Showing papers in "British Journal of Canadian Studies in 2013"

A new Canadian dynamism? From multiculturalism and diversity to history and core values

Abstract: This article examines how Canada's new citizenship study guide might be considered a fundamental shift in Canadian citizenship from one emphasising multiculturalism, rights and diversity to one that encourages the integration of newcomers into Canadian society. It contends that the new approach to Canadian citizenship is part of a wider integrationist agenda sweeping much of Europe and settler-countries such as the United States and Australia. While the integrationist approach in the new citizenship study guide does not explicitly reject multiculturalism, rights and diversity, it promotes a greater commitment to a common set of core values rooted in Canada's history and heritage which might be described as a process of liberal assimilationism. The new agenda does not attempt to construct a religious, cultural or ethnically defined Canadian identity; it attempts to construct a shared citizenship within an increasingly diverse Canadian community.

Sustainable Urban Foragings in the Canadian Metropolis: Rummaging through Rita Wong’s Forage and Nicholas Dickner’s Nikolski

Abstract: Sustainable urban foragings Foraging and ‘dumpster diving’ are activities associated with a kind of environmentally conscious social activism engaged in by those wanting to live sustainably by maintaining a close connection with the local. The former is generally associated with nature, the latter with the urban environment. Wong's poetry collection, Forage, and Dickner's novel, Nikolski, both feature those who scavenge within their urban environment and suggest a connection between the two activities: to label dumpster diving ‘urban foraging’ is to reveal the dumpster diver's potential to disrupt the urban with ‘wild’ activity. This article uses Michel de Certeau's ‘Walking in the City’ to think through Wong and Dickner's figurations of the two Canadian metropolises, Vancouver and Montreal. These cities become places of subversive urban foraging, where rubbish, or garbage, becomes transformed through renewed visibility, just as the urban space is re-made - potentially - as a place of sustainable possibility.

The Tragedy of the Unmet Demand for Walking and Biking

Abstract: Concerns about climate change and fuel prices have led to an increased interest in walking and biking. At present, walking and biking make up only a small share of trips taken overall, though the shares of trips taken by foot or bike for work or errands increased significantly between 1995 and 2009. This study shows that a little less than a quarter of American households believe that it is important for them to be able to walk or bike to work. However, only 5% of Americans actually do walk or bike to work, showing that there is a large number of potential cyclists or pedestrians who would bike or walk to work if they had the option.

Searching for Franklin: a contemporary Canadian ghost story

Abstract: When in 2008 Parks Canada signalled its intention to sponsor a marine hunt for the sunken and lost ships of the 1845 Northwest Passage expedition led by Sir John Franklin, one of the main reasons given by federal authorities was the need to assert their claims to Arctic sovereignty in an unstable and tense circumpolar geopolitical environment. The wrecks of the Erebus and Terror in this context were seen as important due to their historic associations with the development of Canada as a nation. I argue that the phantasmic nature of these shipwrecks, as well as the rhetorics of the supernatural associated with the Franklin expedition in history, literature, documentary, popular culture and heritage policy, discloses a haunting inheritance in the modern Canadian imagination. Through an examination of recent Franklin searches this article locates the place of this ‘quintessential interdisciplinary, diachronic, semiotic subject’ in the contemporary imagination.

Italian-Canadian theatre in the spotlight of multiculturalism: La Storia dell'Emigrante (1979), a case study

Abstract: The present article looks at Tony Nardi's La Storia dell'Emigrante (1979), which was the first theatre work by an Italian-Canadian playwright to win the Ontario Multicultural Theatre Festival as Best Original Canadian Play, in 1982. La Storia dell'Emigrante is first situated in the historical and biographical circumstances under which it was produced. A close reading of the play follows (with interpretations) which make clear its significance to both the playwright and the Italian-Canadian communities at the time. The case study approach allows in-depth exploration of a neglected area in Canadian theatre history in an attempt to contribute to a reformulation of the scholarly debate around multicultural theatre and multiculturalism. It ultimately suggests that the lack of critical attention to Italian-Canadian theatre, which mirrors the lack of attention to the Italian-Canadian community in the first place, is also rooted in an insufficient appreciation of specific aspects of Canadian history.

Alberta's rights revolution

Abstract: Studies of human rights that focus on international politics or institutions fail to convey the complex influence of human rights on law, politics and society in a local context. This article documents the impact of the rights revolution in Alberta. The rights revolution emerged in the province beginning in the 1970s following the election of the Progressive Conservative Party in 1971. Many of the issues that typified Alberta's rights revolution were unique to this region: censorship, eugenics and discrimination against Hutterites, Aboriginals, Blacks and French Canadians. However, as the controversy surrounding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation demonstrates, Alberta's rights revolution remains an unfulfilled promise.

