Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #892618 in Books
• Published on: 1994-01-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .0 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 120 pages

Books in Canada
In his analysis of the impact of European colonialism on African racial identity, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), the Algerian psychologist Frantz Fanon formulated a precept that applies to all centre-margin relations:"Every colonized people – in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality –finds itself face to face with the language of the civilising nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. "
As with Africans, so too with South Asian and Caribbean nationals and their Canadian "hyphens." Indeed, a recent collections of post-colonialist prose features the struggle of two Indo-Canadian writers and thinkers to resist Canadian eurocentricity and to preserve their "cultural originality," that is, this shadowy Canada that metonymizes the phantasmal remains of the British Empire. In Closed Entrances: Canadian Culture and Imperialism, Arnold Harrichand Itwaru, a Toronto writer and cultural theorist, and Natasha Ksonzek, a writer and artist, mount a polemical assault on white media reviews and museum exhibitions.
In his book, Itwaru condemns the caricatures to which he is affixed by "the Empire Dream":"I am Caliban, an inferior sordid enslaved savage evil thing.... I am Friday, Crusoe's subordinate, I am Gunga-subaltern-din for the British Raj's Jewel and Crown, I am a coolie, an embarrassing primitivity who should be only too ready to serve the Light Bearers of Europe and Britain and America and Canada, their panoply of saints and sages whose domination of me is necessary so that my Heart of Darkness can be illuminated to better aid my exploitation. "
Wielding satire and sarcasm, Itwaru attacks several Fanonian "sins": "the colonization of consciousness," "Sadistic empire ecstasy," and "Harmonious infantilism," ideas that would seduce colonials into glorying in their own oppression. Examining Canada, Itwaru finds a nation that practises racism, accepts a foreign monarch as its ruler, and has as its closest friend and ally that Empire State which has named itself America, whose Emperor-King-President is the Commander-in-Chief of the largest and most terrifying armed imperialist military force in the world. Itwaru reads, at times, like George Grant on steroids.
Both Itwaru and Ksonzek (in an unremarkable contribution) impugn the Royal Ontario Museum as well as its controversial 1991 exhibit Into the Heart of Africa, but neither essay displaces the far more cogent critiques deployed by M. Nourbese Philip in Looking.for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (1991) and Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture (1992). Moreover, Itwaru's "Shakespeare, wallah," which excoriates the Bard's elitism and racism, is unconvincing. For instance, Itwaru suggests that Ophelia's ascription of majestic qualities to Hamlet, in III.i, represents pro-imperium "delusional thinking." Maybe. But don't lovers often assign nobleness to each other'? And is it news that "Shaky" abhors "mobocracy"? Nor do Itwaru and Ksonzek recognize the delights of contradiction. Yes, the Empire sought to educate its colonial middle classes into submission, but its teachings fostered the independantistes who wrought its dissolution ....
Closed Entrances is a partisan j'accuse. It quickens thought, but its hypertensive style and one-fell-swoop denunciations detract from its gravitas.
George Clarke (Books in Canada)

About the Author
Natasha Ksonzek is artist, writer, and book cover illustrator.

Arnold Itwaru is a writer of fiction and poetry, and is also a social and cultural theorist.