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Imagining ourselves then and now: nostalgia and Canadian multiculturalism

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Abstract

International relations has begun to take seriously the study of emotions, just as it has long acknowledged the role of collective memory in shaping politics. But the role of nostalgia as a potential driver of progressive political change has been little considered. This article engages the possibility of an ironic nostalgia for shoring up the multicultural project. Through examining the ironic potential in two contemporary popular Canadian cultural artefacts — Molson Canadian's ‘I am Canadian’ commercial and Douglas Coupland's Souvenir of Canada — the article suggests that assimilationist and separationist impulses may actually bolster the integrationist goals of multiculturalism. Contra nostalgia's critics, the article suggests that dominant groups in society may need emotional space to mourn a cognitively simpler past in order to embrace a more complex present.

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Notes

  1. Whereas 55 per cent of Canadians polled in September 2010 disagreed with the statement that ‘Muslims share our values’, asking that very question suggests to Canadians that Muslim citizens are less Canadian than the rest (National Post 2010). Lipari (2000) suggests that polling discourse can elicit certain societal attitudes, and Lewis (1999) shows how media representations of polling data belie a more open cultural text.

  2. Writing in the 1970s, Lasch (1979 [1991]: 5) was keenly aware of what he dubbed a ‘culture of narcissism’. But decades later, perhaps that form of individual narcissism has given way to a collective concern with the boundaries of who is in and who is out.

  3. Ari Folman's Israeli quasi-documentary feature ‘Waltz with Bashir’ (2008) plays with this dynamic: the once-soldier is struggling to piece together a traumatic war experience that he has apparently forgotten.

  4. Elizabeth Nathanson (2009) is more sanguine about pairing post-feminism with a nostalgia for the fantasy of the endless time women had for domestic pursuits, and Sinead McDermott (2004) suggests that through mourning what might have been, nostalgia may in fact help bring about political change.

  5. See Hockey Night in Canada's Punjabi broadcast; info at http://www.punjabihockey.com, accessed 15 August, 2012.

  6. Pagination from Scholar's Portal.

  7. CBC radio interview, October 2009.

  8. Avishai Margalit discussed in Duncan Bell (2009: 350).

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Acknowledgements

For helpful comments and conversations on this and earlier drafts, I am grateful to Melody Herr, Peter Hodgins, Raffaele Iacovino, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Amir Lupovici, Jonathan Malloy, Iver Neumann, Richard Nimijean, Andrew Ross, Brent Sasley, Ira Wagman, and three anonymous JIRD reviewers.

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  1. Department of Political Science, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, K1S 5B6, ON, Canada

    Mira Sucharov

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Sucharov, M. Imagining ourselves then and now: nostalgia and Canadian multiculturalism. J Int Relat Dev 16, 539–565 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2012.23

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