture and significance of
what Canadian poet, lawyer, public intellectual and activist for social and political
causes, F. R. Scott (1899-1985) termed his “pregnant doggerel” poems. Scott was
one of Canada’s founding literary modernists, but unlike the stylized works of
his modernist poetry—for which he has remained best known—his doggerel
poetry was written in a straightforward, social realist style. Only in the short,
economical form of the doggerel, Lang suggests, could Scott find the right outlet
for his critique of the social ills of his time. In the face of injustices and corruption
within the capitalist system, increasing state repression and the dehumanizing
effects of technology, Scott found the abstraction of modernist poetic practice to
be inadequate. With his doggerel, Scott turned poetry into “a caricature of itself,”
so that it could serve in a clear social critique. “Modernism’s polysemic density,
Lang writes, was “intolerable when representing politicized subject matter.”
Research into the archives of literary modernism, she proposes, is of particular
interest to cultural studies for what it reveals about the construction of cultural
formation, particularly one “preoccupied with questions of national identity and
the formation of a specifically Canadian literature tradition.” By examining his
archive for texts that have largely escaped literary critical attention, Lang brings
new perspectives to the project of national cultural formation in Canada.
153
developments represent for traditional perceptions and practices of archiving.
“The online archive simultaneously builds from and undoes the archival
project through its expansive and largely unregulated context and participatory
process,” Hogan observes. “The growing popularity of, if not dependence on,
online archives, including (corporate) social networking sites, unaffiliated online
repositories, podcasts, and blogs ... points to the limitations of the traditional
archive.” Taking Dykes on Mykes, a community radio show,2 and in particular
the show’s use of podcasts,3 as a case study and a site of inquiry, Hogan argues
not only for the tremendous archival potential of podcasting but also its activist
possibilities. Using podcast technology, it is possible to make older (analogue) Dykes
on Mykes shows available to the general public. In this way, the show’s archives are
much more than historical documentation, Hogan argues. The podcast combines
preservation and dissemination. As illustrated by Dykes on Mykes, the “podcastas-archive” promises to put an end to the loss and lack of archival materials about
queer and lesbian women in Canada. It offers a tool of outreach, communication
and accessibility, potentially valuable for other marginalized, minority, or invisible
communities.
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The third ACCS conference, 10-12 June 2009 at Mount Allison University, invites
a retelling of Canada’s stories in “Archives and the Canadian Narrative,” and a
consideration of regional archives in the digital universe. Presentations selected
from the conference will appear as a collection of essays in the Alternatives series
published by Fernwood Press. We hope that TOPIA readers will be inspired by the
essays the follow to look for future results from the Archives in Canada Conference
Series.
Notes
1. Greg Curnoe was killed when struck by a vehicle while cycling.
2. As Hogan points out, Dykes on Mykes “prides itself on being the longest running Anglophone lesbian and queer women’s radio show in Montreal, if not in Canada.”
3. The New Oxford American Dictionary, Hogan explains, defines podcast as “a digital
recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for
downloading to a personal audio player.”
References
Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz.
Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. M. A. Sheridan Smith. New
York: Pantheon Books.
TOPIA 20 155
Aritha van Herk
Ardently Archiving
On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural
breakdown of the said memory.
Derrida, Archive Fever
To archive is to undertake much more than the merely cumulative activity of
saving or preserving. The archive presents to us a vocabulary of our desires, those
we succumbed to in the past, those we fear we will forget, those to which we yearn
to grant a formal significance or recognition. The archive recites a texture of time
elusive as shadows, but arguably alive, a continuum in the discourse of connection,
meaning making and inheritance. Coded as part of all of those elements are
registers of personal identity, political action and social inclination, but inevitably
every archive reveals a soupçon of mortality’s desire to store moments and material.
The gesture of such hoarding is not always altruistic. The perseverance of those
determined to preserve and thus transmit a particular version of inheritance reflects
far more than mere concern for documentation or evidence, but a fascinating
compliance with multiple forms of advocacy. What is kept declares the paradox
of how much we fear loss. What is lost becomes a different archive altogether. As
Leonard Cohen so famously declared, TOPIA 20
156
History is a needle
for putting men asleep
anointed with the poison
Of all they want to keep (Cohen 1969)
But, and here we must tease out the multiple strands of archive, keeper and
archivist, to arrive at a moment that might seem ardently ideal: the gatherer or
creator, the kept material (whole or in fragments), and the subsequent evaluator
and protector of that material together effecting an outcome electromagnetic
if unpredictable. An archive performs a collation of memory, a doubling of the
myriad subtle shadings and details of the past enclosed within the raw or dusty
shelters of repositories. We are caught in a world that speeds faster and faster,
heedlessly committing information to the memory of hard drives in terabytes,
and to electronic devices with names that evoke field fruits and thumbscrews.
Guardians of memory are challenged to keep burning the tiny low-tech flame
that is the past. The refuge of an archive, particularly now, in a culture obsessed
with the moment and the momentary, is increasingly urgent. For all that we
produce more noise and “text” than ever before, that production’s theatricality
is inherently transitory, and archives of our rapid metamorphosis will perform a
valuable activism simply by virtue of being present or existing. The archivist, then,
is recorder, registrar, prothonotary, documentalist, librarian, clerk, bookkeeper,
scrivener, secretary, amanuensis, stenographer and stonecutter. The archivist is
that custos rotulorum holding together an elusive cluster and clutter of time and its
potential friability.
Orbiting that magnetic space is the more elusive and far less reliable magpie
of the artist, a gatherer and shaper of materials that perform sometimes beauty,
sometimes elusive fact and sometimes gestures of declaration with unexpectedly
enduring reverberations. The artist/writer is inevitably in search of a story, endlessly
sieving the world for the archive we call inspiration, but also compelled to record
and narrate, unearth and speculate within Foucault’s archaeology of searching
(Foucault 1972: 131). It is useful to review Foucault’s approach, what he refers to
as “systems of statements (whether events or things)” (128) that together comprise
an archive. If, with Foucault, we read an archive as enunciating a statement-event,
if the archive is “the general system of the formation and transformation of statements,”
(130) it is not difficult to grasp that process as key to cultural articulation.
Nor is the archive that which collects the dust of statements that have
become inert once more ... it is the system of its functioning. Far from being
that which unifies everything that has been said in the great confused
murmur of a discourse, far from being only that which ensures that we exist
in the midst of preserved discourse, it is that which differentiates discourses
in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration. (129)
If the archive inhabits this space between articulation and corpus, it reflects
power and enunciation in its practice as a potentially activist site. As a creative
locus, an archive inspires and produces practicing subjects. The interlacing of the
writer and the archive serves as much more than preserve or reserve, sanctuary or
museum. They share the corpus of what has been kept, yes, but also the suggestive
space of arboreal escape and discovery, and thus a version of paradise replete
with imaginative instigation struggling for articulation despite the constraints
of knowledge and power. The archive suggests a conduit to a vanished but still
resonant world, the maelstrom of its discourse prompting an activist friction.
I choose these two examples out of hundreds of tempting and delicious potential
archives, eager to be consulted. The possibilities are endless. The International
Center of Photography in New York holds unusual portraits of the Surrealists:
“The photography center’s archives contain photo-booth portraits of Breton, a
young Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. They all posed with their eyes closed, as
though dreaming, because Breton believed that ‘the dream was the key to the
unconscious’” (Strausbaugh 2008). What a document category—photo-booth
snapshots of surrealists dreaming. Their archive is also host to self-mugged shots
by Andy Warhol, evidence of his fascination with photography’s vernacular.
And—where else but in Paris—there exists an archive of scent, the Osmothèque,
which keeps for posterity the formulae for rare perfumes, many now disappeared
or lost.
TOPIA 20
Archived archives declare their own variety. There is of course the dry wit of public
record, with its prevalently tombstone narrative: birth, life, death. The registry or
parish roll decrees a finite life, bulletin-brief, resonant with closure. But there are
other archives, dazzling with possibility. So much can be uncovered between the
docket and the dossier, bills of sale and bills of health, engagement books and petty
cash lists. Scrap pads and notebooks together conspire to amplify the daily acts of
memory which requires jogging. Scratches and notations, annotations and dockets
all prescribe cures or curses, as do prescriptions and parchments. Warranties and
testimonials, affidavits and sworn statements, pretend to be authoritative. And then
there are transactions, items bought and sold, prenuptial disagreements, cancelled
cheques. These are the forceful cliffs of document, marriage and birth, driver’s
licence and pilot’s certification, degrees and determinations. Ticket, authority,
authorization and the due process of proficiency all array themselves in line with
law and lineage, power and punishment. Hansard and Burke’s Peerage might
enact exclusive estates, but every life recites a genealogy, even profanum vulgus. To
illustrate such a cornucopia, I will discuss in detail two utterly different archival
repositories. One is a photographic record of the Crowsnest Pass in Alberta within
a horizon of labour activism. The second is less clearly defined, but considers the
quotidian archive of laundry as both object and activity, exemplifying the extent
to which an archive is a discursive formation. 157
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Alternatively, imagine the soon to open Harley-Davidson Museum (www.hdmuseum.com) in Milwaukee, which will house famous bikes (like Elvis Presley’s,
and Serial No. 1, the first Harley from 1903) along with other artifacts connected
to the famed machine. The fonds of that archive tempt archaeology, although
some would declare this documentation of Harleys and Harley riders and their
adventures not an archive but a collection, the result of fetishizing related objects.
The difference between collection and archive is certainly related to the random and
often inexplicable nature of archive as opposed to the putative focus of collection;
nevertheless, both propose a gathering “subjective, full of gaps, unofficial” (Wizisla
2007: 2). Benjamin’s archive and his sense of archive are infused with his passion
for collecting, and so the habits of collecting influence both his theory of archives
and what his personal archives contain. The collection is a system, but one driven or
ordered by the collector’s fetish. Ultimately, and in keeping with Foucault’s sense of
an archive as a system of formations, every place on earth recites a potential archive,
even those decreed by refuse heaps. Some are overwhelming just to imagine. The
Smithsonian apparently holds more than 13 million photographic images “spread
across its 19 museums in 700 archives and special collections” (Gefter 2008). Such
profligacy decries its own availability, becomes reckless abundance. Is it even possible
to sieve a specific story from so much?
For writers, the archival grail comprises notebooks, manuscripts, address books
and royalty statements. Filodex and diary, ledger and catalogue tempt and
tantalize with vestiges and traces, the indecipherable odour of a hand moving
across paper. Such footnotes accompany drafts and versions and dodgings, the
work of arranging words toward eloquence, significance, communication or
beauty, all tempting the gap between absence and presence. Necrology is the art
we writers practice, and paper necrophilia our secret vice. I feel compelled here
to confess that my papers—a haphazard accrual of files, manuscript drafts, notes,
letters and detritus—are archived at the University of Calgary. I seldom go to visit
my deconstructed words, although of course my students do, in search of glaring
errors perhaps, or my errant ways on paper. I deposit materials mostly to get them
out of my overcrowded study, dusty and overflowing with books, research and its
delicious aftermath, invention. And yet, I do not destroy those scraps and jottings
and phone messages; I cannot bear to discard my friends of so many endless hours
spent trudging from word to word, or on good writing days, leaping across vast
chasms. I am an accomplice to my own archiving, even though I refuse to emulate
the assiduous Walter Benjamin, determined to collect and catalogue “everything
of mine that has appeared in print” (Benjamin 1994: 385). As fate or irony would
have it, parts of Benjamin’s vast trove of notes and notebooks and manuscripts are
missing (Marx et al. 2007: 7). Even his mad inventory is subject to that agent of
erasure, the inexorable enzyme of time.
But these are all tantalizing sidelines to the question tempting archivist and
archivee, activist and artist. Most archives do not sit cosily in their acid-free boxes,
glowing with a sepia nostalgia. They perform, declare, argue and shout; they speak
a record of change and movement, discovery and revision. The activist archive
calls out, a telegraph across time. Hayden White argues in his work on narrativity
and chronicle:
I treat the annals and chronicle forms of historical representation, not
as the imperfect histories they are conventionally conceived to be, but
rather as particular products of possible conceptions of historical reality,
conceptions that are alternatives to, rather than failed anticipations of, the
fully realized historical discourse that the modern history form is supposed
to embody. (White 1987: 6)
White comes close here to articulating the activist power of a story that furnishes
its own refusal to vanish, a story that insists on our attention, revisiting what
is taken for granted. The activist archive gestures toward resistance and distrust,
displacement, settlement and survival. The activist archive refuses to endorse the
official “reality,” the broad strokes of a master narrative sweeping difficulty through
a crack in the floor. The activist archive, like Hamlet, knows that murder will out.
Such an unreading resonates in the Glenbow Museum’s photographic archive of
Lena and Thomas Gushul, Ukrainian immigrants who migrated to Canada at the
turn of the 20th century. Thomas Gushul first worked as a labourer, but taught
himself photography, and gradually honed that skill so that it became his livelihood.
For more than fifty years, he and his wife, Lena, captured the intimate and public
lives of the hybrid and variable immigrant community of the Crowsnest Pass.
The Crowsnest Pass through the Rockies strings together a necklace of towns
that sprawled to life beside rich coal beds; coal was the fuel used by the CPR, and
those mining towns were its source. The immigrants working there were Ukrainian
and Italian, Polish and Lithuanian and Chinese, a mélange of hands and voices.
But all humans wish at some point to document a wedding or a christening,
those rituals of belonging and continuance. And though they might not have
wished it, they also needed photographs taken beside the grave of a husband
killed in a mine explosion, a child dying too young. From their small and shack-
TOPIA 20
As I indicated earlier, I wish to discuss in greater detail two archival repositories
that arouse an activist reading. My examples stem from my recent work in
helping to frame Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta, the new permanent
exhibition at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta (which opened in 2007).
I encountered in the archives there an astonishing and unexpected chorus of
activism. Such noise might seem unlikely in the history of Alberta, a province
passive in its acquiescence to the status quo and not noted for extremes of social
conscience. But the archived past tells another story. A subtext of local activism
thrums beneath the surface, ready to ambush a groping researcher. An articulate
archive can unread accepted history and suggest alternative versions, stories below
the surface, mute but also persuasive.
159
like studio, the Gushuls archived the
attendant uneasiness of this dangerous
and dreaming place, destination for
newcomers and migrants.
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The Gushuls documented the work
of their community, work performed
by miners, work performed in butcher
shops and barber chairs. Children with
angelic curls lifted blue eyes to heaven;
men staged mock fisticuffs in pinched
back yards; men stood proudly beside
their mining tools. A group of men
scowled and recoiled from the news in
a Ukrainian newspaper; a miner posed
for a formal shot with his prosthetic
leg beside him. Lena Gushul’s studio
work was hardly bucolic. Often subjects could not pay or pay on time.
And every few days she walked the
rail line between their two studios in
Blairmore and Coleman, pulling a sled
with schoolbooks and laundry for her
family.
Two children, Evan and Nadia Gushul, with
Christmas goose, Crowsnest Pass, Alberta.
Glenbow Archives, NC-54-3744.
Mine tunnel, Blairmore, Alberta.
Glenbow Archives, NC-54-2899.
Parade on Victoria Street, Blairmore, Alberta. Glenbow Archives NC-54-2224.
View of Hillcrest, Alberta. Glenbow Archives, NA-629-1.
More than fifteen years later, in 1931, Thomas Gushul documented the Crowsnest
miners’ strike and the demonstrations in favour of One Big Union. May Day, Tim
Buck, the Doukhobor leader Veregin, Karl Marx and prohibition: the Gushul
record quietly accumulated. He printed cardboard postcards of miners imprisoned
after a demonstration, as well as photographs of their wives, injured in the same
demonstration. Gushul even devised a method—he called it “writing with light”—
TOPIA 20
On Friday, June 19, 1914, Thomas Gushul photographed the damaged pump
house and mine entrance after the horrific Hillcrest Mine explosion, which
killed 189 men. It was the worst coal mining disaster in Canada. 130 women
were widowed, 400 children left fatherless. Only 46 of the men who entered the
mine that morning were rescued. The workers were members of the United Mine
Workers of America. Of the many mines operating in the Crowsnest Pass—
Burmis, Leitch Collieries, Maple Leaf and Bellevue—Hillcrest was considered
the safest and best run. There were 377 men on the Hillcrest Mine payroll and
the average wage was a respectable $125.00 a month. The Hillcrest catastrophe
occurred just before the First World War, and probably as a result was largely
effaced from the Canadian public’s memory until some fifty years later, when
writers began to re-inscribe that time and place. One of the most telling archival
pieces is a photograph of the Hillcrest Soccer Team, showing fifteen men, of
whom six were killed in the disaster. The men who died were aged 18 to 54—and
their names reveal the multicultural ancestors of Canadian hybridity. These details
together contribute to my own construction of an activist archive, an argument, a
story and an interpretation. As researcher I am inventing and yet not inventing,
shuffling, testing, surveying, searching.
161
of taking photographs inside a mine tunnel. Because a flash could ignite methane
(a constant in the mines), he exposed his film for a long six minutes while five
men walked up and down, miner’s lights illuminating the space enough to sear it
into image, even though their movement erased them from the photograph.
Here is a citation of the activist archive (both literal and figurative) writ large:
photographs might illuminate, but even when humans are present, their
very movement can erase their recorded presence. Thousands of documents
representing more than fifty years at the heart of the 20th century in a particularly
volatile community as hybrid as any region of Canada, encapsulate the Gushuls’
photographic legacy, an astonishing record, as precise in its focus as the multiple
subjects were various. To a writer, such images bequeath a powerful narrative,
enigmatic but allusive, labour and pleasure in conversation with one another, the
personal and political inextricably and mysteriously connected. There is humour
in photographs of circus elephants parading down Blairmore’s main street, their
elegant alertness contrasting the tired camel following behind. And there is a sotto
voce adjustment to necessity in a photograph of a baby being bathed in a bread
bowl. But it is my researcher’s perspective that reads this as an activist archive,
resonant with unspoken power, and utterly engrossing, a story beyond words.
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Human debris creates and distends an archive’s potential holdings. But what is
human is often ignored or sidelined, shifted to the periphery. We scour archives in
search of significance, noisy unassailable truths that cannot be ignored. And then
read the archive as disappointment when, expecting answers, precise calibrations
of what people declared or thought, we get only schedules, activities, dates, public
information that suggests a calendar rather than that ineffable “what matters.”
But is the potential activism within archives a question of “what matters” or what
does not matter? The activist archive recites that which is quotidian and human,
inescapable in its determination of dread necessity, a part of “the formation and
transformation of statements” (Foucault 1972: 130). These are not litanies of heroism
or hedonism, but the domain of simple domestic verities. Hauling water and
hewing wood. The daily grind’s repetition. Eating, sleeping, excreting. Cooking,
washing and paying bills, the management of survival, a space in which to perform
the human animal as decently as possible. Such a definition might seem reductive,
elemental. In fact, it is in such insignificant detritus that the archive becomes most
activist, most clearly evocative of desire and its fulfilment, most provocative in its
insistence that questions must be asked.
Take the matter of laundry. Both an activity and a noun (the heap of soiled
clothing it suggests), the portmanteau of laundry declares itself so ordinary as
to be ridiculous, a matter of no importance, laughable if laudable. But within
the subtext of laundry resides a potential motion that bespeaks far greater an
effect than nettoyage and its perfunctory accomplishment. Laundry performs a
paradigm of Derrida’s nomological principle; nothing “acts” more powerfully than
the impression of such an activity (Derrida 1996: 16). But illegitimate as domestic
work often is, it requires activist excavation. Here archives provide fragments of
connection, fragments that effect a bright if chaotic mirroring of conductivity.
Lixiviaticity surely cannot measure civilization and its sombre recitations of
achievement and advancement. Or is lixiviation perhaps more than a mere
reflection of bourgeois localism, as David Simpson has insisted in his discussion
of the culture of domesticity (Simpson 1996: 111)? Laundry, as a metonymic icon,
can be read as both ultimately local and ultimately plural and global, a pragmatic
matrix that crosses from the spectacular to the intensely private, but even then,
hardly worthy of an archive. We are prone to dismissing the “fecund temporality
of ‘the lived experience’” (117) as being not quite resonant enough to matter.
But laundry and its doing argues that such “microhistories” (Davis 1992: 160)
cannot be so easily relegated to irrelevant household chore. Roland Barthes says,
“For what weighs down the basket is not wet laundry but time, history, and how
to represent such a weight as that” (Barthes 1973: 200). Only an archive could
represent the potential of such weight, inspiring its construction and practice, and
suggesting that the recrudescent pragmatic is now potentially the most activist of
archives.
Clearly, this is the most activist archive of all, the archive of work subsumed by
history, politics and economics so that those grander gestures would deny this
archive its probity. Yet, laundry bears the weight of more than mere cleanliness. It is
a cultural apparatus, an underground maneuver, the most intimate of the personal
and private, the origin of murky water, drowning, baptism, civilization and all its
markers. It relates to the question of women and their characters, whether cunning
or courageous, desperate or inventive, and to the documents that show them doing
TOPIA 20
Imagine these archival scatterings. At the turn of the 20th century, in most cities
in western Canada, Chinese laundries and houses of ill repute had delivered every
week an equal number of barrels of clean water. Both the enjoyment and eradication
of “filth” required similar amounts of that desirable but difficult to access element.
No taps or running hot and cold, no easy access to soap or extra clothes meant
that these barrels of water were worth gold. This water, hauled from a potentially
none-too-clean river, inflects the grammar of presentation and appearance, of
commodity and consumption, of class and economic means. Water then, as water
is soon to be again, was a precious resource, expensive, not readily available, but
necessary to carry out the work required by work, an archive in process. In fact, the
recitation of the self in time and space is compounded by the multiple shells that
comprise that performance: the body, its covering and its outward manifestation
of life as archive. The water used to perform ablutions—dishwashing, cooking,
cleaning, child-bathing, laundry—becomes its own burden, carried in and
then carried out all over again, provoking a text of repetition that refuses the
designation of insignificance at the same time as it must be insignificant to be
such scantily rewarded drudgery; an archive of what is forgotten.
163
laundry at a time when the job was no picnic. And it becomes a performance for
men, determined either to demonstrate their proficiency at domestic work, or
to persuade a soft-hearted woman that she is needed more than she knows. The
archive here is indeed Derrida’s archive fever, “an insistent impression through the
unstable feeling of a shifting figure, of a schema, or of an in-finite or indefinite
process” (Derrida 1996: 29). Within that impression, the ardent or activist affiliations of concrete materials insist on their own significance.
It is often said that the past is a foreign country. From archival intonations we learn
instead that the past is an amazing destination, an exotic holiday, a subterranean
prediction, and a haunting echo of the present. The astonishing power of the past
is indisputable, but the archives that can recover that past do not yet receive the
respect they warrant. The power that archivists must protect and defend is elusive,
gravid with the forgetfulness of the future. Our need to remember the traces of
the past may manifest itself too late for us to be able to remember. As Derrida has
so evocatively summarized:
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the question of the archive is not ... a question of the past. It is not the
question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our
disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a
question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a
response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. (36)
The question of a response is the activist seed within every archive, a seed prepared
to germinate and grow a tomorrow of what can be said and what can be analyzed.
But as Derrida declares, it is the breakdown of memory, not the dream of an a
priori answer that enables that activism.
One of the most-studied long poems in Canadian literature grew from an archive.
Robert Kroetsch’s delicious and influential Seed Catalogue was inspired by a lowly
seed catalogue that he discovered in the Glenbow Museum. He writes about that
finding on the book’s dust cover:
[w]hat has come to interest me right now is what I suppose you call the
dream of origins. Obviously, on the prairies, the small town and the farm
are not merely places, they are remembered places, even dreamed places.
When they were the actuality of our lives, we had realistic fiction, and we
had almost no poetry at all. Now, in this dream condition, as dream-time
fuses into the kind of narrative we call myth, we change the nature of the
novel. And we start, with a new and terrible energy, to write the poems of
the imagined real place. (Kroetsch 1977)
Here is Derrida’s “question of the future” shaped into “archival violence” (Derrida
1996: 7), here is Foucault’s a priori, “not a question of rediscovering what might
legitimize an assertion, but of freeing the conditions of emergence of statements
... the principles according to which they survive, become transformed, and
disappear” (Foucault 1972: 127). In another long poem by Robert Kroetsch, The
Ledger, the archive is freed by the ledger of a family business. Its first lines are
telling:
the ledger survived
because it was neither
human nor useful (Kroetsch 1980: n.p.)
There, then, is a mantra for the archivist, a possible activism (“neither human
nor useful”) to counteract this pragmatic and disposable culture. Humans do
not survive—we become dust and ashes soon enough. What persists is not even
what is useful, for what is useful is inevitably destroyed; because it is well used
it disintegrates (witness textile curators who note that Sunday-best clothes are
saved, but work clothes seldom make it to collection). Archivists and researchers
alike now face the terrible demise of what is not useful, details and stories that
remark what we might be, the secret elements of a nation’s character. The last
line of defence then is to preserve and to cherish that which is NOT useful, the
metaphysic of our culture and its sad and tattered and ineffably inspiring and
activist remnants.
