Saturday, October 31th 9:00 – 10:30

Session Room: Miss Lou’s Room

1) Gregory Klages, University of Guelph-Humber
Not quite propaganda: Creation of the Canada Council of the Arts as extension of state influence

During the 1940s, politically aware Canadian creators came together to seek artist-directed public support for the arts.  By the end of the following decade, the Canada Council, a major public agency mandated to support the arts (along with research in the humanities and social sciences) had been created. The creation of the Canada Council has come to be celebrated as both a victory for political advocacy by artists, as well as an enlightened policy decision by the federal government to support the arts without exerting undue pressure on the sector to produce propaganda.

Regardless of whatever positive outcomes the Canada Council may have produced for the arts sector, it is important to note that the agency was not structured to prioritize artists as decision-makers regarding state support of the arts, nor was the agency mandated to pursue goals sought by Canadian artists. The methods used to finance the agency’s activities, as well as the qualifications required for appointees, served to apply the logic of public policymaking, that prioritized the political interests of the federal government rather than the interests of workers within the sector within which the Council was created to intervene.

The commitment to public support for the arts in Canada was – and is – something to be celebrated.  By placing decision-making regarding state involvement in the arts with professional policymakers instead of with artists, however, and by basing the national arts economy on state spending, the creation of the Canada Council was a far more significant victory for politicians than for arts advocates that has served to skew public perception of the arts within Canada in very particular directions.

2) Johanna Lewis, York University
Unsettling Family History: Memoralization, Erasure, and the Settler Colonial Nationalist Imaginary

Celia Haig-Brown has posited the pedagogical utility and transformative potential of writing ‘decolonizing autobiographies’ (Decolonizing Diaspora, 13). This practice of “tracing [colonialism’s] roots through personal narrative and family history,” she argues, “[is a] first step in the long journey of possibility for decolonization” (14). Such a process of untangling stories, migrations, and complicities is crucial for locating ourselves, in relation to each other, to our pasts, and to the land on which we live. To this end, I am investigating the histories of my own family, a web of geographically disparate colonial complicities. Focusing on Canada’s settler colonial context for this presentation, I want to talk about a dual process of memoralization and erasure that occurs at the familial and, relatedly, at the national level. My ancestors were among many who migrated to Saskatchewan at the turn of the last century, as the state offered up homesteads as part of its colonial project of populating the prairies. These histories of settlement are far from erased; these ancestors are celebrated as rugged pioneers and brave explorers, and their actions enable me to claim a supposedly more ‘authentic’ Canadianess. But these stories are elevated alongside and through a related process of denial and disavowal. The celebration and memorialization of early settler histories is grounded in the erasure of the colonial violences, dispossessions, and racist exclusions necessarily enacted through the same process. Through a familial case study, I support the premise that mutually supportive processes of remembering and forgetting are both necessary for upholding settler colonialism, particularly in Canada where, as Sunera Thobani has argued, a “myth of benign origins” is crucial for upholding our particular brand of purportedly compassionate nationalism (Exalted Subjects, 87).

3) Cristina Ivanovici, University of Birmingham
Constructing and Crossing Borders in Literary Archives: Representations of Translation Projects in the Laurence Papers

In the export of literature, translation often functions as ‘soft diplomacy’ or as “cultural diplomacy to achieve soft power”, in that it not only brands a nation abroad, but it also enables an evaluative assessment of the interrelationship between funding, publishing and marketing writers internationally. These four latter aspects indicate differences in the prestige and symbolic power assigned to Western and Eastern European publishers involved in the cultural transfer of contemporary English-Canadian writers. Particularly before 1989, Western and Eastern European publishing industries were placed in a binary opposition, due to cultural policies which not only accommodated or discouraged translations, but also directly influenced what Eastern European publishing houses promoted.

With few recent exceptions, numerous critical studies of the dissemination of contemporary English-Canadian literature internationally undermine how translation operates as a key factor in the cultural transfer of writers constructed as brands of Canada to non-Western European countries.

Intriguingly, such studies seldom engage with archival materials related to specific translations. Drawing upon archived correspondence between Margaret Laurence and her European publishers, literary agents and translators, currently held in manuscript collections available at York University and McMaster University, but which has not yet attracted any critical attention, this paper discusses representations of various translation projects in the Laurence Papers. This paper argues that whereas pre-1989 Eastern European translations of Margaret Laurence’s fiction were constructed as non-lucrative projects or as culturally insignificant in the achievement of her international recognition, thus discouraging a prompt cultural export of Laurence’s fiction to Eastern Europe between the 1960s and 1989, they also highlight ideological interventions in how both borders and cultural prestige are represented in the literary archive.