"Circling the Downspout of Empire":

Post-Colonialism and Postmodernism

LINDA HUTCHEON

THE SUBJECT OF Daphne Marlatt's phrase "circling the down-

spout of Empire" is "[C]anadians," and she is not alone in seeing
Canada as still caught up in the machinations of Empire and col-
ony, imperial metropolis and provincial hinterland (see Monk
14). Irving Layton once defined "Anglo-Canadian" in these
terms:
A native of Kingston, Ont,
- two grandparents Canadian
and still living
His complexion florid
as a maple leaf in late autumn,
for three years he attended
Oxford
Now his accent
makes even Englishmen
wince, and feel
unspeakably colonial.
(Scott and Smith 75)
Whatever truth there may be in these accusations of neo-colonial-
ism, there are many others who are coming to prefer to talk about
Canada in terms of post-colonialism, and to place it in the context
of other nations with which it shares the experience of coloniza-
tion. In much recent criticism, this context has also come to over-
lap with that of postmodernism. Presumably, it is not just a matter
of the common prefix or of the contemporaneity of the two enter-
prises. In literary critical circles, debates rage about whether the
post-colonial is the postmodern or whether it is its very antithesis
(see Tiffin, "Post-Colonialism").
150 LINDA HUTCHEON

Part of the problem in deciding which camp to belong to is that

in many of these debates the term postmodernism is rarely defined
precisely enough to be more than a synonym for today's multi-
nationalist capitalist world at large. But it can have a more precise
meaning. The architecture which first gave aesthetic forms the
label "postmodern" is, interestingly, both a critique of High Mod-
ern architecture (with its purist ahistorical embracing of what, in
effect, was the modernity of capitalism) and a tribute to its tech-
nological and material advances. Extending this definition to other
art forms, "postmodern" could then be used, by analogy, to de-
scribe art which is paradoxically both self-reflexive (about its tech-
nique and material) and yet grounded in historical and political
actuality. The fiction of writers like E. L. Doctorow, Graham
Swift, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison, and
Angela Carter might provide examples. I have deliberately in-
cluded here writers who would be categorized by others as either
post-colonial or feminist in preference to the label "postmodem."
While I want to argue here that the links between the post-colonial
and the postmodem are strong and clear ones, I also want to
underline from the start the major difference, a difference post-
colonial art and criticism share with various forms of feminism.
Both have distinct political agendas and often a theory of agency
that allow them to go beyond the postmodem limits of deconstruct-
ing existing orthodoxies into the realms of social and political ac-
tion. While it is true that post-colonial literature, for example, is
also inevitably implicated and, in Helen Tiffin's words, "informed
by the imperial vision" ("Post-Colonialism" 172), it still possesses
a strong political motivation that is intrinsic to its oppositionality.
However, as can be seen by its recuperation (and rejection) by
both the Right and the Left, postmodemism is politically ambiva-
lent: its critique coexists with an equally real and equally powerful
complicity with the cultural dominants within which it inescapably
exists.
Those cultural dominants, however, are shared by all three
forces. As Gayatri Spivak notes: "There is an affinity between the
imperialist subject and the subject of humanism" (202). While
post-colonialism takes the first as its object of critique and post-
modernism takes the second, feminists point to the patriarchal
 "CIRCLING THE DOWNSPOUT OF EMPIRE" 151

underpinnings of both. The title of a recent book of essays on

colonial and post-colonial women's writing pinpoints this: A
Double Colonization (Petersen and Rutherford). Feminisms have
had similar impacts on both postmodern and post-colonial criti-
cism. They have redirected the "universalist" - humanist and
liberal- discourses (see Larson) in which both are debated and
circumscribed. They have forced a reconsideration of the nature
of the doubly colonized (but perhaps not yet doubly de-colonized)
subject and its representations in art (see Donaldson). The current
post-structuralistjpostmodern challenges to the coherent, autono-
mous subject have to be put on hold in feminist and post-colonial
discourses, for both must work first to assert and affirm a denied
or alienated subjectivity: those radical postmodern challenges are
in many ways the luxury of the dominant order which can afford
to challenge that which it securely possesses.
Despite this major difference between the postmodern and the
post-colonial- which feminisms help to foreground and which
must always be kept in mind - there is still considerable overlap
in their concerns: formal, thematic, strategic. This does not mean
that the two can be conflated unproblematically, as many com-
mentators seem to suggest (Pache; Kroller, "Postmodernism";
SIemon, "Magic"). Formal issues such as what is called "magic
realism," thematic concerns regarding history and marginality,
and discursive strategies like irony and allegory are all shared by
both the postmodern and the post-colonial, even if the final uses
to which each is put may differ (cf. During 1985, 369). It is not
a matter of the post-colonial becoming the postmodern, as one
critic has suggested (Berry 321), but rather that the manifesta-
tions of their (different, if related) concerns often take similar
forms; for example, both often foreground textual gaps but their
sites of production differ: there are "those produced by the colo-
nial encounter and those produced by the system of writing itself"
(SIemon, "Magic" 20), and they should not be confused.
The formal technique of "magic realism" (with its characteris-
tic mixing of the fantastic and the realist) has been singled out by
many critics as one of the points of conjunction of postmodernism
and post-colonialism. Its challenges to genre distinctions and to
the conventions of realism are certainly part of the project of both
152 LINDA HUTCHEON

