Transatlantic Identities and Retrospection in Canadian Liter

A significant number of contemporary Canadian authors from Third World countries (R. Mistry, M.G. Vassanji etc.) have in their fiction turned back to their countries of origin in their award-winning writings (which appears to suggest a functioning of the multicultural paradigm in Canada). The current project will investigate earlier phases of immigration and nation- building in Canada, and focus on the accommodation and acculturation of immigrants from Central (and Eastern) Europe between about 1920 and the late 1980s. Attention will be paid to the autobiographical writings and fictionalized accounts produced by exiled and refugee authors from Austria and Germany (such as Henry Kreisel, Carl Weiselberger, and Carl Ulrich Wassermann) and from neighboring countries. In its imagological aspect the study will also explore the interrelationship between the collective self- image(s) of the host country and the Canadian heterostereotypes of the countries of origin of the newcomers. The significance of the retrieval of transatlantic recollections (even if they were traumatic) in the process of identity construction is borne out by the fact that authors rooted in Canada but with transatlantic experience have also dealt with this issue in their own works, not infrequently including it in their search for a collective national identity. Hugh MacLennan, in particular, in unpublished (apprenticeship) work, and in his last dystopian novel, explored the implications of this theme, which has also been evoked in very recent historical fiction, for instance, by Jane Urquhart. The present project will collect further accounts by writers in non-fiction and fiction. It will examine their depictions of situations in European settings and of `sites of memory` and study them within the context of imagology, ethnic autobiographical texts and transatlantic travel literature. It will also relate the individual identities newly constructed and the processes of remembering to the debates between continentalists and nationalists in Canada, and to the impact of the regional factor on identity construction and the transatlantic heritage. The study will necessitate archival work in Ottawa, Montréal, Toronto, and also in Winnipeg, Calgary and Victoria, and will involve consultations with many Canadian colleagues. It will also include an interdisciplinary field trip in the fall of 2003, in which experts from other fields, and doctoral candidates plus diploma students will participate. Its working title is `Collective Identity in Canada: Nation, Region, and the Transatlantic Heritage`.

The official policy of multiculturalism practiced in the last two decades has not only allowed Asian immigrants to establish a literary claim to their new home and to publish award-winning novels in which their old country functions as the setting and subject. Increasingly, European immigrants of the second and third generations have also acknowledged their heritage and have given voice to it (especially in autobiographical and fictional texts) thus indicating their contribution to the complex national identity of Canada. Since the initiation of the project other scholars have similarly addressed this issue and have recently published monographs and essays dealing with the "obsession with the past" manifest in Canadian literature (cf. Neumann, 2005 and 2006). Still, the comparative analysis of fictional texts by New Canadians of European descent has allowed the participants in this project to gain insights into the functions of variants of memory and life writing, the constructions and deconstructions of individual and collective identities and acts of remembering. The analysis of these texts has shown that ethnic groups aware of a long history of suffering and marginalization have held on more tenaciously to the cultural practices and points of view of their old collective identity (cf. Jewish Canadians, Mennonites). Literary spokespersons of other minorities which have had little prestige in the liberal immigration country Canada has been for the past decades frequently depict the process of acculturation, which, however, often leads to generational conflicts within families, as the first generation clings to its cultural roots, while subsequent generations adopt Canada as their cultural frame of reference. Furthermore, authors with a marginalized ethnic heritage have been discovered to have recourse to a method, that of substitution, at a time when they were not yet ready to acknowledge their own contested collective identity. It is not coincidental that both George Ryga, a Ukrainian dramatist from the less respected Ukrainian minority, and Penny Petrone, an immigrant anthropologist descended from southern Italians, first turned their full attention to the (even) worse lot of indigenous people and vicariously endured the marginalization of these outsiders. Canada also served as the setting of fiction in which ethnic tensions persisted as part of the burden of the European past and had to be acknowledged within the context of the new collective identity. Authors such as Henry Kreisel (cf. "The Almost Meeting") and Eva Stachniak (Necessary Lies) have explored the painful confrontation with this reality and the transplantation of hetero-stereotypes fostering continued animosities and suspicions, implying, however, the hope of negotiating a resolution. Not only these ethnic groups from the continent of Europe, but also Scandinavians, Icelanders, and Gaelic speakers had for a long time to submit to their marginal position and could not fail to observe the gradual loss of language and cultural practices (cf. the elegiac Gaelic speakers in Alistair McLeod`s fiction). More recently, writers representing the Founding Nations have also come increasingly to recognize and pay tribute to the important contribution of other ethnic groups to the construction of a Canadian identity (cf., for instance, the historical novel The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart).