Spectres of Canada: Image, Text, Aura, Nation

Catharine Parr Traill called her new home in Upper Canada 'a matter-of-fact- country' where no ghosts, spirits, fairies, naiads, or Druids haunted the forests and streams she now loved so much. History of the Book in Canada I, 341 Spectrality, which is the mutual haunting or constitutive interpenetration of nation and state ... is also the irreducible possibility of the becoming-ideological of nationalism, where the nation becomes a mystification the state deploys in the service of global capital. Cheah, Spectral Nationality, 346 My title pays tribute to one of Jacques Derrida's most important and apposite works, and is one of many ways in which scholars across the world will mark his passing and insist on the importance and vitality of his legacy. My title also gestures towards the strategic spectrality of Marx to which Derrida responded in one of his most dazzling textual unteasings, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (1994). And my title, like my second epigraph, begins to tie the political radicalism of Marxian tradition and the frequently derided textual radicalism of deconstruction to the multi-mediated, cultural and linguistic nation that was and is Canada. The first two sections of this essay engage with possibilities of nationhood in pre-Confederation Canada in order to suggest how populous and durable are the spectres haunting that archive, and how those spectres can be used to complicate and challenge how 'canonical Canadians' (Day, 166) understand, produce, consume, or are consumed by national culture today. The final two sections of the essay connect aesthetics and politics at the levels of high-theory-as-haunting exemplified by the Benjaminian aura and the 'spectral nationality' which Pheng Cheah has developed from Derrida's Specters and Benedict Ander- son's work on 'imagined' entities like community and nation.