A search for a political economy analysis of Hispanic literary production in Canada can yield both expected and surprising results. The “expected” result is that there is very little to no literature on this cultural phenomenon from a strictly political economy perspective. What is surprising though, is the amount of literature on ethnic minority writing in Canada and diasporic cultural production throughout a number of disciplines, which in one way or another touch on both the political and economic aspects of this cultural and communication practice. Sources on this research topic range from postcolonial studies and theory, transnational communication studies, ethnic studies, multiculturalism and cultural policy research to book history and comparative literature. While many of the research questions and findings presented by writers within these disciplines tend to overlap, the nation (in both its modern and postmodern formulations) appears as a salient concept in the understanding of diasporic literary activity, as well as being central to the limits and possibilities available to diasporic writers and publishers in terms of the actual production of diasporic literature. Many profitable excursions into this field of inquiry have been made in these various disciplines, and this matrix of viewpoints can serve as a useful basis from which a political economy analysis of diasporic literary production can be made.
The usefulness of approaching Hispanic literature in Canada in terms of its very production, or the “nuts and bolts” of how certain Hispanic/minority writers and publishers produce and disseminate their texts in a foreign cultural context, is that it allows us to examine how the nation in both its discursive and administrative functions and roles can limit and/or facilitate the production and consumption of ethnic minority/allophone texts, as well as shape our ideas of literary value or cultural worth. This helps us—as readers, researchers and writers—in turn to better understand some of the socio-historical contingencies that inform both the production and the reception of these texts. Because the concept of the nation in terms of both its social and cultural life, as well as its administrative and actual borders, appears in a number of the academic discussions of “ethnic minority” cultures in Canada, problematizing the “nation” or “nation state” is not particular to the analysis of minority literary production per se. In fields such as book history, Canadian ethnic studies, and comparative literature, minority literary production and texts are often viewed in terms of their relationship to the dominant culture and literary values of the “host” nation. Much of this research tends to demonstrate how minority literatures—like Hispanic literature—are excluded from the literary canon and Canadian state and funding policies, which tend to focus on cultural activity as a means of fostering national unity and identity.
As one of the “high” arts in Canada, literature has traditionally been viewed as being central to identity formation in Canada, as well as a means of communicating what it means to be Canadian or a Canadian “essence” to readers/citizens. Thus, literature and publishing become associated with national identity and nation building. English-Canadian literary histories and criticism written in the middle of the twentieth century were based on a myth of unified cultural identity and, thus, equated national literature with national identity and values (DeCook, 2002, p. 74). This conflation of identity with literature had the effect of excluding authors who worked within a different cultural and linguistic habitus from those in the French- and Anglo-Canadian literary fields, meaning that ideals of literary value (and hence the canon) could not “adequately accommodate ethnic texts” (Loriggio in DeCook, 2002, p. 74). The cultural capital of a Canadian author and the symbolic value of her work depended, then, in large part on her value as a national writer and these values were (and are) reflected in the stated mandates of the majority of Canadian legislation on culture, as well as the mandates and foci of Canada’s national funding bodies. For example, national funding programs for minority /allophone publishers do not currently exist, and the few that existed in the past, such as the Foreign-Language Publisher grants were relatively small and are no longer in operation. In the current policy/funding framework for receiving translation grants from the Canada Arts Council only those publishers that meet the criteria for Emerging Publisher and Block publishing programs will be considered for translation grants. This implicitly excludes ethnic minority publishers who do not work in one of Canada’s official languages. Such exclusions have the effect of creating and perpetuating notions of literary value that are largely based on the project of creating and fostering an essentializing or homogeneous national identity, rather than being based on “inherent” literary value.