enterprises. As Stephen SIemon has argued, until recently it has

been used to apply to Third World literatures, especially Latin
American (see Dash) and Caribbean, but now is used more
broadly in other post-colonial and culturally marginalized contexts
to signal works which encode within themselves some "resistance
to the massive imperial centre and its totalizing systems" (SIemon,
"Magic" IO; also "Monuments"). It has even been linked with
the "new realism" of African writing (Irele 70-7 I) with its em-
phasis on the localized, politicized and, inevitably, the historicized.
Thus it becomes part of the dialogue with history that both post-
modernism and post-colonialism undertake. After modernism's
ahistorical rejection of the burden of the past, postmodern art
has sought self-consciously (and often even parodically) to recon-
struct its relationship to what came before; similarly, after that
imposition of an imperial culture and that truncated indigenous
history which colonialism has meant to many nations, post-colonial
literatures are also negotiating (often parodically) the once tyran-
nical weight of colonial history in conjunction with the revalued
local past. The postmodern and the post-colonial also come to-
gether, as Frank Davey has explained, because of the predominant
non-European interpretation of modernism as "an international
movement, elitist, imperialist, 'totalizing,' willing to appropriate
the local while being condescending toward its practice" (I 19) .
In postmodern response, to use Canadian examples, Margaret
Atwood rewrites the local story of Susanna Moodie, Rudy Wiebe
that of Big Bear and Louis Riel, George Bowering that of George
Vancouver. And in so doing, all also manage to contest the domi-
nant Eurocentric interpretation of Canadian history. Despite the
Marxist view of the postmodern as ahistorical - because it ques-
tions, rather than confirms, the process of History - from its roots
in architecture on, postmodernism has been embroiled in debates
and dialogues with the past (see Hutcheon). This is where it
overlaps significantly with the post-colonial (Kroller, "Politics"
I 2 I) which, by definition, involves a "recognition of historical,
political, and social circumstances" (Brydon 7). To say this is not
to appropriate or recuperate the post-colonial into the postmodern,
but merely to point to the conjunction of concerns which has, I
think, been the reason for the power as much as the popularity
 "CIRCLING THE DOWNSPOUT OF EMPIRE" 153

of writers such as Salman Rushdie, Robert Kroetsch, Gabriel

Garcia Marquez, and so many others.
At this thematic and structural level, it is not just the relation
to history that brings the two posts together; there is also a strong
shared concern with the notion of marginalization, with the state
of what we could call ex-centricity. In granting value to (what
the centre calls) the margin or the Other, the postmodern chal-
lenges any hegemonic force that presumes centrality, even as it
acknowledges that it cannot privilege the margin without acknowl-
edging the power of the centre. As Rick Salutin writes, Canadians
are not marginal "because of the quirkiness of our ideas or the
inadequacy of our arguments, but because of the power of those
who define the centre" (6). But he too admits that power. The
regionalism of magic realism and the local and particular focus
of postmodern art are both ways of contesting not just this central-
ity, but also claims of universality. Postmodernism has been char-
acterized as "that thought which refuses to turn the Other into
the Same" (During 1987, 33) and this is, of course, where its
significance for post-colonialism comes in. In Canada, it has been
Quebecois artists and critics who have embraced most readily the
rhetoric of this post-colonial liberation - from Emile Borduas in
1948 to Parti Pris in the sixties. However real this experience of
colonization is in Quebec, there is a historical dimension here that
cannot be ignored. Quebec may align itself politically with fran-
cophone colonies such as Algeria, Tunisia and Haiti (Kroller,
"Politics" 120), but there is a major political and historical dif-
ference: the pre-colonial history of the French in Quebec was an
imperialist one. As both Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers and
Hubert Aquin's Trou de memoire point out, the French were the
first imperial force in what is now Canada and that too cannot be
forgotten - without risking bad faith. This is not to deny, once
again, the very real sense of cultural dispossession and social ali-
enation in Quebec, but history cannot be conveniently ignored.
A related problem is that postmodern notions of difference and
positively valued marginality can themselves be used to repeat (in
a more covert way) colonizing strategies of domination when used
by First World critics dealing with the Third World (see Chow
9 I ): the precise point at which interest and concern become im-
154 LINDA HUTCHEON

perializing appropriation is a hotly contested one. In addition some

critics, of course, see postmodernism as itself the dominant, Euro-
centric, nee-universalist, imperial discourse (Brydon 5; Tiffin,
"Post-Colonialism" 170-72). There are no easy solutions to any
of these issues raised by the perhaps uncomfortable overlap of
issues between the postmodern and the post-colonial, but that in
itself is no reason not to explore that problematic site of interaction.
Besides the formal and thematic areas of mutual concern that
I have already mentioned, there is what could be called a strategic
or rhetorical one: the use of the trope of irony as a doubled or split
discourse which has the potential to subvert from within. Some
have seen this valorization of irony as a sign of the "increasing
purchase of post-structural codes of recognition in Western soci-
ety" (Slemon, "Post-Colonial" 157), but post-structuralism can
also be seen as a product of the larger cultural enterprise of post-
modernism (see Hutcheon). In either case, though, as a double-
talking, forked-tongued mode of address, irony becomes a popular
rhetorical strategy for working within existing discourses and con-
testing them at the same time. Its inherent semantic and structural
doubleness also makes it a most convenient trope for the para-
doxical dualities of both postmodern complicitous critique and
post-colonial doubled identity and history. And indeed irony (like
allegory, according to SIemon) has become a powerful subversive
tool in the re-thinking and re-addressing of history by both post-
modern and post-colonial artists.
Since I would like to discuss this point in more detail with par-
ticular reference to Canadian art, I must first make what might
seem a digression, but which is, I believe, crucial: one of the les-
sons of postmodernism is the need to respect the particular and
the local, and therefore to treat Canada as a post-colonial country
seems to me to require some specification and even explanation.
This is not to deny in any way that Canada's history and what
have been called the "psychological effects of a colonial past"
(Keith 3) are not both very real and very important. Indeed,
parts of Canada, especially the West, still feel colonized (see Har-
rison 208; Cooley 182). It is almost a truism to say that Canada
as a nation has never felt central, culturally or politically; it has
 "CIRCLING THE DOWNSPOUT OF EMPIRE" 155

