Canadian Identity: Weather, Multiculturalism, Nomadism

• “Bad weather is a transgression of silence and a threat to order.”

– Berland, 218

Lecture Themes

• Statist and Diasporic Identities

• Weather in Canada

• Multiculturalism and Immigration

• Afro-diasporic identity

Watching Others and Ourselves

• television “supervises” our physical being (209)

• we are colder even as the winters are growing milder

• we watch ourselves as if we were on (American) TV

What is an “identity”?

• Culture as managed diversity (Wallace)

• People who have the same culture can predict each other

• Identity may be practiced through shared images and discourses

Statist Identities

• “nation state”

• the Other is other countries

Culture is managed diversity (Wallace)

• Identity needs an Other

• We watch ourselves from the position of the Other

• Different Canadians have different Others

Statist identity and ethnic identities in Canada

• The Other of prototypical Anglo-Canadian: the American, the French Quebecker, the ethnic, the rest of the world

• prototypical Canadian identity is primarily statist

• The (main) Other of the “ethnics”: the prototypical North American

• Ethnic identity in Canada is diasporic

French Identity in Quebec

• The Other is English North America

• Modern Franco-Quebec identity is statist (localized in a territory)

Shared images

• the flag

• nature

• mounties

• Sioux Indians

Shared discourses

• How Canadians are Different

• Hockey

• Weather

• Canada the Civilized Country

Weather in Canada

• “something we love to hate, and nevertheless must hate to lose” (208)

• cannot appreciate cold in a “colonized public domain” (210) that valorizes business and pleasure

Weather as a Discourse Topic

• Weather = nature vs. culture

• Romantic weather

• Weather as a threat

• Weather disasters

• Weather as we don’t talk about it

How can

• the indomitable, unpredictable, and anti-disciplinary excesses of winter precipitation

• be admitted into a public discourse that is so much ordered and enabled (as satellite views remind us daily) by the frame of technological mastery

• without appearing to be caught in a pre-modern, pre-adult condition of perverse glee? (210)

It is

• almost impossible to survive a winter free from ritual performances of betrayal.

• Can we detect a symptomology of sublimated guilt? (211)

• - Guilt about being more consumerist than patriotic

Intermeteorological Colonization

Europeans colonize Canada

Americans colonize Canada

[How about non-European Canadians?]

Multicultural policy

• characterizes the “ethnic” as “a people whose static cultural practices are located both in a past and elsewhere” (30)

“Multicultural”

• 1. Consisting of more than one culture

• 2. Tolerant of all cultures

• 3. Poor and/or not white; esp. originating in the developing world

– esp. in discussing education and immigration

“Ethnic” counter-discourses

• b) extoll home country vs. Canada

• c) develop a counter-identity

– e.g. diasporic, “nomadic” identity

Black Identity and the State

• statist (nation-state) identity makes demands on Black identity

• diaspora identity makes other demands