In the simplest sense it has something to do with too much attention to selected trees and not enough appreciation for the forest. Adam is right. Making things worse, in many cases the void is simply filled with prevalidated narratives of capitalist and patriarchal privilege drawn from transnational theory. The problem with this is not the fact of imported ideas but the absence of the critical wherewithal to test them against local particulars. Nowhere is this more true than in the field represented by this book.
Rutherford is typical here.
Mary Jane Miller's excellent work, again here and elsewhere, on the ways in which Canadian genres and programs have diffe red from their ostensible models, in many cases to such an extent as to defy comparison entirely. This ignorance is not, unfortunately, an an omaly. Part of the answer simply has to do with the way labour is divided in Canadian cultural research. This factionalization is unfortunate on all counts. Consequently, far from being irrelevant, paying attention to the much more extensively studied fields of art and literature can provide some important leads for research into popular materials.