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Reviewed by:
  • White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada
  • George Elliott Clarke (bio)
Daniel Coleman. White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada. University of Toronto Press. x, 320. $55.00

‘Race’ has always been the bête noire of the ‘Great White North’: a phantasm as haunting and as starkly invisible as a sasquatch. Thus, in his [End Page 179] polemical and magisterial monograph, White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada, Daniel Coleman samples examples of British (or European) racialist – seldom explicitly racist – thinking in our literature and defines them as expressing authors’ fantasies of establishing Canada as a pro-British imperial and nominally Christian state that requires no-nonsense, European-derived, patriarchal oversight. As Coleman posits, such dreams were hardly simply anti-subaltern. No, they were either mandates to uplift ‘raced’ others (so that, schooled in this etiquette, they could be utilized as partisans of – or even as cannon fodder for – the paternalistic monarchy) or laments their inevitable disappearance as Darwinian failures (cue D.C. Scott’s 1898 poem, ‘The Onondaga Madonna,’ albeit a work Coleman does not cite).

Coleman cites ‘four ubiquitous allegorical figures’ of the ur-’Anglo,’ intellectual project to construct Canada – the Dominion – as a realm of ordered, civil, kindly, mannered, cultured, ‘pacific,’ and distinctly British/Nordic whiteness. First, there is the ‘Loyalist brother,’ a character whose fetishization obscures the violence the British and their allies employed during the American Revolution – as well as the fact that the ‘Loyalists’ themselves were not, mainly, British, but ‘Germans, Dutch, and Iroquois.’ (I must add the factoid that 10% of the Loyalists were African American.) Second, there is ‘the enterprising Scottish orphan,’ a character who illustrates how ‘the pan-ethnic leeway of Britishness allowed Scots who were being driven off their lands in Scotland an upward social mobility in the colonies unavailable back home.’ Third, the Protestant ‘muscular Christian’ stereotype provided a model for non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants on how they should comport themselves (exercising industry and thrift, eschewing ‘ethnic’ politics and alcohol, and accepting – humbly – British tutelage and rule). Coleman’s fourth figure, ‘the maturing colonial son,’ allegorizes Canada ‘as a youth that has recently emerged from its colonial dependency’ and is now ready to shoulder its rightful share of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘white man’s burden.’ Collectively, this quartet of archetypes – hallmarks of colonial and post-Confederation CanLit – produced, Coleman insists, ‘the privileged, normative status of British whiteness in English Canada.’

Coleman chooses well his ‘supporting’ texts and characters: Major John Richardson’s novels, The Canadian Brothers (1840) and Wacousta (1832); Ralph Connor’s novels, The Man from Glengarry (1901) and The Foreigner (1910); Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising (1941); Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House (1941); Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Imperialist (1904); John Marlyn’s Under the Ribs of Death (1957); and James De Mille’s Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888). Close readings tease out – suss out – the often archly subtle ways in which authors advance a British/Scottish/Nordic/European vision of Canada as the [End Page 180] Christian ‘white man’s country,’ loyal to Crown values/virtues, and superior to the American rabble’s ‘turbulent’ republicanism.

As compelling and as cogent as Coleman’s analysis is, three problems beset his important study. He acknowledges one: by centralizing white-Anglo-Saxon-Celtic Protestant (and Catholic) texts, he risks marginalizing socio-political discourse by Canadian academics and intellectuals ‘of colour,’ many of whom have been pinpointing, for decades now, the insidious politesse of white Canadian racialism, so famous –in ‘black comedy’ – for its superb subtlety. While it is vital that Caucasian Canadian scholars examine Caucasian Canadian racialism, thus dashing it as opposed to whitewashing it, this project must not omit previous, anti-racist scholarship (such as that of Vincent D’Oyley, Carl James, Max Dorsinville, Makeda Silvera, and many others). A second fault in Coleman’s argument is his insistence that white Canadian racialism is rooted in its dispossession of First Nations peoples. This point ignores the historical reality that colonial Canada was also an African slaveholding society. Hence, notions of blackness as well as redness affected conceptions of social status and state formation. Third, while...

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