Colonialism and Post-Colonialism as Contemporary Mythologies
Stephanie MacKenzie

I would like to look at colonialism and post-colonialism in an untraditional manner and suggest that these phenomena are actually contemporary mythologies. Without denying the damage which colonialism has done, I would like to suggest that both colonialism and post-colonialism are more mythological stages than they are pragmatic or useful ideologies for interrogating the network of sophisticated negotiations which has grown out of the construction of empires. In other words, “discovery,” “conquest,” and “settlement” are really tropes in national mythologies. They descend from very real moments of colonization, but they are not so much real, identifiable events as they are symbols for the collective sensibilities of different nations. Post-colonial tropes are more difficult to identify since they are newer and since they are being formed at the present time. However, I would like to suggest that post-colonialism is an adaptive stage in mythological ideation and that this stage is really a mythological moment where colonialism is recognized as mythology and where its defining characteristics are recognized as archetypes or tropes.

In order to illustrate what I mean, I would like to examine post-centenary Canadian mythology as a response to the Contemporary Native Literary Renaissance and the Native Cultural Renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s. I would like to suggest that this pan-Indian social revolution in Canada heightened this nation’s awareness of the “myth of the empty land” – a colonial trope – and that it encouraged writers and thinkers to recognize this myth as myth. Next, I would like to suggest that a post-colonial attempt to break with the colonial traditions of the past is yet another stage in this nation’s mythological ideation. By embracing a post-colonial sensibility, Canadian writers of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s identified and attempted to re-write the myths of the past and to deconstruct the patterns of colonization. But when they attempted to engage with and re-write the past in new mythological works, colonial patterns could not be broken. In conclusion, I argue that the mythologies which grew out of these post-colonial responses indicate that while post-colonialism is a powerful new moment in mythological maturation it is a moment when people are forced to relive national traumas. Thus, post-colonialism falters, stalls and pauses at the recognition of the archetypes of colonialism, but it can do little else. And that is why, perhaps, post-colonial discourse can not seem to surpass such categories as “us and them’ and the many other superlatives and divisions which seem to share such an affinity with colonialism.