Alumnus address presented at Athabasca University's Graduate Student Conference on September 26, ... more Alumnus address presented at Athabasca University's Graduate Student Conference on September 26, 2015.
Contesting Clarke: Towards A De-Racialized African-Canadian Literature (Journal Article)
This article draws on personal narrative, literary criticism, and multicultural Canadian literatu... more This article draws on personal narrative, literary criticism, and multicultural Canadian literature to interrogate George Elliott Clarke’s conceptualizations of a Black Canadian literature and a racialized African-Canadian literary canon in his 2002 essay collection Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literatures. Clarke’s work is juxtaposed with my own experience as a bi-racial, multi-ethnic, Black, Negro, mulatto, half-caste, African-Canadian woman, and with those of non-Black scholars, to expose the shifting contours of ethnicity and the blurred and blurring boundaries of Canadian blackness in multi-, mixed-, and indeterminately racial Canada. Through these critical comparisons, I suggest that a racialized African-Canadian literary canon excludes the multiple Canadian cultures in which our literatures are formed, and supports racial constructs that no longer fit the shapes of our multi-ethnic, diasporic, postcolonial skins. I conclude that upon the fertile ground tended by Clarke’s Black literary activism, a de-racialized African-Canadian literature may grow.
In this study, I explore the political, historical and social contexts of Canadian literary canon... more In this study, I explore the political, historical and social contexts of Canadian literary canon formation and identify the Governor General's Awards as a key mechanism of the Canadian state's national identity project. During the post-war period, the Government of Canada became concerned with differentiating our culture from that of the United States and of Great Britain, resulting in a new interest in uniquely Canadian cultural production. Nationally and internationally the 1960s and 1970s were times of great political unrest, reflected in Canada by minority group civil rights pressures and, most intensely, by French-Canadians' demands for nationhood within the province of Quebec. Out of this milieu emerged the Canada Council for the Arts' acquisition of the Governor General's Awards in 1959, The Official Languages Act of 1969, and the 1971 White Paper on Canadian Multiculturalism, which contains the founding and enduring tenets of our current multiculturalism policies. In order to problematize Canada's multicultural mythology, I look for de-racialized, counter-discursive narratives of difference to mark points of resistance against the emerging legitimation of state-vetted formations of social identities during the policies' nascent expansion. Via self-consciously positional critical discourse analyses of novels given the Governor General's Award for English-Language Fiction during this period, I outline a provisional collective biography of 1970s Canada. I conclude that the education in Canadian identity narrated by state-vetted fiction of this period represents the double-pedagogy of inclusion/exclusion through which Canada's past and current processes of ethnic and behavioural 'whiteness' are superficially contested but purposefully maintained. Keywords: Canadian literature, collective biography, identity politics, multiculturalism, national pedagogy
Through the vexed and multiple lenses of postcolonial studies, this essay explores the literary, ... more Through the vexed and multiple lenses of postcolonial studies, this essay explores the literary, cultural and political meanings ascribed to postcolonialism in order to illuminate the disconnect between the Western academy and its presumed-to-be subaltern communities. In particular, I interrogate Canada's postcolonial status in the context of official multiculturalism, and argue that the aforementioned disconnect may be ameliorated through both critical and self-critical interpretations of cultural texts. Multicultural education is presented as both a cause of the categorization of subalterns by the privileged, and as a potential mechanism for emancipatory, transcultural learning. When interpreted in the context of critical pedagogy, postcolonialism becomes a social justice project, a transformative education, and a lens through which we may more accurately see ourselves.
This essay examines the social, political and economic foundations on which current systems of st... more This essay examines the social, political and economic foundations on which current systems of status are built and maintained inside Canada's public schools. Mass media, neo-liberal political and economic forms, and colonial models of social stratification are revealed via historical narrative and collective biography as persistent and effective instruments employed to shape schoolchildren toward idealized social roles. The contemporary 'school bully' in neoliberal Canada now serves to embody the violence, aggression, status and individuality we celebrate inside and outside our schools while masking the superficiality of popular collectivist, socially inclusive ideals. Critical analysis of Canada's public school system's historical, sociocultural and political foundations here draws on Foucauldian concepts to reveal the 'school bully' as a long-standing mechanism for identifying difference and enforcing exclusion, now coopted by policy-makers, educators and parents to legitimate a Panoptic reshaping of the culture of childhood.
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Papers by Desi Valentine
In order to problematize Canada's multicultural mythology, I look for de-racialized, counter-discursive narratives of difference to mark points of resistance against the emerging legitimation of state-vetted formations of social identities during the policies' nascent expansion. Via self-consciously positional critical discourse analyses of novels given the Governor General's Award for English-Language Fiction during this period, I outline a provisional collective biography of 1970s Canada. I conclude that the education in Canadian identity narrated by state-vetted fiction of this period represents the double-pedagogy of inclusion/exclusion through which Canada's past and current processes of ethnic and behavioural 'whiteness' are superficially contested but purposefully maintained.
Keywords: Canadian literature, collective biography, identity politics, multiculturalism, national pedagogy