North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space by Jody Berland (review)

North of Empire is exactly what one would expect considering the subject and the author. Jody Berland, one of the country’s foremost experts in the field of Canadian cultural and communications studies, provides a stimulating and at times very personal exploration of the relationship between culture and space in the Canadian context. Interdisciplinary in both nature and approach, North of Empire covers a lot of territory, challenging disciplinary silos, and asks us to reconsider how communication intersects with culture not only in relation to the United States but also on a global scale.

One of the main objectives of North of Empire is to address ‘the politics of media culture in connection to a border that separates the different approaches to the study of both media and space.’ Berland accomplishes this goal by engaging the rich theoretical material from both sides of the Canadian-American border and weaving it together with social and culture examinations of specific cultural technologies. This is by no stretch of the imagination an easy subject to tackle; each of the book’s nine chapters is part of a journey that builds upon one of Berland’s pioneering essays, but each is updated, elaborated, and expanded to incorporate, in some cases, decades of knowledge sharing and idea exchange.

The backbone of North of Empire, though, is its engagement with the works of Harold Innes and Marshall McLuhan. Framed within a complex discussion of the production of space, knowledge, and power, every chapter questions the very notion of borders. Each analysis rests on the notion that culture must be thought about and explored ‘in the context of a complicated social and material process that reproduces and extends itself in space and time.’ Particularly refreshing is Berland’s focus on Innis’s work on technology and space, something largely overshadowed by his other contributions to history. Throughout the book, she provides a successful elaboration of Innis’s much discussed and debated notion that empire ‘is constituted through means of communication.’

Exploring Innis’s work on technology, space, and empire relates to the ‘spatial turn,’ in cultural studies (e.g. the works of Edward Said, David Harvey, Anthony King, and many others) and this literature’s approach to the ‘cultural and spatial strategies of European colonization and globalization.’ Berland also does an excellent job demonstrating how Innis’swork contributes to ‘the notion of the margin’ and at the same time discusses what is overlooked. Berland’s convincing and powerful arguments relating to Innis are also combined with an equally significant discussion of the discourse surrounding the work of Marshall McLuhan. While at once corroborating Raymond Williams’s and others’ critiques of McLuhan’s work, Berland nonetheless reinforces the importance of his premise that, as she describes, ‘each new medium reorganizes the communication system as a whole, alters social space and scale, and realigns the human senses.’

North of Empire, though, is not for the faint of heart. For those immersed in the literature and subject, it is an insightful work that both corroborates current discourse and provides new tantalizing insights into the much trodden literature surrounding cultural studies in Canada. For the novice aware of the complexities, but still trying to grapple with them and their meanings, it will prove to be a frustrating introduction. Regardless, North of Empire is a significant contribution that, much like the original works it is based upon, stands to influence a generation of scholars exploring ‘the geographies of influence’ of media and cultural technology.