always felt what Bharati Mukherjee calls a "deep sense of mar-

ginality" :
The Indian writer, the Jamaican, the Nigerian, the Canadian and
the Australian, each one knows what it is like to be a peripheral
man whose howl dissipates unheard. He knows what it is to suffer
absolute emotional and intellectual devaluation, to die unfulfilled
and still isolated from the world's centre. (Mukherjee Blaise 151)
But to say this is still not the same as equating the white Canadian
experience of colonialism, and therefore of post-colonialism, with
that of the West Indies or Africa or India. Commentators are
rather too quick to call Canada a Third World (Saul 53) and
therefore post-colonial culture (SIemon, "Magic" 10). Yet, they
have behind them the weight of the famous pronouncement of
Margaret Laurence that Canadians are Third WorId writers be-
cause "they have had to find [their] own voices and write out of
what is truly [theirs], in the face of an overwhelming cultural
imperialism" (17). While this may be true and while certainly
Canadian literary "models remained those of Britain and more
recently of America" (18), I cannot help feeling that there is
something in this that is both trivializing of the Third WorId
experience and exaggerated regarding the (white) Canadian. Of
course Canada was politically a colony; but the consequences for
white (not Native) writers today of that past are different from
those for writers in Africa, India, or the Caribbean. The struc-
tural domination of Empire (see Starn and Spence 3-4) - not to
mention the racial and cultural - differs considerably, as even
thinking about something as obvious as economic "under-develop-
ment" (Dorsinville, Pays 15) would suggest.
As Helen Tiffin and Diana Brydon have pointed out, there are
different types of colonial conditions even within the British Em-
pire. On the one hand, in countries like Africa and India, the
cultural imposition associated with colonialism took place on "the
homeground of the colonized people" (Tiffin, "Comparison and
Judgement" 3 I ; Brydon 3). On the other hand, in countries like
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the English language and
culture were transpIanted (by settlers, conviets, slavemasters) to
a foreign territory "where the indigenous inhabitants were either
annihilated or marginalized" (Brydon 3). If Canada is any ex-
156 LINDA HUTCHEON

ample, these settler colonies meant the near destruction of the

indigenous culture (and people): it is one thing to impose one
culture upon another; it is another thing practically to wipe out
what existed when the colonizers appeared on the scene. From
this perspective, it could be said that the British relation to the
Native peoples in Canada and their culture was almost more
destructive than that relation of imposition that took place in
Africa or India. To relegate a culture to secondary status is not
the same as making it illegal. But when Canadian culture is called
post-colonial today the reference is very rarely to the Native cul-
ture, which might be the more accurate historical use of the term.
The culture referred to most frequently is the English-language one
of the descendants of the whole colonial settlers. (The fact that
this is not quite accurate is important - given Canada's pluri-
ethnicity - but I will return to that later.) Native and Metis
writers are today demanding a voice (Cuthand; Armstrong;
Campbell) and perhaps, given their articulations of the damage
to Indian culture and people done by the colonizers (French and
British) and the process of colonization, theirs should be con-
sidered the resisting, post-colonial voice of Canada. Or perhaps the
best model is that of Helen Tiffin: the aboriginal writing should
be read as standing in what Richard Terdiman calls a counter-
discursive relation to the settler literature, just as that settler litera-
ture stands counter-discursively against the imperial culture
(Tiffin, "Post-Colonialism" 173; "Post-Colonial Literatures"
20). Nevertheless, there is still a difference in the degree and even
kind of colonization endured. As Coral Ann Howells puts it:
Colonization of the prairie was in the deepest sense a power strug-
gle between whites and Indians over possession of the land com-
plicated by the clash of irreconcilable values, for possession of the
land meant very different things to the two parties in conflict.
In [Rudy Wiebe's novel, The Temptations of] Big Bear the pro-
cess of colonization is presented in precisely these terms of cultural
clash and eventual imperial domination. To the whites land owner-
ship meant exclusive possession of the prairies through the signing
of land treaties with the Indians which "forever extinguished, as
the Prime Minister like [sic] to say it, all native rights".... For
them land spelt economic and political power, an extension of the
British Empire. For the Indians however the land was life itself,
necessary to their physical, cultural and spiritual survival. ( 149)
 "CIRCLING THE DOWNSPOUT OF EMPIRE" 157

This is not quite the genocide of the Caribs or Arawaks in the

West Indies, but it is still something which must be considered
when dealing with the specificity of Canadian post-colonialism
(see Pons and Rocard on the Canadian Native as an issue of
colonization) .
This important difference in the various histories of colonialism
can be seen clearly if we extend even briefly this comparison of
the Canadian experience with that of the West Indies, which some
also see as examples of settler colonies (although to others slavery
or "exile in conditions of bondage" [McDonald 78J remains the
dominant heritage). Both the Caribbean countries and Canada
shared that European colonization which more or less effectively
destroyed certain Amerindian cultures. In Wilson Harris's words:
"this aboriginal conquest exists like a ruin of psychological prem-
ises and biases in our midst" (3). But Canada had no imported
African slave labour and no indentured workers. from India or
China to replace them after Abolition (though the usually ignored
Chinese railway workers in Canada might be a close approxima-
tion). The racial composition of the two countries has therefore
been different, and so too has been the different races' sense of
belonging. Indentured labourers, unlike slaves or settlers, were
always considered itinerant; they never belonged to where they
worked and lived. In the West Indies, the fact that these Indian
"servants" were often poor and caste-bound contributed to the
ease with which their own culture could be suppressed. While
culturally a hybrid, like all post-colonized nations (Tiffin, "Post-
Colonial Literatures" 17), Canada has experienced no actual
"creolization" which might have created something new out of an
adaptation process within a split racial context (see Brathwaite) .
Without this racial mixing, Canada's colonial culture lacked some
of the sense of a "civilizing" mission, but still defined itself in terms
of values which can, today, be seen as British, white, middle-class,
heterosexual, and male, and it passed on these values most obvi-
ously in its educational system. In her novel, Cat's Eye, Margaret
Atwood offers a child's view of what was learned in Canadian
schools in the middle of the twentieth century:
In countries that are not the British Empire, they cut out children's
tongues, especially those of boys. Before the British Empire there
158 LINDA HUTCHEON

