The Dark of Heartlessness: Canadian Identity and Hypocrisy in Ralph Connor's The Foriegner (original) (raw)
2011
Loewen and Friesen trace the origins of public concern about the adverse influence of immigrants in terms of increased competition for jobs, threats to social cohesion, questioning the loyalties of newcomers at the beginning of the 20th century--issues remarkably similar to the mythology describing immigrants in western societies today. Readers may be tempted to ask, If the situation in the 1900s is so similar to today\u27s, why read this book? Not only will readers get a sense of the longevity of these and other myths surrounding migration, they will learn about the creation of ethnic culture in the prairies and leave with a better understanding of immigration in Canada that is germane to comprehending current migrant issues. It is a book that all scholars of Canadian migration history should read
\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
Western Canadian Identity and the American "Other
University of Saskatchewan Undergraduate Research Journal, 2015
This paper investigates the creation of settler identity in the North American West within a comparative Canada/US framework. The creation of a colonial "other" was an important aspect in the creation of settler identity on both sides of the border. It is argued that one particular image of the Native American "other," that of the "ignoble savage" came to dominate the American imagination, while Western Canadians relied primarily on another image of the "other" in constructing their identity-the image of the inferior American. Whereas American and Canadian settlers both manipulated the imagery surrounding Native Americans to foster a sense of settler superiority, the image of the American as immoral, violent, and generally inferior to Canadians was the most persistent image of the "other" for Western Canadians. Through historical analyses of primary source material such as newspapers, popular fiction, and immigration pamphlets, and analyses of Canada/US relations, this paper explores the image of the inferior American "other" and its importance in the settling of the Canadian West.
Histoire Sociale/Social History, 2017
With their life-story approach, Barber and Watson build on, and offer comparisons with, Jim Hammerton and Al Thomson's Ten Pound Poms (a study [End Page 450] of the English in Australia) and Murray Watson's Being English in Scotland. The authors challenge the invisibility of English immigrants in Canadian historiography and suggest rather that "in many respects the English are invisible, though audible" (p. 153). Their analysis sheds light on the range of factors motivating English emigrants and on the ways in which they experienced Canada's newly adopted role as a civic nation. The writers ground these narratives in a wealth of secondary literature, select periodicals, and archival documents, and consider them in relation to "contextual issues related to family and gender, social class, welfare, race and ethnicity, sensory perception, technology, and popular culture" (p. 28). However, one should read their conclusions with caution, since about one-third of English immigrants returned to England or moved elsewhere, and the authors interviewed none of these people.
1995
In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission.
2014
Since 2009, Discover Canada has been the only official study guide for the Canadian citizenship examination, and I argue that this guidebook is a hegemonic settler-making tool. Critical Discourse Analysis is utilized in combination with theories of subjectivity and analyses of settler colonialism to reveal how Discover Canada contains discourses exploitative to both new immigrants and Aboriginal peoples. A clear pioneer narrative is formed, in which images of Aboriginal peoples’ presence and loss are used to exalt Canada and its ‘original’ British and French settlers. Citizenship candidates are interpellated by Canada’s pioneer narrative through a promise of future citizenship, even while textually positioned below the existing settler body as second-class settlers who need to prove their ‘earned’ Canadianness constantly. This interpellation depends on the erasure of Aboriginal peoples by representing Aboriginal peoples’ disappearance as mirroring a narrative of Euro-Canadian progre...
University of Toronto Quarterly, 2017
father (his daughter Jennifer Surridge co-edits these diaries-a Herculean endeavour); he was a devoted husband. He also noted with cute acronym every instance of sexual congress with his wife, Brenda, and rated each act with one word (''admirable,'' ''surprising,'' etc.). At the end of each year he tallied up his performances and explained any falling off (partner away on vacation, intermittent bouts of impotence). His bigotries and prejudices abound (the Irish, Jews, etc.), some excusable for the times, but not all. In a period of increasing demand for women's equality, he refused to admit females to Massey College (this was the early 1960s, not the mid-nineteenth century). But then, Robertson Davies always suffused himself with an anachronistic air, with the high-Victorian tilt to the prophetically bearded visage declaiming graphically his stubborn allegiance to English literature's greatest century, even if the time had passed-most unfortunate-some hundred years earlier. Davies could always turn a phrase, delight with a stentorian sentence, but there are too few in these selections from the many sorts of diary he kept. These records are more mundane reports than revelatory musings, and much is pedestrian, even boring. The stretches of tedium can still be interesting generally for the picture they paint of the thoroughly Anglo-Canadian culture of mid-twentieth century. The insider portraits of the members of the highly influential, and somewhat dilettantish, Massey family also recommend a sporadic reading. But mainly these diary excerpts will be of interest to those readers who have the desire and time to learn a lot more about three things: the vicissitudes of the staging, touring, and precipitous closing on Broadway of the Guthrie-directed dramatization of Salterton's second novel, Leaven of Malice; the founding and furnishing of Massey College; and the daily Robertson Davies 1959-1963.
