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Academic Free Trade? One Canadian's View of the MLA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Linda Hutcheon
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Extract

In 1988, in the midst of the often acrimonious debates about the North American Free Trade Agreement, a button began to appear on Canadian lapels. It featured a section of the Stars and Stripes with a red maple leaf in the place of one star, and a caption read, “No, eh.” Through this image, the anti-free-trade side offered parodic resistance to what it saw as the assimilation—not to say wholesale economic engulfing—of Canada by the United States. Typically self-deprecatory, Canadian humor demanded that the rejection be couched in a gentle mocking of the national verbal tic: eh? is the terser but less elegant Canadian version of the French n'est-ce pas? and the German nicht wahr? In some ways the intellectual equivalent of NAFTA, the MLA is much older than the economic institution and somewhat less controversial. Nevertheless, it too is not unproblematic for Canadians, and to see why and how, one needs to understand something of the political and cultural relations between a very small and a very large nation when they adjoin.

Type
Guest Column
Information
PMLA , Volume 114 , Issue 3: Material Evidence , May 1999 , pp. 311 - 317
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1999

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References

Notes

I would like to express my thanks to those experts on elephant-mouse relations who commented critically and helpfully on these remarks: Suzanne Akbari, Alan Bewell, Brian Corman, Roberta Frank, Sander Gilman, Michael Hutcheon, and Herbert Lindenberger.

1 A sample constitutional mandate of a local—that is, national—organization is that of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English: “To promote the interests of those teaching and studying English languages and literatures in Canadian colleges and universities by facilitating the dissemination and exchange of research and the exploration of professional issues, by organizing scholarly and professional meetings, by seeking to improve working conditions, by representing the interests of members before provincial and federal decision-making and funding bodies, and by supporting the interests and aspirations of members entering the profession.”