Ian Angus

The Undiscovered Country: Essays in Canadian Intellectual Culture - Cultural Dialectics Ian Angus

In this sequence of essays, Ian Angus engages with themes of identity,
power, and the nation as they emerge in contemporary English Canadian
philosophical thought, seeking to prepare the groundwork for a critical
theory of neoliberal globalization. The essays are organized into three
parts. The opening part offers a nuanced critique of the Hegelian
confidence and progressivism that has come to dominate Canadian
intellectual life. Through an analysis of the work of several prominent
Canadian thinkers, among them Charles Taylor and C. B. Macpherson,
Angus suggests that Hegelian frames of reference are inadequate,
failing as they do to accommodate the fact of English Canada's
continuing indebtedness to empire. The second part focuses on national
identity and political culture, including the role of Canadian studies
as a discipline, adapting its critical method to Canadian political
culture. The first two parts culminate in the positive articulation, in
Part 3, of author's own conception, one that is at once more
utopian and more tragic than that of the first two parts. Here, Angus
develops the concept of locative thought--the thinking of a people
who have undergone dispossession, "of a people seeking its place
and therefore of a people that has not yet found its place."Ian Angus is currently professor of humanities at
Simon Fraser University. He has written several books on contemporary
philosophy and communication, as well as on English Canadian social and
political thought, among them A Border Within: National Identity,
Cultural Plurality and Wilderness and Identity and Justic
e. He is also the author of the more popularly oriented
Emergent Publics: An Essay on Social Movements and Democracy
and Love the Questions: University Education and
Enlightenment. He lives in East Vancouver with his wife and
daughter.