Narrating Citizenship and Belonging in Anglophone Canadian Literature

Katja Sarkowsky

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319969343
• eBook ISBN: 9783319969350
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines how concepts of citizenship have been negotiated in Anglophone Canadian literature since the 1970s. Katja Sarkowsky argues that literary texts conceptualize citizenship as political "co-actorship" and as cultural "co-authorship" (Boele van Hensbroek), using citizenship as a metaphor of ambivalent affiliations within and beyond Canada. In its exploration of urban, indigenous, environmental, and diasporic citizenship as well as of citizenship's growing entanglement with questions of human rights, Canadian literature reflects and feeds into the term's conceptual diversification. Exploring the works of Guillermo Verdecchia, Joy Kogawa, Jeannette Armstrong, Maria Campbell, Cheryl Foggo, Fred Wah, Michael Ondaatje, and Dionne Brand, this text investigates how citizenship functions to denote emplaced practices of participation in multiple collectives that are not restricted to the framework of the nation-state.

© The Author(s) 2018

Katja SarkowskyNarrating Citizenship and Belonging in Anglophone Canadian Literaturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96935-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Recognition, Citizenship, and Canadian Literature

Katja Sarkowsky¹

(1)

Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Münster, Germany

Katja Sarkowsky

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

1.1 Approaching Citizenship and Literature

In Guillermo Verdecchia’s short story ‘The Several Lives of Citizen Suárez’ (1998), thirteen-year-old Fernando Suárez learns that his immigrant parents will soon become Canadian citizens and that, as a minor, he can receive his citizenship papers in this process as well. His mother Lina appears to be happy about the prospect of naturalization, but Fernando is not. ‘For Lina, citizenship, and the passport that was its token, was the conclusion of a long and difficult journey’; after a transition into Canadian life that had been ‘violent, upsetting’ (Verdecchia 1998, p. 40), citizenship is thus both a documentation of and reward for her long struggle with alienation and dislocation as an immigrant in Canada. Or at least she hopes this will be so, projecting her expectation to finally ‘belong’ to and participate in a body of ‘equal community members,’ as Rogers Smith has summarized the most common usage of citizenship (2002, p. 105), upon her change of status from ‘landed immigrant’ to ‘citizen,’ her past and her cultural difference absorbed into a Canadian fabric.

In contrast, Fernando’s perception of his own disparity from what he perceives as ‘Canadianness’ is embodied; it is not necessarily visible but deeply felt. He is convinced that he is not ‘constituted as a Canadian. His guts were foreign. His lungs were a deviant shape; his nose sensitized to other aromas and flavours. His ear was pitched to other frequencies; his cranial-sacral rhythm was governed by a divergent drummer’ (Verdecchia 1998, pp. 44–45). For him, Canadian citizenship is not a status that can simply coexist with other statuses; the perspective of having dual citizenship does not impress him, and he sees the acceptance of Canadian citizenship as ‘a profound betrayal of various people: his Nona; his grandfather Rafael; his other grandfather Mario; and the beggar boy at the café that afternoon in the capital’ (p. 45). His grandmother and his grandfathers are associated with another place and language, and even though this ‘other place’ makes demands on him that he cannot and does not want to live up to, when he visits, these filiations signify deep connections. With the ‘beggar boy,’ whose request for a sandwich (or the little sugar bags on the table) his father refuses, Fernando feels a connection he cannot name; he is ‘the boy Fernando might have become if they hadn’t emigrated perhaps’ (p. 45) and thereby seems to offer a kinship of deprivation and empathy that have been denied because of ‘the normalcy citizenship conferred’ (p. 46). The ‘normalcy of citizenship’ offers neither consolation nor belonging; instead, for Fernando, it implies estrangement and foreclosed possibilities.