were no railroads or postal services in India, and Africa was full

of tribal warfare, with spears, and had no proper clothing. The
Indians in Canada did not have the wheel or telephones, and ate
the hearts of their enemies in the heathenish belief that it would
give them courage. The British Empire changed all that. It
brought in electric lights. (79)
The irony of the child's perspective underlines the politics of co-
lonialism - in Canada and in the rest of the Empire. Singing
"The Maple Leaf Forever," thinking it is the Canadian content
to balance singing "Rule Britannia," the young girl notices that it
too is really about England: "Wolfe, the dauntless hero, came /
and planted firm Britannia's flag / On Canada's fair domain"
(80) .
As David Amason explains the history of this neo-colonialism,
Canada was settled by "immigrants who did not regard themselves
as Canadians, but as Englishmen living in a new land. The sense
of history of this first generation of immigrants is the sense of his-
tory of the mother country, not of Canada" (54). As writers, these
immigrants, not surprisingly, wrote in the tradition of Britain -
at least until the reality of the Canadian experience began to force
alterations in the inherited forms. The influx of British Loyalists
at the time of the American Revolution further enforced the values
of Empire. According to one view, Loyalist myths
have encouraged us Canadians to honour colonial symbols instead
of adopting our own, and to substitute for nationalism a peculiar
form of coattails imperialism. Loyalist myth-makers have never
been able to imagine a Canada disentangled from Britain. Perhaps
this is why, for a long time after Confederation, few Canadians
could think of Canada as a nation, and no longer as a mere colony.
(Bell and Tepperman 79)

The nostalgia for the British Empire which was inculcated in At-
wood's character has its echo in another typical cultural irony
pointed out by Arun Mukherjee: the equestrian statue of King
George which sits in Toronto's aptly named "Queen's Park" was
brought to Canada from India "after the latter decided to discard
all visual reminders of its colonial masters" (88). This example
only confirms the long history of colonialism in Canada: from the
British North America Act (passed in Westminster, not Ottawa)
 "CIRCLING THE DOWNSPOUT OF EMPIRE" 159

to the very recent repatriation of the Constitution itself. After

all, until 1947, Canadians were defined as "British subjects."
This perhaps long, seeming digression is intended to make the
point that one can certainly talk of post-colonialism in Canada,
but only if the differences between its particular version and that
of, especially, Third World nations is kept in mind. Two other
distinctions must be made, however, which further condition the
use of the term in a Canadian context. The first is the pluri-ethnic
(and lately more multiracial) nature of Canadian society. Some
of the immigrants who populate this country are not from colo-
nized societies and they often consciously resist being labelled post-
colonial. Filippo Salvatore, an Italian Canadian writer living in
Quebec and writing in French, states: "the defeat of the Plains
of Abraham and that of the Patriotes in r837 did not leave indel-
ible psychic scars on me. Psychologically I am not part of a colo-
nized people" (203). For him and others, the immigrant
experience can even be seen as a reverse of that of colonization, a
conscious decision to change culture (Caccia t 64 ) .
But there are other immigrants who do not share this element
of choice, who come to Canada from the West Indies, Asia or
Latin America and see it as "a necessarily occupied territory be-
cause land was denied somewhere else" (Davies 33). This is
largely non-European immigration, and the historical and political
contexts of post-colonization cannot usually be ignored, as they
might in an Italian or other European perspective. The specificity
of Canadian post-colonial culture today is being conditioned by
this arrival of immigrants from other post-colonial nations. To be
educated, as Atwood described, in a British-inspired school system
in Canada is still different from being so educated in Jamaica,
where the system is seen, by black writers who were trained in it,
as even more obviously and "proudly geared towards the needs of
the British economy" and as clearly maintaining "the social strati-
fication" that denigrates the living language of the people (Allen
66). Immigrants with this experience, who then come to Canada,
bring with them an extra-acute sense of colonialism whieh is bound
to change the nature of post-colonialism in Canada itself. Witness
Cyril Dabydeen's poem, "Sir James Douglas, Father of British
Columbia," which opens with
160 LINDA HUTCHEON

You were born where I was born.

Demerara's sun in your blood,
Guiana's rain on your skin.
You came from Creole stock
taking a native wife. (4 I )

The Guyanese Canadian poet addresses Douglas as "part of my

heritage too / despite colonialism." The piece ends with the poet
pouring (demerara) sugar into his tea and "thinking if you were
more Scottish / I'd be less of the tropics" (42). This is the doubled
sense of post-colonialism that is part of some of the writing we now
call Canadian.
There is yet one other specific factor of Canadian experience
which cannot be separated from the notion of what post-colonial
means to it. For years now (see Morton ISO), Canadians have felt
that they are being "colonized" by American capital. The use of
the term "colonization" is not totally metaphoric, for Albert
Memmi defined it as "above all, economic and political exploita-
tion" (149), and there are many Canadian economic nationalists
who would claim that this is precisely what the United States is
doing to Canada. Even if one does not agree with the extremity
of such an evaluation, it is still the case that Canadians often feel
at least culturally colonized by American mass media. They also
often feel somehow politically threatened by the constant remind-
ers of the power and imperialist impulses of our neighbour to the
south (for a classic Canadian view of American power, see Grant) .
And speaking the same language as both the real historical colo-
nizers and the present-day would-be colonizers has created prob-
lems for Canadian writers trying to hear their own "English"
tongues (Kroetsch I ; Haberly). With these additional issues of the
often doubled post-colonial focus of many Canadians and the
sensitivity to American imperialism, the very use of the word "post-
colonial" cannot help but be a complex issue in a Canadian
context.
The fact that postmodernism is alternately claimed as an inven-
tion of either Latin America or the United States (d. Tiffin, "Post-
Colonialism" 170) is interesting in this light, for it indirectly points
to the intersection of the concerns of postmodernism and post-
colonialism that interests me here. Both terms, whatever their
 "CIRCLING THE DOWNSPOUT OF EMPIRE" 161

