Just got this back: Review of McKay's Quest of the Folk

My field supervisor liked it! Even the clam chowder metaphor :)

Review: McKay, Ian. The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2009.

In The Quest of the Folk, Ian McKay offers a neo-Gramscian contribution to the history of Nova Scotia, challenging hegemonic aspects of Nova-Scotian society as the result of a carefully produced and commodified “Folk” culture. Loosely situating his text within subaltern studies, McKay ultimately presents a critique of authenticity and postmodernity, with significant commentary on essentialism, commercialism, and identity.

In his introductory chapter, McKay repositions the Folk as an idea, rather than an inherent people of Nova Scotia, and establishing renowned folklorist Helen Creighton as largely responsible for furthering this idea. The Folk, according to McKay, emerged following a wider movement to counter the Enlightenment’s class divisions, secularism, and science. This emergence paralleled similar trends in the United States and Britain. The creation of the Folk was not power-neutral, but an “aesthetic colonization” (9) on the part of cultural producers. In this chapter McKay also defines Innocence as a “local variant of antimodernism” and as a mythomoteur, “a set of fused and elaborated myths,” that served as a framework of meaning (30). This motif, McKay shows, emerged largely in the mid twentieth century. The controversies surrounding this text, to which McKay responds to in the foreword to this edition, show the salience of the Folk in the early twenty-first century. This essentialist motif ties together the monograph as a study of antimodernism.

McKay’s second and longest chapter is a largely biographical consideration of Helen Creighton, outlining her intellectual influences and career collecting folksongs. McKay reveals her to be a problematic figure, rather than a hero of the Folk. He pays particular attention to Creighton’s social location, as an upper middle-class gentlewoman, and the impact of this identity and circumstances on Creighton’s work. Her research fit comfortably within the acceptable pursuits of a “gentlewoman,” and while Creighton was caught between models of nineteenth- and twentieth-century womanhood, McKay illustrates that she was unquestioning of her own class position and its implications for her research on folk songs, and used her paternalist outlook to shape an essentialist image of the Folk. McKay concludes this chapter by noting that Creighton’s research is inconsistent with that of more recent folklorists; for example, more recent scholars have shown that Creighton over-emphasized the significance on Nova Scotian folklore tradition of an English cannon known as Child Ballads. I would contend, however, that this is an unfair comparison on McKay’s part, seeing as Creighton’s research was a product of her particular circumstances and lacked the hindsight of contemporary scholars.

Following his analysis of Helen Creighton, McKay turns his attention to Mary Black, a critical figure in the handicraft revitalization on Nova Scotia. Once again, this chapter follows a loosely biographical structure in its treatment of Black’s own work, extending this to include a critique of the commercialization of handicrafts through the tourism industry. Like Creighton, Black was a problematic figure, particularly through her commercial outlook and her desire to define handicrafts in ways that symbolically tied them to, but practically distanced them from, the Nova Scotian “Folk.” While Creighton’s commodification of Folk culture was ostensibly her means of preserving and displaying it, Black’s approach focused on the needs of the tourist market rather than the Folk themselves, as McKay illustrates by outlining her calls for coordination in the designs and productions of handicrafts, and her desire for high-standard craftsmanship, even if this meant the crafts being produced by non-Nova Scotian, often European, trained craftspeople. Creighton, with what McKay termed an “entropic sensibility” (179), worked to discover Folk culture; Black, on the other hand, strived to create it in the image of her own ideals of handicrafts. By including an analysis of Black’s career and impact, McKay shows how the Folk was more significant than a nostalgic collection of folksongs—it was physically and economically tangible through the production of handicrafts.

McKay’s fourth chapter is an analysis of the spread of the mythomoteur of Innocence and its salience for the Folk themselves. It is in this chapter that McKay’s analysis loses some of its appeal. Given the limits of social history methodology, McKay notes that a consideration of the experiences and opinions of the population at large would not be possible; thus, he evaluates the prominence of the Folk as an idea by focusing on cultural works, particularly literature. From this, he infers that the Folk mythomoteur was a widespread imagining, and key as a representation of the province. At no point, however, does McKay make use of the voices of the Folk themselves; indeed, throughout this monograph they are a disappointingly silent presence. While this does not entirely discredit McKay’s argument, particularly as he acknowledges that many cultural producers who reflected the Folk were themselves Nova Scotian, it certainly undermines McKay’s claim that his work is subaltern in outlook, and is a serious gap in his work.

