Gaile McGregor - A Case Study in the Construction of Place: Boundary Management as Theme and Strategy in Canadian Art and Life

The search for a theoretical peg on which to hang this paper led me, inevitably, to Homi Bhabha. Yet when I pulled out Nation and Narration in quest of an apt quote to use as an epigraph, the best I could come up with was actually a passage from Benedict Anderson, whom Bhabha himself quotes in his introduction. Anderson, through Bhabha, states: “What I am proposing is that Nationalism has to be understood, by aligning it not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which – as well as against which – it came into being.” 1 Bhabha jumps from this quotation directly, and without explanation, to writing. I was surprised. I didn’t recall this book as being so narrowly focused. True, it’s supposed to be about narration. But surely the conflation of “cultural representation” (as he calls it on the next page) into one particular mode of representation requires some explanation. Especially if one is purporting to talk about a phenomenon that “precedes” self-consciously held ideas. Why not painting? Why not – if we are going to focus on ideology – television? For that matter, why not everyday life in all its abundance and variety? If there really is a “large cultural system” that underlies, and expresses, and perhaps even creates Nation, then surely its key characteristic has to be its pervasiveness. There’s no sense of this in Nation and Narration. Though the book includes a token piece on “the Englishness of English art,” and though Bhabha himself, in his conclusion, diverges briefly into consideration of a film, the collection as a whole suggests, albeit silently, that literature can somehow be taken to “stand for” culture at large.