geographic origins, are tethered to earlier entities - colonialism

and modernism, respectively. Some Canadian artists have ad-
dressed this double tethering, most notably photographer Geoff
Miles in his Foreign Relations: Re-W jriting a Narrative in Parts.
A series of texts and photographic images "about" colonial rela-
tions, this work offers a view of Canada, not as the Third World,
but certainly also not as the First. In his catalogue, Miles notes that
to discuss the photograph as a postmodern art object in Canada is
"to do so within the confines of colonialism and the colonising
power of the gaze of the other (s ). For is it not true that we are
in the unique position of being colonised by three gazes all at once;
that of France, Britain, and the United States" (2). Neither post-
modernism nor post-colonialism can go backwards; both by defi-
nition contest the imperialist devaluing of the "other" and the
"different." But Miles feels that the discourse of photography in
Canada is still very much caught within the limits of the colonial
and the modernist. But in a way this also describes any post-
colonial or postmodern art, insofar as both (as the very semantic
composition of the adjectives suggests) operate in terms of that
which they oppose: both contest from within. The question Miles
asks himself is one which has a number of possible answers: "How
do we construct a discourse which displaces the effects of the colo-
nising gaze while we are still under its influence?" (3). These
answers include, as he notes, deconstructing existing myths which
support the discourses of colonialism (including modernism) and
constructing different ones to take their place. They would also
include irony - that strategic trope that allows a work to address
a culture from within, while still articulating some challenge.
When I began this discussion of irony as a discursive strategy
of both postmodernism and post-colonialism, I suggested that, not
unlike allegory, irony is a trope of doubleness. And doubleness is
what characterizes not just the complicitous critique of the post-
modern, but, by definition, the twofold vision of the post-colonial
- not just because of the obvious dual history (Slemon, "Magic"
15) but because a sense of duality was the mark of the colonial as
well. Doubleness and difference are established by colonialism by
its paradoxical move to enforce cultural sameness (JanMohamed
62) while, at the same time, producing differentiations and dis-
162 LINDA HUTCHEON

criminations (Bhabha, "Signs" 153). This is the doubleness often

represented in the metaphor of Prospero and Caliban (Mannoni;
Dorsinville, Caliban; for a critique of this see Baker, especially
190-96, and Donaldson). It is the doubleness of the colonial cul-
ture imposed upon the colonized (Meyers vii). But it is also the
doubleness of the colonized in relation to the colonizer, either as
model or antithesis (Memmi 140). As Raymond Williams has
argued, however, all national literatures develop in this sort of
way - up to a point: from imitation of a dominant pattern to
assimilation or internalization of it (see also Marchak 182), but
then to a stage of open revolt where what was initially excluded
by the dominant pattern gets revalorized (12 1-28). Is the last one
here the post-colonial stage, as most critics suggest? If so, then it
can still be argued that its revolt continues to operate within the
power field of that dominant culture, no matter how radical its
revalorization of its indigenous culture (Tiffin, "Post-Colonialism"
172). This is why irony, the trope that works from within a power
field but still contests it, is a consistently useful strategy for post-
colonial discourse.
Nevertheless, Homi Bhabha has argued in a series of influential
articles that irony and mimicry are the modes of the colonialist,
not the post-colonial: "The discourse of post-Enlightenment Eng-
lish colonialism often speaks in a tongue that is forked, not false"
and this, he feels, is the strategy of "colonial power and knowl-
edge" ("Of Mimicry" 126). Bhabha sees irony as appropriating
the colonized Other, and implicitly therefore as part of the am-
bivalence and hybridity that characterize the colonial ("Represen-
tation" 93; "Signs" 154; "The Other Question" 18) in what both
Edward Said and Albert Memmi have seen as its inescapable and
complex mutual interrelations with the colonized. In Memmi's
words: "The bond between colonizer and colonized is thus de-
structive and creative" (89)' Without denying any of this double-
ness of the experience and literature of colonization, it is still
possible to see a different and consequent doubleness as character-
izing the post-colonial: what has been called its "bicultural vision"
(Parameswaran 241) or "metaphysical clash" (Tiffin, "Compari-
son and Judgement" 32; see, too, "Comparative Methodology"
29). And the way post-colonial critics talk about this literature
 "CIRCLING THE DOWNSPOUT OF EMPIRE" 163

suggests the potential importance of irony as the subversive force

operating from within: "the challenge is to use the existing lan-
guage, even if it is the voice of a dominant 'other' - and yet
speak through it: to disrupt ... the codes and forms of the domi-
nant language in order to reclaim speech for itself" (New, Dreams
x). Irony is one way of doing precisely this, a way of resisting and
yet acknowledging the power of the dominant. It may not go the
next step - to suggest something new - but it certainly makes
that step possible. Often combined with some sort of self-reflexiv-
ity, irony allows a text to work within the constraints of the
dominant while foregrounding those constraints as constraints and
thus undermining their power.
On the level of language, irony becomes one of the chief char-
acteristicsof what Bharati Mukherjee calls the "step-mother
tongue" in which post-colonial writers write, "implying as it does
the responsibility, affection, accident, loss, and secretive roots-
quest in adoptive-family situations" (Mukherjee Blaise 147).
Irony is thus one way of creatively modifying (JanMohamed 84;
New, "New Language" 363) or even twisting the language so as
to signal the "foreignness" of both the user and herIhis experience.
W. H. New has traced, as one common thread in Commonwealth
literature, the sense of irony, the sense of being caught between
two worlds: "Though dualities abound in the ironist's world, the
stances he may take range from parody and innuendo through
sarcasm and self-disparagement to absurdity and nihilism.... At
its best, the ironic stance provokes a serious deliberation into the
problems that led to dualities in the first place" (New, Among
Worlds 3). This involves a re-viewing of colonial and post-
colonial history through the doubled lenses of ironic defamiliariza-
tion: in Canada, Cohen's Beautiful Losers remains perhaps the
most powerful example of this process. The contradictions and
heterogeneous dualities that make up the post-colonial experience
also resonate with the paradoxes and multiplicities of the post-
modern and, in both, irony seems to be a preferred trope for the
articulation of that doubleness. The postmodern challenges to hu-
manist universals come together with post-colonial contestings pro-
voked by statements like A. J. M. Smith's famous valorization
of those Canadian poets who "made an effort to escape the limita-
164 LINDA HUTCHEON