I am deeply grateful to Robyn Read for her invaluable observations and suggestions,
especially on Benjamin and the distinctions between collections and archives.
References
Barthes, Roland. 1973. Mythologies. Trans. A. Lavers. London: Paladin.
Benjamin, Walter, Gershom Gerhard Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno. 1994. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cohen, Leonard. 1969. On Hearing a Name Long Unspoken. In Selected Poems. Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. 1992. Stories and the Hunger to Know. Yale Journal of Criticism
5(2): 159-63.
Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Religion and Postmodernism.
Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge, and The Discourse on Language.
Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon.
Gefter, Philip. 2008. Type in “Native American” and Search (Someday) 13 Million Photos. New York Times, 12 March 2008, http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt
.html?tntget=2008/03/12/arts/artsspecial/12photos.html. Accessed August 2008.
Kroetsch, Robert. 1977. Seed Catalogue. Winnipeg: Turnstone Press.
———. 1980. The Ledger. Ilderton, ON: Brick/Nairn.
Marx, Ursula, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz and Erdmut Wizisla, eds. 2007. Walter
Benjamin’s Archive. Trans. Esther Leslie. London and New York: Verso.
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Note
165
Simpson, David. 1996. The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Strausbaugh, John. 2008. Coin. Smile. Click! New York Times, 14 March 2008. http://
select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?tntget=2008/03/14/arts/14expl.html. Accessed August 2008.
White, Hayden. 1987. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wizisla, Erdmut. 2007. Preface. In Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs. Trans.
Esther Leslie, edited by Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz and Erdmut
Wizisla, 1-6. London: Verso.
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Anouk Lang
Creative Advocates: Art, Commitment and
Canadian Literary History
In 1933, one of the Depression’s years of greatest deprivation, a letter crossed the
Atlantic from Montreal requesting four books from a bookseller in Cambridge,
England: “New Signatures (Hogarth Press), Democracy and Crisis by H. J. Laski
(1933), Poems by Spender (1933) and Where Stands Socialism Today (essays by
Laski et al. 1933).”1 The request was sent by F. R. Scott, a poet still unpublished
in book form. The list is a suggestive one. It intersperses two commentaries on
democracy and socialism with a volume from the Hogarth Press, a publisher with
strong associations with the Bloomsbury group and other canonical modernists,
and a book of poems by an author associated with a later and more socially
conscious wave of British modernism.
Moreover, the Hogarth Press title is echoed by New Provinces, the collection which
Scott and A. J. M. Smith would publish—at a financial loss—several years later
(Finch et al. 1936). Modern politics and modern literature are of equal interest to
the Anglophile Scott who seeks to find them not in Canada, nor even in the U.S.,
but in England. It is also interesting that he does not choose a London bookstore
but rather one in Oxbridge, the site of his initial exposure to Fabian socialism and
the location where many of his significant friendships and social contacts had
been made a decade earlier as a Rhodes scholar. Though he was deeply concerned
intellectually at this point in his life with the causes and ramifications of economic
inequity, Scott’s letter suggests that during a time of economic downturn and
widespread suffering, he is not himself materially affected, sending for books to be
mailed to him by international post from a location whose privilege is a reminder
of his own socio-economic position and education. Scott’s letter can be read as
encapsulating one of the central tensions playing out between modernist literary
activity and political activism. Those engaging with the difficulties of modernist
writing are likely to belong to an elite, in terms of the leisure time necessary for
reading and writing, financial stability and the requisite educational training in
the codes of high culture. However, membership in this kind of elite is not always
compatible with the capacity to see the need for—and the inclination to agitate
for—social change.
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Scott’s twin careers across social activism and literature revealed by this letter
are documented in more than twenty-two metres of archival materials held at
Library and Archives Canada, and in fonds in other institutions. He occupies
multiple positions in 20th-century Canadian history: a poet, a lawyer, an educator,
an activist for social and political causes and a public intellectual who for many
years set himself against the political powers of the day. As an Anglo-Canadian
in French Canada, Scott felt his minority status keenly, and his distance from the
Montreal and Quebec authorities was exacerbated by his civil rights work, most
notably the legal battles he fought against the Duplessis provincial government.
He acted as legal counsel in the cases of Switzman v. Elbling (a case testing
Quebec’s “Padlock law”), Roncarelli v. Duplessis and the obscenity trial against
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, all of which he won.2
Being a professor rather than a practitioner of law, Scott did not plead many
legal cases, but those he did were significant victories for freedom of expression
and minority rights (those of Communists and Jehovah’s Witnesses). Politically,
he was a socialist of a Fabian rather than a communist cast, helping to found
the League for Social Reconstruction, a progressive discussion group in 1931
advocating social reform out of which eventually arose the C.C.F.3 Scott did
not run for office but did a great deal of work behind the scenes for the party,
undertaking administration, drafting policy and writing books and articles which
argued for the centralization of government in order to establish social reforms
such as the minimum wage and a more equitable taxation system. His writings
on democratic socialism give something of a sense of the profound upheavals
occurring across different spheres of life in 1930s and 1940s Canada, and the
potential renewal which he and other like-minded young idealists saw as their
responsibility to help bring about. In a section of Make This Your Canada entitled
“The Rebirth of Democracy,” for example, Scott wrote:
We are living to-day in a period of revolutionary change. Two world wars
and a world economic depression have occurred within the space of one
generation. Many empires and nations have been overthrown; economic
systems have collapsed and been transformed. Social experiments of new
and startling kinds are everywhere being tried. […] The pace of social
change has been accelerated beyond all experience, and we can be sure of
only one thing—that we can never go back to our old ways of living or our
old habits of thought. (Lewis and Scott 1943: 187)
In this essay, I bring together some findings from Scott’s archive to present a more
rounded picture of the significance of this “pregnant doggerel,” to give a brief
glimpse into how it was seen by others, to use this information to rethink certain
aspects of Canadian modernism and to consider what is involved in using the
archive for research into cultural studies. By examining Scott’s dual commitment
to poetry and politics, bringing his activism and his poetic output into closer
dialogue and sketching the points of tension and engagement that result, my intent
is to flesh out some of the detail of the encounter between modernist aesthetics
and engaged praxis Canadian literature. Given that Scott has come to occupy
a position of some prominence the history of modernism in Canada, and that
literary criticism, considered more broadly, tends to conceptualize modernism by
reference to its conservative or reactionary proponents,5 Scott offers something of
a compelling test case. Attending to the tensions generated by the combinations
of his literary work and his political convictions can, I contend, tell us some
important things about how modernism in Canada has been, and continues to be,
understood, and how this perception has been influenced by archive holdings.
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Among the references to the detrimental elements of modern life—world war,
economic depression, destructive weapons—there is nonetheless a sense of
energetic optimism of being on the cusp of a better future. The accompanying
conviction, that “old habits of thought” have to change, runs parallel to the
impulse that informs the kind of cultural production that, seeking to change old
habits of perception and representation, falls under the rubric of modernism. And
here, Scott’s literary career comes back into view: in addition to his activist work,
he was also seen as one of Canada’s founding literary modernists, largely through
his association with the McGill Group, a group of young Montreal-based male
poets who met at McGill in the 1920s and who worked on several publications
together.4 Whether or not Scott fits the description of “Canadian modernist”
unproblematically, he is generally understood by literary critics to be a modernist
poet. As well as writing in the kind of stylized and semantically opaque manner
visible in texts such as “Laurentian Shield” (1981: 58) and “Impressions” (207),
however, he also produced poems whose style is not so easily assimilable to a
modernist aesthetic. These poems, which he himself termed “pregnant doggerel,”
address social and economic inequities by employing a degraded kind of social
realist mode. Ranging from mordantly sardonic to outraged, these texts employ a
regular metre and a straightforward rhyming scheme to rail against injustice and
corruption and the capitalist system causing them.
169
As Freshwater observes, the archive has become increasingly attractive to
researchers in cultural studies, who are driven in part by academia’s need for
ever new material to produce original work (2003: 729, 732). She cautions,
however, against falling into the trap of discredited methodological approaches
“underpinned by unreconstructed forms of positivistic authentication and pseudoscientific legitimization” (730) in the attempt to legitimize one’s research as
sufficiently original. The process of reconstructing meaning from archive research
is better conceptualized as “a practice of cultural production” (Pearson and Shanks
2001: 11, qtd. in Freshwater 2003: 739). Evident in this practice is the impulse to
excavate details from the archive which can help to recuperate the voices and the
work of those whom literary history may have previously passed over.
The first intriguing feature to note about the pregnant doggerel poems is that
they have largely dropped from literary critical view.6 Sometimes this was because
Scott chose not to publish them, as with the following scraps of sardonic verse
lambasting federal and provincial politics of the 1930s which he gathered with
others under the name “The Auto-Anthology of F. R. Scott,” housed in the
Queen’s University Archives:
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Political Doggerel7
I
The politics of Billy King
Make honest blood to boil.
His Omissions are staggering,
His Commissions are Royal.
II
Duplessis, with the Rede in view,
Begged Ottawa to Padlock too;
So Mr. King, with ready tact,
Adopted the War Measures Act.
And now Duplessis finds, worse luck,
He’s more subversive than Tim Buck.
III
Quebec Elections
(1939)
Duplessis became a Communist,
The Communists became pro-Hitler.
Westmount became Liberal,
Godbout became God.
It is entirely understandable that Scott opted not to bring these texts into public
view: with their references to a set of highly specific political coordinates, they
are not readily comprehensible by readers outside the context of Quebec politics
of the 1930s. However, their specificity provides a useful contrast to the doggerel
that Scott did elect to put into public circulation, suggesting that it was perhaps
the wider applicability of the scenarios described in particular pieces of pregnant
doggerel that merited their continued exposure in print. This is most notable in
“Social Notes,” the title given to several collections of tiny vignettes about suffering,
injustice and corruption, first printed in the Canadian Forum in the 1930s, which
Scott subsequently reprinted in various forms four times over the next five
decades—in Overture (1945), The Eye of the Needle (1957), Selected Poems (1966)
and Collected Poems (1981). Unlike the “Auto-Anthology” poems, Scott himself
clearly felt that “Social Notes” was significant, to the point of making it one of
his most anthologized poems. Literary critics, however, have exhibited very little
interest in it. Brian Trehearne, for example, has been very critical of the doggerel,
and of Scott’s biographer Sandra Djwa for failing to flag its shortcomings: “Much
of the Scott canon is embarrassing. Scott’s 1930s satiric squibs at the expense of
capitalism could have been criticized on aesthetic grounds much more firmly than
Djwa has done” (Trehearne 1989b). Examining Letters from the Mackenzie River,
D. M. R. Bentley is effusive over the “bathetic lack of subtlety” in one “lamentable
passage,” and, later, “another paroxysm of bathetic over-determination” (Bentley
2005: 30-31).
Come and see the vast natural wealth of this mine.
In the short space of ten years
It has produced six American millionaires
And two thousand pauperised Canadian families. (65)
The diction is prose-like and the lines irregular, and there is no complexity to
the sarcasm. The doggerel mode itself is functioning as a trope here: it represents
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The most glancing analysis of the doggerel poems is sufficient to show why
they have not sustained the same level of critique as Scott’s more celebrated and
carefully stylized poetry. There is no complexity or ambiguity at all to the meaning:
no figurative depth, no metaphorical possibilities to be excavated and weighed up
against each other. The predictability of the rhyme at the end of many of the lines
serves to emphasize the extent to which specialist literary training is not required
to identify the text’s substantive content. Rather than categorizing this poetry as
“embarrassing,” though, I find it intriguing for what it suggests about the putative
division between commitment and high art that Scott appears to have felt, and
for the questions this division raises about why a poet identified as a modernist
might find it necessary to drop his difficult, stylized mode when writing about
highly politicized subject matter. The doggerel is evidently a much more efficient
vehicle for the transmission of political messages where only one interpretation
of a socio-economic inequity is desirable. “Social Notes I, 1932” (65-67), one
permutation of the “Social Notes” collection, furnishes multiple examples of this.
Each of its vignettes employs the same trope again and again, to the point of
tedium. An ostensibly positive image is set up, only to be undermined in a few
lines pointing out the unethical or unjust reality behind the facade:
171
not only bad poetry, but corrupt language and the fraudulence of rhetoric more
generally. With their meanings on the surface, these doggerel poems resist
interpretation: they speak against the interplay of multiple meanings where
human dignity and gross economic inequity is at stake.
A further difference between Scott’s doggerel and the rest of his poetry is that
the former functions at the level of the affective in a way the latter rarely does.
While poems such as “Social Notes” present the ravages of the Depression crudely
and unflinchingly, Scott’s more stylized poetry is unable to carry the weight of
abjection, trauma, injustice or corruption. His carefully constructed poems about
dying women make the point: these employ metaphor and poetic techniques to
represent death, and by aestheticizing it they alleviate its horror. As the narrator’s
mother dies, “[t]he root wherein we joined” is “at last uprooted” (“Bedside” 170);
while in another poem, a woman “dies back to earth like any flower” (“To Joan”
156).8 The death of a woman in a hospital bed surrounded by friends is the kind
of abjection that Scott can mitigate through metaphor with relative ease. It is
death or misery brought on by social inequality that is somehow beyond the
reach of troping, and which makes Scott discard his stylized mode for one which
renounces metaphor and rhetorical artifice.
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172
Elsewhere, the form of the doggerel poems marks a collision between aesthetics
and politics. “Audacity” (213-15) is bereft of any formal organizing principle or
tropes: prose-like language is used to discourse upon the corruption and injustice
visible in Canada, and interpretations other than the surface meaning of the poem
are limited:
You may stand in awe at the audacity of journalists, twisting the news
items by headline and rewrite, blanking out truth,
Ponderously laying down the conventional wisdom in unconventional
English,
These lines exceed the usual length of poetic lines, which tend to fit on a single
page. The line below is enjambed in Scott’s Collected Poems over three lines as
follows:
Without whom no hospital can be opened, no charitable
campaign launched, no church can engage a preacher and no
university can build a building
The very form suggests that poetry is too restrictive a genre to convey the poet’s
depth of feeling about his subject matter. “St Jean Baptiste Day”9 is another
example from the archive in which apparent shortcomings in the form may be
tied to aspects of the subject matter. The lexical repetition emphasizes the failure
of the “passive crowds” to adequately interpret their situation:
It was a big parade.
The floats were big.
There were big bands.
In the front rank were all the leaders,
Leading,
While behind came all the followers,
Following.
And the passive crowds cheered,
Not recognising the symbols of their servility.
Form also follows function in “The Barons” (74-76), where each pair of rhyming
words is indented and the repetitive monotony of the form helps to bring home
the inevitability of the power imbalance:
Their bread-lines
Take
The men they Break
Their prisons
Seal
The fools who
Squeal.
What the simplicity and banality of the language also convey here is the
one-dimensionality of the situation: the “barons” are unmitigatedly evil, and
the ordinary people under their tyranny unmitigatedly wronged. If poetry is
considered to provide a textual space for the circulation of different hermeneutic
possibilities, then in his Manichean portrayal of the world Scott must turn
poetry into a caricature of itself, in order to use it as a vehicle for meanings
that are non-negotiable. The proliferation of possible meanings associated
with modernism’s polysemic density is, it seems, intolerable when representing
politicized subject matter.
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What is also visible in this poem is a degree of condescension for French Canadian nationalism emblematized by the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day celebrations,
something for which Scott, as a federalist, had little patience. Although Québécois
nationalism was not yet as visible, or as politically forceful as it would be during the
rise of the sovereignty movement in the decades to follow, it was an undercurrent
whose potency Scott recognized and against which he argued vociferously.10 The
doggerel mode can be read here as obscuring his derision for the way ordinary
French Canadians slavishly followed their provincial and religious leaders by
subsuming it under a more “universal” critique of those who blindly follow those
in power.
173
Given the doggerel’s overt resistance to glossing, there is a limit to how far literary
analysis can go in understanding its significance. Another avenue for approaching
these archives is to attempt to establish how the work was received by those other
than literary critics who were familiar with the situations it represented. Seeking
evidence of the doggerel poetry’s life beyond the sphere of the literary, I found
permissions letters in Scott’s archive among the most useful clues. These indicated
that the pregnant doggerel was reprinted in publications whose primary purpose
was not literary and whose stated political sympathies were, not surprisingly, in
line with Scott’s own. He is asked, for example, for permission to reprint the poem
“Efficiency” in a book for the Canadian Council of Education for Citizenship:
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174
Efficiency
The efficiency of the capitalist system
Is rightly admired by important people.
Our huge steel mills
Operating at 25 per cent of capacity
Are the last word in organization.
The new grain elevators
Stored with superfluous wheat
Can unload a grain-boat in two hours.
Marvellous card-sorting machines
Make it easy to keep track of the unemployed.
There isn’t one unnecessary employee
In these textile plants
That require a 75 per cent tariff protection.
And when our closed shoe factories re-open
They will produce more footwear than we can possibly buy.
So don’t let’s start experimenting with socialism
Which everyone knows means inefficiency and waste. (Scott 1935)
The volume in which this poem was to be published was intended to “correspond
in some measure to such volumes as The Pocket Book of America,” and promised to
present “by means of selections from works published already, some idea of the
Canadian scene.”11 This small poem may not represent great literature, but it does
successfully represent something else: “some idea of the Canadian scene” worthy
of adding to the picture of Canada to be held up before the eyes of the world. If
literary criticism values poetry for—among other things—condensing complexity
into a small space, then this is a feature that is also useful for representational, and
nationalistic, purposes. If overtly simplistic in its argument and one-sided in its
critique, the poem presents information with an economy that narrative would
find it difficult to match.
Two more poems from “Social Notes” were requested in 1945 for “an anthology of
Canadian democratic writers”: “Government Help” and “Great Discovery”:
Government Help
After the strike began
Troops were rushed
To defend property.
But before the trouble started
Nobody seems to have bothered
To defend living standards.
Great Discovery
After ten years of research
This great scientist
Made so valuable a discovery
That a big corporation actually paid him $150,000
To keep it off the market. (Scott 1935)
Modern Medicine
Here is a marvellous new serum:
Six injections and your pneumonia is cured.
But at present a drug firm holds the monopoly
So you must pay $14 a shot—or die. (Scott 1932)
Here, the deleterious effects of market forces on healthcare provision are depicted
even more concisely, in four lines; exchange pneumonia for a different disease
such as AIDS and the text retains its force some seventy years later.
While the archive cannot tell us how readers responded to these poems, it
does allow us to glimpse something of how Scott’s contemporaries, who were
in a position to reprint his poems, understood them. These permissions letters
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As with “Efficiency,” it is the economy and almost aphoristic quality of these texts
that is striking. Scott could have written a long, fact-filled tract on the responsibilities
of governments to safeguard its citizens’ standard of living (and in fact did exactly
this in his writings for the CCF), but instead he condensed the irony into six
lines of verse capable of comprehension in the space of a minute. Scott notes on
the request letter that he granted permission, but commented that he assumed
the poems would not appear “under any political auspices or dedications,”12
suggesting that he may have wanted to preserve the wider applicability of the
scenarios described rather than tie them too firmly to a specific time, place, or
position on the political spectrum. A third example, “Modern Medicine,” first
published in the Canadian Forum in 1932 and reprinted in a volume entitled
International Treasury of Leftwing Humor (Editors of Contemporary Publications
1945), supports this move towards attempted universality:
175
demonstrate that the editors of publications with an overtly political purpose—
whose ephemerality means they are not always easily recuperable from libraries—
tend not to be interested in Scott’s more difficult and stylized poetry, even where
its subject matter might render it of interest, as in a poem such as “Laurentian
Shield” which celebrates workers. Conversely, where his work is reprinted in
literary anthologies, the doggerel rarely appears.13 The split between politics and
aesthetics which Scott enacted in his work by means of a sharp disjunction in
poetic style is, then, re-inscribed by others in wider publishing circles. It is a
bifurcation which, we will see, he then attempted to impose on other authors.
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176
As well as the foregrounding of the mimetic capacity of language, Scott’s doggerel
is also significant for what it elects to represent. In the poems mentioned above,
we see portrayed mass production and its replacement of human beings with
machines, the threat of force being used in response to social unrest, science
and technology developing at great speed and market forces proving themselves
detrimental to human wellbeing. Scott’s vignettes are miniatures of the forces
of modernity: those rapid changes that caused massive disruption to life in the
20th century and which constituted, in Marshall Berman’s felicitous phrase, “the
maelstrom of modern life” (Berman 1983: 16). Recognizing that established
poetic techniques, narrative forms, generic conventions and linguistic norms were
entirely inadequate to this new and bewildering moment, modernist artists and
writers swept elements of their cultural heritage aside in order to make over its
constituent elements, an impulse Scott joined with poems such as “Recovery”
(105) and “Trees in Ice” (44). The pregnant doggerel poems evidently do not
make anything new, despite their overt anxieties over modernity. The requests
from politicized publications for permission to republish the doggerel can be
seen, then, as a response to modernity which registers its impact on those not
associated with the cultural side of the movement, modernism.
I want to turn briefly to another committed poet, Dorothy Livesay, who is also
associated with the beginnings of literary modernism in Canada and who furnishes
an instructive contrast. With political convictions even further to the left than
Scott’s, Livesay’s work also contains evidence of the pull between aesthetics and
politics, but the tension manifests itself in different ways. A committed Communist
who worked as a social worker during the lean years of the 1930s, Livesay would
have seen first-hand many of the scenarios described in Scott’s doggerel. Her
first collection, Green Pitcher (1928) has been characterized as imagist, but as the
1930s went on and her political commitment increased, she sought to break from
a “mannered, meticulous modernism” with colonialist overtones in favour of a
social realist mode appropriate to the Canadian context (Wayne and McKinnon
1988: 37).
This can be seen, for example, in this excerpt from her vision of Depression-era
Toronto, “’Queen City’”:
Take off the lid, scatter the refuse far,
Tear down the “WELCOME” from the city-hall.
For you’re not welcome, vagabond, nor you
Old man, nor you, farmlabourer, with sun
Still burning in your face. Burn now with shame
Take to yourself the bread ticket, the bed
On John Street—fifteen cents, GOOD CLEAN
And pluck out all the hungers from your brain. (Livesay 1972: 81)
Looking at Livesay’s retreat from a stylized poetic mode as her commitment to
Communism increased, Irvine notes that she was also sensitive to, and vocal about,
the political implications of language as used by other committed writers:
In any new literature that is rising with the rise of a new class to power
there is much of the old forms and the old words that will be used, even
when the thought behind it is new and revolutionary. We cannot expect
a new way of writing all at once. So we find the writers of these poems
struggling to think the way the worker thinks and yet putting his thoughts
into forms that were used during the nineteenth century. (Livesay 1934: 15,
qtd. in Irvine 1999: 202)
The archive also gives us some insight into how Scott separated art and politics
in his capacity as a cultural gatekeeper, and how Livesay’s choice to reject a
stylized poetic mode resulted in her exclusion from a significant anthology. In
the same year that Livesay composed the review above, Scott and A. J. M. Smith
were planning the anthology referred to at the outset of this essay which would
eventually become New Provinces (Finch et al. 1936). Smith wrote to Scott while
the two men were deciding on the volume’s content and contributors, to suggest—
albeit not with much enthusiasm—that they invite Livesay to join them:
I wish we could get some verse that is definitely politically left wing and at
the same time good poetry. Has Dorothy Livesay anything of this sort? I
am beginning to think we ought to invite her to submit some stuff. After
all, it can’t be any worse than some of the things we’ve got.14
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Livesay’s poetic response to the problem she outlines here—that forms are tainted
by their class provenance—was to change her idiom entirely, rather than shuttle
between modes as Scott did. What these comments also demonstrate is her
explicit attention to the question of the appropriateness of stylized language to
treat politicized subject matter in such a way as to make it accessible to all readers;
her attempt to theorize it and set out guidelines for the use of committed poets
stand in contrast to Scott, who appears not to have addressed this problem in any
of his writings. It is tempting to read this absence in his extensive body of written
commentary as something of a disavowal of modernism’s potential impenetrability
and its lack of utility in failing to make its meanings available to all.
