Migrants and Citizens: The Shifting Ground of Struggle in Canadian Literary Representation

While Canadian literary debates and the national-literary apparatus regularly address issues of citizenship and exclusion, the material structures of exclusion that are most urgent today cannot be represented. Because the production of literature is itself embedded in notions of the nation, Canadian literary theory and production embody this gap between literary and theoretical representation and contemporary legal citizenship regimes, a gap that makes it very difficult to fully represent the most glaring contemporary modes of structural exclusion in Canada: precarious legal citizenship status. Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces and Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For, as well as the wider range of Canadian literature dealing with migration, cultural contact, and citizenship, highlight the gap between the state and the ability of some of Canada’s best literature to represent its citizenship regimes. Such narrative limitations reveal the ways literary production and critique are bound up in national narratives, and direct attention to the need for accountable approaches to material change when it comes to Canada’s exclusionary citizenship policies