Manhood in America: A Cultural History

Manliness and civilization: A cultural history of gender and race in the United States, 1880–1917

The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism

Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Gail BedermanAmerican Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Robyn Wiegman

Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction

Historians of Canadian culture have demonstrated increasing awareness that the Group of Seven and the ideas of nation advanced in and around their work were never as fully embraced by the public at large as once assumed. One reason is that the Group, and the cultural producers with whom they aligned themselves, worked from an urban perspective characteristic of Ontario regionalism. For Ontarians, the landscape in paintings by the Group of Seven was not a place of productive labour, nor a permanent home, but rather a place of recreation, a wilderness landscape of scenic value and spiritual renewal. Using the artists’ work in western Canada as a case study, this paper argues that this touristic experience of the non-human environment was intimately tied as well to the emergence of mass tourism, which took shape as a state-coordinated industry in Canada in the 1920s.

The Group of Seven and the Tourist Landscape in Western Canada, or The More Things Change …

This essay deals with a group of late-nineteenth-century landscape paintings that were painted for members of the sportsmen's club movement, who leased salmon rivers in Atlantic Canada for sport fishing. In Canada, as elsewhere, the removal of Native rights to the animal world, through the introduction of policies and laws restricting hunting and fishing technologies and access, went hand in hand with the aesthetic appropriation of the environment as landscape. For this reason it can be argued that in picturing Atlantic Canada as the recreational landscape of these elite tourists-"a sportsman's paradise"-paintings of the region are also products of the history of Native exclusion from the Atlantic salmon fishery. Thus they provide a point of access to the complex history of Native-settler interaction for public art galleries in Canada currently involved in the incorporation of Native North American material into the existing public narrative of Canadian art. Le present article porte sur un groupe de peintures paysagistes du dernier quart du XIXe siecle qui ont ete realisees par des membres du mouvement des clubs de sportifs qui louaient des rivieres a saumon dans le Canada atlantique pour faire de la peche recreative. Au Canada, comme ailleurs, la suppression resultante des droits autochtones au monde animal-par l'introduction de politiques et lois restreignant les technologies et l'acces a la chasse et a la peche-est allee de pair avec l'affectation esthetique de l'environnement comme paysage. Pour cette raison, on peut avancer qu'en montrant le Canada atlantique comme le paysage recreatif de ces touristes d'elite (un paradis des sportifs), les peintures de cette region sont egalement un produit de l'histoire de l'exclusion autochtone des peches au saumon atlantique. Ces peintures fournissent donc un point d'acces a l'histoire complexe des interactions entre les Autochtones et les colons pour les galeries d'art publiques au Canada qui essaient presentement d'incorporer du materiel autochtone nord-americain dans le recit public actuel de l'art canadien. Landscape as a cultural medium ... has a double role with respect to something like ideology: it naturalizes a social and cultural construction, representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable, and it also makes that representation operational by interpellating its beholder in some more or less determinate relation to its givenness as sight and site. Thus, landscape (whether urban or rural, artificial or natural) always greets us as a space, as environment, as that within which "we" (figured as "the figures" in the landscape) find-or lose-ourselves. An account of landscape understood in this way therefore ... has to trace the process by which landscape effaces its own readability and naturalizes itself and must understand that process in relation to what might be called "the natural histories" of its own beholders. [It is a question of] what we have done and are doing to our environment, what the environment in turn does to us, how we naturalize what we do to each other, and how these "doings" are enacted in the media of representation we call "landscape." W.J.T. Mitchell (1994, 2) This essay focusses on a significant body of landscape paintings from the last quarter of the nineteenth century that depict, or were painted for, recreational fishermen from central Canada and the northeastern United States who leased salmon rivers in Atlantic Canada for sport fishing. The pictures, which deal with common subject matter, were painted for art patrons and collectors who were active participants in the "sportsmen's club movement" that swept northeastern North America in the mid-1870s. Each reproduces the motivating ideas of the movement, giving visual expression to contemporary notions of wilderness as a therapeutic environment, an antidote to the debilitating effects of urban-industrial civilization. It was in pursuit of this wilderness experience that the movement organized elite tourists into private clubs for the pursuit of sport, which was conceptualized as a form of personal involvement in the rhythms of nature and for the preservation of game, which they saw as threatened by the same urban-industrial capitalism that compelled their periodic retreat to wilderness. …

Landscapes of Sport, Landscapes of Exclusion: The "Sportsman's Paradise" in Late-Nineteenth-Century Canadian Painting

Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: An Introduction

Although little known today, the 1928 Canadian movie, Saving the Sagas, is an early example of a film recording the presence of the ethnographic fieldworker, in this case, the National Museum of Canada ethnologist Marius Barbeau (1883–1969) at work in the Nisga'a communities along the Nass River in northern British Columbia. This consideration of the film discusses the ways in which it represented those communities, first on its own and then, together with its contemporary Fish and Medicine Men, as part of Nass River Indians, the otherwise lost 1927 film from which the two shorter films were subsequently made. Focusing on the latter film's relationship to government action concerning Aboriginal peoples, it concludes with discussion of the implications of this representation, which was produced originally for the National Museum to be shown first in conjunction with the National Gallery of Canada's 1927 “Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern.”

https://canadianfilm.com/Nass/tin_cans.pdf

Lynda Jessup

Papers

The Group of Seven and the Tourist Landscape in Western Canada, or The More Things Change …

Landscapes of Sport, Landscapes of Exclusion: The "Sportsman's Paradise" in Late-Nineteenth-Century Canadian Painting

Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: An Introduction

Tin cans and machinery: Saving the Sagas and other stuff

Prospectors, bushwhackers, painters: antimodernism and the group of seven