Verdecchia’s short story is an excellent case in point for the way in which Canadian literature engaged with citizenship at a point in time during which the concept appeared to indicate a particular political urgency and was thus met with renewed interest. In 1994, political theorists Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman observed a ‘return of the citizen,’ an ‘explosion of interest in the concept of citizenship’ in the political and social sciences (p. 352). They attribute this return to political developments of the time, namely the effects of the end of the Cold War, the demise of the welfare state in Western nations , and the increasing ethnic diversification of national populations in Western Europe. Moreover, the effects of globalization, of transnational migration and its reconceptualization as ‘transmigration’ (rather than immigration and emigration), and the ‘nation’ —as a political and cultural construct—triggered a debate in which citizenship was rethought as a complex and often-contradictory affiliation within as well as across nation-states. Accordingly, if citizenship was understood as membership in a political entity that is imbued with both rights and obligations, this entity was no longer essentially equated with the nation-state. Concepts such as diasporic or transnational citizenship mirror the diversification of citizenship that emerged due to this fundamental rethinking of the scope of citizenship. Although the ensuing theoretical debates took Canada—Canadian multiculturalism and particularly the relations between Quebec and ‘the rest of Canada’—as a starting point and often as a prime example, they also confirmed that the implications of these nationally specific constellations were much broader.

While the debate first emerged within the social and political sciences, around the same time, literary and cultural studies—particularly American and Canadian Studies—also began to engage with the boundaries of the nation and the boundaries of their academic fields, as well as with the question of ‘citizenship’ as a concept that appeared to highlight the tensions of belonging, filiation, and affiliation—to use Edward Said’s (1983a) terminology—and formal membership. It should therefore come as no surprise that the debates around citizenship, their connection to literature, and the conceptual transnationalization of both American and Canadian Studies coincided. Whereas in the social sciences and political theory Kymlicka and Norman speak of a ‘return’ of the citizen, in literary and cultural studies, it might be more precise to speak of an ‘arrival’ of the citizen and of citizenship as a theoretical concept. This indicates a renewed interest in potential societal functions of literature and its embeddedness in social debates, also very much reflected in the conceptualizations of postcolonial literatures. Accordingly, the study at hand proceeds from an understanding of literature as one way of thinking about and even theorizing society, and its premise is that this is prominently done by way of ‘citizenship.’ In the context of American literary studies, Brook Thomas observed an increasing frequency of scholarly books and articles that were published on the topic throughout the 1990s, the ‘issues of concern for literary critics overlap[ping] with those of social scientists’ (2007, p. 3); and with regard to Canadian Studies, in their 2008 special citizenship issue of West Coast Line, David Chariandy and Sophie McCall comment on the ‘newfound awareness of the complex and sometimes conflicted stakes of this term, and of the need to engage in the citizenship debates in ways that are at once historically grounded and intellectually flexible’ (p. 5) as a result of both the resurgence of the term and its simultaneously unclear implications.

Thus, in light of the developments referred to by Thomas as well as Chariandy and McCall, it is not surprising that the 1990s also saw the earliest attempts to systematically conceptualize the notion of a specifically cultural citizenship , which sought to reconcile the critical potential of literature with its long-standing instrumentalization in citizenship education. Against the background of the canon debates at Stanford University, Renato Rosaldo points out that cultural citizenship is a matter of both curricular changes and the institutional transformation of higher education. ‘The ideal of cultural citizenship ,’ writes Rosaldo,

grows out of the conviction that, in a plural society, one group must not dictate another group’s notion of dignity, thriving, and well-being. Cultural citizenship also implies a notion of the polyglot citizen. Curriculum debates bring up questions of “Who’s the we?” in a plural society and offer hopes of bringing about cultural decolonization by recognizing the value of cultural life in the United States. (1994, p. 410)

Concepts such as Rosaldo’s—or Donna Palmateer Pennee’s (2004) related notion of ‘literary citizenship’—highlight the importance of multicultural curricula and canon diversification. The function of the canon shifts in its representational effect, and so does the function of literature. Martha Nussbaum (1995, 2010) has repeatedly asserted that literature is crucial for readers’ development of skills that are necessary for ‘good citizenship,’ such as empathy and the ability to imagine oneself as another. Even though they are often very different in their political thrust, these recent conceptualizations nevertheless share with more traditional notions of citizenship education—notions that see literature as an introduction to a national ‘norm’ and thus potentially as a means of assimilation—the idea of producing ‘good citizens’ by means of education and thus the importance that they attribute to literature as an educational medium. The ‘good citizen’ they envision is a different one, but a good citizen she is nevertheless.

