Imagining Canaan: Anglo-Canadian nationalism and the discourse of refuge

Studies of Canadian nationalism have tended to engage a static set of historical flashpoints and rhetorical themes, which have worked to further entrench Canada as an exceptional nation-state among even its closest geographical, political and historical relations, such as the United States, Great Britain, and Australia. Arguing that the concept of the nation, particularly with respect to settler capitalism, is under-theorized across this literature, this work intervenes in these tendencies toward exceptionalism and reification by considering Canadian nationalist discourse through an interdisciplinary and internationalist lens. This approach is in step with similar anticolonial and anti-capitalist frameworks for analysis from across the broad spectrum of Ethnic and Cultural Studies, which include, but are not limited to, critical Canadian Studies, Settler Colonial and Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, Refugee Studies, and American Studies. Expanding primarily on Eva Mackey’s description of Canadian cultural politics as a ‘house of difference’ (1992), the five chapters of this dissertation work to identify the discourse of refuge, rather than difference, as the organizing thematic for Anglo-Canadian nationalism from the 1971 introduction of Canada’s official policy of Multiculturalism through to the present. By refuge, I mean a set of narrative conceits relating to a space of safety sought by those marked as refugees, in both its literal and metaphorical valences, and both as it accords with and evades explicit definition in international law. Through close readings of select objects and institutions of mass culture that contribute to the ideological reproduction of nationalism, including national newspaper and newsmagazine articles that feature the Underground Railroad, television advertisements known as Heritage Minutes, literary works and national exhibitions and museums such as the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, I examine the ways in which Canada has imagined itself to be an indelible and inheritable space of refuge. These interdisciplinary and internationalist case studies show the centrality of the Underground Railroad and the figure of the Black refugee in constructions of the nation’s prevailing origin story, as well as the principles of inheritance and dispossession as they shape the settler nationalist discourse of refuge. Ultimately, I argue that this discourse is indeed the dominant one of Canadian nationalism in its post-Multiculturalist era, one that works to cohere the national identity and elide ongoing settler capitalist and state-sponsored violences, while simultaneously containing and subduing insurgent anti-capitalist, anti-racist and anti-colonial political struggles. The dissertation concludes with a call for the counter-narrativization of contemporary Canadian nationalism’s discourse of refuge, looking to examples of this kind of imaginative work in the literature of Eden Robinson.

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