Notes from the cultural field: Canadian literature from identity to hybridity

Within a shift from colonial dependency to global dispersion, this essay examines the changing conditions of possibility for cultural production between the 1950s and the 1990s, when literature worked no longer in the service of the nation's troubled identity within a Cold War competition between communism and capitalism but to further its economic security in an era of global capitalism. Criticism no longer contributes to narrating the nation's bildung to secure symbolic space but fills in the gaps of its inner exclusions to reach out to export markets. In its privileging of hybridity over paradox, this narrative facilitates a community imagined a disjunctive temporality, stretching the map of Canada to global dimensions. Canadian culture is asserted as compensatory though feminized and ethnicized to overcome dependency in the economic realm.