Settling and Unsettling Memories: Essays in Canadian Public History ed. by Nicole Neatby and Peter Hodgins (review)

In the 1990s Canadian historians began adopting new cultural approaches to history. One of these emerged, in part, in response to the so-called “culture wars” then being waged in English-speaking countries over supposed threats to the historical canon of celebratory nation building. It gained momentum through the late 1990s and the first decade of the new century, and now enjoys widespread acceptance among Canadian scholars. Some call this particular approach “history and memory,” others prefer “memory studies,” and still others subsume it into the related discipline of public history. Indeed, the word “memory” has become so commonplace (at the same time stripping it of its original definition and its distinction from history) that perhaps it is time to take stock of Canadian memory studies.

In Settling and Unsettling Memories, Nicole Neatby and Peter Hodgins have produced what the volume’s introduction describes as the first single, interdisciplinary volume on Canadian “sites of memory.” (8) After a brief introduction outlining the standard narrative of the intellectual roots of the approach, the book brings together eighteen chapters by eighteen authors from a range of disciplines including history, geography, literature, education, communications, and art history. But it is not the interdisciplinarity that is new. The majority of contributors describe themselves as professors of history, and a similar range of disciplines can be found in Theorizing Historical Consciousness (Toronto 2004), edited by Peter Seixas, and produced by the same press. What distinguishes the current collection, then, is its exclusive focus on Canada.

Yet, the Canadian focus aside, it is difficult to discern exactly the purpose of this collection. The chapters are not the classics of Canadian scholarship on memory, although some might be described that way. Nor do they represent new approaches, although again some might be so characterized. Instead they represent a selection made by the editors of some studies of Canada’s “sites of memory.” This is fair enough, as the subtitle describes them unpretentiously as “Essays in Canadian Public History.” Certainly one can quibble over the inclusion of one article over another and editors need to balance the contributions to create a coherent whole, but surely this “first” collection could aspire to do more. As it is, Settling and Unsettling Memories is divided into five sections. The first is devoted to heroism and the remembering of heroes and heroic deeds. The second looks at teaching about history in the classroom and in the public sphere. The third section unpacks some of the construction of the nation building story, balanced with resistance to its easy narrative, primarily through the lenses of literature and the visual arts. The final two sections examine tourism and commercial entertainments.

The collection does capture the bias in Canadian memory studies towards the 20th century, but as a review of the field up to 2012, it falls short. Foundational authors and central topics are simply ignored in this book. For instance, there is nothing in the volume on museums or on music and song, although admittedly these aspects of public history remain comparatively underdeveloped in Canada. But two other topics are conspicuous by their absence: parading and war commemoration.

Let us begin with parading. Studies of parades were among the foundational works in developing Canadian memory studies. Parade studies emerged on the one hand from social history studies of sectarianism and ethnic conflict. For instance, in the early 1990s, Michael Cottrell used St. Patrick’s Day parades to uncover tensions in the strategies of protest and accommodation in negotiating legitimacy for Toronto’s 19th-century Irish Catholics. At about the same time, Peter Goheen saw that parades could reveal popular conceptions of public space. These ideas became standard components of graduate theses by the end of the 1990s and laid the groundwork for Ronald Rudin’s book Founding Fathers (Toronto 2003), probably the most famous study of parading in Canada. But aside from its centrality to the development of Canadian memory scholarship...