Narrating Citizenship and Belonging in Anglophone Canadian Literature by Katja Sarkowsky

Author:Katja Sarkowsky
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783319969350
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Thus, ironically, ‘local’ or ‘regional’ identities seem to transport notions of ‘Canadianness’ more strongly than the multicultural and cosmopolitan city—which at the same time, by virtue of its diversity, embodies the national self-image. However, the central argument in this and the next chapter maintains that both spatial constellations provide crucial locations for the enactment of citizenship and help shape the possibilities of citizenship practice and identification. The scope of this enactment is not congruent with the location, however: Citizenship enacted in a rural location is not automatically ‘regional’ or ‘local,’ and neither is the enactment in an urban setting necessarily ‘national’ or ‘cosmopolitan.’ Rather, the locatedness and directedness of citizenship is complicated by historical factors (as illustrated in Kogawa’s novels), by culturally specific conceptualizations of community and citizenship (as shown in Armstrong’s work), and by diasporic mobility and constellations.

While fiction illustrates the close link that exists between citizenship and place , it is in life writing that the interconnectedness of the narrative construction of subjectivity, place, agency, and citizenship is most prominently revealed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson introduce the term ‘life writing’ very broadly as ‘writing that takes a life, one’s own or another, as its subject’ (2010, p. 4); given that this effectually would render the term without any explanatory value (fiction, too, is, after all, about life and lives), they then restrict their actual use of the term to self-referential writing practices, thereby not covering biography as life writing (p. 5). While I agree that there are crucial differences between the ways in which autobiographical and biographical writing narrates a life, I will nevertheless use the term ‘life writing’ in this chapter to cover writing that is explicitly referential, but not exclusively self-referential. Even though the biographer is in a different position than the autobiographer, both present a life strategically and selectively; biography is by no means the neutral depiction of another person’s life but as much as autobiography and memoir the result of selection, omission, and interpretation, and this applies not only to ‘biographies proper,’ but also to biographies embedded in autobiographical writing. After all, like autobiography, ‘biography is a form of narrative, not just a presentation of facts’ (Lee 2009, p. 5). Accordingly, in my reading of how the texts to be analyzed in this chapter include life stories other than that of the autobiographer, I will focus on the question of these stories’ function in life narrative.

Like the bildungsroman that was briefly discussed in the previous chapter, the genre of life writing is one of the subject formations, usually beginning in childhood—that is, a life stage in which the individual is or may be a citizen, in which he or she is ideologically interpellated as a particular type of normative or deviant citizen, but in which she/he is not (yet) a political agent. Hence, in its scope, its focus on becoming and its attempt at individual meaning-making, life writing can be read as countering the conception of the ‘citizen’ as ‘fully cooperating over a complete life’ and thus as a ‘perpetual adult’ (Lanoix 2007, p.

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