Sourayan Mookerjea is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta and the author of Crisis and Catachresis: Pedagogy at the Limits of Identity Politics.

Imre Szeman is Senator McMaster Chair of Globalization and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, and the author of Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism and the Nation.

Gail Faurschou is a Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta.

Canadian Cultural Studies

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DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Duke University Press
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ISBN: 978-0-8223-4398-1

Contents

FREDRIC JAMESON Foreword……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..xiEditors’ Note………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..xvAcknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………xviiSOURAYAN MOOKERJEA, IMRE SZEMAN, AND GAIL FAURSCHOU Introduction Between Empires: On Cultural Studies in Canada……………………………………….1HAROLD INNIS A Plea for Time………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….37HAROLD INNIS The Military Implications of the American Constitution……………………………………………………………………………….54MARSHALL MCLUHAN Canada as Counter-Environment………………………………………………………………………………………………….71MARSHALL MCLUHAN The Medium Is the Message……………………………………………………………………………………………………..87PAUL-MILE BORDUAS Refus Global……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….100NORTHROP FRYE Conclusion to the Literary History of Canada……………………………………………………………………………………….111NORTHROP FRYE City of the End of Things………………………………………………………………………………………………………..129GEORGE GRANT Canadian Fate and Imperialism……………………………………………………………………………………………………..145GEORGE GRANT In Defence of North America……………………………………………………………………………………………………….160FERNAND DUMONT Of a Hesitant Quebec……………………………………………………………………………………………………………173HAROLD CARDINAL The Buckskin Curtain: The Indian-Problem Problem………………………………………………………………………………….200ANTHONY WILDEN The Old Question, but Not the Old Answers…………………………………………………………………………………………210A. NATIONALISM AND CANADA……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..229IAN ANGUS The Social Identity of English Canada…………………………………………………………………………………………………231JOCELYN LTOURNEAU “Remembering (from) Where You’re Going”: Memory as Legacy and Inheritance…………………………………………………………248ROB SHIELDS The True North Strong and Free……………………………………………………………………………………………………..276KEVIN PASK Late Nationalism: The Case of Quebec…………………………………………………………………………………………………289MAURICE CHARLAND Technological Nationalism……………………………………………………………………………………………………..308B. RACE, DIFFERENCE, AND MULTICULTURALISM……………………………………………………………………………………………………….325HIMANI BANNERJI On the Dark Side of the Nation: Politics of Multiculturalism and the State of “Canada”………………………………………………..327KATHARYNE MITCHELL In Whose Interest? Transnational Capital and the Production of Multiculturalism in Canada…………………………………………..344EVA MACKEY Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in a Multicultural Nation: Contests over Truth in the Into the Heart of Africa Controversy…………………366LEE MARACLE Another Side of Me………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..383KRISTINA FAGAN Tewatatha:wi: Aboriginal Nationalism in Taiaiake Alfred’s Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto……………………………390LEN FINDLAY Always Indigenize! The Radical Humanities in the Postcolonial Canadian University………………………………………………………..405C. MODERNITY AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURE…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..423STEPHEN CROCKER Hauled Kicking and Screaming into Modernity: Non-Synchronicity and Globalization in Post-War Newfoundland……………………………….425IOAN DAVIES Theorizing Toronto………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..441WILL STRAW Shifting Boundaries, Lines of Descent: Cultural Studies and Institutional Realignments…………………………………………………….457JODY BERLAND Writing on the Border…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….472RICK GRUNEAU AND DAVID WHITSON Communities, Civic Boosterism, and Fans…………………………………………………………………………….488SERRA TINIC Global Vistas and Local Reflections: Negotiating Place and Identity in Vancouver Television……………………………………………….5013. Government Documents Preface to Government Documents………………………………………………………………………………………….515GOVERNMENT OF CANADA From the Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in Arts, Letters and Sciences (Massey Commission)……………………518GOVERNMENT OF CANADA From the Report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (Bi and Bi Commission)…………………………………..533GOVERNMENT OF CANADA From Multiculturalism and the Government of Canada (Canadian Government Pamphlet)………………………………………………..548YVES LABERGE Afterword Are Cultural Studies an Anglo-Saxon Paradigm? Reflections on Cultural Studies in Francophone Networks……………………………561Contributors…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………581Index of Names……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….585

Chapter One

Canadian Cultural Theory: Origins

HAROLD INNIS A Plea for Time

Harold Innis was born in 1894 in the farming community of Otterville in southwestern Ontario. He attended McMaster University, then located in Toronto, and took preparatory courses for law, among which he found history and political economy particularly interesting. He graduated during World War I, served in the Signal Corps, and was wounded. Upon returning to Canada and finishing his M.A. thesis (titled “The Returned Soldier”), Innis enrolled in law school at the University of Chicago but took courses in political economy, eventually completing a doctorate in economics. His major works of economic history begin with his dissertation, published as A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway (1923), followed by the classic The Fur Trade in Canada (1930) and The Cod Fisheries: A History of an International Economy (1940). Innis develops and elaborates his influential “staples thesis” of uneven, center-dependent marginal historical development during this period. His work on media and communications began in the early 1940s, when he started to rework the key insights of his staples thesis in light of his recognition of the centrality of the social relations of communication to modern industry. Innis was able to complete three books that present his research over the 1940s-Empire and Communication (1950), The Bias of Communication (1951), and Changing Concepts of Time (1952)-before dying of cancer in 1952.