177
In Smith’s request are embedded the assumptions that left wing poetry and good
poetry are usually mutually exclusive categories, but that Livesay is someone in
whom the two come together. Scott’s response, however, takes the two categories
and entrenches the division between them still further. Replying to Smith, he
not only dismissed the idea of including Livesay, but put forward a rationale for
keeping politics so far away from New Provinces that it be consigned to a separate
volume:
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178
I entirely agree with you that we should turn our political interest in
the direction of politically left-wing verse, but I have a feeling that the
publication of this anthology will do more to help us in that direction
than anything else: we shall have got something out of our system and
will be freer to develop the tendencies that there are in the collection. I
have already suggested the idea of a second anthology, entirely concerned
with the social order, to Klein and Pratt, and they wholly support it. Leo
[Kennedy], I think, could and should be influenced in that direction. I am
of the opinion that we should not invite Dorothy Livesay to join us until
we are getting ready for the second volume. I think it is too late now, and
probably not desirable, to attempt to make this anthology into a more
political collection. The very fact that our material is varied both in content
and technique will be a good thing, and might well bring forward some
young people in Canada of whom we have not yet heard.15
Despite claiming to see the value in an anthology with a left-wing bent, Scott
explicitly rejects Livesay because of her politics.16 Moreover, there is a sense of
non sequitur in his rationale: including poems with political subject matter would
increase the variation in the anthology, yet Scott implies that excluding such poems
will ensure the desired variation. The letter suggests that those things which Scott
wanted for this volume—to secure its success, to establish his reputation and
those of a select group of other young men as the new voices of Canadian poetry,
and to bring other like-minded young poets out of the woodwork—would not be
achieved with politicized poetry, and hence the realm of the political had to yield
to the primacy of the aesthetic. In this editorial debate, Scott prevailed. Livesay’s
decision to join the political to the poetic kept her out of this volume, which
came to be seen as one of the earliest collections of Canadian modernist poetry in
English; the second anthology never came to pass. That Scott was something less
than wholeheartedly committed to a second, more politicized volume is supported
by the findings of Kelly (2003), who makes a persuasive case for the theory that
Scott deliberately distanced himself from Livesay and her politics. Associating
himself with a known Communist in print, Kelly suggests, may have had adverse
affects on his political and material success: in conservative Quebec, it was crucial
to both the electoral success of the CCF and his own academic career that he
avoid being perceived as more radically left wing than he was. Scott’s aversion to
mixing modernist art and political commitment extends beyond the limits of his
own work: the archive suggests that he felt it was a combination that could not be
sustained either aesthetically or structurally.
Derrida and Foucault are among those theorists who have shown how crucial
archives are to the functioning of state power, not only in terms of the control
of individual subjects but also for the creation of a sense of national identity and
collective memory (Freshwater 2003: 733). Laying out the etymology of the term
archive at the beginning of Archive Fever, Derrida points to the primacy of the
word’s connection to state power with reference to the magistrate (archon) in whose
residence (arkheion) the official documents of the city were kept (Derrida 1996:
1-2). The authority is invested in them far overreaches the merely administrative,
however: as Richard Harvey-Brown and Beth Davis-Brown point out, archives
enable a sense of moral solidarity by providing a place in which the collective
memory of a nation can be stored and ordered (1998: 17, qtd. in Freshwater 2003:
733), while Featherstone sees in them a technology for the creation of imagined
community (2006: 592). In the context of cultural studies, what is interesting
about research into the archives of literary modernism is what it tells us about
the construction of a cultural formation which was preoccupied with questions
of national identity and the establishment of a specifically Canadian literary
tradition. As Steedman puts it, the lure of the archive derives from “the desire
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The dichotomy I have been elaborating between aesthetics and politics suggests
that Scott’s pregnant doggerel should not simply be passed over as “embarrassing,”
but rather understood as the repressed side of the stylized modernist poetry in his
oeuvre. He was able to employ a modernist mode to celebrate those aspects of
the modern world that he saw as positive: for example the coming into being of
Canada as a nation with a clean slate, “a new soil and a sharp sun” (“New Paths”
37), or the sense of hopefulness and the potential for regeneration following the
war (“Recovery”). But when faced with the negative aspects of modernity—the
dehumanizing potential of technology, the human misery caused by monopoly
capitalism, the increasing repression visited by states upon their citizens—Scott
could no longer use the kind of obscure language that required careful dissection
and analysis. He turned instead to an idiom in which meaning was made instantly
clear. The modernist mode appears to have failed him at exactly the point where
other writers, artists and musicians found it to be instrumental. One could adduce
here such canonical works as Picasso’s Guernica, Schoenberg’s A Survivor from
Warsaw and Joyce’s Ulysses, works of art across different media which demonstrate
the rupturing of convention and the presentation of deliberately dissonant images
or sounds not only to convey, but to emphasize, the fragmentation, dissonance
and even the meaninglessness of modern life. It appears to be Scott’s engagement
with public and political life which caused him to doubt the utility of modernism
as a literary mode for communicating his ideas. This is something which the glib
designation of “Canadian modernist” obscures: he was a poet who utilized the
modernist mode in some of his poems, but revealed its inadequacies in others.
179
to find, or locate, or possess that moment of origin, as the beginning of things”
(2001: 3), and the same desire for the authentically new and entirely original
pervades the endeavours of the young men seeking the “new soil” and “sharp sun”
with which to articulate a new Canadian poetics. Scott and Smith understood
New Provinces as a document testifying to such an originary moment Canadian
culture. Livesay’s exclusion from it suggests that her own politics, which were
closer to communism than socialism, were too disruptive to this self-consciously
foundational moment.
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180
It is the archive, then, rather than the published record of Scott’s works, which
gives a more rounded picture of the significance of his political poetry. It not only
shows what his contemporaries made of his pregnant doggerel poems, and how
they were used and reprinted in political publications, but also suggests that one
aspect of the response to modernity has gone somewhat under the radar. The
inequities, suffering and degradation brought about by the economic upheavals
and class friction of the 1930s weighed heavily on the minds of these poets, and
emerged in their writings in ways which, as I have suggested, gesture towards the
referential inadequacy of the kind of opaque language associated with literary
modernism. However, these material crises and the poems which bear witness
to them have for the most part been passed over by anthologists, critics, and the
writers themselves in favour of poems addressing areas not so firmly grounded
in the realm of the material, in which the impediments to comprehension posed
by formal and linguistic complexity do not clash so obviously with their subject
matter. Perhaps this is not so surprising. Perhaps, as engaged readers and literary
critics, we would rather not think about how those texts, whose esoteric difficulties
best sustain our own activity as expert hermeneuts, are also those which remain,
for many, largely out of reach.
Notes
1. F. R. Scott to Messrs. Bowes and Bowes, 18 March 1933, vol.23, F. R. Scott Fonds,
MG30 D211, Library and Archives Canada. Bibliographic details of these titles are
given in the list of works cited.
2. For an overview of these cases and Scott’s participation in them, see Djwa (1987). See
also Scott (1956).
3. For the basic thrust of the L. S. R.’s policies, see the 1938 volume which Scott co-authored: Democracy Needs Socialism. For a comprehensive description of CCF policy, see
Lewis and Scott (1943).
4. For examples of the importance of the McGill group to narratives of Canadian modernism, see Dudek and Gnarowski (1967); Stevens (1969); Trehearne (1989).
5. See for example Smith (1994), a volume which centres on Pound, Eliot and Yeats.
6. A significant exception to this is the poem “The Canadian Authors Meet” (248),
whose boundary-marking function and criticism of women writers have made it of
interest to feminist scholars and others. Where page numbers are given in brackets after
poem titles, these refer to Scott (1981).
7. “The Auto-Anthology of F. R. Scott,” 105, series II, box 1, F. R. Scott Papers, coll. no.
5021.7, Queen’s University Archives.
8. There are no poems in which dying men are figured in terms of nature: “Last Rites”
(168-69) which portrays the death of Scott’s father, is a meditation on science and
religion.
9. “The Auto-Anthology of F. R. Scott,” 136.
10. See, for example, Scott (1936) and Scott (1942).
11. John D. Robins to F. R. Scott, 16 February 1945, vol. 23, F. R. Scott Fonds.
12. Margaret Fairley to F. R. Scott, 3 May 1945, vol. 26, F. R. Scott Fonds.
13. One exception is The Blasted Pine (Scott and Smith 1972). This anthology’s distance
from the purely literary is, however, signalled by its subtitle, “An anthology of satire,
invective and disrespectful verse.”
14. A. J. M. Smith to F. R. Scott, 15 February 1934, vol. 1, F. R. Scott Fonds.
15. F. R. Scott to A. J. M. Smith, 17 February 1934, vol. 1, F. R. Scott Fonds.
16. For more detail on the gendered aspects to this episode, Livesay’s relationship with
Scott and her exclusion from the canons of Canadian modernism more generally, see
Kelly (2003).
Bentley, D. M. R. 2005. New Styles of Architecture, a Change of Heart? The Architexts
of A. M. Klein and F. R. Scott. In The Canadian Modernists Meet, edited by D. Irvine, 1758. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.
Berman, Marshall. 1983. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity.
London: Verso.
Djwa, Sandra. 1987. The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F. R. Scott. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dudek, Louis, and Michael Gnarowski, eds. 1967. The Making of Modern Poetry in
Canada: Essential Articles on Contemporary Canadian Poetry in English. Toronto: Ryerson
Press.
Editors of Contemporary Publications, eds. 1945. International Treasury of Leftwing
Humor. N. p.: Contemporary Publications.
Featherstone, Mike. 2006. Archive. Theory Culture Society 23(2-3): 591-96.
Finch, R., L. Kennedy, A. M. Klein, E. J. Pratt, F. R. Scott and A. J. M. Smith. 1936. New
Provinces: Poems of Several Authors. Toronto: Macmillan.
Freshwater, Helen. 2003. The Allure of the Archive. Poetics Today 24(4): 729-58.
Harvey-Brown, Richard, and Beth Davis-Brown. 1998. The Making of Memory: The
Politics of Archives, Libraries and Museums in the Construction of the National Consciousness. History of the Human Sciences 11(4): 17-32.
Irvine, Dean. 1999. Among Masses: Dorothy Livesay and English Canadian Leftist
Magazine Culture of the Early 1930s. Essays on Canadian Writing 68:183-212.
TOPIA 20
References
181
Kelly, Peggy. 2003. Politics, Gender and New Provinces: Dorothy Livesay and F. R. Scott.
Canadian Poetry: Studies/Documents/Reviews 53:54-70. http://www.uwo.ca/english/
canadianpoetry/cpjrn/vol53/kelly.htm. Accessed 20 February 2008.
Laski, Harold J. 1933. Democracy in Crisis. London: Allen and Unwin.
Laski, Harold J. et al. 1933. Where Stands Socialism to-Day? [Lectures, by Various Authors,
Delivered to the Fabian Society in 1932]. London: Rich & Cowan.
Lewis, D., and F. R. Scott. 1943. Make This Your Canada: A Review of C.C.F. History and
Policy. Toronto: Central Canada Publishing Co.
Livesay, Dorothy. 1928. Green Pitcher. Toronto: Macmillan.
———. 1934. Review of When Sirens Blow, by Leonard Spier, and We Gather
Strength, by Herman Spector, Joseph Kalar, Edwin Rolfe and S. Funaroff. Masses 2(12):
15-16.
———. 1972. Collected Poems: The Two Seasons. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson.
Pearson, Mike and Michael Shanks. 2001. Theatre/Archaeology. London: Routledge.
Scott, F. R. 1932. An Anthology of Up-To-Date Canadian Poetry. Canadian Forum XII:
290-291.
———. 1935. Social Notes. Canadian Forum XV (174): 220.
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182
———. [‘Quebecer’, pseud.]. 1936. French Canadian Nationalism. Canadian Forum XVI
(184): 12-14.
———. 1942. What Did “No” Mean? Canadian Forum XXII (257): 71-73.
———. 1956. Areas of Conflict in the Field of Public Law and Policy. McGill Law
Journal 3:29-50.
———. 1967. Trouvailles: Poems from Prose. Montreal: Delta Canada.
———. 1981. The Collected Poems of F. R. Scott. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.
Scott, F. R. and A. J. M. Smith, eds. 1972 [1957]. The Blasted Pine: An Anthology of Satire,
Invective and Disrespectful Verse. Toronto: Macmillan.
Smith, Stan. 1994. The Origins of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the Rhetorics of Renewal. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Steedman, Carolyn. 2001. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Stevens, Peter. 1969. The McGill Movement: A. J. M. Smith, F. R. Scott and Leo Kennedy.
Toronto: Ryerson Press.
Spender, Stephen. 1933. Poems. London: Faber & Faber.
Trehearne, Brian. 1989a. Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists: Aspects of a Poetic
Influence. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
———. 1989b. F. R. Scott: An Interpreted Life. Canadian Poetry: Studies/Documents/
Reviews 25. http://www.uwo.ca/english/canadianpoetry/cpjrn/vol25/trehearne.htm. Accessed 23 August 2003.
Wayne, Joyce and Stuart McKinnon. 1988. Dorothy Livesay: A Literary Life on the
Left. In A Public and Private Voice: Essays on the Life and Work of Dorothy Livesay, edited
by L. Dorney, G. Noonan and P. Tiessen, 33-41. Waterloo: University of Waterloo Press.
TOPIA 20 183
Janice Gurney
Evidence of Activism in the Greg Curnoe
Archives
Greg Curnoe should need no introduction anywhere in Canada’s cultural sphere.
It is perhaps a mark of our colonial status that he does. From the early 1960s until
his premature death in 1992, he was one of Canada’s leading artists—and a public
intellectual to the degree that the media allowed artists to play that role. He was
often typecast as a Pop Artist, as his earliest work shared that international idiom.
This hindered the perception of Curnoe’s work, which was less like Pop than
certain strands of Conceptual Art, in its extensive use of text, and of feminist art,
in its reliance on the personal and diaristic. But it may be impossible to categorize
his work using any existing stylistic category.
Curnoe was a radical regionalist, attempting to build a culture by drawing on
what was local, demanding that Canadian universities hire Canadians (rather than
British or American professors and instructors), pushing for copyright control
by artists of their works when they were reproduced, refusing a commission by
Time magazine to do the cover of their Canadian edition. He fought against
censorship, refusing to alter the famous Dorval mural when it was seen as either
anti-American or opposed to the Vietnam war. In the last years of his life, his
work seemed to deepen and assume an additional dimension. His Blue Book #8,
in which he attempts to list everything he was not, and the bookworks, Deeds/
Abstract and Deeds/Nations have come to be particularly admired. As Michael
Snow wrote of the two Deeds works, “His final accomplishment, in fact, is not
what one might call “visual art” at all.... They make an amazing ending to his life”
(Open Letter: 77). Greg Curnoe was killed on November 14, 1992, struck by a
pickup truck while cycling with the London Centennial Wheelers.
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184
Curnoe’s influence was extensive; his effect on artists such as Jamelie Hassan,
Robert Fones, Ron Benner, Dennis Tourbin, Greg Hill, Andy Patton, Ron Martin,
as well me, was enormous. His influence on curators such as Pierre Théberge and
Dennis Reid may have been as profound. I first discovered Curnoe’s work in the
late 1960s when I was an art student at the University of Manitoba. I connected
immediately to how directly the ideas, images and structures in his work conveyed
his way of being in the world. When I met Greg in London, Ontario, in 1985,
through fellow London artists Jamelie Hassan and Ron Benner, the first thing
he wanted to do was take Andy Patton and myself into his studio and share
his contagious enthusiasm for collecting, researching and recording his life. It
does not seem strange, therefore, to see his life displayed in an archive. In fact, it
confirms my sense of him as an artist and a person. There was no private/public
split in his thinking about art and life because he believed art and life were not
separate.
In this paper I will refer to the documentary evidence I found in Curnoe’s archive
that demonstrates the issues upon which he focused his activism. I will begin
by exploring the idea of what I call Curnoe’s “archive of the self ” and how he
used it in his work. It has become clear to me that Curnoe used this self-created
archive as a continuous resource for the content of his work. I will examine
how he expanded this personal archive to include his own research into public
archives—from the records of historical societies to individual memories and the
knowledge of friends that he sought out in order to create work that was both art
and archival document.
An Archive of the Self
When I first began to look at the Greg Curnoe archive at the E. P. Taylor Research
Library and Archives at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in January of 2006,
it seemed to me that he had collected and saved every scrap of paper that could
possibly represent a certain moment in time and be meaningful to him in the
future. After looking longer and in more depth into his archives, however, my
sense of what he saved is quite different. There is continuity in the number of
lists he made and saved over his entire lifetime, in the amount of correspondence
and in the number of journals he kept. But there is a scarcity of papers in the
archives concerning his early activism. For example, I could not find anything
relating directly to his opposition to the war in Vietnam. There are files with
papers that document some of his activist work, but not in the numbers that I
had expected, given my notion that he kept everything. A notable shift occurs
in the documentation of the last few years of his life. These later files bulge with
papers recording the amount of research he did for his Deeds books from the late
1980s to 1992. This raises the question of how well or how complete the archive
documents all of his activities, or the degree to which the archives can be taken
as an accurate representation of Curnoe. It is also possible that he saved more
material as he grew older and, that the archive might be variable in its capacity to
represent him.
His close friend, curator Dennis Reid, made an observation about Curnoe in the
1970s:
Either Curnoe was becoming more involved with historical issues, or I was
noticing his interest more; our serious conversations increasingly focused
on how one can investigate and then record history. He insisted constantly
on the need to make connections, to chronicle events, establish facts,
striving always for objectivity and trying not to rest on judgements. (Reid
2001: 121)
If Curnoe was beginning to pay more attention to historical issues in the 1970s,
then perhaps his archive did change over time. This is something I had never
considered. I assumed that while the person changed, the way or the degree to
which an archive could represent the person did not change, but of course, it
makes no sense to assume that an archive would itself be static.
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From my examination of the archive I discovered that there is very little about
the organization he helped to build, Canadian Artists Representation (CAR)
and its beginnings. I had a sense that Curnoe felt the reasons for the formation
of CAR were self-evident and to be found in some form or other in all his
writings about the rights of artists. There are only two files (in boxes 14 and 23)
that are specifically about CAR and Canadian Artists Representation Ontario
(CARO). On one hand, perhaps he felt that his involvement with these issues was
communal and part of a process that others, such as the co-founder, London artist
Jack Chambers, would record. (The library at the AGO also has the Chambers
archive in its collection.) On the other hand, the amount of material that he
kept from his own research into the history of the land his house was built on is
enormous. Created from sometime in the 1980s until 1992 and containing 75 cm
of text, these papers fill seven boxes with seventy-five files in total. He says in a
letter: “Archaeologists, native historians, and land claims advocates are beginning
to use some of my research” (13/1).1 I think that through his work on this project
Curnoe became a scholar/activist with a much deeper sense of local history.
185
Art and Archive
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186
Curnoe always made it clear that his early artworks were never an illustration of
his activism. At the “Art and Ideology” conference at the University of Ottawa
in 1979, Curnoe presented a paper called “Personal Ideology” in which he said:
“I am far more interested in effective political and social transformation than I
am interested in art that is ‘ideologically correct’....” Although he made art that
was about social issues, it was always personal, connected to what he was reading
or thinking about at the time. The work could take the form of organizing a
demonstration or putting together a petition while making a painting of a bicycle.
Obscure or overlooked things were just as important as current concerns. He
formed The Association for the Documentation of Neglected Aspects of Culture
in Canada (1972-1983) in order to promote the overlooked and ignored art objects
that interested him. In a letter to Curnoe from the curator Pierre Théberge, cofounder and the only other member of the association, Théberge suggests a list
of possible contributors to the Association Review: Max Dean in Calgary (“about
Calgary”); Bruce Parsons in Halifax (“about houses in Newfoundland”); Edith
Goodrich in St. Johns, (“about ‘stuff ’ in Newfoundland”); Louise de Grosbois
in Montreal (“about Quebec”); Raymonde Lamothe and Lise Nantel, both in
Montreal; Pierre Magny in Montreal (“about inventors in Quebec”); Bev Kelly
and Gary Dufour in Regina (“about domestic architecture in Saskatchewan”);
Paul Carpentier, at the Museum of Man in Ottawa; Murray Favro in London
(“about blacksmiths, or small airplane builders”); Henry Saxe in Tamworth,
Ontario (“about a neighbour, a blacksmith and ‘mad’ collector of tools”); Alberta
Gaudet in Moncton (“on Acadian culture”); Greg Curnoe in London (“on
music?, etc.”) and Théberge himself in Ottawa (“possibly on Michael Snow’s
‘Rameau’s Nephew...’ also on a visit to St. Athanase in 1972, etc.”). The activity
of the association began again in 1989 with a grant application to organize an
exhibition. In this application the aim of the association is described as being
“to record and document phenomena which are not regarded as ‘art’ by ‘cultured’
people (other than sometimes as folk art), but which nevertheless are genuine
forms of self-expression” (5/6; 14/13).
Curnoe relied on what I think of as his “archive of the self,” as an ever-expanding
source for the content of his work. He had an intuitive sense about the importance
of making an inventory of the self, responding to the events in the world around
him, documenting his thoughts and changing interests over time. His archive is
full of lists that he made and saved all his life, beginning with things that touched
him immediately and directly. Many of these lists became part of his artworks.
One of the earliest is a text work from 1962 titled Lists of Names of Boys I Grew
Up With, a work that was followed by many others. In fact, some of Curnoe’s own
early material, which is now archival, predates, but also prefigures, the research he
did for his late works, the books Deeds/Abstracts (which traces the ownership of
the land on which his house and studio at 38 Weston Street in London stood)
and Deeds/Nations (which compiles a list, covering the period from 1750–1850,
of every First Nations person who signed treaties that handed over the land in the
London area to the Europeans). I found hand-written notes from as early as 1963
where he recorded the names of various First Nations leaders and their respective
communities from the area around London.
This research forms the structure of Deeds/Abstracts (1995) and Deeds/Nations
(1996), both published after Curnoe’s death. It is important to stress that although
these books appear to be historically objective, they were still very personal. They
emerged directly from his need to know the history of the land on which his
house stood because of a boundary dispute with x-Trax Investments Ltd., which
had purchased the neighbouring property at 34 Weston Street. His research
began with the legal dispute and simply continued, building a complete record
of the occupation and ownership of the land at 38 Weston Street. It details the
habitation of this land with the earliest entry being ca. 8600 BCE and the latest
December 12, 1991: a period of almost 11,000 years.
His research into the history of 38 Weston Street took him into the archives at
the city of London library; the Ontario provincial archives, those at the University
of Western Ontario and a number of archives in the United States. But it also
took him into the earth of the riverbank behind his house. In Curnoe’s archive
there is a note about a dig conducted in his own backyard with two friends, one
a writer, Frank Davey, and one an archaeologist, Neal Ferris (31/11). His eclectic
and non-hierarchical way of collecting historical information mingled completely
different types of knowledge, and created a very different picture of the history of
the London area. In another note from 1992, Curnoe wrote: “I don’t know how
this work will finally take shape, but already this exploration of primary sources,
secondary sources, oral history, family traditions, and the very local landscape is
turning up surprising co-incidences and connections” (33/7).
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Greg Curnoe created his own changing archive by saving the scraps and pieces
that were the evidence of a life being lived. In a sense he acted as his own disorderly
archivist through his life-long activity of collecting and researching. But of course
he did not know that his papers would become an official archive, and had no say
in how the traces of his life would be organized by an archivist. His research for his
Deeds bookworks is intimately connected to his idea of archiving as a way to order
thoughts and record time. He always seemed to rely on some form of research to
make his artwork, using interesting information he came across as the content
of art that was then transformed in his working process. When he came to do
research on the history of his own property, he collected oral histories and went
to historical sources such as the publications of various historical societies and to
public archives. Unlike information that was transformed in the structures of his
previous work, this was raw data that he did not interpret, but only documented
in the form of books.
187
The following is a list of some of the files and their contents that are evidence of
the depth of Curnoe’s immersion in various archives: Box 27 contains (1) A list
of dates and lands deeded to various First Nations between 1747-1836; (2) Some
papers relating to his research about the 38 Weston Street lot and the history of
its first ownership by the Weston family—Curnoe used this research in his large
rubber-stamped text paintings in which he lists the names of the people, such as
the Bartletts and the Knowles, who, at various times, owned the land his house
was built on. Other files in the same box contain: (3) drafts of the manuscripts
for Deeds begun in 1991 and continuing into April of 1992, which begin to put
together all his research into chronological order; (4) a copy of a cover page filed
with the Ontario Ministry of Culture on March 17th 1992; (5) raw notes and
information on the archaeology of the London area given to him by his friend
Michael Spence, who taught in the Anthropology department at the University
of Western Ontario, and (6) a copy of Early Woodland Occupations in Southern
Ontario.
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Another box (29) contains: (1) a file titled “Indices/Photocopies/Newsletters/
Notes,” with a list of the contacts he made with people who could help him with
his research; (2) copies of the papers of Sir William Johnson from the archives of
the state historians in Albany, New York; (3) information from Philip Monture,
director of the Six Nations Land Research Office in Ohsweken, Ontario, who
became one of Curnoe’s main sources of information; (4) information from
the Michigan State University Museum in East Lansing, from the Archives of
Ontario and from the London Chapter of the Ontario Archaeological Society
and (5) photocopies from the Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society from
1886, 1897 and 1907-1909.
