1. Calypso's Cosmopolitan Strategy: Race, Nation, and Global Culture in Postwar Canada
- Author:
- Michael Eldridge
- Publication Date:
- 06-2010
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
- Abstract:
- What I mean to do in this essay, then, is trace calypso’s trajectory across the historically porous U.S-Canada border, in order to take fuller measure of its international ambitions in the mid- twentieth century. In the process, I hope to shine a light on West Indian influence over the layout of the Canadian mosaic and the logic of Canadian multiculturalism, well before that word became a catchphrase of government policy and part of the mythology of Canadian identity. But I also want to puzzle out what Canadians’ embrace of calypso during this same period signified. That, more than anything, will help us understand what sort of symbolic work calypso was doing in the True North. Canadians, of course, are famously, chronically anxious to distinguish themselves from Americans, and so I’ll concede from the start that calypso per se may have played a less direct role in calming nerves about race and national identity north of Niagara than it did in the U.S. I want to argue nevertheless that the full story of calypso in Canada still involves considerable tension over those fraught topics. And so the more significant distinction to draw, I think, is that the Canadian jitters sprang from a very different set of demographics, as well as from a rather different relationship to the history of British Empire and Commonwealth, than their American counterparts. Before we evaluate Caresser’s job performance as Canada’s hired projectionist, then, we would do well to review some of the salient facts.
- Topic:
- Nationalism, Race, Culture, and Multiculturalism
- Political Geography:
- Canada and North America