Locality and Universalization: Where is Canadian Studies?

Abstract

This meditation on locality distinguishes three stages through which writing would pass in order to argue that a genuinely post-colonial English Canadian philosophy would utilize categories taken from here to clarify the universality of the human condition as such. English Canadian thought, as exemplified by Harold Innis and George Grant, contains a contradiction insofar as its principled and universal defence of locality was hinged exclusively to a politics oriented to the nation-state. The term "place" as defended in this tradition of thought, which can also be seen emerging within new social movements, has some limitations that can be clarified by distinguishing the term "place" from "locality." Locative thinking is a thinking that does not simply occur somewhere, but whose location is integral to the meaning of what is thought.