Journal of Canadian Studies

Long dismissed as a “critical error” ( Booth 2016 ) and still capable of inciting “embarrassment palpable” ( Watson 2006 ) among scholars otherwise happy to emphasize the material contexts that inform the circulation of texts, literary tourism has recently become the focus of serious academic inquiry. Recent work has begun to disaggregate the various forms of literary tourist sites ( Fawcett and Cormack 2001 ), but continues to have a methodological gap surrounding the specifically literary aspects of the practice itself, and—with the notable exception of Green Gables (Squire 1992; Devereux 2001 )—has left Canada predictably unexamined. This essay begins with a brief introduction to literary tourism in Canada before moving into a comparative analysis of two National Historic Sites associated with Canadian literary authors: the Robert Service cabin in Dawson City, Yukon, and the John McCrae House in Guelph, Ontario. The sites offer a compelling comparison as the former homes of two of the best-known Canadian poets of the early twentieth century whose works have become popularly synonymous with two of Canada’s most heavily mythologized eras. The enduring popularity of poems like “The Cremation of Sam McGee” reflect not only Service’s central role in mythologizing Canada’s north but also a strategic “cultural commoditization” of the area’s gold rush heritage ( Jarvenpa 1994 ; Grace 2001 ), while McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” retains its status not only as the “most popular poem” of the First World War in Canada and beyond ( Fussell 2000 ), but also as a primary example of the ideological function of Great War literature within Canada ( Holmes 2005 ; Gordon 2014 ). Although the two author houses may initially appear a study in contrasts, I draw on recent work in literary tourist studies to argue they are linked in their function as “materialized fictions” ( Hendrix 2008 ), or concrete interpretative frames that aim to offer tangible evidence of the Canadian myths their former inhabitants helped to fashion.

Robert Zacharias

“Merely to See and Touch It”: On Service, McCrae, and Literary Tourism in Canada

“仅仅是为了看和触摸它”：论服务、麦凯雷与加拿大文学旅游

Historical accounts of commissions of inquiry in Canada make only passing reference to the seminal 1846 Inquires Act. None explore the provenance of this legislation beyond a few sentences of the most general conjecture. This paper contends that Canada’s first Inquiries Act was a by-product of a political crisis that grew out of the politics and institutional processes integral to the resolution of claims for rebellion losses in Canada during the 1840s. As the events associated with the passage of the 1849 Rebellion Losses Bill would disclose, this crisis posed an existential threat to the viability of the Union. The passage of the Inquiries Act, precipitated by the immediate contingencies of the rebellion losses crisis, marked for Canada a fundamental shift in constitutional authority dating back to 1688. The Act embraced methods of inquiry denied to the Crown since the late seventeenth century. Though created by a democratic legislature, the Inquiries Act revived a Crown-driven inquisitional approach to public inquires long since inoperative in Great Britain. The Act thus marked a shift in the relationship between state and citizen, and opened a new terrain for the long struggle to protect the individual against the all-powerful state.

Tom Mitchell

1846: Canada’s FirstInquiries Act

1846年：加拿大的第一部《调查法》

In early 2019, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) intervened at the Gidimt’en Access Checkpoint in northern British Columbia (BC) and arrested 14 land defenders, garnering global media attention. To explore the ways that settler common sense ( Rifkin 2013 ) is assembled and perpetuated in Canada, this paper examines how Wet’suwet’en mobilization is framed in news media coverage. Situating our work in relation to settler colonial studies and informed by the writings of Indigenous scholars, we use critical discourse analysis to assess mainstream news media framings of the Wet’suwet’en struggle. Drawing from literature on social movement suppression, we discern three main themes in these texts that work to validate the RCMP’s excessive use of force against land defenders and delegitimize the Wet’suwet’en’s claim to sovereignty. While this framing set the stage for sustained corporate incursions, police surveillance, and occupation across unceded Wet’suwet’en territory, we suggest negative framing as well as activist use of social media to visualize state repression may have created the conditions for what Hess and Martin (2006) call backfire.

