Showing papers in "British Journal of Canadian Studies in 2014"

Democratizing the Constitution: Reforming Responsible Government by Peter Aucoin, Mark D. Jarvis, and Lori Turnbull (review)

Abstract: concluding chapter by Patti Tamara Lenard locates Canadian temporary labour migration programmes in comparative perspective, commenting that ‘temporary migrants operate at the margins of Canadian society, the victims of multiple forms of discrimination’ (p. 296). Since the contributions to this book were written, the trend of Canadian employers’ use of temporary migrant workers has increased and extended to include high-skilled workers. Legal cases, and reforms in the 2013 federal budget, have raised issues of the employment rights and working conditions of temporary workers while also indicating consequences for employment and wage levels within the permanent labour force. This volume is a timely collection, with substantial contributions. It is an example of work from a critical social science perspective which contributes to theoretical analysis while possessing sufficient coherence to inform social policy. Roy Todd, Chichester

Orientalism at home: the case of 'Canada's toughest neighbourhood'

Abstract: This article examines representations of Jane-Finch, a community in north-west Toronto deemed ‘Canada's toughest neighbourhood’ by The Globe and Mail in 2007. By exploring how the dominant news media negotiate a sense of Canadian identity in contradistinction to this marginalised space, the article highlights the insights that Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) creates when translated into a Canadian context. I argue that by applying Said's conceptual framework to Canadian communities such as Jane-Finch, scholars stand to learn much about the myth of what it means to be Canadian and how the mainstream news media reproduce this (self-) knowledge.

Canadians in Bexhill-on-Sea during the First World War: a reflection of Canadian nationhood?

Abstract: The First World War is surmised to have been a formative event for Canada. Conventional wisdom denotes that the war invoked what Philip Buckner has termed a ‘colony-to-nation framework’, whereby Canada entered the war as a Dominion of Britain and emerged a nation in its own right. This, however, is a contested viewpoint. It is also argued that, although important, the war did not significantly alter the sense of national identity in Canada. Using the location of Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex as a case study, this article will show that while there did appear to be a greater sense of attachment to Canada as a result of the war, this was not at the expense of an attachment to the Empire. There was, as Buckner has argued, scope for parallel identities. Nevertheless, despite this attachment, literature produced at Bexhill showed that the war had exacerbated divisions between English and French Canadians.

Loss and longing in Alice Munro's 'Queenie'

Abstract: This article is a close reading of Alice Munro's ‘Queenie’, principally using the tools of narratology and literary linguistics. I argue that the story illustrates many hallmarks of Munro's art, such as temporal disruption, nuances in narrative dynamism, meticulous attention to character idiolect, indeterminacy and ambiguity. However, it is in addition distinguished by passages of writing that are exceptional in their emotional intensity, and in the extent to which they consequently engage the reader. These passages (those that linguist Michael Toolan would describe as ‘emotionally immersive’) are identifiable and made salient by various grammatical and stylistic means. I argue that these are orchestrated in order to heighten the sense of loss, longing and abandonment in the narrative, making it an especially affecting reading experience.

Fiction and the nation: the construction of Canadian identity in Chatelaine and Canadian Home Journal during the 1930s and 1940s

Abstract: This article presents original research on the mainstream Anglophone Canadian magazines Chatelaine and the Canadian Home Journal and the way in which they constructed a particular Canadian identity as a result of their own need to market themselves as distinct from American magazines. This identity was necessarily inflected by the expectation that the magazines' audience consisted of the white, middle-class consumers to whom the magazines' advertisers sought to appeal. Fiction played an important part in this process, as magazines were key purveyors of fiction in Canada. Intriguingly, citizenship was at the forefront of how fiction was discussed, as authors' own Canadian identities were highlighted as a common bond between author and reader. The fiction itself was defined by two key traits - its ability to provide an accurate portrayal of a particular region and the way of life of Canadians who inhabited it, and its treatment of an issue or event presumed to be of relevance to readers. This article explores the short stories 'The Black Siberians' by Beryl Gray and 'Spring Always Comes' by F. Marjorie Jordan, which are representative of these central themes. Examined together, these two works trace out the way in which mainstream periodical literature urged Canadians to think of their nation, and of themselves, with the desire to attain a better life through hard work, an attention to community-building and a willingness to surrender one's personal history and/or heritage in exchange for a desirable future, all coming to the fore as quintessential Canadian qualities.

