Ethnic Adventures of the Third Generation
| Autor: | Myrna Kostash |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 1995 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Journal of Canadian Studies. 30:124-129 |
| ISSN: | 1911-0251 0021-9495 |
| DOI: | 10.3138/jcs.30.2.124 |
| Popis: | Once upon a time, back in 1978 when I had just published All of Baba's Children, I found myself willy nilly named an ethnic and claimed as such, with the expectation laid upon me by hyphenated Canadians, Ukrainians and others, that I would answer the questions agitating their communities in the late 1970s, early 1980s. How do we maintain our distinct identities beyond the second and third generations? Is assimilation necessarily a bad thing? How important is language retention to cultural identity? What is our responsibility to the Old Country? Can we be loyal Canadians and "ethnics" at the same time? Are we evolving a distinct culture that is neither "English" nor Old World? I was emerging as a kind of spokesperson in western Canada for the idea of ethnicity as a generative identity -- well past the immigrant experience -- that forms part of a broad "culture of resistance" to "Coca-Colonization" in Canada. This was very exciting stuff for me -- it felt like the leading edge of the cultural debate -- and I imagined broader and broader common fronts of cultural subversives (feminists, immigrants, ecoguerrillas, Metis, artists, gays and lesbians) challenging the globalization of culture. By the 1990s, however, I was no longer speaking in those terms, although I still wanted to. What had happened? Let me begin with the National Book Festival in the spring of 1990 in Calgary, when I sat in the audience listening to Gail Scott, Katherine Govier and Lee Maracle speak of multiculturalism and their writing. As the evening progressed and the audience was invited to ask questions, I was feeling decidedly odd. For one thing, I had no questions. How was it possible, I wondered, that having become identified with the question of ethnicity, I had nothing to ask, no pertinent declaration burning up my brain? In addition, virtually all the questions from the audience were directed at Lee Maracle (a Native writer) and had to do with "appropriation of voice." Looking back on that evening, I realize it was a turning point for me and that my silence in the audience was a tacit acknowledgement that some fundamental shift had occurred in the public discussion of culture and identity -- a shift away from my concerns as a third-generation Ukrainian-Canadian. What had happened was the articulation of a whole new point of view in the discussions around culture and identity: the articulation of race and colour. It wasn't that we had never talked about race and colour in the discourse around multiculturalism; it's that we had subsumed them within the familiar categories of "otherness," "assimilation," "community," and -- of course -- "ethnicity." In 1983, the year of the first "Women and Words" conference in Vancouver, Lillian Allen, Kristjana Gunnars and I could still be on the same panel discussing the relationship between ethnicity, feminism and our writing as though the one thing we had in common -- that none of us was "Anglo" -- was the most meaningful. The "politics of difference" soon enough overtook that moment of togetherness, and by the time of the evening in Calgary, I had realized that just as feminism's ideal of gender solidarity (Sisterhood is Powerful!) had had to yield to the analysis of historical, cultural and class cleavages among women ("difference"), so too did multiculturalism's ideal of unity among minorities have to yield to the specifics of race and colour. In a word, I discovered that, in the new terms of the discourse, I was White. I was a member of a privileged majority. I was part of the problem, not the solution. Solidarity was no longer the point. Power and privilege were the point, and the incompatibility of interests, a point made so effectively that today, it seems, no one speaks for anyone else. No one has the right to extrapolate from another's experience. No shared territory can be assumed. It was a shock. I was shocked not just because I had become "White" (two generations ago immigrants from the Ukraine, Romania, Sicily, even Ireland were not considered White, in the sense of British), but because the vision I had of all "ethnic" Canadians as potential cultural subversives united in a protest against the global village of Disneyland had become passe -- before it had even been tried. … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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