In the archive of an activist/artist we expect to find the records of that activism,
as is the case with the limited number of papers from the early years in Curnoe’s
archive. But the activist issues documented in these papers did not directly
become the form of the art he made at that time. It was only later in life, when his
interest turned to the history of the occupation of his own land in London, that
his activism and art began to merge more directly. The extensive information that
Curnoe unearthed became the material for both the Deeds books and a number
of text paintings—visible examples of the same thought process, though not the
same art process, that he maintained throughout his working life. In turn, his
research into this history became in itself another form of activism, uncovering
information about land claims and treaties that both Aboriginal peoples and
historians could use to their benefit. Much of Curnoe’s political work now took
place through his own collecting of historical documents that have become almost
an archive within his archive at the AGO.
When Curnoe began his research into the history of his land, his attitude toward
activism and art changed. His research became his work in a much more direct
way. In a letter to Gary Dufour, curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery, dated
August 4, 1992, he describes five text paintings from the series called DEEDS
saying “This group of works is a list of the occupants of the lot we live on from
10,000 BC to the present” (13/2). It is as if his personal history had expanded to
include a time before he existed. He was able to place himself in this continuum
and allow his work to become part of this longer history. He made books and
paintings that used material from outside his personal archive. In return these
objects and records became part of a larger, more public archive.
It is unusual for an artist to apply for funding for scholarly research from the
Visual Arts section of the Canada Council, which Curnoe did on March 20,
1992. In the application he lists the museums and research centres he had visited
or intended to visit to carry out his research. “My research has taken me to the
Baby Museum in Windsor, the Research Centre on Walpole Island, the London
Room at the London Public Library and the Weldon Library Special Collections
at Western University. I intend to visit the Burlington Collection of the Detroit
Public Library” (13/1). He also speaks about gathering information “from long
time residents of our neighbourhood, from residents of the reserves in this
immediate area, and from archaeologists and historians” (13/1). In this file is a
letter to friends Bob and Yvonne dated June 4, 1992 in which he talks about his
continuing research. “Tomorrow I go to Toronto to do research at the Archives
of Ontario for the book I am writing about our house and the history of the land
we live on” (13/1). It is in this letter that Curnoe adds the observation referred to
above. “Archaeologists, native historians, and land claims advocates are beginning
to use some of my research. Now all I have to do is to make some good work with
it” (13/1).
In 1991/1992 Curnoe received a Canada Council travel grant. In a draft of a
letter to Canada Council officer Myriam Merette, dated August 10, 1992, he
TOPIA 20
The books in particular raise the difficulty of making the distinction between
archive and art. In a letter dated March 10, 1992, the Canada Council refused
his request to submit his book Deeds/Abstracts: The History of a London Lot to the
Public Readings Jury. It was deemed to be “not eligible because it wasn’t published
by a professional publisher. Furthermore, to be eligible a book must lend itself
to public reading which is not the case with Deeds Abstracts”(13/1). This is an
instance of bureaucratic thinking of the kind that Curnoe continually struggled
against. In a paper entitled “Why did the Canadian cross the road? To get to
the middle” that he read at the 1991 University of Guelph Conference, Canada:
Break Up or Restructure?, he complains, “the Canada Council is becoming more
bureaucratized and less able to take chances…” (4/6). He ends by saying “I have
recently been made aware of the large amount of archaeological research being
carried out in Southern Ontario. It is unpublicized developments like this that
enrich our culture daily” (4/6).
189
writes to say “I would like to use the travel grant to; drive or fly to Ottawa to work
on DEEDS (a work in progress) at the Public Archives of Canada in August
or September…” (13/2). He states he has been working by phone with archivist
Trish Maracle who “has said that a trip to Ottawa is the only way to gain access to
original documents in cases where microfilm is unsatisfactory” (13/2). This letter
was written approximately a month before he died. It is clear that Curnoe had not
yet finished his research and planned to continue for some time to come.
Time and history are not the same, though history obviously is built on the
human experience of time. In Curnoe’s work, it is perhaps possible to distinguish
one from the other, but over the course of his work they blur into each other,
as the time-scale recorded in his work stretches out. By the end of his life, his
sense of time had lengthened enormously, and it seems to have shifted from the
more immediate passage of time to something we can clearly recognize as history,
periods of time so long that no one individual could ever experience them.
Connected to Place
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190
If Curnoe’s activism and artwork were never really separate things, it is perhaps
because both emerged from the process of recording his daily life, and because
both were centred on a notion of the central importance of place. In “Notes—on
the North Wall” for Region Magazine in 1967, he described what was on a wall in
his studio. The list included “Map of City of London drawn by G. R. C. 1960 and
Print of old map of London C. 1850, 4 topographical maps—Lucan East Half,
Lucan West Half, St. Thomas East Half and St. Thomas West Half.” He also listed
“Clipping with photo from Toronto Globe about Trotsky’s Exile—(yellowed and
brittle) and Anarchist youth poster—Red and Black diagonal” (26/7).
Throughout his lifetime Curnoe fought to make his hometown a better place but
was continually frustrated by London’s conservative mentality. This continuing
conflict comes across in his writings about London over many years. In 1982 he
said:
I have strong feelings about where I was born, about living in a relatively
small city slightly over 260 km away from a large one, about living in a
sparsely populated large country beside a heavily populated large one. I
live in an extended family and that makes me think a lot about the shared
culture in my community contrasted with other cultural activities that only
a small number of people are aware of. (3/2)
In an interview with Dennis Reid in the first issue of Provincial Essays in 1984
called “A Conversation Following the Reading of Christopher Dewdney’s
‘Oregionalism: Geocentrism & the Notion of Originality” Curnoe argued that in
fact it was easier to dissent in a smaller city like London. “There is the notion of
conservatism and smugness, and there is the reaction to that. There is the sense of
a polarized city, where the smugness and the mediocrity are very, very apparent.
It’s something you can be quite easily opposed to, where it may not be as clear in a
larger city with a lot of sophisticated people in it” (Curnoe and Reid 1984: 20).
Greg Curnoe chose to go against the conventions of an ordinary London life
simply by becoming an artist. As a student at the Ontario College of Art, he also
rebelled against the current conventions of painting in Toronto (which might
be typified as the painterly abstraction of Painters Eleven) by working with text
and image in comic book formats. He admired and was influenced by the Beats,
especially in his early writing. His interest in Jack Kerouac’s writing style was
also evident when, as an early adopter of the computer in 1969, he had a terminal
linked to a computer from the University of Western Ontario installed in his
studio, which he used to record his thoughts and perceptions as they poured out
in a text of unedited stream-of-consciousness.
In many ways Curnoe can be seen as typical of the avant-garde—except in being
separated from “the people” by the art of living. He says in a statement for an
exhibition catalogue for the Norman MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, in 1967,
that after high school, when he was at Beal Tech in London, “I started to become
aware of what I was rejecting which was my environment. I gradually decided
that I did not want to leave it” (26/7). This is a fundamental difference in his
relationship to home, and it is here that his activism was connected to place.
As with the subject matter of his art, his activism began with the local and did not
stray far from the issues that had a direct impact on his life. His activism made
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There are several points about the Beats that are important to understanding
Curnoe as artist and as activist. First, the Beat counter-culture was primarily
literary. Secondly, the Beats as a counter-culture rejected conventional politics.
Lastly, the importance of improvisation nurtured by the Beats was also crucial.
Curnoe took this up when he co-organized the first “happening” in Canada, in
1962. But unlike the Beats, Curnoe never removed himself from what he felt
was “real life”—popular culture, the local and his family. In this way, he was
unconventionally conventional, when most artists, or at least most male artists,
were conventionally unconventional. Curnoe’s “art of living” was not one that
separated him from bourgeois institutions such as marriage, home and family life.
Unlike the Beats and many other artists, he involved his family in discussions of
ideas of importance to him during his entire lifetime. In a letter in 1992 to his
son Galen, he tells him “I’m thinking of taking a course in Ojibwa” (13/2). His
work was routinely diaristic, even in times when the personal was not yet seen as a
subject worthy of serious artwork. In 1962, Curnoe may have made the first artists’
books in Canada: The Coke Book, about his job as a helper on a truck delivering
Coca Cola, and Rain, about a day of rain in his life. In his work he represented
every member of his family—Percy, their bird, and Rufus, their dog—taking note
of the concerns of each (squirrels, in Rufus’s case).
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connections to other people and drew them into the area of his concerns. Much of
this activism remained invisible, taking place through conversation. A phone call
from Greg was usually a call to action about some issue that needed to be addressed.
Traces of these activities are found in his archive. There is a file that contains a
handwritten statement titled “Coalition—CAR Copyright Demonstration AGO
1988” read by Greg on the steps of the Art Gallery of Ontario (3/8). I remember
being there along with Andy Patton, Burton Cummings, Michael Snow and
many others.
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One thing that stands out when looking through the archive is how many names
of prominent Canadians are listed in his many correspondence files. Curnoe knew
a lot of people and had the ability to mobilize a great number of them from
various areas of Canadian culture to join or to lend their support to many of the
causes he fought for. There is a wide range of names from different segments of
Canadian society attached to a petition from 1971 to W. O. Twaits, Chairman,
Imperial Oil Ltd. that demands that they grant New Canada Publications the
right to freely reprint C. W. Jeffery’s drawings. They include poets Milton Acorn
and Dennis Lee, a number of people attached to universities, the organization
for the Canadianization of Canadian Universities, the 85% Canadian Quota
Campaign, various union members and some very well-known political names
such as Gerald Godin, John Sewell and Mel Watkins. This petition was also used
as a leaflet for a demonstration held on May 27 in Ottawa (27/1).
In The Canadian Forum of May 1976 Curnoe published “Feet of Clay Planted
Firm In USA” in response to an article in the autumn 1975 issue of artscanada.
In the first draft of his response, he wrote, “The autumn 1975 issue of artscanada
is in a word—a piece of shit” (27/1). The criticism in the published version is a
more tempered, yet still scathing, criticism. Artscanada had hired an American
journalist, Dale McConathy, to write on Canadian art. McConathy lists some
“immodest proposals” in which “he calls for closer contact with the U.S.” (27/1).
Curnoe points out that at the University of Toronto, Canadian art is still not highly
valued in the Art History program, due in part to the hiring of many Americans,
and leading to “a U.S. outlook ... in the future programs of our art galleries and art
schools” (27/1). He ends his article with a few of his own “immodest proposals,”
number 3 of which is “Declare a national moratorium on the hiring of any
American nationals by our public galleries, universities, community colleges, or
CEGEPS” (27/1).
Curnoe’s founding, usually with other people, of so many counter-institutions
is perhaps almost stereotypically Canadian, demonstrating his reliance on
institutions rather than the American ideology of “self-made” individuals in
competition with each other. It is typical of Curnoe that the only party he joined
was the Nihilist Party, a party that he founded. One file has a list by first name
only of the first dozen card-carrying members of the Nihilist Party (13/8). The
party urged people to have no party, no vote and no democracy. “Vote as you like
but don’t vote” (13/8). This file also has a copy of an article from the London Free
Press from September 19, 1963, describing a Saturday night banquet and ball
held at a secret location by “The London Nihilist Party, a loosely organized antiorganization organization…” (13/8).
The Nihilist Spasm Band that Curnoe helped start in 1965 is a still active group
of anarchic individuals making non-music. In the band, music and activism
seemed to fuse, both emphasizing the individual and anarchic impulses rather
than classical order in either art or politics. Before he died, he was planning a
performance of the band with his son Owen as the producer (18/10).
The following is a list of counter-institutions founded by Curnoe and others:
1961
1962
1963
1965
1966
1967
1972
1973
1984
1988
1990
Curnoe’s constant invention of both pragmatic and fanciful institutions has been
continued by his friend, London artist Jamelie Hassan, who founded the Centre
for Baalqisian Studies as a way of promoting political and artistic activities she
values.
In the drafts of an unpublished paper from 1992 titled “Five Co-op Galleries in
Toronto and London from 1957 to 1992,” Curnoe wrote:
20/20 Gallery in London was one of the models used by the Canada
Council when funding for alternative galleries was developed. It was
consciously set up as an alternative to the local public art gallery ... in
opposition to it, and consciously exhibited work that would never have
appeared there or in the local commercial galleries.... It paid artists’ fees
during its existence, before a fee system was proposed by Canadian Artists
Representation. Jack Chambers and other artist members of the board of
20/20 Gallery were the founders and early members of CAR and later put
into national practice policies that were first introduced locally. (4/7)
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Region Magazine
Region Gallery
Nihilist Party of Canada Nihilist Spasm Band 20/20 Gallery
Canadian Artists Representation
The Association for the Documentation
of Neglected Aspects of Culture in Canada
Forest City Gallery
Provincial Essays
Save London—Talbot Street Coalition
The Journal of Art Criticism Criticism
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“I am unable to separate art politics from art economics.” (2/10)2
Much of his activist energy was directed to issues of artists’ self-representation. He
continuously fought for artists’ right to a living wage, promoting Canadian artists
through his writings, pushing art schools and universities to hire Canadians for
teaching positions at a time when Americans and British held the vast majority
of positions there. Curnoe worked with other artists on national concerns such
as copyright, income tax regulations and payment to artists for the exhibition of
their work. As the painter John Boyle put it, “Every artist in Canada can thank
him whenever he or she is paid an exhibition fee. It was a few fearless people
like Greg who fought and won those fees in the 1970s through Canadian Artists
Representation” (Rodgers 2001: 157).
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The archival evidence for Curnoe’s involvement in local and national issues of
importance to Canadian culture and artists’ rights is found in documents such as
letters, magazine articles, panel presentations, petitions and book reviews. A ninepage bibliography lists all of Curnoe’s published writings from 1956 to 1991.
These documents cover large areas from regionalism and Canadian nationalism
to the struggles for the right for artists to be paid for exhibitions and to have
copyright control over their work (4/6).
It is important to note that Curnoe did not make work explicitly to promote an
organization like CAR or any other union. His activism was always embedded
in his work, just as it was in his daily life, following from his sense that there
was always something to be changed, preserved and made better. It was a natural
extension of his thought process; a “what if?” kind of thinking that became an
exciting way to make change happen. With this strategy, he was able to push
through practical and permanent changes within art institutions that raised the
status and income of Canadian artists.
Curnoe saw making connections with other artists as a form of activism in itself,
something generally overlooked in the written histories of art in Canada. The
archives contain the final draft of his review of Visions, a book on Canadian art,
published in Vanguard XII in 1983. The review was entitled “All Touch and No
Contact.” In it, Curnoe stresses that the book has a
consistent disregard for the fact that Canada’s artistic community is
relatively small.... Artists of all generations in Canada know each other.
They make constant contact and ideas and opinions are exchanged. [A]
more accurate picture would be presented of our various visual activities if
an attempt is made to explain the complexities and connections of artists in
Canada. (3/3)
Greg Curnoe remains one of the most important and influential people in the
history of Canadian art. Years after his death in 1992, his work continues to have
a lasting effect on many artists across different generations. In 2001 his life and
work were the subjects of a symposium at the Art Gallery of Ontario, “Life and
Stuff: We Are Not Greg Curnoe,” and a second one, “Greg Curnoe Adjusted,”
at Museum London. At both events the diversity of presenters and panelists was
remarkable, and that range gives perhaps the most accurate image of who Curnoe
was and where his work was situated. There were art historians ( John O’Brien, Dot
Tuer), artist-activists ( Jamelie Hassan, Ron Benner), poets (George Bowering,
Victor Coleman), anarchic musicians (such as Terence Dick), artists from several
generations (from Michael Snow to Oliver Girling to Luis Jacob, Greg Hill, and
Sally McKay), curators (Dennis Reid, Richard Hill, Ingrid Chu, Philip Monk,
Terrence Heath), critics ( John Bentley Mays, Walter Klepac), cycling activists
(Sally McKay, Greg Hill), a former Professor of French Literature (Michel
Sanouillet) and even an archeologist (Neal Ferris). His sister Lynda Curnoe also
took part in the presentations.
In Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci wrote that “The starting point of critical
elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing oneself ’ as a
product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of
traces, without leaving an inventory” (Gramsci 1971: 323). In the Curnoe archive,
there is no record of him ever having read Gramsci, but certainly he would have
understood this idea completely. As Curnoe said in the Deeds/Abstracts:
The question of the power of histories of broad conclusions and great
events in contrast to histories of details has occurred to me as I am
writing this. I have felt the power of many details adding up to an
understanding of the ground I am standing on. It is an understanding
that is new to me, in spite of the fact that I have worked with this kind of
information for years. (28)
When Jamelie Hassan spoke of his Deeds/Nations as a “directory” (Open Letter
2002: 31), she made it clear that Curnoe’s seemingly endless collecting and
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What was striking was how many people spoke about his very late bookworks
(which at the time were not well known). I spoke about his Blue Book #8 in which
Curnoe identifies himself by trying to list all the things he was not. Dot Tuer
connected this book—”a negative topology” as she called it—to Curnoe’s famous
map of the Americas, in which the USA is missing (Open Letter, 103). Michael
Snow spoke of Blue Book #8 and Deeds/Abstracts. For Greg Hill, it was Deeds/
Abstracts and Deeds/Nations that were crucial—as they were as well for critic John
Bentley Mays. For Luis Jacob, Deeds/Abstracts was the point of departure for a
discussion of aperture, of being open to the world. Jacob spoke for many of those
present when he said “I am struck by the frequency in which this book has figured
in discussions today. It’s evident that for the group today, this work is one of
Curnoe’s most resonant” (Open Letter 2002: 84).
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researching was exactly this, the missing inventory that Gramsci had called for.
It is precisely here that any real distinction between activism and Curnoe’s own
constant self-archiving of his life collapses. They are one and the same, and they
are transforming.
Archival Note
The 121-page Description and Finding Aid for the Greg Curnoe Fonds CA
OTAG SC066 was prepared in 2005 by Amy Marshall with the assistance of
Ben Featherson. The finding aid has a Custodial History section which states that
the fonds were transferred directly from the artist’s studio to the Art Gallery of
Ontario. The immediate source of acquisition was a donation by Sheila Curnoe
in 1996 and 2000.
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196
The description of the scope and content of the fonds states that it is made up of
27 series divided into areas such as writing, correspondence, notebooks and diaries,
bookworks, and ephemera/found objects. The files are contained in 100 boxes
with the dates of creation from 1936–1996. The extent list states that the archive
contains: [6.4 m] of textual records and graphic material [includes volumes such as
sketchbooks and journals], ca. 1895 photographs, 1111 works on paper, 394 artifacts
(buttons, rubber stamps and other material), 85 audio cassettes, 34 linoleum blocks,
10 video cassettes, 9 wood blocks, 2 etching plates, and 1 video reel.
As is evident here, the extent list is itself another list, closely related to the lists
Curnoe made throughout his life, recording what he was thinking and doing at a
particular moment in his own history.
Notes
AGO Librarians Sylvia Lassam and Amy Marshall assisted me in the research I did at
the E. P. Taylor Research Library and Archives in 2006. See Archival Note at the end of
this paper.
1. All references in this text to the box and file numbers from the Curnoe fonds will
hereafter be noted in brackets with the box number followed by file number—for example, (13/1).
2. From “Art and Politics,” an unpublished paper for the symposium “Political Content
in Contemporary Art” at NSCAD, Halifax, 1979.
References
Curnoe, Greg. 1995. Deeds/Abstracts: The History of a London Lot, edited by Frank Davey.
London, ON: Brick Books.
———. 1996. Deeds/Nations, edited by Frank Davey and Neal Ferris. London, ON:
Ontario Archaeological Society (London Chapter) Occasional Publications #4.
Curnoe, Greg and Dennis Reid. 1984. A Conversation: Greg Curnoe and Dennis Reid.
Provincial Essays 1(1): 15-32.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Laurence and
Wishart.
We are not Greg Curnoe. 2002. Open Letter. In A Canadian Journal of Writing and
Theory, Eleventh Series, no. 5. Materials from a Symposium on the Work and Life of
Greg Curnoe, 11-12 May 2001. Edited by Robert Fones and Andy Patton. Toronto.
Reid, Dennis. 2001. Some Things I Learned from Greg Curnoe. In Greg Curnoe: Life and
Stuff, edited by Dennis Reid and Matthew Teitelbaum, 108-28. Toronto, ON: Art Gallery of Ontario and Douglas and McIntyre.
Rodgers, Judith. 2001. Chronology. In Greg Curnoe: Life and Stuff, edited by Dennis Reid
and Matthew Teitelbaum, 139-90. Toronto, ON: Art Gallery of Ontario and Douglas
and McIntyre.
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Mél Hogan
Dykes on Mykes:
Podcasting and the Activist Archive
As stated by jake moore of the Matricule Project,1 archive is both noun and verb.
As a noun, the archive is both physical repository, where materials are stored
for preservation and for perusal, and reference point, where the records are
consulted. As a verb, the archive functions as a social project of history building
and a facilitator for storytelling. The archive, as imagined by moore, ceases to
exist without being in process: acquiring documents, being accessed and utilized,
articulated and critiqued. In essence, the archive ceases to exist when it is no
longer engage in creating, recreating and telling stories. The archive thus becomes
a site of inquiry, shifting from source for research to subject of research, for which
academics and activists alike must “pay attention to the process of archiving, not
just to the archive as a repository of facts and objects” (Arondekar 2005: 15).
The online archive simultaneously builds from and undoes the archival project
through its expansive and largely unregulated context and participatory process;
it is a challenge to archival fixity and to conceptions of time and place as markers
of identity.
The growing popularity of online archives, including social networking sites,
unaffiliated online repositories, podcasts and blogs, reinstate the importance of
knowledge-sharing and point to the limitations of the traditional archive, in its
gatekeeping function (Arondekar 2005). Moreover, archiving in an increasingly
digital environment has become both more efficient and more ephemeral, and
rests in the grey zones of largely unregulated Internet policy, and the maledominated world of information technology and software development (Benkler
2006; Bradley 2005; Stalder 2004).
Dykes on Mykes, as a community radio show, a podcast and an archiving project,
is used here as a case study to explore the connections and challenges afforded
by new media in relation and as a challenge to traditional notions of archiving.2
I borrow moore’s (2006) conceptual framework and propose that the podcast is,
like the archive, both a verb and a noun—a process and an object. It is at once an
audio file, an XML document and a way to communicate and share information.
As such, I propose that the podcast can be analyzed as a technological means
of distribution, but also and more importantly, as an invaluable example of the
web’s potential and its evolution as an online repository and collaborative history
project. Podcasting contributes significantly to the discussion of preservation and
online documentation, all the while putting into question notions of archival fixity
and authority, which is equally valuable to the theorizing of cultural preservation
in an increasingly digital and digitized world.
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While (out) lesbians’ and queer women’s voices and experiences are rarely heard
on mainstream radio, podcasting makes queer programming widely available. This
case study demonstrates how podcasting offers an alternative to traditional media,
and thus, to traditional modes of queer feminist representation, and to recording
and preserving queer women’s culture in a Canadian context. I maintain that it
is podcasting’s intrinsic archival potential, as I define herein, which characterizes
it as a tool for activism. I propose that podcasting is a powerful participatory
alternative to both traditional radio programming and traditional means of
recording, organizing and preserving collections.
This project is a response to the findings of my previous research on Canadian
lesbian and gay archives,3 in which I had the privilege of interviewing many longterm archivists and gay activists. The results of this research were disappointing:
any idealistic notions I had upon entering the archives of locating and perusing
lesbian ephemera were terminated by the serious, and all too obvious, lack of
archival projects initiated by women that either survived and/or were properly
documented. While there have been concerted attempts at preserving lesbian
culture, material repositories are costly and require specialized knowledge and
significant labour to maintain. The traditional archive, then, is not the central
locus of Canadian lesbian culture, should there be one.
As I was conducting this research, many online history projects surfaced, such as
the forum-based SuperDyke4 and the Queer History Project in Vancouver, Daniel
McKay’s Gay Halifax Project,5 and our own Dykes on Mykes podcast.6 This renewed
my hope that similar initiatives might surface online in other marginalized
communities and led me to this research project on lesbian- and queer womenrun online archives, using the Dykes on Mykes podcast as a pilot project and case
study.
Canadian Lesbian Archive Context
According to Harold Averill, long-time archivist at the Canadian Lesbian & Gay
Archives (CLGA), the reason that the word “lesbian” did not figure in the title
was out of respect for the concurrent development of the Canadian Women’s
Movement Archives, also originally in Toronto:
We didn’t feel that we should try and compete with what they were doing.