The issue of national identity and belonging is further complicated by minorities’ relationship to a “home” nation. Since ethnic minority literature and literary production do not naturally reside in a minority’s country of origin or in his/her adopted county, discourses of national literature and national publishing systems implicitly exclude minority production because it cannot fit into any homogeneous national category anywhere. For postcolonial theorists of “minority” experience and consciousness, the liminal position of the migrant figure is viewed as being potentially emancipatory since postcolonial theorists tend to view the discursive otherness of minority subjects as implicitly subverting/resisting dominant discourses of homogeneous identity—national or otherwise. This viewpoint tends to privilege the exile or migrant subjectivity as that most closely linked and, thus representative of, the postcolonial, postmodern era. How then can the researcher studying a subject like minority cultural production reconcile the views of those who see the minority writers’/publishers’ position as one of structural marginalization versus those who see this same position as being emancipatory and discursively resisting homogenizing and static concepts of national identity? I would like to suggest that one way out of this conundrum is by examining the actual practices of minority subjects such as writers and publishers in order to gain empirical information on the actual creation and dissemination of discursive “products” (such as literature) in the host nation. To this end, I have examined the production practices of Ediciones Cordillera, a Spanish-language publisher that was active in Canada from 1978-1997. The time period of Cordillera’s operations roughly coincides with that of Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile and also signals the introduction of a large number of Chilean nationals into Canada for the first time in Canadian history.
Although there is currently a dearth of academic studies on the cultural production practices of minority ethnic groups in Canada, the analysis of minority cultural production has been undertaken in the United States and elsewhere. One of the most influential researchers in this field is Hamid Naficy, an Iranian exile scholar who has done extensive research on the cinematic production practices of the Iranian exile community living in Los Angeles, California. In particular, Naficy’s articulation of the interstitial mode of cultural production is a framework from which researchers can begin to bridge the binary of structural exclusion/marginalization and discursive resistance.
According to Naficy, to be interstitial is to think (and exist) “beyond singular categories and dominant designations and to focus instead on the ‘moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of ‘differences’’(Naficy, 1999, p. 134; Bhabha, 1994, p. 269 quoted in Naficy, 1999, p. 134). Thus, the mode of interstitial production can be described as alternative practice to the dominant mode of cultural production. For Naficy, the mode of production employed by the Iranian exile community in Los Angeles can be understood as being “derived fundamentally from its interstitiality within social and economic formations and its marginality within the dominant film and media industries” (Naficy 1999, p. 129) providing exiled filmmakers with relative autonomy from the economic demands of mainstream filmmaking. He outlines six characteristics of this mode of production: low budgets and varied or multiple forms of financing (1999, p. 134); the multiplication of labour (p. 136); multilingualism (p. 138); complexity of political and temporal constraints (p. 139); extended lengths of time in the production and dissemination of films (p. 140); and the limited output of exilic cultural products (p. 141).
Naficy’s framework for understanding the interstitial mode of production is particularly useful to the study of diasporic literary production in Canada, inasmuch as it may share many of the characteristics of exilic cinematic production in the United States, such as self-publication and the creation and maintenance of cultural activities and networks within diasporic communities. The characteristics of the interstitial mode of production can be fleshed out briefly with examples from Ediciones Cordillera, the previously mentioned Hispano-Canadian publisher. The first characteristic, low budgets and varied or multiple forms of financing, is particularly telling of the limitations and opportunities experienced by minority of allophone writers who, either voluntarily or against their wishes, write and publish on the margins of government support as well as dominant social and market values. Ediciones Cordillera displayed this characteristic inasmuch as its major forms of financing were small and highly diverse. Their works were variously financed through the Chilean Association of Ottawa, private donations, Wintario-Latin American Children’s Fund, the Department of Multiculturalism and later, Canadian Heritage. Community funding is an important and interesting aspect of the interstitial mode of production, as it points to a way in which the line between producers and consumers are blurred. Cordillera was actively supported by the Chilean community and was able to publish its earliest books by Chilean and Spanish-language writers living in Canada and Latin America through the funding and volunteer work provided by the Chilean Association of Ottawa. The majority of Cordillera’s publications were self-financed—twelve of the nineteen texts the press produced were published through community proceeds or private “donations.” Today, many of these multiple forms of financing—self- or “vanity”-publications— and low budgets (i.e. not-for-profit publications) are not funding methods that the Canada Council would approve of under its current mandate for publishing assistance programs.