Rebecca Hume

Kevin Walby

Framing, Suppression, and Colonial Policing Redux in Canada: News Representations of the 2019 Wet’suwet’en Blockade

框架、压制与殖民警务重现：2019年加拿大Wet’suwet’en封锁的新闻报道

The Toronto Raptors’ 2019 National Basketball Association (NBA) championship win, a first for the franchise and for a Canadian team, “turned hockey country into basketball nation” ( CBC Radio 2020 ). Canadians’ burgeoning embrace of the team and the sport seemed to point to a growing celebration of Blackness within the nation. However, we problematize the 2019 championship win to tell a more expansive story about how sport and national myths conceal truths about race and belonging in Canada. We explore two particular cases—the “We The North” campaign and the media coverage of Raptors superfan Nav Bhatia—to highlight the contradictory ways that the Raptors coverage mobilized symbols of the North and multiculturalism to present the team as quintessentially Canadian and rebrand basketball for Canadian audiences. We further explore how these stark contradictions manifest in the racialized policing of basketball courts in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). These cases demonstrate that the celebrations of the Raptors and basketball not only continued to police racialized bodies, but also ensured that their inclusion was contingent on the maintenance of the status quo.

Funké Aladejebi

Kristi A. Allain

Rhonda C. George

Ornella Nzindukiyimana

“We the North”? Race, Nation, and the Multicultural Politics of Toronto’s First NBA Championship

“我们北方”？种族、民族与多伦多首座NBA冠军的多重文化政治

This essay examines the respective mythologizing and debunking of Canada’s “moral superiority” over the United States on matters of white-Black race relations in Benjamin Drew’s 1856 The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada and Samuel Gridley Howe’s 1864 The Refugees from Slavery in Canada West. Their accounts of the impact of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and American Civil War on Canadian and American political reputations are instructive. The historical presence of Black people in the making of Ontario’s history and its relationship to American antebellum history helps to understand in part from where the superiority myth originates. The impact of the American Civil War on the making of Canada as a political entity has been studied by historians but its cultural force is less studied, particularly in literary studies. The relative absence of such knowledge seems part and parcel of the negative definition of Canada as not-American, indeed anti-American, and has helped to continue the mythology of Canada’s moral superiority over the US on matters of white-Black relations. Drew’s and Howe’s work on the substantial presence of Black settlers in early Ontario has been invaluable for the study of both the diaspora and settlement of Black freedom seekers in Upper Canada/Canada West in the antebellum period. Analysis of the rhetoric of national differences on racism in Drew’s The Refugee (1856) and Howe’s The Refugees (1864), particularly on education and law, counters, as does a wealth of scholarship by Black scholars, the myth of Canada’s racial benevolence.

Donna Palmateer Pennee

Benjamin Drew and Samuel Gridley Howe on Race Relations in Early Ontario: Mythologizing and Debunking Canada West’s “Moral Superiority”

本杰明·德鲁和塞缪尔·格里德利·豪论早期安大略的种族关系：神话化与揭穿加拿大西部的“道德优越性”

Meg Holden

Daniel Silver

Ana Karinna Hidalgo

Pierre Filion

Sandra Breux

Book Review Symposium on Crossing Paths, Crossing Perspectives: Urban Studies in British Columbia and Quebec

《交错路径，交错视角：不列颠哥伦比亚与魁北克的城市研究》书评研讨会

Between 1912 and 1947, when it sank, the icebreaker the RMS Nascopie, a British-made vessel commissioned by the HBC to be used as a supply ship, serviced the eastern Canadian Arctic. For an eight-year period during this time it also counted tourists among its passengers, alongside HBC personnel, missionaries, medical practitioners, scientists, and government officials. Life aboard the ship, wildlife, sea ice, inclement weather, and Inuit were all documented in the reports, written diaries, and visual records that emanated from the Nascopie as it operated under the many, often contradictory, guises of icebreaker, supply vessel, cruise ship, and sovereign symbol. Looking across photography, painting, and printmaking during the 1930s through to the present day, I consider the Nascopie as an anchor between the visual arts and the coastal landscape. Here, I position Inuit and non-Inuit perceptions of cultural and environmental change and continuity along Canada’s coastline within the transformative effect of colonial modernity. Image-making, notably photography and painting, aboard the Nascopie sought to reproduce the Canadian Arctic as an object of collective history and national identity. Confronting the often-anonymous Inuit and Arctic environments throughout the photography and painting of Lorene Squire and F.H. Varley, I identify how the Nascopie, as a colonial actor in the local landscape, persists in contemporary Inuit visual and cultural memory, most notably in the work of Shuvinai Ashoona. By untangling the inter-media and multi-temporal role of the Nascopie across past and present image cultures, I explore the intertwined narratives of coastal history, visual culture, and colonial modernity in the eastern Canadian Arctic.

