Melting Mosaics: Transcultural Border Negotiations and Change at the Margins

Description

The concept of the boundary, central to any image of a mosaic, is not what it used to be.

From being dividing or connecting lines and thus relatively fixed constructs of definition, boundaries have developed into contested and dynamic spaces where identities and categorisations are negotiated and re-imagined.

Transcultural perspectives on culture contact, as well as other 'contact zones', are arguably in a process of superseding intercultural ones. As a result, it is fashionable to speak of boundaries as of something which is transgressed in theory and practice, crossed (out), overwritten and dissolved.

Nonetheless the notion of margins and the concept of marginalisation are hard to eradicate and continue to surface in discourses of postcolonial and Native Canadian literatures, as well as other 'minorities', for instance, queer writing.

So, how endangered is the mosaic?

This paper will re-examine the image of the Canadian mosaic in the light of theories of transculturality. It proposes to do so by analysing recent anthologies of writings by authors designated as postcolonial, such as Canadian immigrants, and by First Nations writers.

Anthologies constitute the closest approximation of a literary mosaic, as their elusive, plural and fragmented identities are created by way of co-operation across boundaries. Not only is the anthology a critically marginalised literary form in its own right, but the editorial principles and choices that form the backbone of many anthologies can be said to participate in a perpetuation of notions of marginality.

As an important by-product, in the process of examining literary mosaics, the paper intends to instigate a debate on the need for boundaries to distinguish postcolonial and First Nations discourses.