The Great White North Encounters September 11: Race, Gender, and Nation in Canada's National Daily, the Globe and Mail

Terror is a feature of the symbolic order, the vast mesh of representations and narratives both official and unofficial public and private, in which a culture works out its sense of itself It affects that dynamic but relatively stable set of implicit parameters that establish a group's sense of the actual and the possible and create a loose but definite sense of collective identity.--Geoffrey Galt Harpham (2002: 573) ********** BY BEGINNING THIS ARTICLE WITH AN EPIGRAPH FROM HARPHAM, MY INTENTION IS to highlight the nexus between the construction of terror and the consolidation of national identity. In the following sections, I argue that Canada's national daily, The Globe and Mail offered a symbolic and discursive universe that reinvented the Other in ways that helped to re-inscribe the nation as a peaceful haven. I contend that such an imaginary has strategic uses in formulating discourses of nationness, reflecting a textured landscape in which race, gender, and nation are interwoven in ways that suggest a unifying and homogeneous national identity. In the first part of the article, I discuss the centrality of the news media as purveyors of hegemonic ideals, and as unifying forces in solidifying a sense of an imagined collective, one based on a shared adherence to national mythologies. In the latter part of the article, I turn to an analysis of the coverage provided by the Globe and Mail, one of the national dailies, in the immediate aftermath of the events of September 11. Exercising an informal textual and discourse analysis of the paper's coverage, I outline the various ways in which race and gender are utilized as tropes by which to secure an image of the Canadian nation as a peaceful haven threatened by Others, whose differences are inflected in raced and gendered ways. I pay particular attention to representations of Muslim women, especially those in Afghanistan. Situating the Print Media in the Canadian Landscape In a nation whose geographic size is enormous and whose population lives on a miniscule percentage of the total land mass, the role of the national media assumes even greater import when considering issues of social cohesion and the construction of an imagined community (Anderson, 1983). The news media are a crucial conduit through which representational discourses about the self and other are communicated (Sreberny, 2002). Getting news to various provinces and territories and incorporating news from each of these localities is a challenge that few nations face. Added to this, regional differences compound the situation by reflecting divergent interests, agendas, and degrees of racial and cultural diversity. Language remains a major source of tension, localized in the popular imagination as stemming from and resulting in two distinct solitudes, the French and the English, both of which are enshrined as the founding or charter groups. Notwithstanding the above, the Canadian landscape is also marked by intense media concentration, wherein news stories (and entertainment media) are provided by a few conglomerates, and where local stories are often refracted through the lens of the monopoly that governs that local subsidiary (Hackett et al., 2000; Winter, 1997; 2002). In terms of print media, three large corporations dominate the scene: Bell Globemedia Inc., CanWest Global Corporation, and Torstar. Within Quebec, Quebecor is a major player in that provincial market, being largely responsible for the production of French language dailies. There are few independent papers; CanWest Global, Bellglobemedia, or Torstar own most of those circulated in the major cities. The two national dailies, The Globe and Mail and the National Post, are owned by Bell Globemedia and CanWest Global, respectively, the two largest corporations. Thus, a paper like The Globe and Mail is simply one of Bell Globemedia Corporation's media outlets, which also owns CTV, a leading private broadcaster, the Discovery Channel, TSN. …

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