But, that archive closed 15 years ago and their material is now at the
Morisset library at the University of Ottawa. [...] After that we felt we were
free to put “lesbian” in our name. (Averill pers. comm.)9
Iain Blair, president of les Archives Gaies du Québec (AGQ) echoes Averill’s
(CLGA) notion of competition with lesbian archives, but offers a different
perspective on the issue of inclusion. He contextualizes its inception:
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Before discussing Dykes on Mykes radio and their use of podcasts as a tool for
archiving, a point needs to be made about the dearth of contexts from which to
discuss lesbian history. As queer theorist Ann Cvetkovich (2002) argues, the fact
that “gay and lesbian history even exists has been a contested fact, and the struggle
to record and preserve it is exacerbated by the invisibility that often surrounds
intimate life, especially sexuality” (110). This observation is confirmed by the
trajectory of lesbian archives in Canada reveals. According to Scott Goodine of
the Provincial Archives of Alberta, gay and lesbian archives in Canada “have no
legal compulsion to exist; they are free to create and control their policies and
procedures as they see fit. This is the case whether they are charitable organizations
or private entities” (Goodine, pers. comm.).7 As a result, gay and lesbian archival
repositories in Canada—the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives in Toronto, les
Archives gaies du Québec in Montréal, and the Canadian Women’s Movement
Archives in Ottawa—each present drastically different access policies despite
being modelled in large part on traditional national archival standards. While the
Canadian Women’s Movement Archive is not a lesbian archive per se (at least not
according to its title), it contains an incredible amount of lesbian ephemera and
its existence speaks to the divide between the gay liberation movement and the
women’s movement of the 1970s (1996, 2003; Thompson 1986). The two main
gay and lesbian archives in Canada are predominantly about and run by gay men’s
culture. As part of the gay liberation movement, running parallel to the women’s
movement, the original and exclusively gay (male) archives took time to consider
lesbian history as part of their collecting mandate (Averill, pers. comm.).8
201
the Archives [AGQ] was named in a rather different era when things were
much more separated, and it was started by gay men speaking for gay men
[...] I should say too that a lot of gay men like to work with gay men (for
social or political reasons, or sometimes for basic narrow-mindedness) and
don’t want to change the name” (Blair pers. comm.).10
Initially, both the AGQ and the CLGA considered existent lesbian archives
when choosing their name; however, both failed to foresee their eventual
demise. Instead, the CLGA opted to expand its mandate and make lesbian more
obvious within its title, while the AGQ was still (at the time of the interview)
and assessing whether the inclusion of lesbians in their predominantly gay
male archives would function merely as a token gesture.11 Given the unsteady
nature of the relationship between gay and lesbian cultures, certain proponents of
lesbian history believe the materials would be best housed within the Canadian
Women’s Movement Archives (CWMA) in Ottawa, should it become an either/
or decision.
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The CWMA holds a large collection of lesbian and lesbian-feminist themed
documents, as well as posters, artwork and ephemera; it was founded by outspoken
lesbian-feminist, Pat Leslie. Leslie was very active with the Toronto women’s
newspaper The Other Woman in the mid 1970s. When it ceased publication in
1977, Leslie relocated all of their material to her home and started the Canadian
Women’s Movement Archives (Thompson 1986; Trudel 1998). In the late 1970s,
Leslie wrote about the importance of the archives and of the anticipation and
consequence of its disappearance, for lesbians in particular:
Specifically lesbian Herstory will be forever buried. What little exists now
consists of hopeful conjuncture. It is the fear of oppression and the shyness
of self-expression which makes that invisible veil so heavy. If need be, the
Women’s Movement Archives would go underground, file by file, to protect
records of the growing movement. Access to everything donated by lesbians
is strictly limited. (Leslie 1979-1980: 11)
The CWMA did not go underground, but rather was transferred to the Morisset
Library at the University of Ottawa, deemed by the group to be the most secure,
stable and politically aligned repository, where it has resided since 1992.12 However,
this shift to a university setting, a process which appears to be significantly underdocumented, leaves much to ponder considering the founder’s plea to keep the
archives within the community of women activists. In 1979, Leslie wrote:
To ask the patriarchy to preserve our lives for us is a suicidal act. We do not
need to be researched by patriarchal/academic institutions; we do not need
to be financially supported by governments, capitalist or otherwise. [What]
we do need is a link to future generations of feminists and lesbians who will
have access to our lives. (Leslie 1979: 11)
Researching lesbian history, therefore, means tracking the history of the archive
itself. Lesbian-feminist critiques of the archive ask us to consider not only the
relationship of women to the archive, as repository and process, but also the
problematic nature of defining and delimiting the lesbian community. Who
counts as a historian, archivist and subject of history, and how is history created?
How do citizenship, nationality, race and ethnicity further complicate the lesbian/
queer archive (Pérez 2003)? In outlining a Canadian context, I attempt to delimit
the current boundaries of the lesbian archive and propose that a perspective
positioned within queer and feminist theory is of great value when situating the
practices of podcasting within a larger archival discourse. The question of where
lesbian history belongs, as I explore in this paper, is revisited in and through queer
community new media appropriation.
Case Study: The Dykes on Mykes Podcasting Archive Project
Twenty years later, Dykes on Mykes prides itself on being the longest running
Anglophone lesbian and queer women’s radio show in Montreal, if not in Canada.
Dykes on Mykes is entirely volunteer operated and while it has never had a formal
mandate, its unwritten goal has always been to serve the lesbian, trans and queer
(LTQ) communities and give voice to local Anglophone lesbian culture. Dykes
on Mykes airs LTQ perspectives on politics, music, arts and culture and provides
Montreal’s LTQ communities with a forum to discuss all of these topics. This
forum is achieved through the format of one or two individual or group interviews
per show, frequent panel discussions, listener call-ins, email commentary through
www.nomorepotlucks.org, opinion pieces by contributors and informed debates
between the show’s co-hosts.
Four years ago, the show’s long term-volunteers, Deborah VanSlet and Elana
Wright, turned the microphones over to a new team: Dayna McLeod, MarieClaire MacPhee and myself, Mél Hogan). Wright and VanSlet, who had been
hosting the show for over ten years, wanted more time with their families and
also felt it was important for new voices from more active members of the queer
community to emerge through Dykes on Mykes. With this transition came a milk
crate of cassette tapes and reels dating from the earliest shows in the late 1980s,
and the inspiration to make these shows available to the general public.
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The Dykes on Mykes podcasting archive project functions as a case study and site of
inquiry into debates broadening current conceptions of lesbian archives in Canada
(cf. MacPhee and Hogan 2006). The Dykes on Mykes radio show was created in
1987 shortly after the founding of CKUT, Montreal’s Community Radio Station.
At that time, CKUT was accepting proposals for new programs, to which local
gay and lesbian community activists responded by pitching the idea of a weekly
lesbian radio show as well as a men’s equivalent, then named the Homoshow.
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At this point, I want to address the potential of podcasts to make older, analogue
radio shows available and, more importantly, to merge the recording with the
historical documentation regarding hosts, guests, themes and dates. Attending to
the interaction of these elements is necessary to consider the archives as more than
an amassment of tapes, CDs and reels, or even a method of recording, or mere
process of classification or storage. Given the largely invisible and under-preserved
Canadian lesbian history, podcasting essentially combines the recording with the
preservation process and encourages copying, re-distribution and feedback from
users. As a more participatory process, podcasting shifts the traditional archive’s
emphasis on authenticity and authorization, to the personal, experiential and
collective. As such, the Dykes on Mykes podcast invites and ignites lesbian culture
through shared reference points and folksonomic categorization of content. In
addition, wider distribution has meant more common ground on which to build
the foundations of a distinct yet increasingly more diverse culture.
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204
Unlike many podcasts that gain an audience by first airing on commercial radio,
the Dykes on Mykes podcasts offer the marginal community of listeners a means
of access to a collection of shows from which to choose topics of interest as well
as recent broadcasts. Because commercial or national radio does not cater to a
specifically lesbian audience,13 podcasting has become the de facto means of mass
distribution of lesbian radio culture, in conjunction with its local, live association
to community radio, which provides Dykes on Mykes with a studio, equipment and
a larger community of producers and programmers.
McLeod, co-host and initiator of the Dykes with Mykes podcast, conceives of the
podcast as an archiving tool which allows her to document, organize and keep
a succinct record of all broadcasts. This record inspires the production of higher
quality shows by encouraging the show’s producers to refine programming, as
well as interview and production skills which directly impact the value of each
show. The result is an increasing the number of live listeners and, most noticeably,
podcast subscribers (McLeod, pers. comm.).14
The podcast
The term “podcasting,” was coined by Ben Hammersley, writing for The Guardian
on February 12, 2004. By October of the same year, many how-to guides to
podcasting appeared on the web, an indication of its ever-growing popularity.
Podcasting takes its name from the popular media player by Apple, the iPod,
although one does not need an iPod to podcast or listen to podcasts, making the
term a bit of a misnomer. The New Oxford American Dictionary declared “podcast”
the Word of the Year in 2005, legitimizing its popular use following the large
success and anticipated staying power of the technology, and defining the term as
“a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the
Internet for downloading to a personal audio player” (Kothe 2006).
While podcasting is an increasingly popular tool and medium, knowledge of its
origins, configuration and infrastructural relationships remains largely underdocumented. The podcast is a concept that merges action and object: it is an
audio file, compressed and transmitted over the web. Despite its particular nature,
podcasting shares a close history with traditional radio and web radio, which
I mention here very briefly as preliminary context for discussing the uses of
emergent technologies. Like many important contributions to communication
technologies, traditional radio was born of collective efforts and innovation across
the globe. Suffice to note is that from (radio) listener to (podcast) user, to potential
podcaster, radio’s time- and location-based natures are transformed in the digital
networked era. Web radio, also called Internet radio, came into being with the
advent of web streaming in the mid 1990s (Kurose and Ross 2007),15 arguably
serving as a bridge between traditional radio and podcasting.
Podcast content is recorded, compressed, and/or distributed on an mp3 file,
which is the current standard for audio files. An mp3 file is, simply put, a standard
compression format that is less than a tenth of the original size. The mp3 thus
offers an alternative to pre-digital notions of the original, by proposing an archival
means of distribution that is different from but points back to, a high quality
file. Just as the digital necessarily shifts the archival discourse from questions of
authenticity to those regarding access and transmission, the mp3 file, as far as its
role in podcasts is concerned, invites users to engage in its reproduction and make
it a part of their own archives. Popular podcasts often allow free streaming of their
most current show while charging a small fee to access the rest of the collection
items, selling the mp3 file as a collection piece.20 This speaks to the non-rivalry
in consumption of digital media, or more specifically, the absence of the type of
TOPIA 20
Credit for the first actual “podcast,” as distinct from web radio for its automation
capacity, often goes to Adam Curry, a former MTV Video Jockey and pirate radio
amateur,16 with the help of Tristan Louis, and the cooperation of RSS (“really
simple syndication” or “rich site summary”) feed developer Dave Winer (based in
part on the work of Stephen Downes, creator of the RSS Ed Radio application).17
Curry is said to have named the code “the iPodder,” an Applescript application
that automated downloading and syncing processes of audio files to iPods, which
he released on August 15, 2004 (Giles 2006; Kothe 2006). However, conceptual
variations on the current podcast were being developed in various forms, dating
as far back as 1999, according to www.voices.com.18 The release of Curry’s code
also coincided with the launch of Napster, a system that put peer-to-peer (p2p)
file sharing on the map, transforming the music industry.19 Together, these various
innovations demonstrate a collective push for mass communication through file
sharing, collective projects and open networks. To this effect, participatory media
researcher, Yochai Benkler (2006) explains that more people have access to the
physical means necessary to participate in network culture than ever before.
205
forced scarcity necessary to create the value attributed to rare or difficult-to-find
collection pieces (Murray 2004; Stalder 2004).
In order to amass files, podcasting uses syndication feeds (Atom or RSS) for
playback on portable media players and personal computers. This allows for
automatic downloading via subscription, which is why podcasting requires an
accompanying XML file and why podcasting refers to all media, not just audio.
However technically complicated, XML makes it possible to use, create and
benefit from metadata and documentation without having to know the intricacies
of its inner workings, much like the web itself.
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206
A deeper understanding and theorizing of XML allows for its consideration as
a tool for archiving. It is a powerful classification system: not only does it allow
any user to create custom tags, these tags also become searchable categories,
allowing users to search for files by their creator, title, date, etc. Furthermore,
outputting XML data is flexible as it can be made manifest in various forms
and places from the computer monitor to a database, personal digital assistant
(PDA), or printer. Its versatility (or, extensibility), openness (or, non-proprietary
nature) and independence from any platform and programming language means
that documentation is easily migrated, adapted, customized and transferred, all of
which are crucial concerns in digital preservation.21
Automation for podcasts functions in a highly technical manner yet is simple to
use for podcast creators and users. In this regard, automation is a two-fold process:
for podcasters, the structure is already in place allowing for mass distribution
of audio files through fan or user subscriptions, and for the subscriber, podcasts
are automatically delivered to personal accounts. However, with the advent of
podcasting, content emerged from those who put the technology in place. IT
conversations, technology-themed interviews dominated by the largely white,
male perspective working within the IT industry. One of the most popular
podcasts by and for women in the early days of the medium, for better or worse,
was MommyCast hosted by Gretchen Vogelzang and Paige Heninger.22 In a
2005 Wired interview, Vogelzang attempted to justify the gender lag through her
personal experience with podcasting: “There’s a learning curve there, and once
women come to it, [podcasting is] going to be huge for women.” She added that
podcasting allows women to “listen on their own terms,” because they “do not
have the luxury of being in a specific place and time to listen to a broadcasted
show” (Friess 2005).23
Dykes on Mykes Podcast Radio
Adapted from the American Legal Guide to Podcasting,24 Kathleen Simmons
and Andy Kaplan-Myrth and the faculty of the Law and Technology group at
the University of Ottawa produced a Canadian version of the guide: “Podcasting
Legal Guide For Canada: Northern Rules For The Revolution” (Simmons and
Kaplan-Myrth 2007). While the guide provides advice and insight into the
largely unregulated world of copyright as it pertains to podcasting, its definition of
podcasting as an individual and/or independent venture overlooks the relationship
between community radio and podcasting. Given the importance of this guide for
the podcasting community and to policy makers, community radio podcasting has
been largely overlooked in the conversation. Much of what Dykes on Mykes does
pushes the boundaries of legal content distribution. I propose that this is a form of
“queer dealing,” a play on the Canadian legal exceptions to media (re)use known as
“fair dealing.” While traditional radio’s publicness was balanced by its immediacy,
podcasting now replicates, transmits and in many ways, concretizes each show.
However, given the history of gay and lesbian censorship, collaborative and agit
prop activism and general invisibility of LGBT peoples in the Canadian media,
queer dealing implies an inherent rejection of copyright and Internet regulation
in favour of the conception of radio podcasting as an open and provocative media
outlet.25
Dykes on Mykes hosts, programmers and technicians have taken it upon themselves
to podcast the show independently. This means that many users can download
the show at any time, simultaneously. In this sense, the podcast, by eliminating
the notion of the original central to conventional archives, privileges widespread
access over the live radio experience. The XML file can always be edited or altered
by the podcast creator, thereby seriously challenging notions of archival fixity and
the role of archivists as gatekeepers (Burton 2005; Jourden 2007). Furthermore,
podcasting allows Dykes on Mykes to keep track of the number of listeners and
downloads per show, something that was impossible with live radio. Dykes on
Mykes has approximately 500 regular podcast listeners,many of whom download
the show from outside of Canada.
Along with the technical advances afforded by podcasts, the diversity and
availability of otherwise rare and specialized topics is the key to the podcast’s
popularity and power as a tool for dissemination and preservation. As stated by
Kothe, “podcasting has flourished because it gives people more control over what
they listen to, and the freedom to take their programs with them” (2006). Listeners
can now tune in when they wish, listen to a few shows consecutively, skip content,
TOPIA 20
The CKUT radio show archives are stored in two different qualities to suit different
needs and bandwidth constraints: 64 kbps (a medium quality bandwidth at 28
megabytes per hour of sound) and 128 kbps (the best quality bandwidth at 57.6
megabytes per hour of sound). The CKUT archive permits a maximum of 3 hours
of download or streaming at one time. And, the 64 kbps archives are stored for 2
months and 128 kbps only for one week.26 Each of these technical requirements
reveals political decisions made by the radio station staff in managing bandwidth
use and server (storage) space.
207
or repeat a show many times. Moreover, podcasting may have special import for
those who do not have access to much queer culture. As McLeod (2007) observes,
“queer radio disseminates information to people who are closeted, in the process
of coming out, or merely interested in queer women’s culture” but wishing to do
so in a private and personal manner.
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208
Given the reach of podcasting, Dykes on Mykes is inspired by and invites responses
from its new-found national and international audiences, while remaining
cognizant of CKUT’s mandate to promote local events, artists and news. Now
hosting more than sixty podcasts, Dykes on Mykes has aired topics ranging
from interviews with queer artists (Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Milan, Alyson
Mitchell, Rae Spoon, Ivan Coyote, Paige Gratland, Moynan King, Jackie Gallant,
etc.) and academics (Nancy Nichol, Judith Jack Halberstam, Jennifer Miller,
etc.) to discussing two-spirited gatherings, queer youth, abortion, film festivals,
bisexuality and queer zine archives. All of the shows’ podcasts topics are listed
and further documented on www.nomorepotlucks.org, its affiliated website.27
Nomorepotlucks.org, also founded and run by the current Dykes on Mykes hosts,
functions as a site of convergence for lesbian and queer media in Montreal. The
website strives for a bilingual balance, while Dykes on Mykes is the Anglophone
sister radio show to the francophone program, LesBo-Sons.28
Podcasting is a powerful tool for dissemination because the podcast creator retains
much of the control over the way the sound file is handled, described and with
which program it is registered. With a simple interface and free registration, the
now-ubiquitous iTunes (http://www.apple.com/itunes/) capitalized early on the
trend to become one of the most widely used methods for podcasting. Given that
there is no user-generated equivalent to the centralized video repository www
.YouTube.com for audio podcasts,29 the reliance on Apple’s iTunes comes at a
price. McLeod explains:
When we first started podcasting, I noticed a really big delay—a week or
two weeks—before iTunes would register changes in our XML file, which
is what is read by the iTunes interface. I compared this timing with shows
like CBC’s Definitely Not the Opera, a show whose information would
appear the day after radio broadcast which seemed unusual to me. I am
always suspicious of the mega corporations, especially when they do not
respond to emails detailing and complaining about why a show called
Dykes on Mykes is having such problems connecting with our audience
through their interface. I become even more suspect, and dare I say,
paranoid, when I upload an episode about the L Word, where the discussion
focused on gays and lesbians in the American military, and the war in Iraq,
and iTunes doesn’t register it for one week, until I remove the meta-tag
equivalent buzz words of, “Iraq war,” “terrorist” and “Afghanistan,” and as
soon as I remove these keywords, it appears in iTunes. So I ask you, am I
paranoid? (McLeod 2007).
As demonstrated by McLeod’s example, within the so-called democratic potential
of the web, podcasting’s reach is thwarted by its reliance on corporate mediation
determining in large part the acceptability and accessibility of online content.
Thus, while Dykes on Mykes need not use iTunes for dissemination, it is the most
popular application for podcast aggregation and distribution, creating dependence
based on popularity and reach.
because as queers, we are incredibly aware that mainstream culture equates
simply talking about gay and lesbian issues as sexualized content, we
are always wary of how to contextualize content for our XML files and
descriptions of our shows because we are using mainstream distribution
systems like iTunes. (McLeod 2007)34
Reminiscent of early queer activism, sexuality tends to both enhance the appeal
and downgrade the value of the podcast within conservative corporate enterprises.
The Dykes on Mykes podcast is in a bind: it simultaneously normalizes queer and
sexual content by making it more visible and accessible, while remaining true to
and speaking for a distinct queer women’s audience. In Canada, with its open
access to the media and enlightened human rights policies, Dykes on Mykes is in a
privileged position: it can convey an important message to others who, in complex
situations or more restrictive countries, have little or no exposure to queer voices.35
The Dykes on Mykes podcast thus functions as an archive of collective and individual
struggles and stories, and as a means of further exploring the impact and effect of
media on the ever-growing and diversifying lesbian and queer community.
TOPIA 20
The notion of access is further complicated by the ways in which issues of
sexuality are understood and framed in a digital environment. As a queer show,
Dykes on Mykes often broaches sexual content, some of which is “sexually explicit”
in iTunes parlance. Dykes on Mykes co-hosts do consider that some content may
be less suitable for a younger or more conservative audience; in those instances,
they select the optional iTunes-specific “explicit content” box in the XML
generator. This way the listener is forewarned; the onus remains on the podcaster
to determine which content is explicit and which is not. One example of a show
deemed explicit by Dykes on Mykes featured well-known Japanese bondage expert,
Midori ( July 31, 2006).30 For the co-hosts, however, merely mentioning sexuality
does not merit the disclaimer, as in the interview with Lindsay Willow, a teacher
from Halifax who was wrongfully accused of sexually interfering with one of
her students by a homophobic teacher and her principal (September 11, 2006),31
the Little Sisters’ pornography case discussing the bookstore’s landmark litigation
against Canada Customs ( January 29, 2007), 32 and recent interview with Paige
Gratland’s celebrity Lezbian Fist Project, an art project on display at Art Metropole
in Toronto ( June 9, 2008).33 This is not content deemed explicit by the co-hosts,
as the urgent need for dissemination overrides any need for such a disclaimer.
However, McLeod explains,
209
Dykes on Mykes is not the only queer podcast. In fact, queer voices are emerging all
over the web, so much so that their activities are now referred to as “queercasting.”
Queercasting imitates and remixes traditional radio, with live guests, phone
interviews, conversations between friends at home and features topics ranging in
political import. This has greatly expanded the potential of queer or other marginal
voices for mass dissemination. Popular queercast types include radio show
“recycling” (reusing old episodes), including PrideNation Gay Radio, QRadio: The
Las Vegas Gay and Lesbian Talk Show, and original podcasts such as TrannyWreck,
The Lesbian Mafia, The Planet: The Podcast For L Words Fans.
These shows vary in their originating contexts, though most are produced in the
United States. McLeod offers the following observation:
There is an entire Queercasting explosion happening; why wouldn’t Dykes
on Mykes take part in this media revolution? We hope that our podcasts will
reach audiences who need to hear queer voices, women’s voices—and reflect
a unique history. What we’re learning through this podcasting project, is
that if we don’t archive our own queer culture, no one else will. (McLeod
2007)
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210
McLeod’s statement harkens back to feminist lesbian pleas of the late 1970s, when
freestanding archives of the women’s movement and lesbian community were first
imagined, and to the possibility of instantiations in the public realm in which
the control and content of lesbian lives could be maintained by its representative
communities. So while this lesson has informed much of the lesbian media activism
in which Dykes on Mykes situates itself, podcasting and emergent technologies of
display and dissemination, in conjunction with the mainstreaming and increased
tolerance, in certain contexts of queer representations, have also challenged the
possessive nature of lesbian history.
We lesbians could no longer take our archival collections underground, file by file,
as Leslie’s 1979 plea proposed. Lesbian culture belongs to and is now housed in our
personal collections, or more specifically, on our media players, CDs, hard drives
and servers. Because podcasting allows for easy access to information, both in its
creation and consumption, lesbian culture has been able to expand and redefine
itself in the digital age; lesbians and their archives can be seen and heard, not just
represented and talked about. Lesbian culture online maintains the urgency and
necessity of a distinctive lesbian culture, often in conjunction with, but sometimes
in opposition to, queer, LGBT, as well as various feminist political stances. New
means of communication have thus afforded otherwise invisible and marginalized
lesbian communities the means with which to re-represent community, challenge
dominant representations, highlight the importance of minority representation
itself, and archive the results of their activity and activism.
Notes
Special thank you to Andrea Zeffiro for her editorial suggestions, to Dayna McLeod and
M-C MacPhee for their endless feedback on all things queer and technical, and to Dr.
Kim Sawchuk for her ongoing encouragement and support.
1. Matricules project link: http://www.studioxx.org/fr/matricules and moore’s statement in DPI: http://dpi.studioxx.org/demo/?q=fr/no/07/brief-matricules-database-and
-archive-project-studio-xx-first-10-years. Accessed August 3 2008.
2. Dykes on Mykes. http://www.nomorepotlucks.org/chronique-dykes/. Accessed 5 September 2008.
3. Mél Hogan. 2007. Archiving Absence: A Queer Feminist Framework. MA thesis. Concordia University.
4. http://www.superdyke.com/. Accessed 5 September 2008.
5. Personal interview. Daniel McKay, Gay Halifax Project. Halifax, NS, February 2007.
http://gay.hfxns.org/HistoryProject. Accessed 5 September 2008.
6. http://www.nomorepotlucks.org/chronique-dykes/. Accessed 5 September 2008.
7. Personal correspondence. Scott Goodine, Provincial Archives of Alberta, March 2007.
8. Personal interview. Harold Averill, Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives archivist.
Toronto, ON, March 2007.
