Culture, Canada, and the Nation (original) (raw)

2006, Histoire Sociale Social History

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