Jennifer Henderson

Colonial Reckoning, National Reconciliation?: Aboriginal Peoples and the Culture of Redress in Canada

Colonial Reckoning, National Reconciliation?: Aboriginal Peoples and the Culture of Redress in Canada

Of Bombs, Baking, and Blahniks

C     ,  reading of our moment in history. A finger to the cultural and political winds would seem to indicate strong backward gusts, in the direction of spacetimes previously passed through. We’re thinking of paranoid security regimes, military occupations, bombed and bulldozed civilians, and nuclear “deterrence” strategies. e escalation of anti-immigration and -asylum arguments and the stoking of fears about internal enemies. We read that the .. Department of Health is trying to block the World Health Organization from including abortion pills on its list of basic, essential drugs. Meanwhile, our women’s bookstores have closed, the cinema is all lacquered hair, pointy bras, and pearls, and Nigella Lawson sells us a vision of the apron-clad, floury-fingered “domestic goddess” on . As numerous cultural critics have observed, the effects of the global restructuring of capitalism have been managed in the West in the past few decades through the collapse of ideological debate into a discourse that recognizes only economic pragmatism and moral differentiations between levels of commitment to putatively shared community values. At times it seems that “the whole world” (in other words, educated middleclass Anglo-America) has traded in ideology for affect—has taken to

Joy Kogawa, Obasan (1981)

The publication of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan in 1981. And not just because passages from the novel would be read in Parliament on the day of the signing of the Japanese-Canadian Redress Agreement seven years later, or because the novel helped to galvanize a public around collective historical injustice. It was the novel’s particular figuration of historical injury that would reverberate for decades. Obasan’s appearance was itself a ripple effect of the second-wave feminist thematization of child abuse, the early circulation of trauma theory, and the rise of the child as the emblem of a cosmopolitan humanitarian imaginary. The novel’s condensation of these elements into a narrative of the intimate impact of statedirected violence laid the conventions of a whole discursive field stretching from English departments to state apologies. It may be that neuroscientific positivism now reigns supreme, but politicians (at certain moments) and literary theorists still speak of unconscious memory.