10. Personal interview. Iain Blair, President, les Archives Gaies du Québec, January 2007.
Les archives gaies du Québec (AGQ), 4067 boulevard St. Laurent, bureau 202. Montréal, Quebec, Canada.
11. Personal interview. Alan Miller, CLGA Archivist. Toronto, March 2007.
12. The CWMA archives donated their collection to the University of Ottawa, in 1992,
because they “could provide (a) bilingual service and communication among the feminist
community from coast to coast,” (b) the content was already organized into groups. See
“Deed of Gift: Letter of Agreement Between The Women’s Information Centre of Toronto and The University of Ottawa Library Network,” authorized by Anne Molgat and
Nancy Adamson. 1 October 1992.
13. See The Pride of Toronto 103.9 PROUD-FM as one example of all gay content
radio: http://www.proudfm.com/. Accessed 8 September 2008.
14. Personal interview. Dayna McLeod, Dykes on Mykes Community Radio. Montreal,
2007.
15. Streaming relies on bit transportation over the network in Transmission Control
Protocol (TCP) or User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets.
16. http://www.cliquecomm.com/blog/2006/09/24/introduction-to-podcasts-part-2/.
Accessed 3 September 2008.
17. For more information on Downes and Winer, see: http://www.voices.com/
podcasting/history-of-podcasting.html. Accessed 3 September 2008.
18. http://www.voices.com/podcasting/history-of-podcasting.html. Accessed 4 September 2008.
TOPIA 20
9. Canadian Women’s Movement Archives (CWMA). University of Ottawa Archives
and Special Collections, Morisset Library, University of Ottawa. http://www.biblio
.uottawa.ca/. Accessed 6 June 2007.
211
19. http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Spring01/Burkhalter/Napster%20history.html. Accessed 4 September 2008.
20. A good example of this is “This American Life” which sells its previous podcasts for
$ 0.95. See: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Podcast.aspx. Accessed 9 September
2008.
21. http://www.allbusiness.com/technology/internet-technology-web-development/
10201-5.html. Accessed 4 September 2008.
22. http://www.mommycast.com/. Accessed 3 September 2008.
23. http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/11/69583. Accessed 3 September
2008.
24. Creative Commons. Podcasting Legal Guide. http://wiki.creativecommons.org/
Podcasting_Legal_Guide. Accessed 29 August 2008.
25. My doctoral work will address more specifically the linkages between lesbian and
queer politics and copyright in Canada—queer dealing—inspired by agit prop video
AIDS activism in the 1980s, thwarting notions of authorship and ownership underlying
the current intellectual property regime.
26. CKUT Radio Archive. http://secure.ckut.ca/cgi-bin/ckut-grid.pl. Accessed 10 September 2008.
27. http://www.nomorepotlucks.org/chronique-dykes/. Accessed 8 September 2008.
TOPIA 20
212
28. LesBo Sons. http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&
friendID=65252415. Accessed 8 September 2008.
29. Sourceforge’s Juice is a free end-to-end application: http://juicereceiver.sourceforge
.net/index.php Accessed 12 September 2008.
30. http://www.nomorepotlucks.org/chronique-dykes/doms-shop-til-you-drop-to-your
-knees. Accessed 8 September 2008.
31. http://www.nomorepotlucks.org/chronique-dykes/doms-go-back-to-school-part
-deux. Accessed 8 September 2008.
32. http://www.nomorepotlucks.org/chronique-dykes/hey-little-sister. Accessed 8 September 2008.
33. http://www.nomorepotlucks.org/chronique-dykes/paige-gratlands-celebrity-lezbian
-fists. Accessed 8 September 2008.
34. In iTunes, if one show is labelled explicit, the show itself carries that label within the
interface.
35. Dykes on Mykes received on average ten emails per year, through
www.nomorepotlucks.org, comparing or commenting on the role of the podcast in
people’s current situation.
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Napster%20history.html. Accessed 9 September 2008.
Nestle, Joan. 1987. A Restricted Country. Ann Arbor, MI: Firebrand Books.
———. 1998. A Fragile Union: New and Selected Writings. San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press.
Opinionated Lesbian. 2005. Listener’s guide to Canadian Queer Radio. http://www
.opinionatedlesbian.com. Accessed 21 July 2008.
Pérez, Emma. 2003. Queering the Borderlands: The Challenges of Excavating the Invisible and Unheard. A Journal of Women Studies 24(2-3): 122–31.
Plack, Christopher J. 2005. The Sense of Hearing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Queer History Project. http://www.queerhistoryproject.com/. Accessed 5 September
2008.
Rosenberg, William G. 2007. Is Social Memory a “Useful Category of Historical Analysis”? Paper prepared for the St. Petersburg Colloquium, 25-29 June.
Stalder, Felix. 2005. Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. New Media Center/kuda.
org, eds. Montenegro: Futura publikacije Novi Sad.
Simmons, Kathleen and Andy Kaplan-Myrth. 2007. Podcasting Legal Guide for Canada:
Northern Rules for the Revolution. Creative Commons License. http://www
.creativecommons.ca. Accessed 31 October 2008.
Superdyke.com. http://superdyke.com/. Accessed 8 May 2007.
Terranova, Tiziana. 2004. Network Culture: Politics for the Internet Age. London: Pluto
Press.
Thomson, Aisla. 1986. Interview: The Canadian Women’s Movement Archives Collective. Women’s Education des femmes Winter/Hiver: 5.
Trudel, Andrea. 1998. CORA: The feminist bookmobile. 29 May 1998. http://section15
.ca/features/ideas/1998/05/29/cora. Accessed 10 September 2008.
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history-of-podcasting.html Accessed 3 September 2008.
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OFFERING
Sharon Rosenberg
History, Memory and MtF Transsexual
Activism: A Review of Screaming Queens
(and a retort to Margaret Wente)
We turn to the past with new questions because of present commitments, but we
also remember more deeply what a changed present requires us to know.
Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai
¤
I am hesitant to give more print space to comments by conservative Globe and
Mail columnist Margaret Wente, but her newspaper column of February 16,
2008, “A day at the theatre of the absurd,” is intruding into my thought as I
complete this short essay (Wente 2008). Wente’s column opens by purporting
curiosity about the work of human rights commissions, reporting on a day she
“dropped in on a hearing at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.” The hearing
that day was into complaints brought by two transsexual women against a plastic
surgeon who refused to do the procedures they desired. In the column, Wente
outlines the circumstances that brought about the case, remarking: “I liked them
both [the MtF complainants] even though I thought their sense of outrage and
entitlement—fuelled for years by the administrative apparatus of the human
rights commission—was absurd.” In her reading of the case, Wente forecloses on
a complexity of issues indexed by transsexuality, rendering such complexity mute
under the weight of normative gender ideas: men are men, women are women,
and gender is an unproblematic binary rooted in biological sex.1 Reading Wente’s
column then, and recalling it now, reminds me that the “changed present” to
which Plaskow refers above is not so changed at all.
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In contrast to Wente’s column, Susan Stryker’s film Screaming Queens: The Riot
at Compton’s Cafeteria expresses, and is articulated through, a human rights
paradigm in support of transsexual and transgender folks. What was to become
the film began in an archive of gay and lesbian history, when Stryker came across
a short newspaper article about an August 1966 riot at Compton’s Cafeteria in
the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. A transsexual historian “hungry for
community” and historical belonging, Stryker set out to uncover the details of that
riot, to learn about the conditions under which it came to be, and to represent that
history to contemporary audiences. After a decade of research, cultural work and
fundraising efforts, that history comes to us in the form of a fifty-seven minute
documentary. By compiling footage from interviews, excerpts from original
broadcasts, newspaper headlines, and archival work, and by walking the streets to
recall their histories, Stryker tells the story of a fight between police and the drag
queens, MtF transsexuals and gay hustlers for whom Compton’s had become an
established haven.
Reading Stryker’s film against Wente’s column suggests more than a simple
reiteration of pro- versus anti-human rights positions. Screaming Queens is an
important film both because it brings into contemporary circulation a largely
forgotten episode of what Stryker calls “a history of gay militancy,” and because
it reveals (perhaps inadvertently) the complexities of the present moment of a
rights-based identity politics that attempts to draw coherence from the past. It
is this doubleness—reminding us of a forgotten history and drawing attention to
the present through that now-recalled history—that makes Screaming Queens such
a significant film. On one register, read as a retort to the limited and delimiting
interpretation of transsexuality such as that offered by Wente, the film tells an
empowered, embodied and textured account of male-to-female transgender and
transsexual history in North America, clearly articulating it to the necessity of a
human rights discourse. However, the film does more than this. It is not singularly
oriented to and by a critique of trans folk as “lesser”-human (although, as I will
go on to discuss, it clearly and importantly does undertake such a critique), but
is also caught up in the current complexities of past-present relations, gender
and sexuality identities and identifications, and affective politics. To develop each
of these points, let me say a little more about both modes of storying and their
differing effects for viewers and a broader gender/sexuality politics.2
Still image from Screaming Queens
(2005), with permission
of Susan Styker.
At the same time, a sense of belonging is threaded through these stories, as
women endeavour to create for themselves and each other the terms of being
(transsexual) women. Compton’s was a “clean,” “fabulous” “fairyland” in which to
gather and find community. This is reminiscent of the houses described in the film
Paris is Burning (1991).3 Also fascinating are interview excerpts from a former
policeman and a local clergyman which complicate dominant narratives of police
harassment and religious dismissal of queer folk. We hear these men speak to
making alliances with the queens and hustlers of the Tenderloin, helping them
to access federal financial resources, medical services and legal interventions. We
begin to grasp a more complex picture than an “us versus them” narrative would
have made apparent—a texture of complex life and relations that Wente’s column,
for example, utterly disregards.
Stryker also references the broader historical context of protests against the
Vietnam War, with their associated interventions in gender politics, the civil
rights movement, and the emergence of a transsexual identity, all of which
animated terms on which the queens could “claim their rights as human beings”
and “fight for their individual rights for freedom.” Through this juxtaposition of
oppressive and liberating discourses, Screaming Queens sets the scene for the fight
with the police at Compton’s: memorable images include queens throwing coffee
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In documenting-to-remember, Screaming Queens provides witness to lives lived
in the Tenderloin district of the 1960s. Constituted as “female impersonators”
who were frequently jailed for breaking the law (by wearing lipstick or mascara
or a blouse with the buttons on the “wrong side”), the transsexual women Stryker
interviews describe lives of restricted access to housing and work, in which they
were disowned by their families and worked in street-level survival prostitution
if they could not get work as entertainers. Across the interviews, we develop an
image of the poverty, drugs, violence, police harassment, and degradation through
which lives were lived by those for whom embodying femininity was not an
impersonation but a deeply felt sense of identity.
219
in the face of a club-wielding cop, smashing sugar shakers through the cafeteria
windows, and using empty alcohol bottles in handbags for self-defence. Stryker
describes the Compton’s Cafeteria riot as “the first known incident of collective
militant queer resistance to police harassment in U.S. history.”
Stryker concludes the film with a discussion of the changing social environment
that followed the riot. She highlights the 1966 publication of Dr. Harry Benjamin’s
The Transsexual Phenomenon, which became a “guidebook” for transsexuals in the
Tenderloin, and the subsequent emergence of sex reassignment surgeries and
clinics in the Bay area and other places. It is on this note that Screaming Queens
returns us to the present: through a call to recognize the power of histories—
particularly forgotten and under-known histories—to animate contemporary
struggles for recognition of diverse, complicated and variant embodiments of
genders and sexualities. Such struggles in Canada are currently animated, for
example, by arguments for gender neutral bathrooms in public institutions, state
supported financing of surgical procedures and associated pharmaceutical and
psychological care (for, as Wente’s column reminds us, surgeries are not only costly,
but also not universally available), and creating a “third box” on forms such as
driver’s licences, passports and medical cards that require gender identification.
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220
Such struggles lead me to contemplate the second type of storying undertaken
in the film. Through its dominant narrative arc and explicitly in the voice-over,
Screaming Queens tells the story of the Compton’s riot as a correction to the historical
record, supplanting Stonewall as the “origin” event of gay militancy in historical
memory with this story of MtF transsexual militancy in San Francisco three years
earlier. In the early years of the 21st century, when transgender and transsexual
politics have an unprecedented presence in North America, it is not difficult to
recognize the import of such a re-casting of history. It effectively switches the
“T” from the end of LGB to its start, constituting a radical reorientation to (and
hence rethinking of ) gender and sexual diversities, variances and struggles.
While Stryker’s reorientation of precedence will no doubt be a matter of debate
for historians of sexuality, I am more interested in how pasts are produced in the
present, and the effects of animating origin stories per se. I take counsel here from
Ann Braithwaite, who, writing in a different context, notes a concern with
...the ways in which “beginnings” are told, the various narratives that
are constructed about beginnings (of lives, of theories, of histories and
memories) are tied (albeit not necessarily consciously) to perceptions about
“ends,” defined as both aims and objectives and as chronological time. And,
thus, beginnings are necessarily shaped by their contexts of telling, are not
true beginnings—because those are impossible—but are instead always
stories about beginnings, in particular contexts, to particular audiences, for
particular purposes. To tell a particular story about beginnings is precisely
that, to tell a story and all stories have consequences.... (2004: 25)
Reading Screaming Queens on these terms alerts us to the workings of the present
as a shaping force on how (and which) past is brought forward and on what terms.
On the terms of the narrative pedagogy articulated through Stryker’s film, it is
reasonable to anticipate its desired consequences as furthering the human rights
of trans folk. In the register of political intervention, this is of course necessary and
vital work for making diverse and variant gender and sexual lives more liveable
without diminishment and constraint.
Such complexity is made most evident through three central tensions in the
footage. First, there are references throughout the film to a hierarchy and struggle
within transsexual communities in San Francisco. We see this, for example,
through excerpts of black and white footage of two transsexual women discussing
their lives (unnamed, but presumably from the 1960s), juxtaposed with more
recent footage from interviews with Stryker which were undertaken for the film.
Still image from
Screaming Queens
(2005), with permission of
Susan Styker.
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At the level of cultural work, however, I want to suggest that resting with a
secure(d) origin story of trans history isn’t all there is to say, and isn’t all that
is needed. Indeed, Screaming Queens itself actually points us in this direction.
The film footage complicates the narrative pedagogy by troubling identity as
a straightforward or stable marker of claims for justice. Through this footage,
Screaming Queens departs from a critique of the kinds of ideas expressed by Wente,
by providing another register of more complicated representation with which to
grapple. Rather than regard such complexity as a problem of the film, I suggest
that it underscores the need to view and engage with this film as an offering of
insights into the present moment of gender/sexuality identity politics as constituted,
and hence circumscribed, by human rights discourses. To recall Braithwaite, the
juxtaposition of film footage tells a story that exceeds and complicates the story
as narrated.
221
In the former footage, the women endeavour to mark and name themselves as
distinct from the transsexuals who hustle to make a living, expressing their desire
for legitimacy and respect as “ordinary women” and not queens, whom they regard
as “common.” By contrast, Stryker’s interviewees were the derided “gutter girls,”
who also desired ordinariness and respect. This was particularly so following the
riot, once a discourse of transsexuality began circulating in ways that made other
possibilities for the self imaginable. It is this tension in identification that leads to
the second tension I perceive in the complexities of “belonging.”
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222
This tension is expressed in feelings of belonging, friendship and intimacy that
are partially consituted by shared subjection to violence, harassment and poverty.
For example, when Stryker is mapping the neighbourhood with one of the queens
of Compton’s, the queen clearly demarcates the streets that bounded the area of
relative safety; they were not free to leave the neighbourhood and were explicitly
policed to stay “among their kind.” This issue of “one’s kind” is the third tension in
the film: whereas in the historical accounting, transsexual is the identity claimed
and fought over, by the end of the film there is a switch to transgender. On the
one hand, this makes sense in terms of the contrast of historical moments. On the
other, however, it glosses over a slippage that continues to be a site of contestation
in North America, both “within” and “outside of ” queer-ing scholarship, culture
and activism.4
Rather than tell a simple singular story, Stryker allows Screaming Queens to
represent such complexity. As a historian, Stryker the filmmaker turns toward the
past to uncover a history of the present. As a remembrance of history, the film
tells a story of the past that is necessarily constituted through the present within
which that remembrance occurs. These modes of storying are inextricably linked
in the film by the force of a human rights discourse that locates contemporary
struggles for trans equity, justice and recognition in a history of oppression and
concomitant activism. As an encounter with and response to trans invisibility
and marginalization—not only in normative thinking about gender(s) and
sexuality(ies) but also in the mainstreaming of lesbian and gay theorizing and
activism—Screaming Queens’ emphasis on trans visibility and centrality becomes
a necessary counterpoint. I have argued that this is the film’s explicit pedagogy
and, in a context in which comments such as those made by Wente circulate
with apparent assent in Canada’s “national” daily newspaper, one that offers an
important intervention.
A second and equally compelling and significant storying in Stryker’s film exceeds
the human rights emphasis on fixing identities, through slicing oppressive practices
out of the texture of the everyday. With its spirited exploration of hierarchy,
tension, pleasure and agency, Screaming Queens has much to offer viewers about
the need to understand—and think and act away from—the delimiting claims
to fixing identity in embodiment. It points eloquently to the ways that freedom
can be circumscribed by the affective appeal of ordinariness within contemporary
regimes of normativity. That’s the changed present I am seeking—and while
Stryker’s questions and mine don’t map neatly onto one another, the stories she
offers through Screaming Queens help me to keep asking about pasts, presents and
what makes for more “livable lives” (Butler 2004: xv).
Notes
1. Rather than reinscribe Wente’s reiteration of normative renderings of femininity
and masculinity, I refer the reader to her original column. Unfortunately, the prevailing thought Wente expresses is neither hers alone nor is that column its only articulation. Reading her February intervention, I was reminded of another of her columns, six
months prior, in which the sanctity of the nuclear family and psychiatric judgements
are written as the moral high ground, dismissing and rendering as monstrous (without
feelings of “remorse or guilt for the destruction of ... family or the pain caused”) a person
undergoing sex-reassignment surgeries and identifications (Wente 2007).
3. Jennie Livingstone’s Paris is Burning is a documentary of drag ball culture in the midlate 1980s in New York City. Participants in the balls were representatives of “houses,”
gestures to the fashion houses of the city. Such houses constituted intentional families
for those who, through the workings of heteronormativity, had lost or fraught relations
with the families they were born into.
4. Such debates hinge, in part, on how sex, gender, sexuality and desire are understood
to be articulated in relation to each other and with what implications for a politics of
embodiment. Underneath these articulations, others seem to be at stake—what it means
to be a self, for example, and how selves are understood in relation to other selves. Scholarship and cultural critique here is extensive, but interested readers might consider, for
example, the work of Kate Bornstein, Judith Halberstam, Anne Fausto-Sterling, J. Bobby
Noble and Shannon Winnubst.
References
Benjamin, H. 1966. The Transsexual Phenomena. New York: Julian Press.
Braithwaite, A., S. Heald, S. Luhmann, and S. Rosenberg. 2004. Troubling Women’s Studies. Toronto: Sumach Press.
Butler, J. 2004. Precarious Life. London and New York: Verso.
Halberstam, J. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Livingston, J. and B. Swimar. 1991. Paris is Burning [film]. USA: Off-White Productions.
Plaskow, J. 1991. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: Harper and Row.
Stryker, S. and V. Silverman. 2005. Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria
[film]. San Francisco: Frameline Distributors.
Wente, M. 2007. The Explosive Rethinking of Sex Reassignment, Globe and Mail. 25
August, A19.
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2. I am using the term “storying” here to reference both what I read as the explicit
pedagogy of the film (as indexed by its prevailing narrative arc, discussed later in this
essay), and the film footage, which, as I go on to suggest, is not neatly contained by that
pedagogy. In brief, and as I will go on to discuss, my reading is that the two modes of
storying in the film are actually in some tension and it is precisely this that I think makes
Screaming Queens a particularly important film in the contemporary moment.
223
———. 2008. A Day at the Theatre of the Absurd, Globe and Mail. 16 February, A19.
Winnubst, S. 2006. Queering Freedom. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
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TOPIA 20 225
REVIEW ESSAY
Peter Conlin
The Pragmatics and the Promise of Working
with and Not for: Policy and Canadian
Artist-run Culture
A review of
Robertson, Clive. 2006. Policy Matters: Administrations of Art and Culture. Toronto:
YYZ Books.
¤
As much as Policy Matters is a book about something ostensibly remote and
dry as cultural policy, it is also personal, drawing on more than three decades of
Robertson’s writing and organizing in Canadian artist-run centres and extending
policy itself into the passions and experiences of collective art activities. The
title is an uncontroversial statement of fact imploring us to take up a concern.
The “mattering” in the title is a Foucauldian “caring for.” It also follows from
the cultural studies tradition of proclaiming that this or that “matters” and that
realizing so can shift the apparently tangential into the crux of a situation, possibly
reformulating the categories of the political and cultural. What is unusual about
Policy Matters is that instead of making something hitherto superfluous into a key
site of political agency, it is the administrative and bureaucratic activities—already
political in a narrow and instrumental way—that are foregrounded as a potential
space for action.
Related to this, Policy Matters goes against a certain tendency in contemporary
art and theory, which seems to be more enthusiastic about exploring how culture
matters to the political than exploring something as supposedly conventional,
uncreative and unsexy as how policy affects the cultural. Robertson’s approach
seeks to avoid, in Andrew Sayer’s language, “vulgar culturalism” without reducing
culture too narrowly to funding and the traditional estimation of administration
(2000: 167). The lure of policy, for cultural policy studies researchers, lies in this
integration and in the ensuing possibility for culture, and ideas about how culture
might lead to concrete results, or as Toby Miller and George Yúdice suggest,
“actually existing politics” (2002: 30). It seems to be a way for cultural researchers
to prove they are not useless, yet with the danger that this pragmatic politics could
form “the horizon of the thinkable” (O’Regan 1992: 420). Robertson counters
this risk by examining a practice of cultural policy that seeks to be as expedient
as it is extensive.
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226
Policy in Policy Matters extends out from funding, administration and publicity
into a set of practices forming subjects in the sense that, within Foucault’s concept
of governmentality, cultural policy is a way to manage individuals and form citizens,
as well as the managerial and discursive processes that make up the conditions of
the production and reception of art. This complex notion of policy is then brought
back to “disturb” managerial apparatuses and connect them to political social and
cultural movements. Policy is examined in numerous sites and moments specific
to Canadian visual artists and those involved in artist-run organizations, to whom
the book is dedicated. Robertson works toward the ethos of a policy by artists, that
is, for artists to become self-governing, active policy actors. The project is to create
a bureaucracy of their own instead of leaving it to government administrators
and professional managers. In so doing, artists can be more than “merely readers
of funding rule changes” and engage in an active production of policy that is
considered to be a part of “participatory citizenship” (8).
In developing this compound view of policy, Robertson provides an historical
analysis of artist-run activity in Canada and its ongoing relation to funding
bodies. The book, with an emphasis on empirical work, is comprised of three
parts, beginning with an adaptation of Robertson’s PhD thesis on artist-run
centres. Part two, which focuses on relations with the Canada Council for the
Arts, and part three, which focuses on media representations of cultural work, are
comprised mostly of articles written for publications connected to the Canadian
artist-run community. Robertson, more than any other commentator I know,
looks at Canadian artist-led organizations as a rich tradition of self-governance
and contestation.
The book is largely premised on the “hard to achieve” Foucauldian formulation
of “working with and not for the government” (iv). However, I wonder if such
alternative approaches to cultural policy are only viable in a time when the state itself
is not in such deep collaboration with corporate power, and executive control and
market driven thinking aren’t so pervasive. Perhaps beyond the relative autonomy
of art, it is the meaningful autonomy of society from capitalist economics that
weighs so heavily on how policy can or cannot matter. The book purposely avoids
systemic critiques and references to neoliberalism and capitalism, however, and
instead Robertson’s version of “working with” government has interventionist
tendencies. The techniques of policy engagement he looks at are certainly not
public commissions, nor the development of think tanks and government
bureaucracies, but rather various kinds of interventions on state apparatus, and
the development of alternative policy ideas by artists, especially in the workings
in and between artist-run centres. Examples include the miraculous petitioning
of members of the Senate by the Canadian Artists Representation/Le front des
artistes canadiens (CARFAC) to block a merger between Canada Council for the
Arts and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), or
the dramatic shake-up caused by the Minquon Panchayat collective’s anti-racist
strategies.
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I have been active in “artist-run culture,” as it is called, since the mid 1990s; and
to be candid, Robertson speaks of a side of artist-run culture that most in my
generation have never experienced. As a result, some of the possibilities he sees
in artist-run centres can sound like wishful thinking. Nonetheless, Robertson
is well aware of the challenges artist-run centres face, especially the Canada
Council for the Arts’s tendency of “re-infantilization” (126), wherein artist-led
organizations are considered to be a feeder system into more serious institutions.