‘If everything is moving where is here?’: Lisa Robertson's Occasional Work on cities, space and impermanence

Abstract: In her 2003 collection of essays Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, poet Lisa Robertson describes a shifting and dissolving Vancouver. Through a consideration of the theoretical work of geographer Doreen Massey and architect Rem Koolhaas, we explore the ways that, for Robertson, space is not reducible to singular, official narratives, but is the result of the complex and contradictory accretion of multiple historical trajectories. Focusing on Vancouver's New Brighton Park, both in Robertson's text and as a physical space, we ask how clashing forces, from the forceful organisational movements of global capital to the differentiating, yet minor, descriptions of the wandering poet, produce a space, a specific site, together through their cooperations and antagonisms?

Wilderness, the West and the national imaginary in Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy

Abstract: Guy Vanderhaeghe scrutinises the garrison image in the wider context of the North American West in The Englishman's Boy. His appropriation of the conventions of the Western lays bare the underpinning ideologies of the genre, especially imperialist assumptions about wilderness and the role that genre and wilderness play in American and Canadian national mythologies. His configuration of the North American West rejects the traditional idea of space as a static background for historical events. This article investigates how Vanderhaeghe rewrites the past of the North American West in spatial terms to expose the interconnection among colonialism, the Western and the national imaginary, and how such remapping presents the Western landscape as a space palimpsestically inscribed by diverse social discourses.

‘Beauty which we had not previously known’: Walter Abell and the dynamics of modern art in Canada

Abstract: A re-reading of the writings of Walter Abell, a well known art critic and theorist in Canada in the 1930s and 1940s, suggests a different way of thinking about the development of Canadian art and culture. Instead of viewing Abell's treatments of art - as have other cultural historians - as a stable discourse, this essay suggests that they are better viewed as a series of often incongruous treatments that do not constitute a cohesive whole. It is the very disjunctures and aporias in Abell's discourse, however, that make it most meaningful. Instead of treating Abell's contradictions and shifting perspectives as problems, this essay argues that they signify the diverse, and at times incompatible, ways that artists, intellectuals, and Canadians responded to the the development of modernist art and the conditions of artistic modernity in twentieth century Canada. In this sense, they present an image of Canadian artistic culture as a fractures field within which different subject positions, conceptions of cultu...

Transitions in regional development policy implementation in Canada: the cases of New Brunswick and Manitoba

Abstract: Research on policy implementation in Canada and around the world is seeking to address the nexus of the mandates, resources, and cultures of public agencies and their wider institutional and socio-political context. This article examines the implications of the transition in the framing of policy implementation processes from ‘administration’ to ‘governance’ by looking at regional economic development policy implementation in the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Manitoba since the mid-1980s. These two provinces are part of geographically determined regions classified under Canada's official regional development policy as socioeconomically disadvantaged in relation to the rest of the country. Regional development policy itself has undergone a noticeable shift in policy discourse among public managers over the past decade towards an emphasis on ‘promoting innovation’ as the rationale for policy intervention. The implications of these transitions suggest that policy implementation or program delivery ...

Canadian literature of ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’: CanLit Balkans

Abstract: This article examines the use of ‘the Balkan’ as a trope in Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion and Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces. Whilst speaking to a well-established inventory of ‘the Balkan’ that invokes the region and its peoples in a range of exoticising and demonising metaphors, the texts under consideration also mobilise the Balkan trope in order to interrogate national myths of homogeneity and essentialist notions of identity - issues central to the political and cultural debates taking place in Canada during the 1980s and 1990s when both novels were published. By drawing on the historical, political and cultural affinities between the Balkans and Canada, in terms of their geopolitical liminality, cultural multiplicity and fraught European legacies, Ondaatje and Michaels redefine ‘the Balkan’ as a mediating and enabling site within a multiplicity of fraught contexts, and thus explore the ethical, critical and political possibilities of a transnational literary positionality.

My Mother's Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding: writing Canada for an American theatre audience

Abstract: After a successful season in Toronto, the Canadian musical My Mother's Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding (2009) was invited to travel south of the border for a production at the 2010 New York Musical Festival. Having realised prospective US-based audiences could be unfamiliar with the many Canadian elements of the narrative, playwrights David Hein and Irene Carl Sankoff embarked on an extensive process of rewriting. This article considers the (re-)presentation of and introduction to Canada the amended script offers to a non-Canadian audience. Shifting implicitly from Frye's ‘Where is here?’ question to a ‘What is "here"?’ musing, I consider the change in geographical setting, the elimination and/or alteration of topical Canadian references, and the introduction of what I term ‘reminders of Canadianness’, as I argue that the musical offers a significant opportunity to renegotiate the relationship between Canada and the US.