Exporting the clarity ethos: Canada and the Scottish independence referendum

Abstract: Canada's Clarity Act, an act governing the process and practice of future referendums on Quebec sovereignty, has managed to find its way into the discourse, discussion and debate surrounding the 18 September 2014 referendum in Scotland. This article explores the notion of ‘clarity’ as it is being applied to the Scottish referendum, the consequences of this emergent ethos and how the question itself has become a preoccupation for both Separatists and Unionists alike. Having taken form in Canada, and now being utilised by lawmakers in the UK, the ‘clarity ethos’, as we argue below, is altogether an unattainable ideal. Subject to interpretative/cognitive bias, referendum questions, and how they are formulated, deserve the same level of analysis as the debate and discussion precipitating them.

The delightful revolution: Canada's medical expedition to Easter Island, 1964-65

Abstract: Planned as a study of the isolated inhabitants of the mysterious Easter Island, the 1964 Canadian-led Medical Expedition to Easter Island (METEI) was an example of military and civilian interests uniting to promulgate Canadian values in a global context Conceived and led by McGill University's Dr Stanley Skoryna, the four-month Expedition was sponsored by the World Health Organization and the Medical Research Council of Canada Skoryna convinced the Canadian Navy to lend its ship, the HMCS Cape Scott, to the enterprise Thus on 16 November, the Cape Scott sailed out of Halifax harbour with officers, sailors, physicians, botanists, sociologists, anthropologists and translators aboard While the scientific team analysed the people, flora and fauna of Easter Island, the crew of the HMCS Cape Scott continued on a goodwill tour of Chile, engaging in soft diplomacy with a country whose newly elected government was implementing comprehensive democratic, social and economic reforms Unknown to the Canadians, Eas

‘Dangers behind, pleasures ahead': British-Canadian identity and the evacuation of British children to Canada during the Second World War

Abstract: Between 1939 and 1940, over six thousand British child evacuees were shipped across the dangerous Atlantic seas to the safe shores of Canada. Examining three Toronto-based organisations, the University of Toronto's Women's War Service Committee, the St George's Society of Toronto and Havergal College, illustrates the British-Canadian connections that inspired Canadians to open their homes to small strangers for ‘the duration’. Wartime letters from six-year-old evacuee Julie Kemp and those sent between her natural mother and foster mother reflect the constant negotiations and intricacies of this prolonged separation between child and family and country. Post-war oral interviews with former evacuees point towards the complexities of their reintegration back into British society and the lasting effects of their evacuation. The children's wartime migration drew upon pre-war British and wartime Canadian identity. Upon the evacuees' return home, this combined with a post-war British identity to produce an amalg...

Liberal Nationalisms: Empire, State, and Civil Society in Scotland and Quebec by James Kennedy (review)

Abstract: opinions. More extensive use of archival sources could have provided new insight on how Washington has perceived Canadian naval politics in the past century. Also, the book’s traditional themes and chronology do not set Canadian foreign policy scholarship in any new directions. While Lincoln Paine’s The Sea and Civilisation: A Maritime History of the World (New york, 2013) offers fresh perspectives for the twenty-first century, it is not clear how Tracy’s volume fits within global and transnational history frameworks. A Two-Edged Sword does not break much new historiographical ground. Still, it charts the scholarly field (or seas) like no other book of its kind. Tyler Turek, Western University

'A Century of Canadian Art': the Tate Gallery exhibition of 1938

Abstract: An exhibition of 263 works of Canadian art opened at London's Tate Gallery in October 1938. These showed how European traditions of portraiture, landscape and religious carving had interacted with Canada's geography and First Nations to create a distinct national aesthetic epitomised by the Group of Seven and Emily Carr. The exhibition had been envisioned by Vincent Massey, Canada's foremost arts patron and collector, who had lent many works to the show. He was an ardent Anglophile who, as High Commissioner in London, believed in fostering Anglo-Canadian understanding as war loomed. He had also seen the impact of cultural propaganda launched by European governments in the mid-1930s. While Canada lacked a similar programme, Massey believed that ‘the force of culture’ could promote Canada's unique identity within an imperial heritage. Modern Canadian art had been exhibited in London and Paris in the mid-1920s and critics had greatly admired works they did not completely understand. By providing a century of...