tions of provincialism or colonialism by entering into the universal

civilizing culture of ideas" (xxiv). Such a description can today
be seen as pure neo-colonialism, looking as it does to Arnoldian
standards for validation, standards which have been argued to be
anything but universal - but rather the product of specifically
nineteenth-century British, middle-class, white, male values (Bel-
sey) .
Because irony is also the trope of the unsaid, it becomes as well
a possible way to encode a subtext which will deflect the risks of
"[f]ull visibility and accessibility ... [which] constitute an inherent
danger for the colonized" (Weir 61). As Lorraine Weir argues,
irony
in the hands of those who exercize genuine power is very different
from the same device in the hands of those classified as powerless.
Among those whose basic communication may frequently depend
upon the skilled use and reception of ironic utterance - that is,
among the powerless - irony will be all the more powerful. The
Irish, as is commonly known, are masters of irony and invective;
so is the primary community of women. (67)
Joining women and the Irish here would be ironic post-colonial
writers as obvious as Narayan and Rushdie, each in his different
way, and others perhaps less immediately obvious: Ruth Prawer
Jhabvala (see Gooneratne 65-78) or Ngugi and Tayib Salih
(Said 54).
Irony is the trope of the redeployable and the refracted as well
as simply of the double, but doubleness seems to provide fertile
ground for its usage. This makes Canada - as a post-colonial
nation (in the very specific sense offered above) and as part of a
general postmodern culture - rich terrain indeed:
Canada est omnis divisa in partes duo: all Canada is divided into
two parts. We used to have Upper and Lower Canada, but, with
the settling of the plains beyond Ontario, this division is now ex-
pressed as East and West. There's also North and South and lots
of divisions not based on geography: a political division between
the Provincial and Federal governments; an economic one between
the have and have-not provinces; a sectorial one between industrial
regions and agricultural; a linguistic one between English and
French. And so on. (Pechter 291)
But the multiplicity of these dualities does not always make the
 "CIRCLING THE DOWNSPOUT OF EMPIRE" 165

often resulting ironies easy to interpret, for these are frequently

double-directed ironies. For example, James Reaney's poem, "The
Royal Visit" (in Barbour and Scobie 58), uses repetition to signal
irony: the repeated line that both those in Stratford, Ontario,
who were slighted by not being presentable and thus presented to
royalty and those who did not manage to see the Queen because
the train moved too quickly through the town would remember
the event "to their dying day." But is the irony directed against
colonial royalists in Canada? against an inculcated neo-colonial
mentality? against royalty for not caring enough for those who
cared for them? or against all of these simultaneously? What about
the subtle, self-reBating Canadian ironies of Miriam Waddington's
"Back at York University" (271-72) where the narrator confronts
the dual colonization of Canadian culture:
I am walking back
to an English colony,
watch me change into
an American aspiration,
look, I'm whispering into
a Canadian answer-box ...
But neither Waddington nor Reaney are usually considered post-
modem writers, and so it is hard to see from these passing examples
where irony actually marks the overlapping of concerns for which
I have been arguing. But in order to show that, instead of looking
to the writing of Atwood, Ondaatje, Kroetsch or other writers in
Canada who are generally seen as both post-colonialist and post-
modem, I would like to change media and investigate briefly the
intersection of the post-colonial with the postmodern in Canadian
visual art and film which are usually labelled as postmodern, but
which I think ought to be viewed in the light of post-colonialism
as well, especially in their use of irony in the negotiation of the
aesthetic and historical heritage within which they work.
Some Canadian artists do see themselves as working within the
bounds of a historically determined colonialism. London artist
Greg Curnoe writes: "the artists who are original, who break out
of the colonial mode, are the ones who really affect our culture ...
because they develop out of their whole background" (quoted in
Theberge 17). None of Smith's universalism for Curnoe! Post-
166 LINDA HUTCHEON

colonial art, he implies, would be that which derives directly from

its own local and particular situation. This too is a tenet of post-
modernism, of course. Another example of the kind of artist who
might be simultaneously post-colonial and postmodern is Charles
Pachter. Like many other Canadians (such as Margaret Atwood
and Joyce Wieland), Pachter's time in the United States seems
to have sharpened his sense of what constitutes both the historical
and current nature of colonialism in Canada. His 1972 series of
paintings and prints on the theme of Queen and Moose chooses
deliberately provocative subjects and forms: the Queen as the
symbol of nostalgic neo-colonialism meets the U r-cliche of the
Canadian wilderness experience. His ironic portrayals and situa-
tions explode both myths, or rather, he makes them implode under
their own accumulated cultural weight.
The entire question of Canadian identity has become a kind of
playground - or battlefield - for the postmodern as well as the
post-colonial defining of "difference" and value. As Laura Mulvey
has written:
The question of Canadian national identity is political in the most
direct sense of the word, and it brings the political together with
the cultural and ideological issues immediately and inevitably. For
the Canada delineated by multinationals, international finance,
U.S. economic and political imperialism, national identity is a
point of resistance, defining the border fortifications against ex-
terior colonial penetration. Here nationalism can perform the
political function familiar in Third World countries. (IO)