The multiplication of labour, which is the second characteristic of the interstitial mode of production identified by Naficy, can also be seen in the work of Ediciones Cordillera. The core members of the editorial committee not only supervised the publication of texts they selected for publication, but were often the authors of those texts. Many of the writers who published with Cordillera also edited, translated their works and the works of other writers, in addition to providing literary criticism for these works (and those published by other Spanish-language presses) before the academic and literary audience had grown enough to include outside critics, translators, and editors. Multilingualism, the third characteristic of the interstitial mode of production, emerged most clearly with the publication of bilingual texts, and was a vital part of Cordillera’s mode of production. The appearance of bilingual English and Spanish texts began in the early 1980s and helped to widen the collective’s audience, marking a significant change in Chilean literary production in Canada. Six of the 19 publications produced by Cordillera were bilingual and were translated on a voluntary (unpaid) basis rather than through paid professional services. None of the editorial members interviewed for this study could recall having received grants specifically in support of the translation of their publications into one of Canada’s official languages (J. Etcheverry, electronic interview, December 29, 2004; J. L. Urbina, personal interview, March 1, 2005).
The fourth characteristic that Naficy identifies is the complexity of political and temporal constraints experienced by exilic producers. In the case of Ediciones Cordillera, this characteristic has been more difficult to document than the other characteristics even though it is closely linked to the minority’s liminal position vis à vis the home and host nations and the language of publication. In this case, the fourth characteristic is manifested in terms of audience creation and is closely linked to the preceding multilingualism characteristic. The need to establish both Spanish language and English language audiences in Canada, Chile and elsewhere meant that Ediciones Cordillera had the additional work of translation and trying to distribute their texts in both Canada and Chile, as well as other parts of the Spanish-speaking world. The latter was often accomplished by organizing co-publications with Chilean presses, such as Documentas, who co-published 6 texts with Cordillera.
The slow production and distribution of cultural products and their limited output are the last two characteristics described by Naficy. It should be noted that it is difficult to make comparisons between cinema and literature based on these final aspects of the interstitial mode of production. The complex processes of cinematic production are generally much more specialized and technical than literary production, and generally require more time and money. Thus, for a small, non-profit publisher, Cordillera produced a considerable amount of publications during its lifespan. On average, Cordillera published one book per year, for a total of approximately nineteen books between 1978 and 1997. Although the exact number is unknown, each edition usually ranged from five hundred to one thousand copies (J. Etcheverry, electronic interview, December 29, 2004). Copies of Cordillera’s earliest publications are now almost exhausted and many of these have been diffused in academic contexts as material for use in courses on comparative literature and diasporas (J. Etcheverry, electronic interview, December 29, 2004). Despite geographic, economic, and linguistic constraints, Cordillera – a small, non-profit, literary press – managed to produce a significant number of publications.
Contextualizing exilic/minority subjectivities within a particular set of social, cultural and economic conditions helps us to escape the binary of victimized minority vs. the subversive Other (or the structural vs. the discursive). Thus, “[b]y means of the alternative mode of production, [minority cultural producers] can move out of their disempowered minority status, conferred upon them by the majority, into becoming minor, a self-designated, self-actualizing category of empowerment” (Naficy, 1999, p. 133)—recognizing the real, material aspects of structural marginalization while demonstrating how such exclusions can be side-stepped or negotiated through alternative production practices, as well as alternative discourses.
WORKS CITED
DeCook, Travis. (2002). The History of the Book, Literary History, and Identity Politics in Canada. Studies in Canadian Literature, 27 (2), 71–87.
Machalski, Andrew. (1988). Hispanic Writing in Canada. Multiculturalism Department, Government of Canada.
Naficy, Hamid. (1999). Between Rocks and Hard Places: The Interstitial Mode of Production in Exilic Cinema. In H. Naficy (Ed.), Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place (pp. 125–47). New York: Routledge.