In Flux: Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing by Roy Miki (review)

Abstract: elsewhere, at home, in private collections, in shoeboxes’ (p. 35). Karis Shearer and Jessica Schagerl also develop the digital scope of the collection, focusing on Sina Queyras’s online blog ‘Lemon Hound’ as itself a literary archive. In common with Devereux’s focus, Shearer and Schagerl’s essay unpacks the significance of fluid digital participation. ‘Lemon Hound’ is here understood as an archive of contemporary Canadian women’s cultural production opening out into an informal global system of decentred publics. Linda M. Morra and Jessica Schagerl’s collection of essays provides an excellent crosssection of contemporary work on Canadian women’s literary archives. Will Smith, Lancaster University

Huron Carol: a Canadian cultural chameleon

Abstract: The Huron Carol was written in the Wendat or Huron language in the early 1640s by Jesuit Father Jean de Brebeuf. It tells the story of the birth of Jesus. Over time it became a part of the religious culture of the Wendat people. The interpretation of the Huron Carol became less true to the language and culture of the people from the translations first of Father Etienne Thomas de Villeneuve Girault in the late eighteenth century and Huron Paul Tsa8enhohi Picard during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Early in the twentieth century Jesse Middleton created a version of the song that made it popular throughout North America, but was not in any way a translation of the original Wendat version. The process of the song's acculturation to mainstream culture turned around by the latter half of that century, with the song being recorded repeatedly in the original Wendat, and with versions being created in other Aboriginal languages.

Les espaces multiples de la fête: la Saint-Jean-Baptiste 1968 à Montréal

Abstract: Cet essai s'interesse aux relations 'nation-espace urbain', telles qu'exemplifiees par la parade de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste a Montreal, en particulier celle de 1968. Il propose une reflexion sur la parade en tant que dispositif contribuant a la formation d'une identite nationale, pour ensuite decrire comment la forme et l'apparence (voire l'iconographie) de la parade qui defile dans l'espace urbain permettent aux groupes concernes d'explorer leur relation a l'espace social, politique, culturel et materiel dans lequel ils evoluent en tant que nation. This article takes as its focus 'nation-urban space' relations as exemplified by the Saint-Jean-Baptiste parade in Montreal, in particular that of 1968. It proposes a reflection on the parade as a key contributor to the construction of national identity, going on to describe how the form and appearance (the iconography) of the parade marching in urban space allow the various groups concerned to explore their relationship to the social, political, cultural and material spaces in which they are evolving as a nation.

Growing Up Canadian: Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists by Peter Beyer and Rubina Ramji (review)

Abstract: English Canada and Quebec, many of the contributors also reflect on their experiences as practitioners. These more personal accounts make engaging reading for their detailing of various political and economic events in Canada’s recent past, yet many of the authors’ active involvement in these debates oftentimes appears to undermine the necessary objectivity needed to determine the status of the public intellectual in Canada in relation to the events discussed. Despite the inclusion of four female contributors in the collection, its engagement with the role of female public intellectuals is decidedly limited. Wiseman argues in his introduction that this ‘speaks to the historical inability of women to claim equal space and attention in public forums’ (p. 8). Responding to this historical absence, Sylvia Bashevkin’s article instead encourages us to ask ‘which women thinkers evidenced the attributes of creativity and courage, with respect to what issues and when – regardless of whether their contributions were interpreted as the interventions of public intellectuals’ (p. 113). Taking a more openly adversarial tone, John Richards’s article on the role played by public intellectuals in the evolution of Canadian Aboriginal policy argues that these intellectuals have produced an unbalanced dialogue (in which he himself is equally culpable). He closes by offering questions that he hopes might help correct this imbalance. Intriguingly, Wiseman is one of his collection’s own worst critics. He provides a detailed analysis of each of the articles in his conclusion, drawing links between the collection’s rather disparate articles and finding common points of comparison or dissonance, and deliberately drawing attention to the collection’s lack of minority and ethnically diverse voices. When justifying this absence, Wiseman concludes that ‘as these essays collectively reflect them, the faces and pre-occupations of Canada’s public intellectuals have not changed as rapidly as have the faces and concerns of Canada’s evolving society’ (p. 245). Thus, while this collection offers some interesting insights into the role and status of the public intellectual, Wiseman seems to draw the reader’s attention to the limits such a role still holds and its drastic need for reinvention in order to remain relevant in twenty-firstcentury Canadian society. Sarah Galletly, University of Strathclyde

