Borders — whether internal or external, social or economic, geopolitical or psychological — have assumed a most significant role in developing Canada's sense of nation. Borders, starting with those in common with the United States, in addition to the artificial internal regional borders, frame Canadian identity. Identity, however, is a notion both revealed and invented. The Canadian identity is composite and multifaceted to the point of not being easily understood even by those who would try to create or define it.
A pan-Canadian identity has very often been countered by the panoply of attachments existing in the country: allegiances to regions, to ethnic groups, to religion, to outside interests. Although it is certainly not a gathering of …show more content…
As a result, these contradictory energies have created a country that is in itself a paradox, obsessed with the definition of a "Canadian identity," which has become an elusive notion.
The metaphor of the border, however, has become synonymous with Canada's geopolitical predicament. Borders partake in the construction of the imaginary of the nation. The border is in fact also the symbol of the exclusionary practice inherent in the discourse of the nation. Border and borderlands, nonetheless, are not static, inert entities but organic ones; they change over time and space and become different and often unfamiliar kinds of places.
In the present discussion of the novel Obasan by the Japanese Canadian author Joy Kogawa, I look at the relationship between the developing of identity and the metamorphosis of space and place over time, with a particular emphasis on the representation of the border. I shall look at ways in which identity and place, mutually dependent notions, are formed by borders and borderlands. I shall also draw attention to the liminal sites of merging of interiorities and exteriorities, to the moments in which outside and inside face each other, when everything is suspended in a state of redefinition. In such a process, representations of subjectivity, territoriality and belonging are discordant to the official imaginary …show more content…
Race makes the "exclusionary discourse of the nation possible, solidifying and edifying the borders of the nation-state through the delineation between who is 'at home' and who comes from elsewhere. This elsewhere is defined and coveted by the white supremacy either covertly in the name of such pluralist liberal discourse as multiculturalism or overtly in the blatantly racist discourse that form the vocabulary of nationalism" (Manning 2003: 72). Borders are also sites of separation that strictly regulate the relations between self and other, citizen and non-citizen, thus stipulating "the manner in which otherness is created and reproduced" (Manning
A pan-Canadian identity has very often been countered by the panoply of attachments existing in the country: allegiances to regions, to ethnic groups, to religion, to outside interests. Although it is certainly not a gathering of …show more content…
As a result, these contradictory energies have created a country that is in itself a paradox, obsessed with the definition of a "Canadian identity," which has become an elusive notion.
The metaphor of the border, however, has become synonymous with Canada's geopolitical predicament. Borders partake in the construction of the imaginary of the nation. The border is in fact also the symbol of the exclusionary practice inherent in the discourse of the nation. Border and borderlands, nonetheless, are not static, inert entities but organic ones; they change over time and space and become different and often unfamiliar kinds of places.
In the present discussion of the novel Obasan by the Japanese Canadian author Joy Kogawa, I look at the relationship between the developing of identity and the metamorphosis of space and place over time, with a particular emphasis on the representation of the border. I shall look at ways in which identity and place, mutually dependent notions, are formed by borders and borderlands. I shall also draw attention to the liminal sites of merging of interiorities and exteriorities, to the moments in which outside and inside face each other, when everything is suspended in a state of redefinition. In such a process, representations of subjectivity, territoriality and belonging are discordant to the official imaginary …show more content…
Race makes the "exclusionary discourse of the nation possible, solidifying and edifying the borders of the nation-state through the delineation between who is 'at home' and who comes from elsewhere. This elsewhere is defined and coveted by the white supremacy either covertly in the name of such pluralist liberal discourse as multiculturalism or overtly in the blatantly racist discourse that form the vocabulary of nationalism" (Manning 2003: 72). Borders are also sites of separation that strictly regulate the relations between self and other, citizen and non-citizen, thus stipulating "the manner in which otherness is created and reproduced" (Manning