The Construction of Canadian Identity from Abroad

This chapter, which sets forth the scope and analytical framework of the book, considers the impacts of externality on Canadian expatriate scholars as they approach and construct Canadian identity. We examine how spatial dislocation—i.e., being physically located beyond Canada’s borders—creates a myriad of professional and personal challenges while also generating unique opportunities. The expat Canadianist experience, we argue, is thematically similar in three significant ways. Future support for an international Canadian Studies program should directly work to engage the Canadian expat academic community.

This essay focuses on the value of environmental history in teaching Canadian Studies abroad from Denmark and especially the United States; I also reflect on intellectual and emotional experiences of researching Canada from away. This suits thinking about “externality” by illuminating and challenging the frame of the national project. Environmental history asks us to consider how different ideas of the “national interest” have driven human actions and environmental transformation, and to acknowledge the development ethos so embedded in state-building. This pulls us beyond borders to consider continental ecologies and dynamics, particularly valuable in teaching the colonial era. This study affirms the need to examine precisely that country—Canada—where geography and history have been so entwined, and where so many of the issues of concern to sustainability can be found.

This chapter uses the backdrop of racism in institutions of higher education to examine the varied manifestations of structural racism in the United States and Canada in two ways. First, the chapter analyzes how being Canadian in American higher education reveals how the core conceptualization of the university—as an employer, a space where ideas are debated, a public good, a corporation or brand, and a home and community—each surreptitiously works to exclude non-white people. Secondly, the chapter uses these lessons to rethink the ways that systemic racism functions in Canadian higher education, in spite of Canada’s national imagery as a tolerant, multicultural, and egalitarian society. In normative terms, I question whether belonging in the university is feasible or desirable for Black academics, given the systemic nature of racism in Canadian and American higher education.

Teaching about Canada in institutions outside of Canada and as an expat are circumstances of externality that condition the kind of information students receive in their classes. As a Maliseet citizen of Tobique First Nation, New Brunswick, Canada, I grapple with additional layers of externality. There is an “externality” the First Peoples of Canada must endure that is obscured by the national rhetoric of multiculturalism and world peacekeeper. The colonial legacy has rendered the Indigenous populations as external to the Canadian body politic. As an Indigenous expat, the double externality serves as the critical ground for classroom instruction on ongoing colonial structures that exclude Canada’s Indigenous populations from the national imaginary as a nation-state guided by precepts of social justice. In the third decade of the twenty-first century is there a way forward that will redress centuries of colonial erasures of the First Peoples. This chapter explores such possibilities.

This is a collection of teaching anecdotes and reflections on how my experiences as a Canadian and Francophile from New Brunswick, Canada have helped shape the identity of my undergraduate classroom in Western Washington University, located mere minutes from the British Columbia–Washington State border. Over the years, I’ve adopted a more experiential and comparative lens through which francophone Canada is now presented to my students, grounded in experiential learning. These stories aim to illustrate my efforts to combat the singularization and othering of francophone Canada (namely Acadia) within Canadian Studies which, until very recently, has been mirrored at Western Washington University in both Canadian-American Studies and the French program. As a linguistic and ethnic minority in Canada, Acadia, like many cultures suppressed by colonialism and hegemonical groups, has been othered in North America since the early 1700s and whose lasting effects have trickled down into contemporary Canadian Studies and the French language classroom. Fortunately, through my efforts described herein and with the support of the university administration and its current strategic plan that calls for pursuing the knowledge and understanding of minorities, Canada has gained some sexiness.

My scholarly trajectory has been a strange duality of dealing with indifference and authenticity, challenges that shift depending on whether my audience is inside or outside of Canada. Outside of Canada, being a (partial) Canadianist means convincing others that the Canadian case is worth studying. I have done this by promoting a comparative scholarship of migration, helping to break new ground within a largely U.S.-dominated approach to migration studies. However, in Canada, the challenge is one of authenticity. What does a U.S.-based academic, especially one who is increasingly distanced from the lived experience of Canadian life, truly know about a country she no longer calls home? Being abroad can make the big picture easier to see and articulate, though it can come at the cost of fine-grained details. With time, you are no longer an “expat” Canadian with some legitimacy to speak on Canada; you become a Canadian immigrant in the United States, vulnerable to the criticism of excessive nostalgia for the homeland, and an understanding of Canada frozen in the moment that you left the country.

This chapter examines the effect of distance on rethinking Canada professionally and personally. Located in Switzerland since 2015, Nimijean continues to teach online courses in Canadian Studies to his students in Canada while maintaining an active research and professional profile. The chapter describes how this unique situation not only presents numerous professional and pedagogical challenges but it affects how he relates to Canada at a personal level.

“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.