‘“Anglo-Conformity”: Assimilation policy in Canada, 1890s-1950s’
International Journal of Canadian Studies, 2014
In the late nineteenth century Canada started to receive large waves of non-British migrants for the very first time in its history. These new settlers arrived in a country that saw itself very much as a British society. English-speaking Canadians considered themselves a core part of a worldwide British race. French Canadians, however, were obviously excluded from this ethnic identity. The maintenance of the country as a white society was also an integral part of English-speaking Canada’s national identity. Thus, white non-British migrants were required to assimilate into this English-speaking Canadian or Anglocentric society without delay. But in the early 1950s the British identity of English-speaking Canada began to decline ever so slowly. The first steps toward the gradual breakdown of the White Canada policy also occurred at this time. This had a corresponding weakening effect on the assimilation policy adopted toward non-British migrants, which was based on Anglo-conformity. À la fin du 19e siècle, pour la première fois de son histoire, le Canada commençait à accueillir des vagues importantes d’immigrants non britanniques. Ces nouveaux arrivants entraient dans un pays qui se percevait en grande partie comme une société britannique. Les anglophones canadiens se considéraient en effet comme une composante centrale de la « race » britannique mondiale. Les francophones, en revanche, étaient de toute évidence exclus de cette identité ethnique. Par ailleurs, une autre composante essentielle de l’identité nationale canadienne anglophone était la pérennité du pays en tant que société blanche. Les immigrants blancs non britanniques étaient donc tenus de s’assimiler sans délai à la société anglophone anglocentrique. Mais dans les années 1950, l’identité britannique des anglophones du Canada a commencé à s’effriter lentement. La politique du « White Canada » a aussi commencé à se fissurer à ce moment-là, et cela a affaibli conséquemment la politique d’assimilation reposant sur « l’angloconformité » adoptée envers les immigrants non britanniques.
Historical Social Research, 2016
»Die komplexen Beziehungen zwischen Etablierten und Außenseitern in Kanada: Reintegration sozialgeschichtlicher Analyse und Auseinandersetzung mit einigen postkolonialen Betrachtungen«. Canada represents a compelling illustration of the complexities of established-outsiders relations. A close examination of various historical processes, such as the official narrative of two founding peoples, different waves of colonization, and racialized immigration policies, sheds light on how dynamic and ever changing established-outsiders relations are developing. It also uncovers the tremendous importance of racialization in the shaping of Canadian figurations. First, I offer some historical highlights on the colonization processes and their effects on establishedoutsiders relations in Canada. Second, I look at inclusion / exclusion dynamics in the different immigration waves and focus more specifically on "whitening." It shows that established and outsiders are not two black boxes but very fluid and dynamic relational patterns. Lastly, I present the persistent hierarchies of the hierarchies within both the French-speakers and English-speakers which allows me to open the discussion on the problematic conceptualization of identity as a single root and multiculturalism. I finally argue that taking seriously rhizomatic identities seems a promising avenue to overcome establishedoutsiders relations.
The Predicament of Belonging: The Status of Enemy Aliens in Canada, 1914
This essay examines Canada’s internment of enemy aliens during the First World War. The internment of thousands of aliens, who had been invited to Canada short years before as immigrants, was not grounded in international law or xenophobia. Instead, the decision by the Borden Cabinet to intern enemy aliens was rooted in an imperialist understanding of Canada and the associated understanding of individuals as subjects of a sovereign. Internment forced the articulation of these important categories and, as a result, the deci- sion casts light on broader notions of “belonging” in pre-war Canada.