Professor. Irene Rostagno Course.

Culture in a Globalised World Erickzon Astorga Cabezas

Tokenism, a social artifact. Culture transmitted by a strong Tokenism from Canada to the U.S.
In this paper, I will refer to a phenomenon that has been strongly increasing during many decades between Canada and United States. This is called Tokenism that is the policy or practice of including one or a few members of a minority in a group without having authority or power equal to that of the other group members, for instance women working in some jobs that are exclusive for men. This present review will be focused mainly on the cultural flowering of Canada over United States based on tokenism. However, the fact that tokenism may be interpreted as your partners looking down on you will not be taken into account. The mentioned cultural rising was clearly represented through music, literature, theater, etc. In other words, creativity devoted to the culture in some Canadians has driven their arts to be attractive not only to Americans, but the rest of the world as well. It is important to remember these improvements were not made only in Arts, but in every respect. For a long time, some Americans considered Canada as shared borders that needed to demonstrate cultural distinctiveness. This was possibly generated as a collective psyche of mythical and historical facts into their history; that is, their culture, in general, is much more focused on their own idiosyncrasy and political sovereignty than something just for fun. Whereas, Canada thinks that U.S lacks its own cultural identity and their culture is merely settled under an insubstantial and trite entertainment. Nevertheless, as years went by, the boring vision that U.S. had in relation to Canadians soundly changed. This was principally because Americans accepted that they could possess the ability to influence tastes and morals in their society; additionally, they were able to shape the opinion and self-image of their people, without resorting to common and ordinary things in culture. However, this acceptance depended to a great extent on notable Canadians who were seen as symbols of strong tokenism in U.S culture. They were Alice Munro, Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain and Atom Egoyam, among many others. These people attained such critical and personal successes in U.S culture that they were considered as symbolic icons in United States pushing many of their American partners into the background, but not in terms of discrimination or exclusion as tokenism states largely in its definitions. Alice Morissette and Shania Twain became the most popular North American female singers in any genre. This was surely obtained because of their local song-writings which did not represent only Canadian culture, but their new one, United States. Their songs were plenty of typically American social events as Alanis Morrissettes album called JAGGED LITTLE PILL (1995), flexibility to create different version of an album (originally Canadian country version, 1997, and the pop and revised international version 1999) as Shania Twain on her album called COME OVER (1997). Alice Munro, while, was a regular contributor to The New Yorker recognized as the best master of the short story ever, OPEN SECRETS (1994), which deals with her strongly regional features in her fiction. Finally, Atom Egoyam an ArmenianCanadian independent film whose work often explores themes of alienation and isolation, CHLOE (2009).

To sum up, all of these notable Canadians, among many others, were largely benefited by a social artifact called tokenism, which far from having a negative connotation, was a sort of cultural conveyor from Canada to United States. Apparently, the main reason that tokenism works in that way is the fact that it is so inclusive that attention is highly focused on determined individuals. Therefore, it immediately produces acceptance or rejection in other group members.