Canadian Historical Review Volume 96, Issue 4/ December 2015
This issue contains:
During the 1870s and 1880s, when cartoonists working for Britain's most popular satirical magazine, Punch, wanted to represent Canada visually, they drew on centuries' old artistic conventions that depicted America, and, later, British North America, as a woman and an "Indian." During the same period, in Canada's most popular satirical magazine, Grip, normative portrayals of the embodied nation were unambiguously white. The visual trope of an indigenized, feminized body was enlisted instead to represent Manitoba and the North-West Territories. This imagery disavowed British depictions of Canada as a racialized and colonized subject and relocated the identity of the colonial Other onto the Prairie West. In other words, Grip's images constituted a representational politics that involved both "looking back" at Empire and directing the imperial gaze onto others. Continue Reading...
Ronald Rudin
In 1955, on the bicentenary of the Acadian deportation, the National Film Board released Les aboiteaux, the first film with an original Acadian script and one that spoke volumes about the changing contours of Acadian identity in the postwar period. Directed by Léonard Forest, one of the many Acadian artists depicting their society's engagement with modernity, the film challenged the Acadian self-image of constituting a diasporic people. Instead, Les aboiteaux advanced a more territorial view of Acadian identity, grounded in places such as southeastern New Brunswick where the film takes place. Here Acadians were still living on a landscape created by their pre-deportation forebears through the construction of a system of dykes, known as aboiteaux, which drained the marshlands and allowed the people to settle along the rivers that flowed into the Bay of Fundy. By the 1940s, economic circumstances had led to the decay of the aboiteaux, and so Forest's film, using local actors to give it a documentary feel, describes one Acadian community trying to preserve the ancestral landscape. It shows modern techniques, introduced by the federal Maritime Marshland Rehabilitation Administration, which were able to coexist with more traditional ways, suggesting a bright future for Acadians in a territory they could call their own. Continue Reading...
David Meren
The early twenty-first century witnessed a shift in Canadian international action, how such action is portrayed, and how Canada's international history is deployed to understand Canada and its evolution. This shift has contributed to a growing awareness of the intellectual and political significance of Canada's international history and a heightened awareness of the need for a re-engagement with this history to produce more complex narratives. Demonstrating and encouraging such a re-engagement is the purpose of this historiographical article, which traces the writing of Canadian international history from its origins to a period of crisis in the last three decades of the twentieth century. In so doing, it explores how "empire" and its legacy run through this historiography's various overlapping currents. Flowing from this discussion, the article highlights three "tragedies" that have marked the historiography and that are reflective of, and linked to, tragedies in the history of Canadian encounters with the world. This is followed by an examination of current trends that are contributing to a renewed, more expansive literature, thereby emphasizing the value and potential of Canadian international history as a means to obtain greater understanding of Canada as a project of rule. Continue Reading...
The Tragedies of Canadian International History: A Comment
John English
Diplomatic history in Canada and in North America has faced serious challenges to its methodology and popularity. Although International Relations has become one of the most attractive fields for undergraduates, it has become increasingly linked to the discipline of Political Science and distant from History. Historians understand the need to reinvigorate what once was called diplomatic history and the emphasis on transnational history reflects that ambition. Nevertheless, the writings of William Appleman Williams do not offer a path forward but are rather a return to sterile and stale debates of the past. Continue Reading...
Adam Chapnick
This brief response unpacks and contextualizes the alleged tragedy of a "lack of an effective countervailing voice that could respond to the instrumentalization of Canada's international history for reactionary ends." Rather than advocating a single voice, it suggests the use of multiple perspectives. For international history to flourish in Canada, it explains, we must welcome all sorts of histories, from the bottom and from the top, written for academic and popular audiences and from micro- and macro-level perspectives. A failure to work together, and thereby validate one another's interests and passions, can only lead to further instrumentalization, and nothing would be more tragic than that. Continue Reading...
Réponse à "The Tragedies of Canadian International History" : un autre survol historiographique
Dominique Marshall
Ce commentaire apporte quelques nuances au survol historiographique de David Meren en diminuant la portée des lacunes identifiées. L'article attire aussi l'attention sur des études traditionnellement peu prises en compte par les grandes fresques de l'histoire des relations internationales canadiennes, mais dont les résultats devraient figurer dans la perspective plus englobante dont il esquisse les contours.
This commentary provides nuance to David Meren's historiographical overview, downplaying the seriousness of the gaps noted by the author. It also draws attention to authors who have received traditionally less attention in the broader area of the history of Canadian international relations, but who should be included within the more encompassing course charted by the article. Continue Reading...
David Meren
In addition to engaging with the three commentaries regarding the historiographical essay under discussion, this author's response considers the future of Canadian international history by posing the following questions: (1) who is Canadian international history for?; (2) what is Canadian international history in service to?; and (3) how should we explore Canadian international history? The answers to these questions emphasize the value of a more inclusive and expansive approach. Continue Reading...
