Summary of the thesis "The search for national identity in the public discourse of Canada in the 1950s and 1960s". (original) (raw)
Related papers
\Limited Identities\ Revisited: Regionalism and Nationalism in Canadian History
2000
AS EVERYONE IN THIS AUDIENCE is undoubtedly aware, it was Ramsay Cook who coined the term "limited identities". He first used it in a 1967 article entitled "Canadian Centennial Cerebrations", the main purpose of which was to attack the journal Canadian Dimension for demanding greater government support for Canadian publishers. Such a policy, Cook predicted, would only lead to further outpourings of books featuring "contemplation of the Canadian navel". Indeed, he mused whether anything would be achieved by new books on "the great Canadian problem-our lack of unity and identity" and suggested that "Perhaps instead of constantly deploring our lack of identity, we should attempt to understand and explain the regional, ethnic and class identities that we do have. It might just be that it is in these limited identities that 'Canadianism' is found". 1 Maurice Careless popularized the term in his oft-cited 1969 article, "'Limited Identities' in Canada", in which he insisted that the "Canadian experience" must be "discerned and defined" through the "limited identities of region, culture and class referred to by Professor Cook". Careless concluded that it was this very diversity which largely differentiates Canada from the United States and that "the whole may indeed be greater than the sum of its parts, producing through its internal relationships some sort of common Canadianism". 2 Cook returned to this theme in a 1970 paper on "Nationalism in Canada, or Portnoy's Complaint Revisited", in which he argued that Canada has suffered "from a somewhat more orthodox and less titillating version of Portnoy's complaint: the inability to develop a secure and unique identity". As Cook put it, "Canadian intellectuals and politicians have attempted to play psychiatrist to the Canadian Portnoy" in order to provide Canadians with a national identity which would enable them to transform "selfdeprecation" into "self-assurance". Fortunately, Cook concluded, Canada "stubbornly refuses to exchange its occasionally anarchic pluralism for a strait-jacket identity. Perhaps it is this heterogeneous pluralism itself that is the Canadian identity". 3 It is important to keep in mind the political context in which these comments were made. Prior to the 1960s, Canadian historians had seen as their central responsibility the need to emphasize the economic and political unity of Canada as it evolved from a colony into an independent nation-state. After the Second World War that approach was virtually unchallenged. There were liberal nationalists such as A.R.M. Lower and Frank Underhill, and there were conservative nationalists such as Donald Creighton and C.P. Stacey; but virtually every English-Canadian historian accepted the legitimacy of the Canadian nation-state as a frame of reference. Their approach to
The Concept of Canadian National Character in National Discourse of Canadian Federation after 1867
The article is devoted to the national discourse in Canada and the problem of defining semantic content of its central concepts as "nation" and "national character" in the second half of XIX - early XX cent. The main attention is given to the three important aspects of Canadian national ideology formation. First, historical conditions, events and processes that affected the appearance of Canadian nationalism. Several factors can be mentioned as the most important ones. They are the formation of the Canadian federation in 1867, the struggle for its centralization, the federal government policy of overcoming the isolation and disintegration of provinces, economic development of the Dominion of Canada, national market formation, demographic trends. Secondly, it studies in depth popular political and racial theories of that time and defines the specificity of their perception by Canadian elites during national discourse formation. All this allows us to get close to the main problem solution - to define key concepts of the Canadian national discourse semantic content and its influence on the development of Canadian nationalism and Canadian national identity.