One particularly satisfying component of McKay’s work can be found in a short section of his fourth chapter that presents an analysis of gender and sexuality as part of the mythomoteur.  McKay highlights the connections between Innocence as an essentialist framework and the traditional family values and gender roles that proponents of the Folk assumed to be inherent in Nova Scotia as a “therapeutic space” away from the challenges of modernity (251). In doing so, he positions the Folk as a gendered category—though not as individual men and women. This illustrates the complex role of gender in antimodernism, which celebrated pre-modern gender roles of domestic femininity and thriving masculinity. These traditional roles stood in stark contrast to the realities of gender relations in Nova Scotia, which experienced changing reproductive patterns consistent with those of other parts of North America. Thus, McKay highlights the gendered nature of Innocence as an ideological formation through which “a politics of cultural selection” cherry-picked, from an otherwise modernizing society, those aspects of gender and sexuality that were anti-modern (251).

In a concluding chapter, McKay outlines his neo-Gramscian theoretical underpinnings and meditates on the utility of the Folk as a concept in post-modernity. McKay carefully distinguishes this from postmodernism, basing his ideas on the work of literary critic Frederic Jameson. McKay notes that postmodernity, while intensifying demand for images of Folk, is more accepting of the fragmentation and lack of authenticity that follows from these images. This assertion, in my opinion, bears the wider significance of McKay’s work, although this is somewhat mitigated by his taking for granted his characterization of contemporary society as situated in postmodernity. Along with his introductory chapter, the final portion of this chapter serves as a theoretical bookend to the three interior chapters, clarifying the theory that McKay applies, to varying degrees, throughout his work. In order to diminish the strength of the mythomoteur, McKay proposes a neo-Gramscian framework. In short, this approach reconciles and thus combines the strengths of Marxian political economy and Foucauldian genealogy, thus enabling an analysis of the Folk that considers power structures, rather than assuming unity. McKay roots his use of such an approach as grounded in the work of Stuart Hall, who criticizes the linguistic turn in historiography without outright dismissing it. While McKay’s preceding chapters illustrate the theory that he lays out in his conclusion, this meticulously integrated theoretical framework ultimately appears to be what he wishes he had accomplished in The Quest of the Folk, or perhaps the goal for future work. This is particularly clear in his attempt to situate his work within subaltern studies.

McKay’s characterization of his work as “subaltern” is peculiar, and problematic. This characterization is rooted in his theoretical links to Gramsci, whose thought is foundational for, but expanded by, contemporary scholars in subaltern studies. The Quest of the Folk is, however, inconsistent with many of the major tenets of this particular subfield. The present incarnation of subaltern studies is postcolonial in its paradigm, whereas McKay’s work is focused on Folk who, though economically marginalized, are largely part of a colonial white settler society—a state formation that McKay does not deconstruct. Additionally, subaltern studies emphasize “history from below.” While the major players in McKay’s work are not elite, Mary Black and Helen Creighton are certainly women of significant privilege, as are the cultural producers who form the focus of McKay’s chapter on the influence of the Folk. Through the act of cultural production, it is arguable that these cultural producers, if they were Folk to begin with, leave the Folk behind and portray them from the perspective of outsiders. This is neither history from above, nor history from below—instead, it is history from in-between. This could be a valuable positioning for an historical analysis, but it is not the paradigm that McKay lays claim to.

By leaving the voices of the Folk out of his analysis, McKay falls victim to his own criticism of Folk portrayals of Nova Scotians. In his prologue, McKay charges that the framework of the Folk entails “the reduction of people once alive to the status of inert essences as a way of voiding the emancipatory potential of historical knowledge,” calling on subaltern studies to reassert specificity and complexity (xx). While he certainly challenges the essentialist portrayals of the Folk that permeate Nova Scotian culture, his work does not use historical knowledge as a truly emancipatory force; instead, he perhaps inadvertently perpetuates the marginalization of Folk voices.

On a childhood trip to Nova Scotia, I had the privilege of encountering a sizeable bowl of clam chowder in a small cabin on a northern part of Cape Breton Island. This chowder was ostensibly world famous; indeed, it was initially exquisite. As I made my way through the bowl, spoonful after spoonful, it began to feel heavy, and the weight detracted from the overall experience of the meal. To make matters worse, I did not find the amount of clams I had been hoping for. Ian McKay’s Quest of the Folk had the same effect on my reading appetite: ultimately, his verbosity detracted from the appeal of his argument and his theoretical strengths, and the relative silence of the Folk themselves made this otherwise compelling work rather disappointing. This disappointment is only somewhat mitigated by his acknowledgement that voices of the Folk are hard to come by—it is akin to a waiter apologizing that the restaurant is out of clams, but serving chowder anyway.