In 1969 I went to Czechoslovakia intending to spend a year or two teaching English before returning to my home country, Canada. Fifty-three years later I am still here (though now in the Czech Republic). Until 1977 I taught at language schools, since then at Masaryk University, in the country’s “second city,” Brno. Canada was always a natural part of my practical English classes, but in 1985, with the introduction of my first course in Canadian literature, I became a “Canadianist.” Since then, most of my teaching and scholarly work has been devoted to Canada, and I have also played an active role in the development of Canadian Studies internationally. This chapter describes how my involvement as a diasporic Canadian with Canadian Studies has changed over the years, and along with it my relationship to Canada itself—how, moving from isolation to closer personal engagement to a renewed sense of inclusion, it has been shaped by external factors such as the political reality of the Cold War East–West divide, the opening-up following the fall of Communism, Canadian government support for Canadian Studies, the presence of a world-wide community of Canadianists, and globalization and the new media.

The longer I am away from Canada, the more textual my relationship to my home country becomes. Reading about Canada, and teaching Canadian literature to my Slovene students, has changed what Canada means to me and I am now less confident about how in touch I am with Canada. This chapter examines how my medial position makes me aware of knowledge gaps about Canada and how it also makes me aware of cultural assumptions that are transferred from Central Europe and must be addressed in the classroom. At the same time, I am made aware of a relative parochialism in the Canadian literary scene. The final section of the chapter focusses on teaching Rohinton Mistry’s “Squatter” (1987) and David Bezmozgis’s “Immigrant City” (2019) in a place where “immigration” and “multiculturalism” are understood differently, often negatively. The longer I remain and teach in Slovenia, the more I realize the benefits of adopting an outsider’s view of my own country, and the more I appreciate my changing understanding of Canada.

Focussing on the research and teaching about Indigenous theatre and performance in Canada that I conduct at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), this article meditates on the concept of critical distance. How might working and teaching from abroad afford Canadian researchers the added form of critical distance, that is the geographical as well as cultural de-familiarization necessary to engage with and unsettle Canada’s powerful narrative and sense of self as a peaceful nation on the right side of history? How might such distance and having to engage a student population largely unfamiliar with Canada, help put in relief the fissures in Canada’s announced reconciliation process with Indigenous people and expose the gap between discourse and performance? And how does working at UC San Diego, on the unceded territory of the Kumeyaay nation, and in close proximity with Mexico, lend itself to a transnationally Indigenous reflection on Canada and the way it represents itself through performance? In short, what emerges when research on theatre and performance in Canada unsettles itself through migration?

This chapter focusses on communication in Canadian Studies as related to evolving identity for an expatriate scholar in the United States. More specifically, representation of ideas based on systemist graphics is advocated as a way of dealing with both cross-national and interdisciplinary challenges to effective communication in the information age. Systemist visualizations resemble conventional “box and arrow” diagrams, but are created in compliance with rules that ensure reproducibility and mutual understanding. Included in the chapter are examples of systemist graphics to depict scholarship from Canadian Studies based in the humanities and social sciences. Such systemist visualizations are used to stimulate engagement across boundaries and potentially move Canadian Studies in the direction of greater disciplinary integration. This chapter’s autobiographical components concern experiences in research, teaching, and service that have combined to stimulate commitment to a graphic approach toward conveyance of ideas. For me, being transplanted to the US setting has been a major influence in reaching the conclusion that improved communication through visualization is an urgent priority for Canadian Studies in particular and area work in general. I would add that the most promising intellectual future resides in comparative analysis of Canada, notably within the context of New Area Studies.

This chapter documents how moving to western New York in 1989 led, quite paradoxically, to Canada looming larger in my professional career, if not my personal life. My Canadian-ness is a professional asset since Buffalo is uncharacteristically familiar with, and to a degree overshadowed economically and demographically, by Canada. Proximity and location therefore matter and can foster cross-border understanding and comity. I also explore a second paradox I have experienced: location and shifting perceptions of power and influence. As a Nova Scotian, I felt far from the corridors of power in Canada. Buffalo is similarly removed from American centers of power and influence. Ironically, moving to a border region of a different country brought me closer to the economic power center of Canada, as Toronto is just 90 minutes away. Though changed, my understanding of Canada continues to reflect the sentiments of a resident of a peripheral region, albeit one now with privileged access to the heartbeat of Canada.

Living and working abroad has had a significant impact on my teaching and research on Canadian foreign policy in North America. Ironically, working in Mexico has provided better access to Canadian, United States, and Mexican foreign policymakers as they see me as a channel to voice their concerns on North American cooperation. Often, I will be invited to a workshop in Mexico to speak about Canada, while on other occasions, I will be invited to Canada to speak about Mexico. I am much more aware of the positions of all three North American countries and why they have these positions. With specific reference to Canada and the actual content of its foreign policy, I have come to see that Canadian foreign policy is strikingly more “realist” than what I was taught in Canada in Canadian foreign policy courses, showing how externality provides new insights into Canada.

My approach toward and construction of all things Canadian—including undergraduate and graduate teaching, scholarship, and service to university life, professional academic associations, and community engagement—is rooted in one central inquiry: why Canada? The construction of Canadian identity, I argue, is grounded in and rests on a core foundational need to first explain why Canada (as opposed to who, how, what, and when) merits time and attention as a matter of analytical focus.