Culture, Canada, and the Nation
Histoire Sociale Social History, 2006
The contributions to this special issue exemplify the cultural turn of the study of nationalism. Although a concern with the narrative construction of national identity runs through the articles in this volume, it is tempered by the authors' inclination to explore the middle ground of social and cultural practices. By asking how Canadians "internalized" notions of national identity, how they incorporated them in their everyday lives and material worlds, and how they constructed a sense of Canadian-ness in inter-cultural encounters, the authors bring to the fore a Canadian nationalism that revealed itself not in the grand national ideal, but in more tangible practices, encounters, and stories. Les articles de ce numéro spécial témoignent du tournant culturel qu'a suivi l'étude du nationalisme. Le souci qu'on semble s'y faire pour la construction narrative de l'identité nationale y est tempéré par la propension des auteurs à chercher à comprendre le terrain mitoyen entre les pratiques sociales et culturelles. En se demandant comment les Canadiens ont « intériorisé » les notions d'identité nationale, comment ils les ont intégrées à leur quotidien et à leur monde matériel et comment ils ont forgé leur canadianité au fil des rencontres interculturelles, les auteurs révèlent un nationalisme canadien qui prend non pas la forme du grand idéal national, mais celui de pratiques, de rencontres et de récits plus tangibles. * Barbara Lorenzkowski and Steven High, guest editors of this issue of Histoire sociale/Social History, are faculty members in the Department of History at Concordia University. The editors are grateful for financial support received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Nipissing University, the latter of which provided a superb venue for the conference "Cultural Approaches to the Study of Canadian Nationalism", from which this theme issue is derived. Thank you, as well, to Colin Coates for offering such gracious and sound advice on the editing of this volume. 1 Anne Clendinning, "Exhibiting a Nation: Canada at the British Empire Exhibition, 1924-25", pp. 79-107. 2 We solicited the French-language contributions by Godefroy Desrosiers-Lauzon and Jocelyn Létourneau specifically for this volume. The term "realms of memory" is borrowed from Pierre Nora's magisterial Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. III
The Centenary of Confederation as a Milestone in the Evolution of Canadian National Consciousness
Études canadiennes / Canadian Studies, 2018
The centenary of the Canadian Confederation is regarded as one of the key moments in the evolution of Canadian nationhood. This paper focuses on those structural determinants by which Canadian national identity had been formed and articulated in the public discourse through large-scale celebratory activities. Analyzing temporal symbolism of major Centennial events, the paper examines how they treated the theme of Canadian past, present, and future. It is claimed that it was the past that drew most attention for those who saw the Centenary of Confederation as an opportunity to strengthen Canada’s unity and foster pan-Canadian national identity. Le centenaire de la Confédération Canadienne est considéré comme un des moments clés dans l’évolution de l’esprit national des Canadiens. Le présent article se focalise sur les déterminants structurels qui ont formé l’identité nationale canadienne et ont été exprimés dans les discours publics par la voie de grands événements festifs. En analysant le symbolisme temporel des événements majeurs du centenaire, cet article étudie comment ils ont traité le sujet du passé, du présent et du futur du Canada. Il est affirmé que c’est le passé qui a attiré le plus d’attention de ceux qui ont considéré le centenaire de la Confédération comme une occasion de renforcer de l’unité du Canada et du développement de l’identité nationale canadienne.
What nation, which people? Representations of national identity in English-Canadian history textbooks from 1945 to 1970 José E. Igartua, Department of History, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, QC, CANADA In Canada, education is a responsibility of the provincial levels of government. Curriculum content and textbook approval are therefore not uniform across the country. Yet Ontario, the largest province, in practice specified the contents of high school Canadian history textbooks across the country until the 1960s, when textbooks fell out of fashion, because publishing houses could not afford to produce different editions for different provinces. Therefore, an analysis of textbooks authorized for use in Ontario provides an overview of the texts used throughout English-speaking Canada. This paper surveys the Canadian history textbooks authorized in Ontario during the period from the Second World War to the end of the 1960s. It summarizes a systematic examination of all textbooks that draws out the representations of national identity imbedded in the textbooks. In the 1940s and 1950s, Canadian history textbooks placed 'race' at the core of definitions of Canadian identity. They tended to "explain" Canadian history by the ingrained characteristics of the two major 'races,' the French and the British. The contrasting characteristics of each 'race' were presented as the explanation for much of the political conflicts in Canadian history. While Canadians of British origin were depicted as a "progressive" and "democratic," French Canadians were portrayed as simple, happy, and backward peasants. Natives and Canadians of immigrant origin only marginally appear in the story. The stereotypes in which textbooks grounded Canadian history were attenuated in the 1960s, but did not disappear. As Canada grew closer to the United States, the prescribed Ontario curriculum and the textbooks geared to it mandated a continentalist perspective on Canadian history based on the common British origins of Canadians and Americans rather than on their belonging to the same continent. The presence of French Canadians, the Ontario curriculum stated, did not alter that fact. While textbooks now depicted French Canadians in a somewhat more favourable light, they retained the underlying concept of 'race' as the prime building block of Canadian identity. These 'racial' stereotypes made it difficult for English-speaking schoolchildren, and for their parents, to understand the political upheaval under way in the Province of Quebec in the 1960s.