In Post-National Arguments: The Politics of the Anglophone-Canadian Novel since 1967, Frank Davey sees contemporary English-Canadian fiction as signalling the arrival of the postnational state. This collection seeks a larger context for what Davey calls the" postnational," trying to understand it within the context of Canadian literary culture's struggling with postcolonial dilemmas, including a colonial heritage insufficiently acknowledged in our national histories and criticism. Canada has not yet produced equivalents to Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra's postcolonial reading of Australian identity in Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind, which reads the cultural productions of white settlers and Aboriginal peoples in terms of their cross-cultural contacts under colonialism, nor to Ross Gibson's more postmodern and discontinuously postcolonial reading of Australian culture in South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia. These important books situate current Australian cultural debates within larger postcolonial and postmodern contexts. This collection of essays makes no attempt to replicate their arguments by producing Canadian equivalents because the Australian debate is culturally specific to Australia. Canadian imperatives take us in different directions, and certainly away from grand phrases like the postcolonial moment, the postcolonial mind, or the postcolonial intellectual. It is useful, however, to consider why such initiatives have not happened in Canada, and to look at where our own scholarly interests have been concentrated instead. For example, Julia V. Emberley's Thresholds of Difference: Feminist Critique, Native Women's Writings, Postcolonial Theory concentrates on the cross-illuminations of feminist and postcolonial theories, but leaves the problem of invader-settler postcolonialism unresolved to concentrate instead on what she (following Paul Tennant) terms the" internal colonialism"(131) of Native peoples. More problematically, she assumes that postcolonial theory is exclusively metropolitan and Third World in its origins, ignoring Canadian and Commonwealth contributions to its development.