In the diversified and ambiguous, globally and glocally networked mobile present, national identities are challenged internally and externally in multiple ways. In Canada intellectuals and notable novelists have lately begun to remember and re-discover the significance of the First World War for their construction of a Canadian national identity. The book presents the first large-scale interdisciplinary analysis of these developments. The author of this Bourdieusian inspired literary-critical research work nails down the sociological foundations of the concept of the nation before then discussing aspects of the role of the First World War for (Canadian) national identity and the relevant memorial discourse. The reconstruction focuses on how remarkable Canadian authors – including Hugh MacLennan, Timothy Findley, Jack Hodgins, Jane Urquhart, Frances Itani and Joseph Boyden – have challenged, re-imagined and rewritten the Nation Forged in Fire-myth in the 20th and 21st century to bring to life the experiences of national minorities like women, indigenous people, migrants, war veterans, children and people with disabilities. The study shows that the literary workings on the myth, myth reconstruction and myth deconstruction is a fascinating though ambivalent and dynamic project in the Third Millennium.
Kategorie: Neuerscheinungen
Mary Jane Logan McCallum (Author), Adele Perry (Author)
Structures of Indifference examines an Indigenous life and death in a Canadian city and what it reveals about the ongoing history of colonialism. At the heart of this story is a thirty-four-hour period in September 2008. During that day and half Brian Sinclair, a middle-aged, non-Status Anishinaabeg resident of Manitoba’s capital city, arrived in the emergency room of the Health Sciences Centre, Winnipeg’s major downtown hospital, was left untreated and unattended to, and ultimately died from an easily treatable infection. His death reflects a particular structure of indifference born of and maintained by colonialism.
McCallum and Perry present the ways in which Sinclair, once erased and ignored, came to represent diffuse, yet singular and largely dehumanized ideas about Indigenous people, modernity, and decline in cities. This story tells us about ordinary indigeneity in the city of Winnipeg through Sinclair’s experience and restores the complex humanity denied him in his interactions with Canadian health and legal systems, both before and after his death.
Structures of Indifference completes the story left untold by the inquiry into Sinclair’s death, the 2014 report of which omitted any consideration of underlying factors, including racism and systemic discrimination.
Helga Elisabeth Bories-Sawala / Thibault Martin (†)
Cette étude se présente en trois volumes. Elle analyse la place allouée à l’histoire autochtone dans l’enseignement et à l’image qu’il transmet des Autochtones et de leur rôle dans l’histoire canadienne et québécoise ainsi que la constitution implicite ou explicite d’un NOUS collectif par rapport à l’AUTRE. Un premier volume retrace l’évolution des contenus et des discours des manuels d’histoire du Québec depuis les années 1980 au programme « Histoire et éducation à la citoyenneté « au second cycle de l’enseignement secondaire et des manuels actuels du primaire. Le second volume s’intéresse à la perception de l’histoire autochtone dans la conscience des jeunes, aussi bien francophones, anglophones et autochtones en analysant un millier de copies d’élèves à travers le Québec. Dû aux retards dans la publication des manuels définitifs du nouveau programme „Histoire du Québec et du Canada“ des années 2016-17-18, leur analyse sera réservée à un troisième volume (prévu pour 2019). Pour conclure l’ensemble, le discours majoritaire dans l’enseignement de l’histoire nationale y sera confronté à celui de manuels d’histoire autochtones conçus spécialement pour eux.
Que la publication en ligne des résultats de cette recherche les mettant gratuitement à la disposition de tous serve à concevoir un meilleur enseignement de l’histoire commune des Québécois est notre souhait qui accompagne le lancement de l’ouvrage. Il aura lieu officiellement le 12 octobre prochain, de 10:30 à 12:00 heures, à l’université du Québec en Outaouais, dans le cadre d’un hommage à Thibault Martin
An important resource about Canadian art history directed by Louise Déry, Curation and coordination by Josée Desforges
Even though the warm season is going strong, you might already be reflecting on next year’s teaching activities. With that in mind, Galerie de l’UQAM invites you to take some time to explore its new virtual exhibition, 150 Years | 150 Works, a unique asset for teaching Canadian art history. The virtual exhibition presents art as an integral part of Canada’s social and political history. It looks at Canada through 150 works that have in some way shaped or changed the country’s history over the past century and a half.
Check out the online exhibition here.
by Rosmarin Heidenreich
In the first half of the twentieth century, a number of Canadian authors were revealed to have faked the identities that made them famous. What is extraordinary about these writers is that they actually „became,“ in everyday life, characters they had themselves invented. Many of their works were simultaneously fictional and autobiographical, reflecting the duality of their identities. In Literary Impostors, Rosmarin Heidenreich tells the intriguing stories, both the „true“ and the fabricated versions, of six Canadian authors who obliterated their pasts and re-invented themselves: Grey Owl was in fact an Englishman named Archie Belaney; Will James, the cowboy writer from the American West, was the Quebec-born francophone Ernest Dufault; the prairie novelist Frederick Philip Grove turned out to be the German writer and translator Felix Paul Greve. Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, Onoto Watanna, and Sui Sin Far were the chosen identities of three mixed-race writers whose given names were, respectively, Sylvester Long, Winnifred Eaton, and Edith Eaton. Heidenreich argues that their imposture, in some cases not discovered until long after their deaths, was not fraudulent in the usual sense: these writers forged new identities to become who they felt they really were. In an age of proliferating cyber-identities and controversial claims to ancestry, Literary Impostors raises timely questions involving race, migrancy, and gender to illustrate the porousness of the line that is often drawn between an author’s biography and the fiction he or she produces.
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