10. “Proving Canada”: A Canadian Writer in the American Academy

“Make a case for it,” is how the Chair of the Curriculum Committee put it to me. He had in his hands my proposal that a class in “Canadian Literature” be counted for IC or “International Cultures” credit. I had regarded it a mere formality; I was mistaken. “It may be that Canada does not meet everyone’s threshold for international,” he told me, and he paused as if he were thinking about how to put delicately something that should have been obvious to me. “We need some context. Make an argument, and I’ll consider it. You have to prove it, I’m afraid.” This was some 20 years ago, during the first week of my first job at an American university. It became clear to me from then on—when I found myself faced with the task of arguing that Canada was something other than a wintery appendage of the United States—that existing as a Canadian writer and academic in the United States meant also explaining Canada, proving its existence. This chapter recounts my experience of making the case for Canada both culturally and politically over the last two decades and the ways in which the teaching of Canadian literature and the presentation of myself as a Canadian writer has shaped both my identity and the identity of the institutions of which I have been a part. The chapter concludes with a reflection on my own very recent decision to become an American citizen at a time when many Americans are questioning their own national identity—and having to make their own arguments about how and by whom it is constituted.