Dark Side of the Nation

These feminist Marxist and anti-racist essays speak to important current political issues. Though they begin from experiences of non-white people living in Canada, they provide a critical theoretical perspective capable of exploring similar issues in other Western and Third World countries. This reading of difference includes and extends beyond the cultural and the discursive into political economy, state and ideology. It cuts through the conventional paradigms of current debates on multiculturalism.

These essays take up in particular the notion of Canada—as the nation and the state—as an unsettled ground of contested hegemonies. They particularly draw attention to how the state of Canada is an unfinished one, and how the discourse of culture helps it to advance the legitimation claim needed by any state, especially one arising in a colonial context, with unsolved nationalist problems. The myth of the “two founding peoples,” Anglo and Francophone, conveniently ignored the reality of First Nations. More recently, it has also ignored the entrance of non-European immigrants, who may have a history of being indentured and politically marginalized and have just begun struggling for political enfranchisement in their new homeland.