Post-Colonialism, Post Socialism, and Multiple Remembrances

Abstract

On the morning of 12 July 1990, I flipped on my TV to CNN's Headline News. I received about two hours of English-language television each morning, and had grown dependent on CNN to let me know in the vaguest sense what was going on in the world. I was living in Prague, in what would remain Czechoslovakia for another couple of years, part of the swarm of do-gooders, curiosity-seekers, and carpetbaggers descending on the entire former East Bloc at the end of 1989. By the time I left Prague, it was clear to anyone who looked carefully that the new regime's willingness to suspend visa and currency regulations made 'English teacher' a surprisingly lucrative moniker for anyone looking to cash in quickly before the heavyweights took over, and in the process thoroughly elided any boundary between do-gooders and carpetbaggers 1). Given the time difference between Prague and eastern Canada, that morning's top story on Headline News was the first I heard of events at Kanehsatà:ke, or as it was soon referred to, the 'Oka Crisis'. The previous 1 The comparison with the original 'carpetbaggers'-northerners who headed to the defeated Confederate South at the end of the American Civil War, looking to make quick profits during Reconstruction-resonates strongly. The Soviet bloc was seen as having been defeated in the Cold War, and an influx of transient opportunists saw this as a chance to get quickly rich. In Mandevillean fashion, private vices would become public virtues, as the populace of the former East bloc received a crash course in capitalism from its least reputable proponents. The joke was still circulating in the former USSR well into the twenty-first century: 'Everything we knew about socialism was false, and everything we knew about capitalism was true'.