The Newfoundland Diaspora: Mapping the Literature of Out-Migration
220The Newfoundland Diaspora: Mapping the Literature of Out-Migration
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Overview
Many writers and scholars have referred to Newfoundland out-migration as a diaspora, but few have examined the theoretical implications of applying this contested term to a predominantly inter-provincial movement of mainly white, economically motivated migrants. The Newfoundland Diaspora argues that “diaspora” helpfully references the painful displacement of a group whose members continue to identify with each other and with the “homeland.” It examines important literary works of the Newfoundland diaspora, including the poetry of E.J. Pratt, the drama of David French, the fiction of Donna Morrissey and Wayne Johnston, and the memoirs of David Macfarlane. These works are the sites of a broad inquiry into the theoretical flashpoints of affect, diasporic authenticity, nationalism, race, and ethnicity.
The literature of the Newfoundland diaspora both contributes to and responds to critical movements in Canadian literature and culture, querying the place of regional, national, and ethnic affiliations in a literature drawn along the borders of the nation-state. This diaspora plays a part in defining Canada even as it looks beyond the borders of Canada as a literary community.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781554588947 |
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Publisher: | Wilfrid Laurier University Press |
Publication date: | 03/01/2013 |
Pages: | 220 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Excerpt from the Introduction of The Newfoundland Diaspora: Mapping the Literature of Out-Migration by Jennifer Delisle
While many Canadian provinces, particularly other Atlantic provinces, have experienced out-migration for similar reasons, 1 Newfoundland's population loss stands out for its sheer numbers, at times reaching a net rate of more than 6 percent of Newfoundlanders aged five and older (Statistics Canada). Moreover, this statistic does not include the significant amount of seasonal migration that brings Newfoundland labourers back and forth several times a year. As of 2003, Newfoundland's expatriate community was estimated at a total of 220, 000 (Royal Commission i)—a staggering number considering that the province's population in that year was just 512, 500. This long period of population loss may finally be slowing; in 2008 and 2009 the province experienced a brief population increase for the first time in fifteen years (Statistics Canada). Yet census data since then again show an annual population loss to out-migration. The province's unemployment rate remains the highest in the country, at 13 percent as of June 2012 (Statistics Canada).
Out-migration has not been limited to former fishers or young blue-collar labourers. Professionals and artists have also left. Others have left in search of better education. Aging parents have followed their children to their new hometowns in Toronto or Fort McMurray in a “second wave” of out-migration (Royal Commission 39). While not every Newfoundlander's reasons for leaving are the same, together they have formed a culture of out-migration, in which leaving is often expected or considered inevitable, and in which returning is a powerful but often unfulfilled dream. Together, these migrants constitute a Newfoundland diaspora.
This book examines how this diaspora has impacted Newfoundland literature, both as the subject of much of the work and as a condition from which many writers write. In Newfoundland, critics have explicitly connected the development of a distinct literature to the massive change resulting from Confederation, the government resettlement program of the 1940s and '50s, and the collapse of the fishery (Gwyn; Rompkey,”Colonial”). This book argues that much of Newfoundland's current literary production is also a result of, or a response to, diaspora. The idea of a “Newfoundland diaspora” does not just refer to the post-cod-moratorium outflux, then, but to a larger social phenomenon that has shaped Newfoundland literature and culture. Malcolm Macleod's review of Helen M. Buss / Margaret Clarke's Memoirs from Away suggests the way in which the Newfoundland diaspora can be considered in terms of a broad literary history: “‘Memoirs from away' is the title of this one book, but it is a fitting label for a whole category of writing about Newfoundland. While Newfoundlanders have been massively re-locating themselves in North America for 120 years, literary elements in the diaspora have often penned accounts of displacement, adjustment and nostalgia for a distant, past homeland” (98). This migrant literary tradition can be traced back to the early twentieth century and the poetry of E. J. Pratt and the stories and essays of the Montreal-based magazine The Atlantic Guardian. Contemporary narratives of out-migration also frequently locate themselves within a long historical diasporic trajectory, so that Wayne Johnston's memoir of family and displacement, Baltimore's Mansion, for example, looks back at the retreat of one of the colony's first settlers, Lord Baltimore, as the beginning of a social pattern. In this book, then, rather than moving chronologically through the texts, I take a comparative approach, examining how diaspora influences writers of diverse eras and genres, and how diasporic subjectivity intersects with the theoretical flashpoints of affect, authenticity, nationalism, and ethnicity.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Mapping the Literature of Out-Migration 1
Part 1 Defining the Newfoundland Diaspora
1 Newfoundland and the Concept of Diaspora 9
Part 2 Affective Responses
2 Donna Morrissey and the Search for Prairie Gold 31
3 "The 'Going Home Again' Complaint": Carl Leggo and Nostalgia for Newfoundland 49
Part 3 Is the Newfoundlander "Authentic" in the Diaspora?
4 E.J. Pratt and the Gateway to Canada 65
5 "A Papier Mâché Rock": Wayne Johnston and Rejecting Regionalism 85
Part 4 Imagining the Newfoundland Nation
6 "This Is Their Country Now": David French, Confederation, and the Imagined Community 101
7 Writing the "Old Lost Land": Johnston Part Two 115
Part 5 Postmodern Ethnicity and Memoirs from Away
8 Helen Buss/Margaret Clarke and the Negotiation of Identity 145
9 The "Holdin' Ground": David Macfarlane and the Second Generation 167
Conclusion: Writing in Diaspora Space 181
Notes 189
Works Cited 195
Index 207