Isabelle Gapp

All Aboard the Nascopie: Image-Making, Colonial Modernity, and Coastal Memory in the Canadian Eastern Arctic

《登上Nascopie号：影像制作、殖民现代性与加拿大北极东部沿海记忆》

Biodiversity conservation is at an inflection point. With the crises of biodiversity loss and climate change, novel strategies are needed to conserve ecosystems under a variety of property regimes. In southwestern Alberta, the Waldron Ranch Grazing Cooperative and the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) have collaborated to use conservation easements (CEs) to place over 30,000 acres (12,140 hectares) of endangered grassland under perpetual protection. Waldron Ranch provides a unique case study, not only due to the size of the total CE, but also the cooperative structure that requires 72 Albertan ranchers to agree on restricting their productivity for conservation protections. We interviewed four individuals from the Cooperative and NCC to understand the motivations, values, and impacts that influenced the CE placement. Key themes include historic sustainable management and minimal impacts to livelihoods, with economic benefits being crucial for CE enrollment, which contrasts with findings from existing literature. Considering these, we expand on the critical role of landowner values and fears when using CEs as a tool for private land conservation. We argue that environmental nongovernmental organizations (eNGOs) need to deeply understand the social complexities that exist on private landscapes if voluntary collaborations are pursued for conservation benefits.

Forrest Hisey

Jonah Olsen

Collaborative Management on the Eastern Slopes: The Waldron Ranch Grazing Cooperative and Conservation Easement Motivations

东坡协作管理：瓦尔德伦牧场放牧合作社与保护地役权动机

In this article, I critically theorize my lived experiences with cofounding The People’s Pantry (TPP), a Toronto-based mutual aid project formed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic by racialized queer, trans, and women organizers. Drawing attention to how TPP was slowly cooptated from within, I apply the concepts of Non-Profitization, Social Death, and Grievable Death to explain TPP’s trajectory as both racialized and systematic. I argue that COVID-19 originally created a fluidified climate of deracialized social death that enabled mutual aid to not only punctuate, but dominate, the whitestream. This, in turn, prompted an unprecedented influx of monied white Canadians to join the counterpublic praxis. These volunteers joined mutual aid groups, such as TPP, and fought for our ethos of transformative justice right after COVID-19 struck but ultimately abandoned the ethic when presented with the opportunity to go back to “normal”. Yet at the same time, many of these volunteers remained active in mutual aid and continued to participate in the movement. As such, they slowly infused mutual aid with the hierarchical logics of charity practices, thus promoting its non-profitization from within. Observing the harmful impacts that this has had on TPP, I conclude by cautioning other racialized queer, trans, and women organizers against uncritically welcoming monied white people into our transformative justice spaces immediately following the onset of a severe crisis.

Jade Da Costa

Charity Not Solidarity: COVID-19 and the Non-Profitization of Mutual Aid in Canada

慈善而非团结：COVID-19与加拿大互助的非营利化

Featuring data from a nationwide survey of English faculty in Canada, this study focuses on the reasons that faculty offered for choosing their respective doctoral programs. This analysis pays particular attention to gendered disparities in participants’ responses and to disparities associated with parental educational level, two variables that sometimes intersect in striking ways. This investigation explains why some reasons that women and first-generation university students provided for their choice of doctoral program can increase a student’s chances of entering a poorly ranked program. Employing previously unprocessed data from Statistics Canada, this article also presents information to help would-be PhD students who are women, first-generation university students, or both make more informed decisions about where to pursue doctoral study to be more competitive in the academic job market if they aspire to be professors. This article is simultaneously designed to increase faculty mentors’ understanding of the problematic logic that women and first-generation university students may use when selecting their PhD programs so that such mentors can better address these students’ misperceptions about doctoral studies and the profession.

Lynn Arner

How to Choose an English Doctoral Program: A Guide for Women, First-Generation University Students, and Their Mentors

如何选择英语博士项目：针对女性、第一代大学生及其导师的指南

ISSN	0021-9495, 1911-0251
h-index	19

Publication Information	Publisher: University of Toronto Press，Publishing cycle: ，Journal Type: journal，Open Access Journals: No
Basic data	Year of publication: 2002，Proportion of original research papers: 100.00%，Self Citation Rate:14.30%， Gold OA Rate: 0.00%

Journal of Canadian Studies

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