Issue 29.3

Overview

Special Issue: Idols of Otherness: The Rhetoric and Reality of Multiculturalism

Published: September 1996


View the issue introduction or see the issue summary and contents below.

 13 essays, totalling 216 pages

 $15.00 CAD


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Issue Summary

As Editor Evelyn J. Hinz asks in her introductory essay to this special issue of Mosaic, how does one conceptualize multiculturalism? Ought it be done with space, time, distance, and technology in mind? Ought it be done solely from one side? Can it be done without othering or the use of binaries? Is there an end game to multiculturalism or is it an end in itself? Questions such as these circulate through the six essays that make up this special issue. Focused predominantly on multiculturalism in Canada, the essays in this issue focus on Marshall McLuhan’s global-village and his critical heritage; metaphors of eating and multiculturalism in A.M. Klein; time/space in Andrew Suknaski, Mikhail Bakhtin, and multiculture; children’s literature as multicultural tool; the otherness of Quebec’s theatre; and the (mis)function of hyphenated ethnicity.

Contents

From New Criticism to Cultural Pluralism: The Southern Legacy of Marshall McLuhan

Karl Precoda

Marshall McLuhan’s career illustrates the continuities between Southern New Criticism and contemporary cultural pluralism. A better understanding of McLuhan’s debt to the New Critics can help explain both why McLuhan’s stocks have declined in recent years and what he and they have to contribute to discussions of multiculturalism today.

The Ethno-Semiotics of Food: A. M. Klein’s The Second Scroll as Recipe for Multiculturalism

Marta Dvorak

This essay addresses the issue of ethnicity by exploring the socio-political nature of food semiotics, then discussing the ingestion metaphors in Klein’s novel. The analysis demonstrates how the alimentary dynamics function in Klein’s attempts to recover his ethno-religious heritage and to respond to that epitome of anti-multiculturalism: the Holocaust.

Andrew Suknaski’s “Wood Mountain Time” and the Chronotope of Multiculturalism

Dawn Morgan

Using and adapting insights from Bakhtin’s “historical poetics,” this essay explores the way that Canadian writer Andrew Suknaski “novelizes” poetry by establishing an interaction between two time/space dimensions. In this way, multiculturalism is shown to be a site and process of intersecting boundaries of identity and representation.

Enlisting Children’s Literature in the Goals of Multiculturalism

Carole H. Carpenter

Children’s literature was one means enlisted to achieve the goals of official multiculturalism in Canada. Employing both a functional and reader-response approach, this essay explores the evolution of children’s literature in the context of various theorizing about education and argues that the major problem has been lack of attention to children’s own multicultural experience and their role as producers of culture.

Multiculturalism and Postmodern Theater: Staging Québec’s Otherness

Jane Moss

Recently, immigrant and Amerindian playwrights have begun to affirm their cultural differences on the Québec stage. By their representation of cultural diversity, they participate in the transformation of Québec theater, once the domain of the identitary, into a site of heterogeneity. This essay examines plays by Marco Micone, Abla Farhoud, Bernard Antoun, Alberto Kurapel, and Yves Sioui Durand.

How Hyphenated Can You Get? A Critique of Pure Ethnicity

W. M. Verhoeven

In multicultural discourse, essentialist notions of ethnicity frequently operate simultaneously as markers of identity and as barriers to cultural integration. This essay argues that Bharati Mukherjee’s relatively narrow exploration of hyphenated identity ultimately delivers her into the hands of her ideological enemies, whereas Michael Ondaatje’s self-conscious poetics enables him to construct a fluid ethnic selfhood and to evade some of the pitfalls associated with the ethnicity debate.

Foundational Myths of Multiculturalism and Strategies of Canon Formation

Norman Ravvin

Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon and Robert Lecker’s Making It Real reflect radically different perceptions of the relationship between “great books” and multiculturalism. In the process of reviewing their basic contentions, this essay attempts to identify two of the founding myths of multiculturalism and to explore the legacy of Northrop Frye’s notion of “The Peaceable Kingdom.”

Postcolonial Theorizing Achieves Academic Acceptance

Douglas Barbour

Postcolonial studies have much to offer Canadianists and those interested in multicultural issues in general. This review essay highlights the contribution made by two recent Routledge publications: The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, eds), a massive introduction to the subject in all its variables; and De-Scribing Empire (Lawson & Tiffin, eds), a collection of new essays with a major focus on literature.

Pluralism, Diversity, Heterogeneity: Continuing the Debate

Lorna Marie Irvine

Focusing on three recent Canadian publications—Other Solitudes (Hutcheon & Richmond, eds), Sounding Differences (Williamson, et al), and Thresholds of Difference (Emberley)—this review essay examines some of the idiosyncratic foci of the terms pluralism, diversity and heterogeneity as they function in the current debate about multiculturalism. The essay argues that each term encourages particular political strategies ranging from the most conservative to the most radical, and demonstrates underlying assumptions about relationships between power and culture.

Comparative Literature, Multiculturalism, and “The New Face of America”

Winfried Siemerling

In Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, Charles Bernheimer makes available his and previous reports to the American Comparative Literature Association about the state of the discipline, together with comments by leading scholars in the area. This review essay focuses on the debates surrounding the interdisciplinary aspects of comparative literature, in particular the field’s relationship to cultural studies and to multiculturalism in its various guises.

Feminism as Framework for Investigating Canadian Multiculturalism

Nancy E. Bjerring

This review of Himani Bannerji’s Returning the Gaze: Essays on Racism, Feminism and Politics and Barbara Godard’s Collaboration in the Feminine: Writings on Women and Culture from Tessera examines the contributions that feminist theory and methodology have made to the investigation of multiculturalism in Canada.

Locating Difference: Ways of Reading Multiculturalism

Noreen Golfman

Using Bissoondath’s controversial Selling Illusions as a focusing center, this review essay examines four recent collections: Other Solitudes (Hutcheon & Richmond, eds); Talking About Difference (James & Shad, eds); Pens of Many Colours (Karpinski & Lea, eds) and canadas ᑲᓂᑭ (Zinovich, ed). Overall, the works are evaluated in terms of the extent to which they further Bissoondath’s argument that official multiculturalism should be disbanded in favor of a more hybrid and flexible positioning of social difference.

Multiculturalism and Literary Criticism: Comparisons and Possibilities

Francesco Loriggio

Evidencing a common interest but also differences in Canadian, American and Australian perspectives on multiculturalism are three recent publications: respectively, Ethnicity and Culture in Canada (Berry & Laponce, eds); Multiculturalism (Goldberg, ed); Framing Marginality (Gunew). This review essay is designed to explore the issues that are raised in and by these texts and to advance alternative theoretical and critical proposals.