Jean-Paul Baillargeon, editor - The Handing Down of Culture, Smaller Societies and Globalization

Chapter 2 | John Meisel

(continued)

It is significant that despite the undisputed processes of globalization enveloping Canadian arts, cultural activity is alive and well in both of our linguistic families. This is evidenced in reports by Statistics Canada (yearly), media coverage and personal experience. A straw in the wind blew my way recently when I was browsing in a book shop of a German airport. On a smallish table displaying popular paper backs were three translations of Canadian books, two by anglophone authors and one by a francophone. The presence of Canadian musicians on the international scene is likewise unprecedented and impressive. In the nineteen nineties there was some decline in activities and audiences but the principal cause was the economic downturn of the period, and government cutbacks, not global competition. So, while globalization, and specifically the massive presence of US cultural products, particularly in popular culture, impede the full flowering of Canadian creative talent and its enjoyment by maximum audiences, it additionally provides incentives for Canadian artistic activity and, because of its remoteness and scale, also triggers the creation of a countervailing culture rooted in, and speaking to, Canadian reality (Statistics Canada, 2000; Meisel, 1996a).

Another important but neglected phenomenon grows out of developments accompanying the globalization process. Both in North America and in Europe, powers formerly possessed by national governments are being assumed not by an enveloping global hegemon but by regional bodies or regional arrangements. The North American Free Trade Agreement and the European Community are respectively reshaping the mental maps of North Americans and Europeans, admittedly in part deflecting them somewhat from a deep localized nationalism but at the same time plunging them into a universe which is anything but global. Explicitly in Europe, and implicitly in North America, a newly emerging, intervening space has insinuated itself between the old state and the new global environment. The world is being regionalized, as well as globalized. This means that although local links may attenuate, those going upward toward the broader world do not necessarily enter a global network but an intervening one, hovering somewhere between the local and the global.

This will inevitably present a new spatial and mental context for cultural life — a phenomenon already emerging in Europe. Although conditions in North America are different, there is nevertheless a likelihood that eventually the cohabitation on their continent of Americans, Mexicans and Canadians will lead towards a continental framework, separate from that shaped by globalization and even by the United States. The Hispanic and geographical reality wrought by NAFTA will modify the way culture is pursued in the three countries linked by new trade ties. The new supra-national but non-global sphere is essentially geographic. A related development is functional. Thus the International Network for Cultural Diversity, so vigorously championed by Sheila Copps as a corrective to the WTO, consists of geographically scattered states fearful of United States cultural domination.

Let us now turn to the notion of Canadian cultural activity and Canadian reality. How appropriate is it to employ so all-embracing a term? Northrop Frye, in a profound statement — so telling that I have used it as one of the epigraphs of this piece — noted that “... the question of Canadian identity, so far as it affects the creative imagination, is not a ‘Canadian’ question at all, but a regional question” (Frye, 1971).

Some francophone Québec readers will have wondered about the relevance of these observations to the particular circumstances of Québec. There, it is widely recognized, a particular, well articulated and flourishing Québec culture is shared by a self-conscious cultural and political community. These sorts of conditions, it is usually assumed, do not hold in other parts of Canada. The assumption is flawed. Newfoundlanders, British Columbians and readers from the other regions almost certainly had a similar reaction. For in many respects, and particularly that of culture, the Frye insight is perfectly apposite. Just as “culture” is too broad a term for many purposes, so is “Canada.” Again, the importance of the geographical — and hence societal and mental — context varies from cultural area to cultural area. The verbal arts and those emanating from myths are more linked to the creator’s communal roots than, say, abstract art or action painting, but even then only very few cultural activities are completely divorced from the creator’s milieu. In a sense, therefore, artistic life in a small country like Canada takes place against two backdrops: one provided by the global scene; the other by the forces which have their inspiration in the country or nation. And within these contexts, the artists’ specific circumstances — ethnicity, race, locality, preoccupations etc. — shape their oeuvre. And as I have just suggested, a third backdrop — the regional one — is also often present.

The respective causal force of global, regional, country-wide and specific contextual influences on an artist or work varies from case to case — in some instances one or another of these elements is insignificant, in others they may be of primordial importance.

Chapter 2, continued >

  


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