Innis was also the chairman (1945-46) of the Social Science Research Council of Canada. He taught political economy at the University of Toronto. Though Innis never considered himself to be a Marxist, his work was hugely influential for the development of a mostly Marxist-oriented critical political economy tradition of scholarship, which sustained the political movement of left nationalism from the 1960s through the 1980s.

I must plead the bias of my special interest in the title of this paper. Economic historians and indeed all historians assume a time factor and their assumptions reflect the attitude towards time of the period in which they write. History in the modern sense is about four centuries old but the word has taken on meanings which are apt to check a concern with facts other than those of immediate interest and its content is apt to reflect an interest in immediate facts such as is suggested by the words “all history proves.” As a result history tends to repeat itself but in the changing accents of the period in which it is written. History is threatened on the one hand by its obsession with the present and on the other by the charge of antiquarianism. Economic history is in a particularly exposed position as is evident in the tendency to separate it from economics or to regard it as a basis of support for economics. “Knowledge of the past is at all times needed only to serve the present and the future, not to enfeeble the present or to tear the roots out of the vigorous powers of life for the future” (Nietzsche). The danger that knowledge of the past may be neglected to the point that it ceases to serve the present and the future-perhaps an undue obsession with the immediate-supports my concern about the disappearance of an interest in time.

Perhaps the exposed position of economic history may strengthen the urge to discover a solution of the difficulty, particularly as it becomes imperative to attempt to estimate the significance of the attitude towards time in an analysis of economic change. The economic historian must consider the role of time or the attitude towards time in periods which he attempts to study, and he may contribute to an escape from antiquarianism, from present-mindedness, and from the bogeys of stagnation and maturity. It is impossible for him to avoid the bias of the period in which he writes but he can point to its dangers by attempting to appraise the character of the time concept.

It has been pointed out that astronomical time is only one of several concepts. Social time, for example, has been described as qualitatively differentiated according to the beliefs and customs common to a group and as not continuous but subject to interruptions of actual dates. It is influenced by language which constrains and fixes prevalent concepts and modes of thought. It has been argued by Marcel Granet that the Chinese are not equipped to note concepts or to present doctrines discursively. The word does not fix a notion with a definite degree of abstraction or generality but evokes an indefinite complex of particular images. It is completely unsuited to formal precision. Neither time nor space is abstractly conceived; time proceeds by cycles and is round; space is square.

The linear concept of time was made effective as a result of humanistic studies in the Renaissance. When Gregory xiii imposed the Julian calendar on the Catholic world in 1582 Joseph Justus Scaliger following his edition of Manilius (1579) published the De emendatione temporum and later his Thesaurus temporum (1606) “probably the most learned book in the world.” With his work he developed an appreciation of the ancient world as a whole and introduced a conception of the unity of history at variance with the attitude of the church. While Scaliger assisted in wresting control over time from the church he contributed to the historical tradition of philosophy until Descartes with his emphasis on mathematics and his unhistorical temper succeeded in liberating philosophy from history. The ideal of mathematical sciences dominated the seventeenth century. It was not until the Enlightenment that the historical world was conquered and until Herder and romanticism that the primacy of history over philosophy and science was established. Historicism was almost entirely a product of the nineteenth century. In geology the precise date of the earth’s formation advanced by Bishop Ussher was destroyed. “The weary series of accommodations of Genesis to geology was beginning.” In archaeology a knowledge of earlier civilizations implied a vast extension of time. In the hands of Darwin the historical approach penetrated biology and provided a new dimension of thought for science. In astronomy time was extended to infinity. Laws of real nature became historical laws. Even in mathematics arithmetic escaped from its bondage to geometry and algebra as “the science of pure time or order in progression” (Sir William Hamilton) came into its own.

I have attempted to show elsewhere that in Western civilization a stable society is dependent on an appreciation of a proper balance between the concepts of space and time. We are concerned with control not only over vast areas of space but also over vast stretches of time. We must appraise civilization in relation to its territory and in relation to its duration. The character of the medium of communication tends to create a bias in civilization favourable to an over-emphasis on the time concept or on the space concept and only at rare intervals are the biases offset by the influence of another medium and stability achieved. Dependence on clay in Sumerian civilization was offset by dependence on stone in Babylon and a long period of relative stability followed in the reign of the Kassites. The power of the oral tradition in Greece which checked the bias of a written medium supported a brief period of cultural activity such as has never been equalled. Dependence on the papyrus roll and use of the alphabet in the bureaucracy of the Roman Empire was offset by dependence on parchment codex in the church and a balance was maintained in the Byzantine Empire until 1453. “Church and Army are serving order through the power of discipline and through hierarchical arrangement” (Metternich). On the other hand in the West the bias of the parchment codex became evident in the absolute dominance of the church and supported a monopoly which invited competition from paper as a new medium. After the introduction of paper and the printing press, religious monopoly was followed by monopolies of vernaculars in modern states. A monopoly of time was followed by a monopoly of space. A brief survey of outstanding problems of time will perhaps assist in enabling us to understand more clearly the limitations of our civilization.