Mulvey argues that Geoff Miles's work, The Trapper's Pleasure

of the Text, deconstructs the Canadian identity and reduces it to
its male, Anglo-Saxon and capitalist defining essences. And it
would seem to be irony that triggers and even enables this decon-
struction. The title alone, with its incongruous juxtaposition of a
well-known work by Roland Barthes and the notion of a trapper,
sets up the possibility for irony. The trapper here is the original
European, white, male traveller, exploiting nature for financial
gain, who made colonization possible in Canada. But in conjunc-
tion with the photograph (of a street scene devoid of people except
for the shadow of the photographer), the person who captures the
visual image is also a trapper: also a white male, he has just
 "CIRCLING THE DOWNSPOUT OF EMPIRE" 167

returned from studying in England; he too exploits external reality

for potential financial gain (if he can sell his photographs). Like
the trapper of old, he not only captures "reality" but fixes it and
in that sense destroys its "life." This too is a form of metaphoric
colonization, a taking over through representations. As Mulvey
writes: "the metaphor ironizes and parodies the way that photo-
graphic aesthetics have apotheosized the decisive moment (the
kill) and consequently the 'Trapper' himself as hero" (10). Fur-
ther ironies result from the text which accompanies the visual
image: one, positioned near the photographer's shadow, reads
"Standing above it all / he sensed the power / of his position."
The preying and the voyeuristic are clearly not absent from this
awareness of position. On the other side, away from the shadow,
we read: "The text needs its shadow! / This shadow is a bit of
ideology, / a bit of representation, a bit of subject." And, of course,
'a shadow can, by definition, only ever be a bit of a subject and
a bit of a representation. Without a shadow, that is, without a self-
reflexively revelatory doubling, the text is in danger of replacing
the photograph as a transparent realist medium presuming direct
access to the "real." The deliberate echoing of Barthes, from the
title to these texts, also recalls Barthes' own autobiographical and
complex ironic use of photographs and text in both Roland Barthes
by Roland Barthes and Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photogra-
phy. In Miles's work too, the viewer must respond actively to
decipher ironies and construct meanings in the relation of text to
image. The post-colonial "Trapper" and the postmodern "Pleas-
ure of the Text" overlap within the problematics of ironic double-
ness.
The same dualities or perhaps, more accurately, the same un-
reconciled and unresolved contradictions that characterize both
the postmodern and the post-colonial can be seen in Joyce Wie-
land's political film trilogy, True Patriot Love, a title whose echo
of "0 Canada" immediately foregrounds the significance of her
Canadianness to her exploration of the intersection of the aesthetic
and the political in these films. The first, Rat Life and Diet in
North America, was made when Wieland was living in New York
in 1968. But it is also subtly concerned with historical as well as
current colonialism, for it is a loving parody of Beatrix Potter
168 LINDA HUTCHEON

narratives. It is about the rebellion of a group of rats (actually

gerbils in the film) against the oppression of New York and the
Vietnam War. These "political prisoners" escape to Canada
where they live on an organic co-op farm. Some critics have argued
that this idealistic and naive view of Canada shows Wieland to be
"removed from the political mainstream" (Magidson and Wright
39), but perhaps it depends on whose political mainstream. What
such a view misses are the ironies that perhaps only Canadians
would notice: ironies of disjunction between the real and the ideal
Canada, and ironies resulting from the view that, for a Canadian,
even a less than ideal Canada might be preferable to the United
States - a point American critics might be forgiven for missing.
The second film, Reason over Passion (1967-69) is an ironic
reworking of the conventions of the travel documentary. It por-
trays the Canadian landscape as recorded by a hand-held camera
through the windows of trains and cars. There are also freeze-
frame pictures of the face of Pierre Trudeau, the man who uttered
the rationalist statement that gives Wieland her title. This material
is rephotographed from a moviola to get a grainy effect that self-
reflexively serves to introduce an immediately noticeable visible
mediation between the recording and the recorded. The images are
accompanied by a variety of machine noises, a female voice, and
537 printed permutations of the title's letters, as selected by rea-
son's instrument - a computer. This reappropriation of the land-
scape of Canada as the subject of art is a political and cultural
statement of the value of the local and the particular over the
universal and the eternal. It is not, as some critics have suggested,
a nostalgic move, but a postmodern and post-colonial challenging
that both contests nostalgia and postmodernly mixes elegy with
exaltation in the viewing of the land. And it is the ironic juxta-
position of the title, the Trudeau shots, and the soundtrack with
the landscape, as well as the self-reflexive mode of recording, that
makes this double contesting possible.
The third film, Pierre Vallieres, is the most overtly political, as
its title suggests, for it is a parody of the documentary portrait.
Its three parts link Quebec colonization and search for liberation
with that of women. The fixed camera frames the Quebec revolu-
tionary Vallieres's mouth from which come the words we hear:
 "CIRCLING THE DOWNSPOUT OF EMPIRE" 169