From a politics to a poetics of memory: fracture, return and renewal in Robert Lalonde's Sept Lacs plus au Nord

Abstract: This article analyses the language of memory in Lalonde's Sept Lacs plus au Nord by applying a semiotic reading to the text, combined with an anthropological and sociological perspective and within the theoretical framework of memory studies. It shows how the main themes identified at the deep level of meaning of the text are related to the paradigms of fracture, return and renewal, unfolding a poetics of memory that is in tension with a politics of memory as a signifying absence. The article concludes that the reconciliation of the two opposing poles of Amerindian and non-Amerindian (white) memory (in the context of mixed cultural heritage) that are seen to govern the narrative can only be fully achieved through the individual's return to the original place of trauma and the reactivation of the sensory and cultural embodied processes of remembrance that lay below the level of consciousness.

John Buchan: Model Governor General by J. William Galbraith (review)

Abstract: This is a collection of essays by Peter A. Russell on the historiography of agriculture in nineteenth-century Quebec and Ontario followed by an agricultural history of the Prairies. He has excluded the Maritimes and British Columbia from this study. Russell begins with a survey of the debate regarding Fernand Quellet’s thesis of an agricultural crisis in Quebec beginning in the first decade of the nineteenth century. He suggests that some scholarship provides a measure of support for Quellet’s analysis. Russell then considers the debate regarding whether farmers in Quebec were inferior to those in Ontario. He concludes that Canadiens were as successful as Anglophone farmers where they had opportunities. Russell then surveys the historiography of the staples theory first expounded by W.A. Mackintosh in 1923 and subsequently developed into the pre-eminent theory of Canadian economic growth by Harold Innis. He concludes that ‘Innis, by an apparent exclusive focus on wheat as an export staple, mistook an important part of the colonial economy for the whole of it ... Without the support of the subsistence-oriented domestic economy, the wheat staple would not have been possible’ (p. 141). Russell ends the first half of his book with an exploration of the debate over David Gagan’s thesis that rural Ontario suffered an agricultural crisis during the mid-nineteenth century. Russell begins his agricultural history of the Prairies with an analysis of the struggle between anglophone and francophone settlers for supremacy in the transition of the Red River settlement into the new province of Manitoba. He then explores the role played by railways and homesteading in the agricultural development of the prairies. He shows that while the influence of the US Homestead Act of 1862 on the Dominion Lands Act of 1872 is often commented upon, less attention has been given to the influence of Dominion land policy on US federal legislation. In the early twentieth century tens of thousands of Americans moved north to take advantage of Canadian free or cheap land. The US federal government responded by making its land policy more attractive. Russell argues that Canadian free homesteads played a much more significant role in western settlement than their American counterparts. Russell also shows that the First Nations successfully developed commercial agriculture on the Prairies before the later non-indigenous settlers. However, the Indian Affairs Branch was opposed to economically independent indigenous Canadians and imposed peasant subsistence farming from the late 1880s. This type of farming was ill-suited to the Prairies and resulted, in some cases, in starvation. Russell observes the Indian Affairs Branch also sought at the same time to reduce the size of native reserves to open more land to white settlers. This book is a significant addition to the literature on the history of Canadian agriculture. It has one major shortcoming – insufficient maps. Not all readers will be familiar with the historical geography of nineteenth-century Canada. Richard A. Hawkins, University of Wolverhampton

'Canada Abroad' (at a) crossroads

Abstract: The three co-authors are scholars whose age, gender and nationality differ, but who are united by one characteristic that brings their experiences together: researching and teaching Canadian studies (abroad). Employed at the English Department of Szczecin University in Poland, the three met in 2011 to officially form the Szczecin Canadian Studies Group (SCSG). The aim of this article is to present this mutual experience in greater detail, but also to put into a wider context the state of Canadian studies abroad after the closure of the Understanding Canada: Canadian Studies Program.