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This volume examines the history and current state of Canadian studies in a number of countries and regions across the world, including Canada's major trading partners. From the mid-1980s until 2012, Canadian studies was seen as an important tool of soft power, increasing awareness of Canadian culture, institutions and history. The abrupt termination in 2012 of the Canadian government's financial support for these activities triggered a debate that is still ongoing about the benefits that may have flowed from this support and whether the decision should be reversed. The contributors to this book focus on the process whereby Canadian studies became institutionalized in their respective countries and on the balance between what might be described as Canadian studies for its own sake versus Canadian studies as a deliberate instrument of cultural diplomacy.
"Including a new article "The Swedes in Canada's national game: they changed the face of pro hockey" by Charles Wilkins."
Canada and the Idea of North examines the ways in which Canadians have defined themselves as a northern people in their literature, art, music, drama, history, geography, politics, and popular culture. From the Franklin Mystery to the comic book superheroine Nelvana, Glenn Gould's documentaries, the paintings of Lawren Harris, and Molson beer ads, the idea of the north has been central to the Canadian imagination. Sherrill Grace argues that Canadians have always used ideas of Canada-as-North to promote a distinct national identity and national unity. In a penultimate chapter - "The North Writes Back" - Grace presents newly emerging northern voices and shows how they view the long tradition of representing the North by southern activists, artists, and scholars. With the recent creation of Nunavut, increasing concern about northern ecosystems and social challenges, and renewed attention to Canada's role as a circumpolar nation, Canada and the Idea of North shows that nordicity still plays an urgent and central role in Canada at the start of the twenty-first century.
Responding to the comprehensive topic 'Old Environments - New Environments', scholars from a variety of disciplines reflect the various connotations that the term 'environment' carries in a Canadian context. Whether moving within the realm of foreign policy, visual arts, constitutional questions, tourism, nature preservation or aboriginal rights, these essays put the capaciousness and cohesiveness of the nation to the test by illustrating the pressures enforced upon it by multiculturalism, the claims for self-determination, anti-confederate agitation and globalisation. The environments scrutinised are many and various, but within each the linchpin remains the quest for identity on the part of the individual, the group or the nation at large. Individually as well as collectively, the essays in this volume constitute an important contribution to the ongoing debate on Canadianness.
In this provocative re-examination of the work of Robert Kroetsch, who has been hailed as the father of Canadian post-modernism, Dianne Tiefensee argues that Kroetsch's "deconstruction" fails to address, or even comprehend, the radical nature of Derrida's theory.
In the context of de/colonization, the boundary between an Aboriginal text and the analysis by a non-Aboriginal outsider poses particular challenges often constructed as unbridgeable. Eigenbrod argues that politically correct silence is not the answer but instead does a disservice to the literature that, like all literature, depends on being read, taught, and disseminated in various ways. In Travelling Knowledges, Eigenbrod suggests decolonizing strategies when approaching Aboriginal texts as an outsider and challenges conventional notions of expertise. She concludes that literatures of colonized peoples have to be read ethically, not only without colonial impositions of labels but also with the responsibility to read beyond the text or, in Lee Maracle's words, to become "the architect of great social transformation." Features the works of: Jeannette Armstrong (Okanagan), Louise Halfe (Cree), Margo Kane (Saulteaux/Cree), Maurice Kenny (Mohawk), Thomas King (Cherokee, living in Canada), Emma LaRocque (Cree/Metis), Lee Maracle (Sto: lo/Metis), Ruby Slipperjack (Anishnaabe), Lorne Simon (Miikmaq), Richard Wagamese (Anishnaabe), and Emma Lee Warrior (Peigan)