thirty-three minutes of monologue with subtitles. After a while the

moustached mouth with its crooked, discoloured teeth goes beyond
suggesting the paradoxical revolutionary folk hero and working-
class victim imaged as one (see Rabinovitz, "Films" 168-69) to
imply almost a kind of sex-inverted, ironic vagina dentata, the
terror of which informs the messages of women's liberation as well
as Quebec decolonization in the soundtrack.
Many of these same national and gender ironies are picked up
in her 197 I National Gallery retrospective, also called True Patriot
LouefVeritable Amour Patriotique. The entire show was set up to
feel like a country fair, perhaps in itself signalling a feminist sub-
version of the honorific retrospective format. She even sold bottles
of a perfume she created, called "Sweet Beaver: The Perfume of
Canadian Liberation." The beaver as sweet here suggests more
than a "nostalgic longing for a Canadian wilderness past" (Ra-
binovitz, "Issues" 40). As a symbol of Canada, the beaver is
"sweet" because it is both pleasurable and innocent, but also
because it was an appealing lure to European fur-traders and
colonizers, first, and then to American capital. As medievalists
also know well, the beaver (castor) has traditionally in the West
represented a gentle (male) beast and the secretions of its scent
glands were considered important to medicine - while serving the
beaver as a mode of sexual attraction. In various versions of myth,
when hunted, the beaver is said to bite off its own testicles (mis-
taken for scent glands) and thus escape with its life. Wieland's
Canadian beaver may also be self-mutilating but safe, attracting
but medicinal. The link between castration and castor is also an
evident one, offering another form of safety, this time from sexual
vices and sins. But, as a number of critics have noted, today this
image also cannot help connoting pornographic reductions of
women as well: "Canada's history as a land raped and colonized
by England and then by the United States parallels women's his-
tory of oppression" (Rabinovitz, "Issues" 40) . Moreover, by ironi-
cally, if indirectly, pointing to the capitalist and patriarchal
representations of women (in both pornography and in advertis-
ing - she did make the perfume a commercial object), Wieland
adds another level of irony: perfume here is the very femininely
coded medium that delivers a message which defies the trivializa-
170 LINDA HUTCHEON

tion it seems to invite. Perfume has traditionally been used to

enhance women's sexual attraction to men, but here the "sweet"
lure is loaded! The feminist, the environmentalist and the Cana-
dian nationalist ironies here are at one and the same time post-
modern and post-colonial.
Such is also the case in Fastwiirms' installation, Father Bre-
beuf's Fugue State. According to medical psychology, a "fugue
state" is a state wherein awareness of identity seems to disappear.
This work politicizes and historicizes- and thereby ironizes- this
term in relation to the spiritual conquest of North America, which
was the first step in the French colonization of Canada's aboriginal
peoples and the destruction of their identity. Using industrial ma-
terials to create postmodern ironic incongruities in the represen-
tation of historical objects, this work suggests the juxtaposition
of the Jesuit missionaries' colonizing quest with the resistance of
the Native peoples, including their torture of Father Jean de Bre-
beuf in 1649. Tarpaper walls and fluorescent lights implicitly
signal the loss and indeed the total destruction of one culture, the
one close to nature; a charred wooden cross suggests the survival,
despite many trials, of the other. As one commentator describes
another part of the installation: "Heaped onto a pile of consumer
kitsch and junk goods of Western culture are a few cobs of Indian
corn and a complete deer skeleton, the leg bones of which prop up
a barbecue grill topped with a steak - the stake of colonization"
(Fischer 12). But it is also, most ironically and horrifically, the
stake at which Brebeuf was burned - or barbecued. Yet the cross
remains, however charred, and all that is left of the Native culture
is bones. This is the loss of identity suggested by the title's fugue
state: Brebeuf's loss of the memory of the act of colonization and
its subsequent destruction of the identity of others.
The art of Geoff Miles, Joyce Wieland and Fastwlirms, each in
its own way, confronts the amnesia of colonialism through the
memory of post-colonialism. And all three use the discursive strat-
egy of irony to underline the political dimension of that confron-
tation. But in each case, the contesting is done from within the
dominant discourse, as may be inevitable given the structure of the
trope of irony. The post-colonial is therefore as implicated in that
which it challenges as is the postmodern. Critique may always be
 "CIRCLING THE DOWNSPOUT OF EMPIRE" 171

complicitous when irony is its primary vehicle. For this reason, I

would disagree with one important part of Simon During's par-
ticular definition of post-colonialism as "the need, in nations or
groups which have been victims of imperialism, to achieve an
identity uncontaminated by universalist or Eurocentric concepts
and images" (1987, 33). Most post-colonial critics would oppose
this as an essentialist, not to say simplifying, definition, and I
would have to agree with them that the entire post-colonial project
usually posits precisely the impossibility of that identity ever being
"uncontaminated": just as the word post-colonialism holds within
it its own "contamination" by colonialism, so too does the culture
itself and its various artistic manifestations, in Canada as else-
where. Colonies might well speak "unreflectingly," as Dennis Lee
has suggested (163), but the post-colonial has at its disposal vari-
ous ways of subverting from within the dominant culture - such
as irony, allegory, and self-reflexivity - that it shares with the
complicitous critique of postmodernism, even if its politics differ
in important ways. I return to this last point once again to empha-
size the difference that the use of irony by both underlines. The
post-colonial, like the feminist, is a dismantling but also construc-
tive political enterprise insofar as it implies a theory of agency and
social change that the postmodern deconstructive impulse lacks.
While both "post-"s use irony, the post-colonial cannot stop at
irony, as Ihab Hassan's exposition of the trope's postmodern fea-
tures in the end suggests:
I rony. This could also be called, after Kenneth Burke, perspec-
tivism. In the absence of a cardinal principle or paradigm, we turn
to play, interplay, dialogue, polylogue, allegory, self-reflection--
in short, to irony. This irony assumes indeterminacy, multivalence;
it aspires to clarity, the clarity of demystification, the pure light of
absence. We meet variants of it in Bakhtin, Burke, de Man, Jacques
Derrida, and Hayden White. And in Alan Wilde we see an effort
to discriminate its modes: 'mediate irony,' 'disjunctive irony,' and
'postmodern' or 'suspensive irony' 'with its yet more racial vision
of multiplicity, randomness, contingency, and even absurdity.'
Irony, perspectivism, reflexiveness: these express the ineluctable
recreations of mind in search of a truth that continually eludes it,
leaving it with only an ironic access or excess of self-consciousness.
(506 )
172 LINDA HUTCHEON

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