Canadian Culture: An Introductory Reader

John D. Blackwell is Reference Librarian/Collections Coordinator of the
Goldfarb Library at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

Canadian Studies, which began as a formal discipline about thirty years
ago, has grown into a large international enterprise. This latest
anthology attempts to delineate for the student what it means to be
Canadian.

Marshall McLuhan once wrote that “Canada is a land of multiple
borderlines, psychic, social and geographic. Canadians live at the
interface where opposites clash.” Cameron, who is well known for her
studies of Canada’s literary icons, seems to be of a similar mind. She
writes that “Canadians are comfortable in what might be called an
ideological limbo.” She has selected 41 essays, short stories, poems,
and song lyrics, and classified them into nine thematic groupings:
margins and centres; the north; two solitudes or more?; nationalism;
internationalism; regionalism; beautiful losers; multiculturalism; and
ideology in culture. These excerpts reveal that identity is a complex
construction based on race, ethnicity, class, gender, and geography, and
that countries are created by artists, writers, and musicians—not just
politicians. She weaves this material together in an elegant and
intelligent introductory essay, and reproduces a few notable works of
art throughout the text.

Although imaginative and evocative of the “Canadian mosaic,”
Cameron’s selection falls short of achieving its goal. Sometimes her
choices seem inadequate. Her treatment of popular culture, for example,
overlooks such seminal work as Ian McKay’s studies of the
commodifi-cation of culture in Nova Scotia. Equally puzzling is her
decision to reprint William Spray’s article, instead of highlighting
the recent renaissance of black Canadian authors. One also wonders why
she omits the important issue of technology and identity, but includes
John Matheson’s ponderous account of the birth of the Canadian flag.
Such cultural expressions as sports, religion, and folklore are also
given short shrift. Finally, her anthology would have been greatly
strengthened by including an index and a bibliographical essay on the
Canadian Studies canon, and being proofread more carefully.

Offering only a fragmentary glimpse of Canadian culture, this volume
demonstrates just how difficult it is to capture a national entity
between two covers. There is much of value in this collection, but it
will be most effectively utilized in conjunction with several
established texts: A Passion for Identity: An Introduction to Canadian
Studies (3rd ed., 1997), edited by David Taras and Beverly Rasporich;
Profiles of Canada (1992), edited by Kenneth G. Pryke and Walter C.
Soderlund; and Understanding Canada: A Multidisciplinary Introduction to
Canadian Studies (1982), edited by William Metcalfe et al.