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I: Staging Identity in the 1890s; or, The Late Great National(ist) Road Show
IN 1895, Pauline Johnson conducted a reading tour of Canada to promote the publication of her first collection of verse, The White Wampum. Critical responses in the periodical press suggested that Johnson, as the descendant of a Mohawk father and an English mother, occupied a unique position vis-a-vis Canadian literature because she simultaneously embodied an authentic (because Native) Canadian voice and bodied forth her poetry from the British tradition in which she had been educated. Preoccupation with British legitimation had similarly manifested itself at the I89Z Canadian Literature Evening in Toronto that had served as Johnson's literary debut. There a letter, written by a British barrister in support of such events and read aloud, had simultaneously figured Canada as a prodigal child of "Old England" and asserted the Englishman's singular capacity to appreciate the burgeoning literature of Canada in the face of Canadian indifference:
If the wealth of native literature which exists in Canada is not yet fully realised in your country, with how much greater force does a revelation. . come to us in Old England! . . . You may rely upon this, that everything which will tend to throw light upon the history and genius of Canada will be heartily welcomed by Englishmen all over the world, and when I speak of England I mean the greater England, embracing all those great races whose interests are one with ours. ("Canadian Literature")
Although the barrister's evocation of Canada's colonial relationship to England exceeds the parameters of this paper's focus,1 his rhetoric serves as an apt example of similar strategies employed in the Canadian periodical press at the moment of The White Wampum's publication. Such strategies often shared a metonymic relationship with their English counterparts: just as late-Victorian England was in the business of empire building, so too was Canada in the early I89os, in the receding wake of Confederation, striving to construct often competing notions of nation. The easy conflation of those who were not English under the rubric of "great races"; the assumption that these peoples' interests were necessarily congruous with the interests of imperialism; and the displacement of England as a geographically specific body onto the terrain of...