Parallel Narratives: Teaching
|
||
Bruce DanielsCanada's nine English-speaking provinces look and sound remarkably like the northern regions of the United States. Other than the nuisance of a customs check, no exotic stimuli alert travelers from Minneapolis to Winnipeg that they have crossed an international boundary. Wars and diplomats, not geography, drew the line between the two countries; it is artificial and manifestly flies in the face of an economic reality that favors north-south communications over east-west ones. Political considerations created the Canadian-U.S. border, and political considerations, abetted by modern technology, are shredding it. In the years since World War II, Cold War politics, aggressive marketing, radio, television, computers, and the globalization of trade have dramatically reduced the barriers to the flow of goods, people, and ideas between the two countries. Canadians have always feared Americanization, but with the economic gates swung nearly open, fear may turn to fact. Canadian cultural distinctiveness lies in danger of being washed away by the relentless American tide surging north or dried up by the steady stream of Canadian talent draining south. Some Canadians perceive more danger than do others, but virtually all Canadians believe that there is something about Canada that is fundamentally different from the United States and that--whatever that something is--it is worth preserving. Thus, Canadians view the United States through many more filters than the United States uses to see Canada. Americans glance northward only occasionally and usually like what they see; Canada does not figure prominently in American intellectual life and is seldom mentioned in the media. Canadians, on the other hand, stare southward, are bombarded with American news, and are extraordinarily conflicted about what they see. Feelings of admiration and contempt, superiority and inferiority, gratitude and anger, swirl ambiguously through Canadian perceptions of Americans. The United States not only plays a major role in the Canadian economy, it plays an equally important role in the Canadian mind. Canadians cannot avoid thinking about the United States and cannot avoid having opinions on American power, government, foreign policy, race relations, cultural institutions, and social problems. Canadians contemplate the meaning of America because doing so is necessary for contemplating the meaning of their own country--Canada is the not-America. And because English Canada looks so much like the United States, the process of discovering what makes Canada the not-America is difficult and hidden beneath the surface of the visible similarities. History becomes one of the best places to look for the elusive, deeper meanings of the two nations. I began teaching American history at the University of Winnipeg in 1970 at the height of the student revolt in the United States and at the high tide of an invasion by American academics into Canadian universities. The department I joined was evenly divided--eight Canadians, eight Americans--not an unusual ratio for Canadian universities at the time although a decade earlier it would have been unthinkable. Anti-Americanism was rampant in the world, among Winnipeg students, and among many of the young American professors--including me. Ironically, students vented little of this hostility on the new American professors and tended to see them more as romantic expatriate radicals than as cultural imperialists. Also, ironically, classes in American history bulged with enrollments: students were fascinated by the threatening bully to the south who appeared to be coming apart at the seams. Aside from the need to be sensitive to Canadian nationalism, I did not realize at first that the teaching of American history to these students required a different set of reference points than I had used as an instructor at the University of Connecticut. Like many American travelers, I had been misled by the similarity of sight and sound into thinking I was in familiar cultural territory. Wrong. Professors on both sides of the border whine about student ignorance of history, but I soon realized that all ignorance is not the same nor is it only students who are ignorant. Some professors--me, for example--were in the dark. Through a process of osmosis, people who have never taken a history course in their lives nevertheless learn a version of history that arises from other educational processes and popular culture. Events and people in the American past often connoted things to Canadians that either had not occurred to me or which I had placed little emphasis on. Loyalists from the American Revolution were courageous nation builders who mutually pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to defend peace, order, and good government. The Canadian triumph in the War of 1812 handed the Americans their only defeat and preserved Canada from the fate suffered by Mexico thirty years later. A proud and respectable socialist tradition in Canada bespoke a tolerance that made McCarthyism seem all the more outrageous and xenophobic. And so it went--I became educated in Canadian history and on the effect that a different national identity had on Canadian perceptions of American history. Every topic I lectured on evoked comparisons that would not have occurred in an American classroom. It was thrilling. It also meant that a course in American history taught in Canada inevitably required a parallel narrative: what effect did the American Civil War have on the creation of an independent Canada? How did Canadian and American immigration differ? Is racism less or more virulent in Canada than in the United States? Undoubtedly, teaching American history as a foreign history anywhere in the world--or perhaps even in differing regions of the United States--also produces parallel narratives; but Canada's history seemed uniquely positioned to offer a reasonable alternative to the development of the United States. If America's history was Plan A then Canada's was Plan B: the evolutionary model instead of the Revolutionary one. Canadians are engaged in perpetual soul-searching for the state and fate of their national identity--a Sisyphean task that has informed every course I have taught in American history for thirty years. Not surprisingly, as the ongoing search looks in new places and under new circumstances, the parallel narratives get compared at new points. Pierre Trudeau's decision to enshrine a charter of rights in the Canadian constitution provoked discussions that contrasted the effects of judicial review on American history to the effects of Parliamentary supremacy on Canadian history. In the Reagan years, the relative strengths of the two nations' social safety nets were frequently compared as were the historical forces that allowed Canada to create a program of publicly funded medical insurance that became a national shibboleth, while the wealthier United States argued such a program would not work and was unaffordable. With the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, doomsayers among Canadian nationalists predicated that the two lines of historical development might not continue parallel but instead would meet and merge. As of yet, they have not, but the two lines do seem less far apart and, once again, this fuels historical discussions and comparisons. Does the narrowed space reflect a trend or a cycle? Under the freeflowing traffic of NAFTA and in the absence of American Cold War posturing, Canada seems less preoccupied with the harmful effects of American power on Canadian sovereignty. Certainly, overt anti-Americanism, which grew into nasty proportions in the late 1970s, has receded into small constituencies. This waning of anger can be interpreted in at least three plausible ways: (1) Canada has matured intellectually and culturally and is sufficiently confident in its destiny that it no longer needs to beat the drum of false assurance; (2) Canada has become so Americanized that it now reluctantly resigns itself to a fate as a politically independent but culturally and economically dependent region of the United States; (3) Canada is in the cool part of an historical cycle that will again heat up under new circumstances. I place no bets on which of these or other alternatives is correct, but I will bet that Canadian students will be discussing them in American history classes. Bruce Daniels teaches in the Department of History at the University of Winnipeg. |
||