Focus On: Canadian Culture

Essays and Proclamations on Canadian Culture

Victor Howard

In the spring of 1970 a group of academics met in Washington, D.C., to organize the Association of Canadian Studies in the United States. That assembly spoke vigorously to the need to dramatize the indifference of Americans in general and their schools in particular to the history and civilization of Canada. The Association grew out of a resolution to alleviate that indifference by proselytizing in behalf of the study of Canada in this country. The enterprise is not concluded but a s the decade of the 1970s closes it is clear that much has been accomplished. The Association itself has flourished, numerous programs and courses and libraries and curricula have either been created or expanded, conferences and symposia abound, serious scholarship h a s been encouraged and produced. This supplement to the Journal of American Culture, is a t least partially a consequence of this movement.

The range of the essays included here are meant as testimony to the distinctiveness of Canadian culture but they can be seen, also, to demonstrate approaches to the study of that culture: intellectual history, comparative literature, political science. The moods of these papers vary as well from scholarly sobriety to soapbox humor, for if the Canadians take themselves seriously, they also leaven that seriousness with a sense of humor. And with style.

Some twenty years ago, Canada moved, however cautiously a t first, into a period once called “the new nationalism.” A combination of forces, figures, stresses, some internal, others external, prompted the Canadian people to a new and more positive regard for themselves. The ‘lament for a nation’ which had been the unhappy theme of a commentary by philosopher George Grant became clearly inappropriate. The polite and politic national character similarly lost credence. And in testing this new nationalism which was, after all a new consciousness, Canadians came again and again to examine their cultural heritage and to create and celebrate present and future potential. That first wave of enthusiasm has subsided but the majority tha t emerged is everywhere apparent in that country; a vitality, a n independence, yes, a n identity. At last.

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