| In recent years, critical discussions of citizenship have taken place with increasing frequency in a number of fields of study. As a theoretical concept, citizenship is expansive, connoting everything from rights to participation to a sense of patriotism. The issue taken up in this dissertation is the notion of citizenship identity. Whereas national identity has historically been influenced by everything from civic memory to geography, citizenship identity, born out of an awareness of specific rights and societal obligations, is more specific. Contemporary debates tend to frame citizenship identity in terms of emerging transnational and global subjectivities. Such work, while important, is premature, particularly in the case of Canada, where we do not have a clear idea of what domestic citizenship identity has meant since the passage of Canada's first citizenship act in 1947. Using literary texts in tandem with historical, sociological, and political science works, I explore representations of "the Canadian citizen" from 1947 to 1967 in order to examine what citizenship identity, in its nascent state, meant to Canadians in English-speaking Canada in the immediate post-World War II period. I look at the experiences of displaced Japanese Canadians in Joy Kogawa's Obasan, anti-confederates in Wayne Johnston's Baltimore's Mansion and David Macfarlane's The Danger Tree, and West Indian domestics in Austin Clarke's Toronto Trilogy. I discover that British imperialism influenced many individuals' understanding of their Canadian citizenship in the 1950s. As well, race and ethnicity often mitigated access to full citizenship rights, while class could be a motivating factor in the decision to apply for Canadian citizenship. Most importantly, alterity seems to have been a constitutive feature of the earliest statutory definition of Canadian citizenship; as a result, gradations of citizenship exist in Canada that destabilize the citizen/non-citizen binary and shed new light on contemporary discussions of statelessness. I conclude that citizenship as a form of identity for Canadians was neither well understood nor easily articulated in the two decades after the passage of the country's first citizenship act, a reality that has implications for any attempts, past or present, to foster citizenship as a form of belonging.;Keywords: citizenship, identity, Canada, postwar, Canadian literature, Japanese Canadians, Newfoundland, West Indian domestic workers, 1947-1967, Joy Kogawa, Austin Clarke, Wayne Johnston, David Macfarlane... |
