In the last decades of the twentieth century, English Canadian and Québécois literature became increasingly defined by their relations to a world much larger than Britain, France, and the United States. How those other languages, races, and cultural traditions manifest themselves in Canada is commonly called “multiculturalism.” How English Canada and Quebec locate themselves in relation to other places and cultural traditions is called “globalization.” There is, however, another definition of “globalization,” equally common but with the opposite meaning, which refers to increasing cultural homogenization and subordination to the English language and international capital. Both definitions must be remembered for both express a truth.

Different kinds of difference

This chapter will discuss the authors from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean most responsible for making literature in Canada multicultural, but, in order to establish a context, we must first make some important distinctions. The presence of other languages and races in Canada is nothing new: Canada has always imported cheap labour to do the work English Canadians did not want to do, and immigration is central to the nation’s self-definition as a place that people choose to come to. English Canadian literature has long included writers from ethnic minorities, such as Mordecai Richler and Rudy Wiebe, but their presence did not make that canon multicultural in the way it has so resoundingly become. As long as decolonization and the forging of a national identity were the great projects of literature in both French and English, as they were until the 1970s, the experience of people who spoke other languages, looked different, or did not identify with the national history could be ignored.