Because moments of dissent and autonomous organization in artist-run culture
are rarely seen today, Robertson’s analysis and histories are valuable; however, does
this mean that they are all too historical? An example is the assertion that artistrun centres “were (and I assume are) quite happy to program rather than curate,
to coordinate rather than to edit” (13). This was/is done out of an “an ethical
refusal for artists not to anthropologize other artists” (14), that is, for artist-run
centres to be an alternative to the way other institutions extract artists from
whatever context and insert them into an art world circulation that estranges
artists from their work and each other. What is peculiar is that many artist-run
centres have long since dispensed with such a refusal and are now oriented rather
enthusiastically toward curation as a means of building careers and advancing
organizations. This underscores that generation gaps and partial continuations
are what artist-led activities are all about; and yet other than acknowledging
this fundamental characteristic, the fascinating question of how policy relates to
generational dynamics is not addressed in Policy Matters.
227
Robertson’s idea of policy is substantially different from Tony Bennett’s call
for culture studies scholars to become state policy technicians, where policy
“is the structural engine room which powers everything else” (O’Regan 1992:
416). Robertson’s Policy Matters examines policy as both more specific and more
general. The book is primarily about arts policy, expressly the relation between
the artist-run centre network and the Canada Council for the Arts. However,
Robertson’s conception of policy covers a dispersed set of practices, including
media debates, cultural criticism, journalism and larger political struggles. While
not about “bottom up” cultural policy per se, the crux of Policy Matters lies in
moments when government policy is acted upon by self-organized actors and
grassroots initiatives. Policy is a site of political action only if there are powerful
social and cultural movements acting upon it.
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228
Robertson’s Foucauldian approach to policy aligns him with theorists Toby Miller
and George Yudice who call for a shift away from policy as maintenance of social
order by the state, to policy driven by social movements in the transformation of
social order. This is the happy project of “practic[ing] the arts of governmentality
in order to further a radical-democratic cultural politics” (Miller and Yudice 2002:
34). Robertson sees artist-run centres as, at various moments, participating in
social movements such as feminism (e.g., the “After the Party’s Over” event by the
Women’s Cultural Building) and Québecois sovereignty (Québec 75 exhibition),
and in so doing “producing a hybrid model of aesthetic and social organization” (v).
Yet there is something very tenuous in a constructive yet antagonist relation
with the state, and it is this same precariousness that underscores artist-run
centre culture itself. This indeterminacy is what the whole book turns on—the
trepidations and potentials in the struggle over the administration of cultural
resources and production. But in an asymmetrical relationship with larger arts
institutions and the powers of the state, how can artists pursue their interests unless
they already coincide with the state’s? It is here that the ambivalence of Foucault’s
concept of governmentality comes into play. Governance is a way for states to
manage individual citizens, and cultural policy is part of the state’s apparatus used
to mould members of the population, which is most effectively carried out by
“managing the public by having it manage itself ” (Robertson quoting Miller 60).
But in order to do this, there is nevertheless a measure of autonomy that can
potentially function beyond subjugation. Policy studies like Robertson’s are based
on the assumption that there is no way out of governance and that “[t]he state is
an important and legitimate object of political struggle” (263), and therefore such
studies are engaged in the fight for the good side of governance.
This raises the question of where Policy Matters sits in the myriad of competing
interpretations and uses of Foucault with respect to policy. On one hand there
are “rightwing Foucauldians,” as Jim McGuigan has described them, seeking an
“accommodation to prevailing powers of social management in order to make
technical adjustments” (2004: 53). On the other hand, there is the assertion of
a genealogical politics by theorists, such as Wendy Brown (1998), who read
Foucault’s theories as explicitly at odds with attempts to influence policy. This is
not because policy orientations are complicit or reformist per se, but rather that
the production of alternative policy limits politics to this preview, rather than
undermining political rationality itself.
Robertson advocates numerous, valuable proposals and prescriptions, such as the
inclusion of a brief for a guaranteed annual income for artists, written by Karl
Beverage and Gary Kibbins. Policy Matters looks for solutions by negotiating
with the existing political apparatus, rather than, in Foucault’s words, approaching
“politics from behind and cut across societies on the diagonal” (Foucault 1986:
375). Foucault refused to specify how his methods might be used, yet if Robertson
is not that far from conventional leftist positions (criticizing cut-backs, calling for
the strengthening of social and cultural programs, perhaps for a social democracy
with a cultural activist edge), then some of the Foucauldian approaches in the
book work against the grain of the analysis.
Another limitation of Policy Matters is the extent to which Robertson’s analysis is
strictly tied to Canada. The conditions of artist-led spaces in other countries and
their relations to art councils rarely, if at all, enter into Robertson’s analysis. The
few references to international forces are of the unfortunate “world class” variety
of prestige institutions and art stars, such as in the discussion of Frank Gehry’s
renovation of the Art Gallery of Ontario. This omission of transnationalism in
Policy Matters is intentional:
While I recognize the usefulness furtherance of fluid boundaries and
cultural hybridizations, I am purposely choosing to seek out and analyze
artist interactions with policy apparatuses and institutions that can be held
accountable, that are not “over there” but are “here.” (22)
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At various points Policy Matters seems to take on the Foucauldian method of
tracing fractures in history that disrupt the governing episteme as it is manifest
in art institutions and funding bodies. In other ways there seems to be more of
a practical attempt to establish an alternative history by pointing out omissions
in the established view of art in Canada. Robertson develops something of a
lineage from conceptual art to the beginnings of artists’ active engagement with
policy and self-governance. It is compelling, but it offers us a fairly progressive
development rather than a Foucauldian genealogy. Similarly, Robertson’s analysis
of the structural adjustment of the Canada Council from the 1990s up to the
present (with a reorientation of visual arts grants from production to career
development) are essential for anyone involved in visual arts in Canada, but
this does not seem like a radical project that disrupts the solidity of the present
episteme and turning us to “that which might not be.” Instead it presents an
alternative historical narrative that legitimates a different cultural order.
229
Notwithstanding, there also seems to be a defensiveness in the book in this
regard. The analysis would be stronger if it addressed transnational possibilities,
especially as many of the challenges Robertson studies are not unique to Canada.
Since policy is influenced by supranational entities, a global understanding would
give artists a stronger position to self-govern. In many ways, Canadian artist-run
culture is caught in what Michael Dorland (2000) has described as the painful
shift from an internal, controlling statist policy to an interstate rationality.
As previously mentioned, the book focuses on cultural policy as a way for
culture to matter, and for artists to take these matters into their own hands. For
Robertson, policy at best works not through the instrumentalization of art, but as
an instrument for artists to take on a degree of autonomy. The question of cultural
pragmatics is central here—how to move from idle to active curiosity without art
turning into business, or at least, just business?
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230
The declaration that “policy matters” is significant only when countering the
assumption that it doesn’t. However, Robertson is not suggesting there is a
general disinterest toward policy in art. The problem seems to be the irresolute
specialization in the field—policy should matter to bureaucracies and directors, not
to artists, after all, what artist in their right mind would want to be bogged down
in administration? Of course artists value self-direction and know that aesthetics
are always caught up in framing and dissemination. But there is a paradox here.
In order to do this, artist-run organizations must be staffed by administrators,
and practices must be professionalized in order to be more effective. So at what
point are they still artist-run? Do these organizations, in the name of effective
governance, return to a specialization of artists making art and administrators
administrating it? Robertson calls for a necessarily tenuous relationship between
artists and the state, and this is also linked with the difficult project of developing
competencies while at the same time disrupting specializations. These tantalizing
combinations make policy by artists seem all the more necessary and radical.
References
Brown, Wendy. 1998. Genealogical Politics. In The Later Foucault, edited by Jeremy
Moss, 33-49. London: Sage Publications.
Dorland, Michael. 2000. Policying Culture: Canada, state Rationality, and the Governmentalization of Communication in Capital Culture, edited by Jody Berland and Shelley
Hornstein, 142-51. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1986. Politics and Ethics: An Interview. In The Foucault Reader, edited
by Paul Rabinow, 373-80. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
McGuigan, Jim. 2004. Rethinking Cultural Policy. Maidenhead: Open University.
Miller, Toby and George Yúdice. 2002. Cultural Policy. London: Sage Publications.
O’Regan, Tom. 1992. (Mis)Taking Policy: Notes on the Cultural Policy Debate. Cultural
Studies 6(3): 409-23.
Sayer, Andrew. 2000. Critical and Uncritical Cultural Turns. In Cultural Turns/Geographical Turns, edited by Ian Cook et al., 166-81. Longman: London.
TOPIA 20 231
REVIEW
Joel McKim
Expressions of Memory
in Canadian Photographic Art
A Review of
Langford, Martha. 2007. Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in
Contemporary Photographic Art. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University
Press.
¤
Perhaps no medium seems as inextricably linked to the subject of memory as
photography. Encouraged by the canonical writings of Barthes, Benjamin and
Sontag, we might well imagine every photograph to be an example of prosthetic
memory. The initial challenge facing Martha Langford in her study, Scissors,
Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art, is to clearly
demarcate within the field of photography in general those images that are chiefly
concerned with the experience of memory. She does so through the claim that
“picturing memory is, first and foremost, the exhibition of a mental process” (4), one
that invokes mental images that are distinct from those of perception. Langford
suggests that the photographs she considers all involve a rehearsal of memory,
prompting the spectator to place in suspension the “external world” of perception in
order to bring forward “internalized images” of memory (5-6). Having established
these parameters, Langford’s next claim is that a conception of memory so defined
is a particularly important reference for Canadian photographic art, and the
book concerns itself exclusively with the work of Canadian photographers. She
goes so far as to suggest that an as yet absent history of Canadian photography
may best be viewed through the optics of memory. The book goes some distance
towards substantiating this claim and within its framework Langford provides
both original analyses of familiar Canadian photographers, such as Jeff Wall and
Michael Snow, and insights into the work of lesser-known practitioners.
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232
As her title suggests, Langford uses the children’s game of scissors, paper,
stone as a structuring metaphor for her overall study. A playful, but effective
device, it allows Langford to explore three discrete elements of the relationship
between photography and memory. The first, “Scissors,” begins by questioning
the common association of photography with “[t]he cut—the extraction of an
image from the spatio-temporal flow” (13). Here Langford complicates the
equation of the photograph with arrested memory and presents the image as
something far more pliable, subject to adjustments and reinterpretations. She
considers artists who position the photograph on the shifting threshold between
remembering and forgetting. Included in this section is a chapter devoted to
artistic reflections on practices of image collecting (building on her previous work
Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums, 2001)
and a thoughtful analysis of the photography of Donigan Cumming. According
to Langford, the boundaries separating realist, amateur and staged photography
are significantly blurred in Cumming’s portraits of “forgotten men.” The history
of social documentary photography is evoked in his series entitled Reality and
Motive in Documentary Photography (1986). In these photographs, lower and
middle class men play versions of themselves in portraits perched somewhere
between authenticity and parody. Drawing on Kaja Silverman’s writing on the
limits of empathy and her theory of “identity-at-a-distance,” Langford argues
that Cumming’s work “makes us uncomfortable in our awareness of others, in
part by making us aware that we are paying close attention selectively” (Langford
2007: 61). The otherwise unnoticed come into sight in these images. The men
who occupy bedsits and basement apartments, but they do so seemingly only
through a detachment. We see them as types rather than individuals. Cumming’s
photos simultaneously engender and admonish this viewing tendency. As his work
progresses across several decades, Cumming becomes increasingly self-reflexive
about the relationship of his photographic practice to the outsider community
with which it engages.
“Paper,” the second part of Langford’s triad, explores the divergences and
connections between memory and imagination. Langford emphasizes a mutually
transformative relationship between the two faculties, disputing the naturalism of
philosopher Kendall L. Walton’s conception of the photograph as a “transparent
picture” and Oliver Wendell Holmes’s metaphor of “the mirror with a memory.”
In the final section of the book, “Stone,” the distinction between lived memory
and monumental history is subject to interrogation. Langford refers to the work
of Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora within the tradition of French “historical
anthropology,” but remains unsatisfied with the position photography seems fated
to occupy within these frameworks. Even in these forms of “history from below,”
photography is at best a raw material calling for the interpretive account of the
historian. Langford sees a different potential in photography conceived as the
surface on which these two categories of memory and history co-mingle. The
photographs she considers in this section produce “imagery that belongs to both
memory and history, and perfectly [serve] neither”(190). This final grouping of
essays includes a reading of Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge’s photographic
depictions of an otherwise undocumented workers’ history and an analysis
of Stan Denniston’s “flashbulb memories” that provocatively blend personal
recollections and important moments of collective history.
The field of memory studies can at times be a victim of its own eagerness for
interdisciplinarity. Given the multitude of available approaches generated by
diverse domains such as philosophy, history, psychology, ethnography and psy-
TOPIA 20
Remembrance and creativity fold in on each other in Langford’s account: “the
trace of that-has-been becomes the image of that-might-be; the internalized
given-to-be-seen is externalized as made-to-be-photographed” (100). The works
considered in this section all confirm, according to Langford, that memory’s
attachment to a material past serves as a catalyst rather than a limitation to
the photographic imagination and that imagination may act as a productive
interruption in the flow from perception to memory. In one chapter Michael
Snow’s confounding of visual expectations in such works as Midnight Blue (197374) and In Media Res (1998) are read through the lens of Henri Bergson’s theory of
“false recognition” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological study of imagination.
Another essay compares the works of Jeff Wall and Jin-me Yoon through their
shared technique of “conflation,” the strategic binding together of two images,
one past and one present. Langford maintains that this act of historical fusion has
a critical aim for both photographers, “their imagery abjures novelty for its own
sake, favouring telling difference; it reopens the past by constructively critiquing
the culture’s valued representations” (166-67). In Wall’s case, the formal elements
of the 19th-century pictorial tradition collide with scenes of racial and class
tension in contemporary Vancouver. Yoon’s photography fuses the experience of
the Vancouver Korean community with typical representations of Canada’s visual
heritage, such as the paintings of the Group of Seven and scenic postcards of the
Canadian Rockies, raising questions of cultural visibility and inclusion. Langford
argues that conflation is a tool for political critique in the works of both Wall and
Yoon and is importantly one that avoids evacuating questions of aesthetics and
imagination, countering a tendency she identifies in the Marxist theories of Hal
Foster and Terry Eagleton.
233
choanalysis, the temptation to become a collector of memory theories is often
difficult to resist. The particularities and disciplinary contexts of these theories can
be eclipsed by the common denominator of memory. Langford only occasionally
falls prey to this tendency. In the many essays devoted to the work of specific
photographers, she productively combines well chosen theoretical sources with
perceptive interpretations of her artistic material. However, Langford’s claim
that the history of Canadian photography might be understood primarily as an
art of memory could be challenged. There is a circularity to this argument, as
a significant number of the photographs selected by Langford were produced
in the 1980s and 1990s, a period when the question of memory was becoming
increasingly prominent in the arts, humanities and social sciences. A generation
of Canadian photographers now coming to the fore may test the limits of this
interpretative frame. The young Montreal artists Jason and Carlos Sanchez are
one such example. Their photographic portrayals of contemporary culture often
possess a terrifying immediacy that seems indifferent if not hostile to the claims of
memory. Despite this caveat, Langford advances an uncommonly rich conception
of memory, and Scissors, Paper, Stone is an important contribution to the growing
scholarship on Canadian photographic art.
TOPIA 20
234
References
Cumming, Donigan. 1986. Reality and Motive in Documentary Photography: Donigan
Cumming. Ottawa, ON: Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography.
Langford, Martha. 2001. Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic
Albums. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
TOPIA 20 235
REVIEW
Laura Ishiguro
Stories of Stories: Examining Ethnography
through Biography
A Review of
Thompson, Judy. 2007. Recording Their Story: James Teit and the Tahltan. Vancouver:
Douglas and McIntyre.
¤
Judy Thompson’s Recording Their Story uses biographical information, historical
photographs and museum collections to explore the relationship between turn-ofthe-century ethnographer James Teit and the Tahltan people of British Columbia.
In doing so, Thompson situates Teit’s Tahltan project within the larger context of
his life, explaining how his research in the Stikine region was influenced by his
experiences in the Shetland Islands, U.K., and other parts of British Columbia.
She also details Teit’s publications and collections of Tahltan material, allowing
the book to function partly as a catalogue of his work.
As an ethnographer, Teit’s name is closely linked with major figures in North
American anthropology such as Franz Boas and Edward Sapir, both of whom
employed him as a researcher. In this book, however, Thompson also gives
credit to Teit as an individual, emphasizing that the Tahltan related to him not
as an emissary of Boas and Sapir, but as a man they knew as a local big game
hunting guide, an organizer and advocate for Indian rights associations, and an
ethnographer in other parts of the province. As such, Thompson maintains, the
Tahltan were eager to have him “record their story.” As a result of this relationship,
Teit produced five papers, a manuscript, more than four hundred pages of field
notes, 135 song recordings, 167 photographs, 191 artifacts, 130 mythological tales
and a rich correspondence with Sapir and others. Recording Their Story includes
six appendices that detail this work through lists of artifacts, song recordings and
the contents of his publications.
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236
After a short introduction situating Teit and this Tahltan work, Thompson
seeks to tell his life story using sources such as personal correspondence and
field notebooks. The book is divided into ten chronological chapters that begin
with his upbringing in the Shetland Islands from 1864 to 1884, his experiences
with arrival and settlement in British Columbia in the late 19th century, and
his emergence as an ethnographer under the wing of Franz Boas at the turn
of the 20th century. The second half of the book focuses on Teit’s contact with
the Tahltan as he researched and produced ethnographic material for Boas and
Sapir from 1910 until 1922. The final chapter begins with his death in 1922, then
examines his legacy, both in terms of personal grief and professional productions.
Thompson leaves the reader with the sense that this was a man and a body of
work of great value. Produced in a field that often erased contemporary voices of
Aboriginal people in hopes of uncovering a “pristine” and collective past, Teit’s
work with the Tahltan instead paints a more nuanced picture of individual and
group experiences in the early 20th century.
While Thompson’s analysis of Teit’s writing reveals this sense of Tahltan
individuality, her emphasis on the visual is also important. The text is interspersed
with 120 colour and black-and-white photographs of Teit, his associates, the
land and the Tahltan material he collected. These photographs give faces to Teit’s
“informants” and Tahltan friends, whose individuality was often erased by his
editors and employers in formal ethnographic publications. They also serve to
remind the reader that the experiences of ethnographers were visual, material,
sensual and vibrant in ways that is sometimes lost in an analysis of just their
textual publications. In this way, Thompson draws connections between Teit’s
writing and his collections that might otherwise be lost as they are housed and
accessed separately today.
Although the emphasis of the book is clearly Teit’s work among the Tahltan,
Thompson uses his other experiences and activities to situate his work in the
Stikine. This serves to remind the reader that just as the subjects of ethnographic
work were not static and anonymous relics of the past, so too was the ethnographer
an individual with concerns and interests that went beyond the standards and
expectations of early 20th-century anthropology. Scholars have reminded us that
ethnography was not objective or disassociated from broader colonial, scientific
and political concerns, but Recording Their Story makes it clear that Teit’s work was
also entwined with very personal experiences in the Shetland Islands of his youth,
and in Spences Bridge, Nanaimo and the Stikine in early British Columbia. In this
sense, Thompson is successful in reminding the reader that both ethnographers
and their subjects were individuals with personal stories that influenced the final
works. A clearer recognition of this offers a fuller and more critical understanding
of British Columbian ethnography as a whole.
Although it does not draw compelling connections with related scholarly literature,
Judy Thompson’s Recording Their Story is a visually appealing and engaging
biography that accomplishes an important feat: giving a sense of individuality and
personal history to Teit and the Tahltan. At the heart, this is a story about telling
stories. While Teit recorded the story of the Tahltan so it would not be lost to the
machinery of Canadian colonial history, so too does Thompson record Teit’s story
so that it will be remembered. As with all histories, this is only one of the stories
that could have been told.
TOPIA 20
James Teit’s activities were so diverse that historians and scholars of any number
of fields—for example, Aboriginal politics, anthropology, botany, conservation,
hunting and tourism, mining and socialism—will find details of interest in his
life. However, the photographs and standard chronological biography also make
it an accessible book for the general reader. Indeed, although Recording Their Story
has much to offer historical understandings of James Teit, early 20th-century
ethnography in British Columbia and the Tahltan and Stikine region of BC, its
most appropriate audience is those who do not consider themselves specialists in
any of these fields, but rather appreciators of them. Specialists may be frustrated
that the book does not link to broader theoretical themes and the relevant academic
literature, even as Teit’s life offers an opportunity to draw out a deeper analysis of
turn-of-the-century British Columbia and the British Empire. For example, his
life could serve as a fruitful case study for exploring the links between colony and
metropole in anthropology or early immigration, providing an opportunity for
historians of BC to situate their work in a broader field.
237
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REVIEW
Nilanjana Deb
Of Wordarrows and Memory Wars
A review of
Sam McKegney. 2007. Magic Weapons: Aboriginal Writers Remaking Community
after Residential School. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.
¤
Sam McKegney’s Magic Weapons is a thought-provoking introduction to the
political and academic debates over the residential school system that scarred
generations of Aboriginal, Metis and Inuit people in Canada. His holistic,
interdisciplinary approach represents a new direction in Aboriginal Studies in
Canada, combining literary analysis with a critical study of discourses on residential
schools in the fields of education, public policy, politics and history. Inspired by
the people-centric critical approaches now emerging from within the Aboriginal
and Metis communities in Canada, Magic Weapons is deeply concerned with the
ethics and effects of writing and researching Canada’s cultural holocaust.
Residential school narratives generate a field of intersubjectivity that connects
author, community and reader in a unique way, and requires reading frameworks
different from those for conventional “lit-crit” approaches. McKegney’s book
gives the reader a fairly critical overview of the ways in which scholars and writers
both within and outside the community, such as Helen Hoy, Renate Eigenbrod
and others, have struggled to develop appropriate tools for reading these texts.
There is a carefully thought out section on the politics of location that engages
with past attempts to frame the insider/outsider boundaries in Aboriginal Studies
in Canada.
Because residential school narratives are texts that enter the public domain both
as literature and as bibiliotherapy, as it were, McKegney investigates the crucial
question of whether and how literature can perform a healing function. He maps
the changes in the Canadian government’s response to policies regarding residential
schools, as well as the arguments within and outside Aboriginal communities
regarding possible recuperative strategies for dealing with the psychological,
emotional and social aftermath of what the “stolen generations” suffered. The
continuing interactions between church, state and community are presented in
all their diversity; as such, Magic Weapons is a useful entry for both academic and
lay readers to this complex and contentious field. The book is liberally interleaved
with creative writing by First Nations authors, allowing the reader to hear a wide
range of independent narratives complementing McKegney’s argument.
Apart from closely linking the readings of the selected texts to the biographies
of the authors, McKegney attempts to offer the reader cultural and historical
contexts for the residential school narratives. Magic Weapons is committed writing,
and admirably so, combining rigorous research with community-centric ethics. It
becomes clear to the reader that residential schools were part of a larger and older
network of colonial institutions seeking to “discipline” the lives of Aboriginal
peoples. McKegney repeatedly emphasizes that many of the problems facing
Aboriginal and Metis communities today are directly related to the damage caused
by the residential schools, rather than being “inherent” to the communities in any
way. However, historical contexts could have been more carefully incorporated;
TOPIA 20
Simply cataloguing the many recriminations levelled against residential schools
would have been an easy track for McKegney to take. Instead, he problematizes
the issue by choosing to look at authors like Rita Joe and Basil Johnston, who
re-present their memories of residential school in extremely ambivalent ways.
However, one wishes that McKegney would engage more deeply with theories
of memory and trauma when dealing with the question of why past events are
recorded in certain ways by authors. Avoiding both over-deference and the elision
of difficult questions, Magic Weapons provides sensitive, nuanced readings of the
work of lesser-known writers such as Anthony Thrasher as well as popular authors
such as Thomson Highway. Of particular interest is his study of Skid Row Eskimo,
a work that has rarely been written about, let alone subjected to the kind of intense
and robust scrutiny that McKegney provides. McKegney, in selecting authors
whose responses to the residential school experience cannot be read simply in
terms of victimhood or condemnation, provides a challenging new direction in
which to think about this kind of testimonial life writing.
239
one wonders why McKegney devotes a substantial section to the history of the
Mi’kmaw experience of colonization when contextualising Rita Joe’s poetry, but
fails to provide detailed historical overviews of the communities of other authors
included in the book.
