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Articles

Volume 34, Number 1 (2013)

From Seaton Village to Global Village: Metonymies of Exile and Globalization in Judith Thompson's Sled

Submitted
December 5, 2013
Published
2013-01-01

Abstract

As in other settler/invader colonies that artificially invented and inserted themselves as nation-states in regions where they did not naturally belong, the collective feelings of estrangement and the reassessment of Canada’s history and national identity have been ongoing. Inspired by recent theories of globalization, this study proposes the understanding of Canadian colonialism as a form of macro-globalization, taking place during the second stage of historical globalization, and of official multiculturalism as a type of micro-globalization, which foreshadows the third and more intense wave of globalization that started in the second half of the twentieth century. This perspective dismantles the myth that Canada’s multi-national nature is determined by its so-called “exceptionalism,” which Irene Bloemraad explains as the result of the economic selection of immigrants, geographical location, and most of all the worldpraised tendency to welcome ethnically diverse immigrants because of its “immigration-as-nation-building paradigm” state policy (7). Using this theoretical frame, this essay argues that the metonymic depiction of 1990s Canada in Judith Thompson’s Sled asserts exile as a shared identity marker determined by globalization. The first part of this study analyzes how the combined legacies of colonialism and Pierre Trudeau’s multicultural policy generate the characters’ collective exile. The second part investigates some of Sled’s characters as metonymic representations of Canadians’ ethnic diversity and examples of exile determined by globalization on an individual level.