The pervasive character of the time concept makes it difficult to appreciate its nature and difficult to suggest its conservative influence. The division of the day into 24 hours, of the hour into 60 minutes, and of the minute into 60 seconds suggests that a sexagesimal system prevailed in which the arrangement was worked out and this carries us immediately into Babylonian history. The influence persists in systems of measurement and more obviously, for example, in Great Britain where the monetary system is sexagesimal. The advantages of the sexagesimal system are evident in calculations which permit evasion of the problem of handling fractions and have been exploited effectively in the development of aviation with its demands for rapid calculation.

In a system of agriculture dependent on irrigation the measurement of time becomes important in predicting periods of floods and the important dates of the year, seed-time and harvest. A concern with time was reflected in the importance of religion and in the choice of days on which festivals might be celebrated. The selection of holy days necessitated devices by which they could be indicated and violation of them could be avoided. Dependence on the moon for the measurement of time meant exposure to irregularities such as have persisted in the means of determining the dates for Easter. Sumerian priesthoods apparently worked out a system for correcting the year by the adjustment of lunar months but the difficulties may have contributed to the success of Semitic kings with an interest in the sun, and enabled them to acquire control over the calendar and to make necessary adjustments of time over the extended territory under their control. With control over time kings began the system of reckoning in terms of their reigns; our present statutes defy Anno Domini and date from the accession of the king in whose reign they are enacted. Control over time by monarchies, on the other hand, in addition to the human limitations of dynastic and military power, was limited by the continuity of priesthoods and the effectiveness of an ecclesiastical hierarchy.

In Egypt the power of the absolute monarchy reflected in the monumental architecture of the pyramids and in sculpture was offset by the power of the priesthood based on a complex system of writing and the use of papyrus. The emphasis of a civilization on means of extending its duration as in Egypt accompanied by reliance on permanence gives that civilization a prominent position in periods such as the present when time is of little significance. In Babylonia the power of the priesthood was dependent in part on a mastery of complex cuneiform writing on clay tablets, and an increasing power of the monarchy on the creation of new and elaborate capitals emphasizing sculpture and architecture. Relative stability was gradually established over a long period by compromises between political and religious power.

The limited possibility of political organizations expanding their control over space incidental to the control of priesthoods in their monopolies of knowledge over time facilitated the development of marginal organizations such as those of the Jews in Palestine. The marginal relation to cultures with monopolies of complex systems of writing favoured the development of relatively simple systems of writing such as emerged in the alphabet of the Phoenicians and the Aramaeans. In these marginal cultures religious organization emphasized a system of writing in sharp contrast with those of Egypt and Babylonia, and in compensation for lack of success in political organization with control over space built up an elaborate hierarchy with control over time. The latter emphasized the sacred character of writing and drew on the resources of Egyptian and Babylonian civilizations to an extent obvious to students of the Old Testament.

Contact with barbarians on the north shore of the Mediterranean with older civilizations was followed by the emergence of Greek civilization. An emphasis on problems of space incidental to a concern with conquest of territory was evident in the Homeric poems developed in the oral tradition. Geometry with its bias toward measurement and space imposed restrictions on a concern with time. The spread of money economy strengthened an interest in numbers and arithmetic and in turn mystery religions in conflict with the established Apollonic religion. The flexibility of an oral tradition enabled the Greeks to work out a balance between the demands of concepts of space and time in a city state. In the reforms of Cleisthenes control over time was wrested from religion and placed at the disposal of the state. The results of a balanced society were evident in the defeat of the Persians and the flowering of Greek culture in the fifth century. But such a balance was not long maintained.

A balanced civilization in its concern with the problems of duration or time and of extent in space is faced with several difficulties. Systems of government concerned with problems of duration have been defeated in part by biology, when dynasties fail to provide a continued stream of governing capacity, and by technology, when invaders are able to exploit improvements in the methods of warfare at the expense of peoples who have neglected them. Writing as a means of communication provides a system of administration of territory for the conquerors and in religion a system of continuity but in turn tends to develop monopolies of complexity which check an interest in industrial technology and encourage new invaders. A balanced concern with space or extent of territory and duration or time appears to depend on a dual arrangement in which the church is subordinate to the state and ensures that the mobilization of the intellectual resources of the civilization concerned, by religion or by the state will be at the disposal of both and that they will be used in planning for a calculated future in relation to the government of territory of definite extent. If social stratification is too rigid and social advancement is denied to active individuals as it is in plutocracies a transpersonal power structure will be threatened with revolt.

(Continues…)

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