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240
McKegney’s attempt to develop an apt theoretical framework for residential
school narratives is valuable for scholars interested in Aboriginal, Metis and
Inuit cultural studies. There is a particularly useful framing of authorial responses
as affirmativist and contestatory, though the lengthy engagement with Gerald
Vizenor’s postmodernist writing seems unnecessary to the construction of
McKegney’s argument. What stands out in Magic Weapons is McKegney’s study
of the intertextuality between traditional stories and contemporary narratives, and
of the ways in which the community’s stories and symbols can be used to develop
contemporary anti-colonial and political frameworks for reading Aboriginal
literature. This enables a richer reading of a text such as Skid Row Eskimo, for
example, through the analysis of the story of Iliapaluk and his grandmother
(91). Contesting the mainstream dismissal of the text as “simple” testimony,
McKegney demonstrates how a culturally informed study of the links between
the location of stories and remarks by the author within a narrative can yield
extremely productive readings. Combining theory and praxis, Magic Weapons is a
noteworthy contribution to the ongoing effort to connect the Canadian academy
and its critical vocabularies with the concerns of the individuals and communities
by and for whom the residential school narratives were written.
and promoting “the complexity of life as the experience of interconnected
subjectivity”(123). Therefore, totality for both writers is not represented best
by organic holistic forms, but rather through polyphony and montage. Within
this chapter lies a subsection dealing with perhaps the most important point of
contact between Bakhtin and Benjamin: the relationship of Bahktin’s concept
of dialogism with Benjamin’s concept of allegory. Both concepts function as key
devices for subverting the symbolic universe of the status quo but, unlike some
liberal interpreters of their work, such as Ken Hirschkop, Beasley-Murray argues
that these concepts maintain a negative relationship with a view of totality that
holds open a slim threshold to an alternate future other than that projected by
the status quo.
While agreeing with many of Beasley-Murray’s conclusions in this book, I could
not help but be frustrated by the brevity of his analysis of many of the key concepts
and points of comparison between Benjamin and Bakhtin. I am hopeful, however,
that the rich potential that has now been unearthed by Beasley-Murray’s valuable
analysis will enable future scholars to pursue these lines of inquiry to an even
greater depth.
Cohen, Tom. 1998. Ideology and Inscription: “Cultural Studies” after Benjamin, de Man, and
Bakhtin. New York: Cambridge University Press.
TOPIA 20
References
243
TOPIA 20 244
REVIEW
Ian Mosby
History from the Bottomless Cup:
The Culture of Donuts in Postwar Canada
A Review of
Penfold, Steve. 2008. The Donut: A Canadian History. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
¤
In recent years, the donut has become a makeshift national institution in Canada.
In a country where the only firm consensus about national identity is that it is
in perpetual crisis, it is not entirely surprising that a deep-fried, sugary snack
would be adopted as a cultural icon. While the largely American origins of the
donut industry, the current U.S. ownership of iconic donut chain Tim Hortons,
and the entire phenomenon’s decidedly regional character have been glazed over
in this nation-building myth, the donut’s status as a kind of ironic anti-symbol
has allowed it to gain a significant foothold in the Canadian imagination. Steve
Penfold’s The Donut: A Canadian History builds on the current fascination with
this now ubiquitous snack food by providing historical context through which to
understand its rise to power within the Canadian foodscape.
To a certain extent, the mundane and seemingly frivolous nature of the donut could
make potential readers ask themselves if they really need to know so many details
about donut franchising, drive thrus, or frying technologies. Penfold occasionally
offers a self-deprecatory take on the banality of his research subject, at one point
joking that his take on the social and cultural history of the donut amounts to “a
sort of history from the bottomless cup” (15). Despite such instances of tonguein-cheek self-mockery, Penfold ultimately makes a convincing case that the very
banality of the donut places it at the center of Canadian post-war social and
cultural life. The donut is therefore presented as a quintessential symbol of the
kinds of mass commodities that defined the post-war period: goods that were
both cheap and non-essential but which also represented the privileging of pure
desire over necessity. For Penfold, an examination of the spaces where donuts are
bought and sold is therefore particularly useful in that it enables us to look at
TOPIA 20
Although a book about donuts could easily have gone in another direction, The
Donut is a decidedly smart, engagingly written and thoroughly researched work
of social and cultural history which draws upon a range of sources including
more than sixty-five interviews with a mix of donut shop patrons, workers,
owners and corporate executives. One thing that The Donut is not, however, is
a work of culinary history. While the technical aspects of donut production are
described in some detail throughout the book, it is doubtful that many readers
will find these descriptions of the donut’s assembly line manufacturing processes
particularly appetizing. Similarly, Penfold devotes little space to examining the
sensory experience of donut consumption and at one point even laments, “I am
so thoroughly sick of donuts, I could die” (ix). In large part this is because, while
Penfold is concerned with the how, why and when of donut consumption, his
primary focus is not so much the donuts themselves as it is their social lives. This
means that he is ultimately most concerned with questions about the economic
and social relations of donuts, their cultural meanings, and their place within
larger gender and class structures. In this way, The Donut shares its approach with
some of the recently popular literature on the history of single edible commodities
like salt, milk, sugar, or chocolate. Like the best of these recent histories, Penfold
focuses less on donut trivia and lore than he does on the history of the social
relationships that have evolved along every link of the donut’s commodity chain:
whether that be the technological, economic and architectural infrastructure of
donuts; the relationships between franchise owners, workers and customers; or
the larger cultural meaning of donuts as both commodities and symbols of an
imagined national culture. In the process, Penfold provides a fascinating account
of the donut’s transformation from tasty snack into mass commodity, as well as
of the donut shop’s rise from its meagre roots as a largely male, blue collar social
space to the omnipresent fast food behemoth that currently consists of more than
6000 shops, exceeding $2 billion in sales and employing at least 100,000 people
nationwide.
245
the various links that are formed between commodities and culture in modern
capitalist societies. Donut shops were not merely places to purchase goods, but
were also important social spaces that fed off of the major transformations taking
place in Canadian communities throughout the postwar period. As an increasingly
important fixture in a now dominant “geography of convenience” the growing
popularity of the donut shop in the 1970s and 1980s spoke to an increasingly
consumption-driven and automobile-focused culture. By examining the growth
of this foodscape through the eyes of customers, employees, franchisees and the
corporations that came to dominate the business, Penfold provides a glimpse into
the day-to-day impact of the larger structural changes that took place in Canadian
society after 1945.
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246
One of the greatest strengths of Penfold’s analysis is his welcome examination
of the importance of donuts as a cultural institution. While many of the basic
historical facts that constitute the central narrative of The Donut debunk common
assumptions about the Canadian origins of the donut industry or even its national
character, Penfold is generally less concerned with proving or disproving the
“authenticity” of the donut as a cultural institution than he is with explaining why
it has become such a powerful symbol of Canadianness among certain groups.
In the chapter “Eddie Shack Was No Tim Horton: Donuts and the Folklore
of Mass Culture, 1974-1999” Penfold makes a persuasive argument that the
currently articulated nationalist “donut folklore” represents, “a belief that in mass
commodities, consumers could find authentic institutions and meanings which
transcended fragmented identities and vast geographies” (194). The donut, in other
words, had become a touchstone for an imagined Canadian community not in
spite of its status as a mass commodity but because of it. For Penfold, the perceived
Canadianness of a company like Tim Hortons had less to do with its namesake’s
status as a celebrated Canadian hockey icon than it did with a set of aggressive
commercial strategies that saw the widespread expansion of the franchise in the
1990s and, perhaps more importantly, the successful transformation of the donut
shop from a largely Ontario-centred, male, working-class institution into a more
homogenous and truly national commercial space.
In the final analysis, Penfold takes what might seem to be a trivial and mundane
topic and manages to produce a novel historical study that easily stands on its own
among the best recent works in Canadian social, economic and cultural history.
Moreover, by grounding this ironic national institution within the context of its
post-war ascendancy within a marketplace seemingly saturated with convenience
foods, The Donut provides a relief from the corporate myth-making exercises that
have come to dominate the increasingly Tim Hortons driven popular histories of
this humble snack food.
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REVIEW
Gabrielle Slowey
Manufacturing Consent? People and
Policy-making in the Arctic
A review of
Kulchyski, Peter and Frank James Tester. 2007. Kiumajut (Talking Back): Game
Management and Inuit Rights, 1900-70. Vancouver: University of British Columbia
Press.
¤
One of Canada’s greatest paradoxes lies in its historic desire to protect Aboriginal
people from cultivating a dependency on the state while, at the same time,
working to legislate and regulate their existence. Kulchyski and Tester’s Kiumajut
(Talking Back), following upon their earlier collaboration Tammarniit (Mistakes):
Inuit Relocation in the Eastern Arctic, 1939-1963 (1994), considers the advent of
state intervention in Inuit game management and asks the question: what caused
government agents to act? Moreover, why did the government develop a policy
that would not support the Inuit hunting economy (7)? Based on extensive
archival research and personal interviews, the authors argue that Canadian policy
makers chose to listen to scientists and their corresponding claims that there was
a need to make policy to preserve the animals in the region. What the authors
demonstrate is the extent to which the policy, and the science upon which it was
based, was flawed.
Colonialism, paternalism and shifts in the broader political economy offer
compelling reasons for government intervention in the lives of Aboriginal
peoples because of their obvious impact and material significance. Certainly one
cannot deny the effect that events like the oil and gas boon of the Western Arctic
(specifically the Mackenzie Valley Basin), contested Arctic sovereignty and the
transition from a laissez-faire approach to the welfare state have had on state
responses to the Aboriginal economy in the North. Though the authors touch
briefly on some of these topics early on in the work, they gloss over most since
it is their intent to instead link people to policy. That is, Kulchyski and Tester
suggest it was not one of these events per se that led to the regulation of the Inuit;
rather, it was the interplay between social assumptions and scientific method (80).
Drawing on the theoretical notions of Sartre and the concept of the totalizing
state, the authors emphasize the importance of human activity. In addition to
external events and stimuli, Kulchyski and Tester show what many communityoriented researchers in the Arctic know: when it comes to the Arctic, given its
vast size and small demographic density, people can make a difference, whether
positive or negative (even before men like Justice Berger!).
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In making their case, the authors begin by exploring the people and personalities
involved in the trapping and trading of animals in the Arctic to demonstrate the
challenge of developing regulations. The basic question that confounded policy
makers at the time was: Are Inuit Indians? That is, how are Inuit to be viewed
in the eyes of the law? Do they have special status given their Aboriginal ways
of life? Or, alternatively, if they hunt to sell are they acting in a non-Aboriginal
way and therefore treated as such? In short, to what extent are Inuit citizens?
Issues of status were critical and confusing for policy makers with the issue
oscillating back and forth, from within the purview of Indian Affairs to beyond
their jurisdiction.
The book then considers the creation of a crisis (due to reports suggesting rapidly
diminishing numbers of animals from caribou to polar bear to seals) as a way to
prompt a conservationist oriented policy. Arguing the policy was based on faulty
assumptions and guesstimates, the authors demonstrate the extent to which these
crises were manufactured by scientists and rooted in unsubstantiated assumptions.
Inuit testimony gathered by the authors further contradicts the scientists’ portrayal
of the Inuit as wild hunters, shooting caribou with reckless abandon. Instead, the
research proffered emphasizes the skill and care Inuit employed when hunting
and the real need for the hides and meat taken. That is, the logic and conclusions
proffered by the scientists involved, who were working on behalf of the Canadian
Wildlife Service, was not always sound or verified though convincingly presented.
It was the presentation of information, from manipulated data sets (“the problem
with this science is that the numbers do not add up” (64)) to the use of terms
like slaughter rather than kill (79), that would eventually sway policy makers and
cause alarm, even panic, about the future of animal stocks, compelling regulators
to act quickly. In other words, Kulchyski and Tester offer a shocking indictment
of government agents working to promote their own agendas without any real
accountability.
In the second half of the book, the authors argue that the regulations imposed
on the Inuit people led to their resistance. As Tester and Kulchyski suggest, the
regulation issue is neither a purely academic nor theoretical issue, neither purely
about material nor immaterial interests, but rather it is about people—from civil
servants to Inuit hunters. The introduction of legislation led to Inuit protest. In
this section, the authors focus on specific examples of Inuit petitions for rights
from health care to land title, and the introduction of new forums (specifically the
Baker Lake Council), all of which provided the Inuit with new forms for political
expression.
References
Kulchyski, Peter and Frank James Tester. 1994. Tammarniit (Mistakes): Inuit Relocation in
the Eastern Arctic, 1939-63. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
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Overall, this book is a rich story, weaving together the elements of policy
and people. In the end, where Kulchyski and Tester ultimately succeed is in
demonstrating how “attempts to manage game after the Second World War had
significant implications for Inuit rights and the genesis of Inuit resistance to
the management not only of wildlife, but also, by implication, of Inuit lifestyles,
relationships and natural resources” (54). The case study approach and choice of
the Inuit is of particular value in that it clearly identifies the limits of “objective”
science and makes the case for what is now accepted as the importance of
traditional knowledge. That is, they reveal the extent to which science must be
viewed as neither apolitical nor neutral when it comes to making social policy
as evidenced in the Inuit experience (80). Though this book is not intended as
a cautionary tale for current policy makers, it will be of interest to academics,
students and policymakers alike as it sheds light on the challenges and conflicts
ever-present in regulating Aboriginal people. Though consultation in policy
making with Aboriginal peoples is increasing, the transformation of paternalistic,
(neo)colonial notions imbued in people, both in the Arctic and in Ottawa, is slow
and needs to be guided by new understandings of how people influence policy.
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REVIEW
Jonathan Warren
This Little Comic Went to Market,
This Little Comic Stayed Home
A review of
Beaty, Bart. 2007. Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the
1990s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
¤
The shelves of any large North American bookstore today stage at least one
story about the history of the comics. Having migrated from newspaper gag or
adventure strips and escapist, superhero comic books to glossy collections stocked
under the sign for Humour, comics have infiltrated the “Literature” department
(sometimes cordoned off nearby as “Graphic Novels,” as though store managers
are still not quite sure of the propriety of seating Charles M. Schulz cheek-byjowl with Charlotte Brontë). Glomming onto the novel’s prestige, comics in this
new generation of long-format, complex graphic stories, with themes no less
mature than their sign systems’ weave of word and image, burnish their worth by
accommodating themselves to the narrative and aesthetic expectations of a system
of cultural valuation and literary seriousness that once denigrated their frivolity
and disposability as juvenilia, lowest-common-denominator pap, and formulabound anti-art.
For studies of North American comics, the mid-20th-century campaign that
led to the imposition of the moralistic Comics Code and the reverberations of
that censorious cudgel have been scholarship’s richest laboratory for exposing
and decoding the constitutive discourses of comics culture. Beaty is the first to
comprehensively chart the dramatic shifts in the 1990s small-press comics milieu
as Europe’s most salient and instructive critical moment. Unpopular Culture teases
out this period’s densely interwoven stories first by proposing the usefulness and
limitations of Pierre Bourdieu’s distinction between heterogenous and autonomous
art. That rubric, which identifies two kinds of aesthetic production, one subservient
to the market and the other untethered to the demands of filthy lucre, divvies
culture up with less mess than Beaty ever discovers on the ground among smallpress comics. Nonetheless, an idealistic fascination with the possibility of standing
remote from the market inspired the formation of L’Association, the artist-run
cooperative best known to North American readers for producing David B.’s
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Bart Beaty’s resourceful and wide-ranging reflection is spurred, in part, by a desire
to expose the multiple interests at work in the literary market’s recent embrace
of what it once scorned and, thinking through this transformation even more
from the point of view of the producers than the distributors, to map the ways in
which the past twenty years have spawned a generative turmoil among European
small-press comics artists. Beaty surveys the diverse sweep of the contemporary
European comics scene and its history with a remarkable command of an
immense archive of small-press and mainstream materials and with exceptional
access to the mix of voices at play in the creative and commercial communities
he brings to light (mixing citations of published commentary with reports of his
own interviews and encounters). With compelling closeness to his sources, Beaty
tracks how artists, art collectives and publishers have contributed and responded
in mixed ways to recent changes in market-driven and market-ambivalent
understandings of the cultural prestige of comics. Beaty demonstrates well that
one cannot think about the new legitimacy of comics without grappling with the
ironies of the deep and fascinating back stories in which artists’ mixed feelings
about and sometimes hostility toward mainstream acclaim have been a crucial
goad to the field’s most important formal, thematic and economic innovations.
Unpopular Culture exposes what the bookstore shelves mask and simplify. Its most
recurrent concern is aesthetic labour’s friction with the market, a relationship that
is not always adversarial. Beaty’s main contention is that, though this friction is
protean, it yields a notable set of stances that are legible in the comics of the 1990s.
Unpopular Culture provides a taxonomy of those stances, reading the comics as
expressions of an evolving effort to conceptualize art vis-à-vis commerce (mutual
cooptation, resistance, hybridity, etc.) and demonstrating the usefulness of treating
the form, theme and dissemination of comics as indexes of the cultural field of
their production.
251
L’Ascension du Haut Mal (1996-2003), translated into English as Epileptic (2005)
and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000-2003), translated into English in 20032004.
The first of Beaty’s case studies, L’Association manifests a determination to
contrive a new mode of comics production, protecting aesthetic experimentalism
and difficulty from market forces and aiming for durable artistic quality. Beaty’s
second chapter locates L’Association’s interest in an artisanal collective unswayed
by the demands of the market within a broader small-press reframing of the
idea of beauty in the comics. Rebelling against the norms of mainstream print
format, small-press artists revivify the tradition of the artist’s book, letting each
work’s particular vision govern its ultimate size and scale. If market-based prestige
judges value with an eye to new comics’ novel-like narrativity, small-presses like
Drozophile emphasize visuality and avant-garde difficulty, with limited print runs
enhancing the specialness of each creation.
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Whether such tendencies might sustain a comics avant-garde is the subject
of Beaty’s third chapter, one which explores the case of Frémok, a small press
which brought together Amok and Fréon publishers, the former noted for its
parodic anti-commercialism and the latter for its emphasis on experimentalism
and theoretically inflected and self-referential comics. Where the art-of-thebook focus of the previous chapter serves to locate small-press artisanal efforts
in a long-standing tradition, this chapter’s querying of the comics avant-garde
against modernist notions of the avant-garde is constrained by the terms of its
comparative framework. Beaty’s provocative commentaries on specific Frémok
comics need a better lattice.
Chapter four puts aside the possibility of a coherent avant-garde to consider the
development of global and transnational aesthetic communities and networks and
to chart a sociology of European comics festivals. Chapter five veers abruptly to
the question of autobiography, memoir being a signal fascination of 1990s comics
in Europe and North America. While writing the self has been characterized as a
stratagem for conveying authenticity, Beaty deftly shows how the most influential
small-press autobiographers commingle elements of ostensibly authenticating
confessionalism with the generic features of the most commercial comics
(adventure, escapism, etc.). Such attention to the implications of whimsical
hybridity continues to be the focus of chapter six which explores and explodes the
notions that small presses and large mainstream comics publishers must function
as adversaries and that creativity can only flourish in a market-free zone. As many
small-press artists also regularly publish with mainstream publishers now, the
division between these two regimes has grown blurry. Large presses market the
small-press artists as rebels to conventions that these same large presses established
and championed. Might such rebelliousness become just one more commodified
convention? Beaty argues that participation in such marketing ploys is not a
cooptation of small-press credibility because the large presses are transformed
by small-press experimentalism via such arrangements. To substantiate the claim,
Beaty’s last chapter, before a brief conclusion, explores what it calls the strange
case of Lewis Trondheim, a small-press experimentalist who goes to work for the
large publishers but maintains his avant-garde sensibility. That such a case counts
as strange might bear further reflection.
Beaty reconciles a very large and excitingly unsettled field to an admirably useful
set of lively problematics, charting the way forward for course designers and
scholars’ next steps. His provisional glosses of the many comics he cites should
alone inspire his grateful readers to extend the readings he has just begun.
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REVIEW
Darren Wershler
Fair Deal or No Deal
A Review of
Murray, Laura J. and Samuel E. Trosow. 2007. Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s
Guide. Toronto: Between the Lines.
¤
By the time that this review appears in print, Laura J. Murray and Samuel E.
Trosow’s Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide will either have proven to be
prescient, or will have been reduced to a powerful potential that was nevertheless
betrayed by the actual events of history.
One major reason for the state of uncertainty that surrounds the arguments in
this book is the Harper government’s Bill C-61. Introduced at the end of the
spring 2008 Parliamentary session, Bill C-61 will, if it passes into Canadian law,
implement the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)’s Internet
Treaties, which Canada signed, but did not ratify, in 1996. These are the same
treaties that served as the basis of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
in the U.S., a piece of legislation that many scholars, journalists and activists have
argued is deeply flawed.
Murray and Trosow contend that Canada is under no obligation to ratify the
WIPO treaties, but that if we do decide to ratify them, we should try to avoid the
DMCA’s mistakes. In any event, if they continue, Canadians have a greater range
of choices concerning how to implement them than the official discourse on the
subject would suggest (34). Even if Bill C-61 is defeated, there is a larger problem:
hard on its heels are a whole series of trade-related treaties that will place much
greater pressure on Canadian lawmakers to conform to an agenda for intellectual
property that better suits the desires of the U.S. entertainment industry than it
does the rights of Canadian citizens.
It is precisely because of its explicit acknowledgement that this pressure is not
likely to abate any time soon that Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide will
remain an important text, regardless of changes to the letter of the law. As the
authors note, “all law is always developing in a complex and fitful way” (1). This
is especially true of copyright law, which changes constantly as judgements are
delivered, appealed and ratified or overturned as each case makes its way through
the judicial system. If stabilizing copyright law is neither desirable nor possible
in a democratic context, it is important to shift our perspective in a direction that
will allow us to conceive of fair copyright not as an immutable edifice, but as a set
of informed practices that are part and parcel of citizenship (2).
The book’s major contribution to the development of fair copyright practices is its
extensive discussion of users’ rights. As Murray and Trosow observe, the notion
of users’ rights as a positive concept that supplants conservative formulations like
“exception to infringement” is a recent and important addition to the discourse
around intellectual property. What Murray and Trosow attempt to do is to present
users’ rights as a check against the powerful rhetoric of owners’ rights mobilized
by media conglomerates, allowing for the conception of copyright as “a system
of relationships and interests” (74) rather than as a law and a series of limited
defences against accusations of infringement.
Once their framework of relationships and interests is in place, Murray and
Trosow devote the majority of the book to the diverse range of contemporary
practices that invariably touch on the subject of copyright. Craft and design, digital
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The first seven chapters of Canadian Copyright: A Citizen’s Guide provide a brief
introduction to the history of copyright as a legal concept, but this is not primarily
a book of history or legal theory. Its strong suit is in its recognition of crucial
details of Canadian copyright law that usually fall between the cracks in other
accounts, particularly those penned in the United States. Major differences
between Canadian and U.S. conceptions of copyright, such as the duration of the
copyright term, the uncertainty about the status of parody as a protected activity,
and moral rights all receive their due. Murray and Trosow also touch on a range of
subjects that don’t often appear in copyright books aimed at a general readership,
such as Aboriginal notions of cultural property and the differences between the
functioning of copyright and citation economies like the academy.
255
rights management and technical protection measures, educational uses, film and
video, journalism, photocopying, music, photography, visual art and the Web, each
receive their own chapter of discussion. The authors do make some aggressive
claims for the scope of users’ rights, such as affirming that Section 80(1) of the
existing Copyright Act indicates that downloading music for private use does not
constitute infringement if the music is copied to “an audio recording medium”
for private use and not redistributed (158). Such claims will invariably enrage
copyright maximalists of all political persuasions. However, Murray and Trosow’s
assertion of the importance of users’ rights is not in the service of anything as
banal as unbridled digital consumerism.
What makes the project of this book entirely laudable is that it imagines Canadian
citizenship in a contemporary milieu as something that invariably involves active
cultural production as well as consumption. People engaged in activities as diverse
as the craft production of knitwear, making photocopies of journal articles,
blogging or writing pornography about Star Trek characters all need to be aware
of the ways in which concerns about copyright are imbricated into the fabric of
their everyday lives.
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In keeping with this model of the engaged, productive citizen, Murray and Trosow
conclude with a series of policy recommendations. These include a call for a more
robust, open-ended notion of fair dealing, strong limits on anti-circumvention
clauses that restrict them to direct acts of infringement (as opposed to practices
like reverse engineering, which often involve breaking technical protection
measures), the abolition of Crown copyright, limits on statutory damage claims,
limits on the waiver of moral rights, a droit de suite clause giving artists a small
share of profits from subsequent sales of their work, clear procedures for handling
copyrighted works whose creators cannot be located, sanctions for the misuse of
copyright (notably, as a tool for “chilling” or dissuading people from fair use of
copyrighted works), protection for Internet Service Providers from liability for
the actions of their clients and maintenance of the current duration of Canadian
copyright (the U.S. term is 20 years longer). Given that the items on this wish list
are almost entirely absent from the text of Bill C-61, we may all have to be very
engaged and very productive for the foreseeable future.