While the theoretical concept of citizenship in literary studies is principally a product of the 1990s, the issues addressed by this concept and the language by which they are negotiated in literature precede its theorization as citizenship by far; so here, it might indeed be appropriate to speak, as per Kymlicka and Norman of a ‘return’ of the citizen. Brook Thomas’s groundbreaking Civic Myths (2007) and Kathy-Ann Tan’s Reconfiguring Citizenship (2015) are book-length examples of how such issues can productively be mapped onto literary texts from the nineteenth century onward. Both studies illustrate clearly that citizenship is ‘storied’; as Chariandy has highlighted,

we inevitably tell stories about citizenship. Of course, this does not mean that we have the ability to conjure up citizenship through individual imaginative inspiration or the intercession of some fitful muse, but rather that we narrate not only our identities and practices as citizens but also citizenship itself in ways that inevitably reflect our sidedness and desires. (2011, p. 327)

As Verdecchia’s short story illustrates, literature is clearly one such way of imagining ‘citizenship itself’ in its complex discursive constellations of selfhood and otherness, norms and difference—citizenship that is understood as being about both political membership and affective belonging. In the story, Canadian citizenship suggests a certainty of placement that Fernando does not experience and, in contrast to his parents, does not seek. The ‘normalcy’ of Canadian citizenship that Fernando rejects is, for him, a normalcy of pretense and silence; his parents’ Canadian life is one of increasing and mutual estrangement. Their impending transition into officially recognized Canadianness appears to solidify a displacement that goes deeper than physical dislocation.

Fernando’s desperate attempts to be an ‘anti-citizen’ by deciding to ‘break the law and get caught’ (Verdecchia 1998, p. 64) fail. Canadian citizenship is tellingly granted to him in absentia. The grief that grips him at the end of the story, the loss he feels, is a loss that he cannot name, one he can express only in wordless howls. He becomes what Marlene Goldman calls—citing Ian Baucom—a ‘domestic interloper’ (quoted in Goldman 2012, p. 6) the ‘haunting opposite (and double) of the citizen’ (Goldman 2012, p. 6) in a context where he not only feels like but also remains a racialized ‘Other.’ Citizenship appears to leave no space for cultural difference—an ironic and bitter comment on the hopes invested in ‘multicultural citizenship’ in Canada precisely around the time when ‘The Several Lives of Citizen Suárez’ was published.

In addition to focusing on the central issue of ‘belonging,’ the story highlights that ‘citizenship’ is also about formal membership status and the relationship that exists between state and citizen as well as between citizens. While this is obvious in political debates, it has not always been as self-evident with regard to the discussion of literature; ‘citizenship’ has certainly been used as a mere metaphor of belonging all too often. So while ‘belonging,’ as Chariandy remarks, has gained increasing importance in recent discourses on citizenship (2011, p. 329), formal membership and its regulation clearly also play a crucial role in the ways in which literary texts construct citizens and negotiate citizenship. ‘Citizen Suárez’ also uses citizenship as a metaphor, yet the story revolves around the question of filiation and affiliation that is just as important to citizenship as formal membership in the nation . The process of naturalization, which Fernando so desperately seeks to avoid, serves to highlight the implicit norms of this membership—the fact that he associates Canadian citizenship with loss is plausible as he feels that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Recognition, Citizenship, and Canadian Literature
• 2. ‘This Is My Own!’: Negotiating Canadian Citizenship in Joy Kogawa’s Novels
• 3. ‘Dismissing Canada’? AlterNative Citizenship and Indigenous Literatures
• 4. Writing Lives: Cartographies of Citizenship and Belonging
• 5. ‘Cityzenship’? Writing Immigrant and Diasporic Toronto
• 6. Cultural Citizenship and Beyond
• Back Matter