Demonizing Another Other.

• In Event: Crossing the Great Divide. Looking at the US from the North of the Border

Abstract

The idea of the Canadian mosaic is that unlike the neighbor to the south Canada has never demanded assimilation into a so-called melting pot. The ideal of a harmonious Canadian mosaic hinges on the manageability of the national/linguistic divide between French Canada and the Anglophone majority in the rest of the country. But a public culture built upon a single great divide which is presumed to be bridgeable by “men of goodwill,” masks other divides and overlooks the fact that true cultural diversity is no more a feature of Canadian than it is of American society. In 1967, cultural diversity was not a mantra of Canadian public culture. The ideal of bilingualism and biculturalism was. In order to foster both, the Canadian government set up a travel program that sent groups of high school students to other regions to be hosted by local students, and the travelers themselves then did the same for a completely different group from another part of the country.

Library and Archives Canada has a collection of press clippings about the Youth Travel Program and they all conclude with a positive assessment and hope that the program will continue. I myself went on one. The most memorable part of the trip was witnessing a performance of a play written and produced for the Centennial by students from a group of towns in rural southern Manitoba. Why memorable? It was a terrible play, but in re-enacting the history of the French exploration of the New World, a Shylockean character is introduced to thwart the daring plans of the would-be explorers. However, in exploring the wilderness (the wild, the pure and the bountiful) what more appropriate impediment could there be than this quintessential urban, (the impure and sadistic/withholding) Jewish moneylender who in a Levi-Straussian sense mediates culture and nature, the familiar and the unknown?

Author

• Jack Kugelmass, University of Florida