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Rethinking the Great White North

Rethinking the Great White North

Race, Nature, and the Historical Geographies of Whiteness in Canada

Edited by Andrew Baldwin, Laura Cameron and Audrey Kobayashi

Published by: University of British Columbia Press

Imprint: UBC Press

356 Pages, 152.00 × 229.00 mm, 3 b&w photos, 2 maps

Paperback
9780774820141
Published: July 2012

£28.99

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Hardcover
9780774820134
Published: September 2011

£84.00

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Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

Canadian national identity is bound to the idea of a Great White North. Images of snow, wilderness, and emptiness seem innocent, yet this path-breaking volume shows they contain the seeds of contemporary racism.

Rethinking the Great White North moves the idea of whiteness to the centre of debates about Canadian history, geography, and identity. Informed by critical race theory and the insight that racism is geographical as well as historical and cultural, the contributors trace how notions of race, whiteness, and nature helped shape Canada's identity as a white country in travel writing and treaty making; scientific research and park planning; and within small towns, cities, and tourist centres. These nuanced explorations of diverse historical geographies of nature not only revisit the past: they offer a new vocabulary for contemporary debates on Canada's role in the North and the nature of multiculturalism.

Introduction: Where Is the Great White North? Spatializing History, Historicizing Whiteness / Andrew Baldwin, Laura Cameron, and Audrey Kobayashi

Part 1: Identity and Knowledge

1 "A Phantasy in White in a World That Is Dead": Grey Owl and the Whiteness of Surrogacy / Bruce Erickson

2 Indigenous Knowledge and the History of Science, Race, and Colonial Authority in Northern Canada / Stephen Bocking

3 Cap Rouge Remembered? Whiteness, Scenery, and Memory in Cape Breton Highlands National Park / Catriona Sandilands

Part 2: City Spaces

4 The "Occult Relation between Man and the Vegetable": Transcendentalism, Immigrants, and Park Planning in Toronto, c. 1900 / Phillip Gordon Mackintosh

5 SARS and Service Work: Infectious Disease and Racialization in Toronto / Claire Major and Roger Keil

6 Shimmering White Kelowna and the Examination of Painless White Privilege in the Hinterland of British Columbia / Luis L.M. Aguiar and Tina I.L. Marten

Part 3: Arctic Journeys

7 Inscription, Innocence, and Invisibility: Early Contributions to the Discursive Formation of the North in Samuel Hearne's A Journey to the Northern Ocean / Richard Milligan and Tyler McCreary

8 Copper Stories: Imaginative Geographies and Material Orderings of the Central Canadian Arctic / Emilie Cameron

Part 4: Native Land

9 Temagami's Tangled Wild: The Making of Race, Nature, and Nation in Early-Twentieth-Century Ontario / Jocelyn Thorpe

10 Resolving "the Indian Land Question"? Racial Rule and Reconciliation in British Columbia / Brian Egan

11 Changing Land Tenure, Defining Subjects: Neo-Liberalism and Property Regimes on Native Reserves / Jessica Dempsey, Kevin Gould, and Juanita Sundberg

Interlocations

Extremity: Theorizing from the Margins / Kay Anderson

Colonization: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly / Sherene H. Razack

Notes

References

Index

Andrew Baldwin is a lecturer in human geography at Durham University. Laura Cameron is an associate professor of geography at Queen's University and Canada Research Chair in Historical Geographies of Nature. Audrey Kobayashi is a professor of geography and Queen's Research Chair at Queen's University.

Contributors: Luis L.M. Aguiar, Kay Anderson, Stephen Bocking, Emilie Cameron, Jessica Dempsey, Brian Egan, Bruce Erickson, Kevin Gould, Roger Keil, Phillip Gordon Mackintosh, Claire Major, Tina I.L. Marten, Tyler McCreary, Richard Milligan, Sherene H. Razack, Catriona Sandilands, Juanita Sundberg, and Jocelyn Thorpe.

Innovative...the book is also particularly stimulating in its attempt to read urban geographies against and/or as part of Canada's constitutive interaction with "nature." - Bruno Cornellier, Centre for Globalization and Cultural Studies, University of Manitoba (Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Vol. 13 No. 3, Winter 2012) Is the issue race or whiteness? Nature or wilderness? The best papers in this collection engage the tensions between key concepts, offering not only theoretically engaged analyses of the Canadian situation but also seeking to advance conceptual understanding of race or whiteness and nature or wilderness. - Shannon Stunden Bower, University of Alberta (The Goose, Issue 10, 2012)