In this Book

summary

Material Cultures in Canada presents the vibrant and diverse field of material culture studies in Canadian literary, artistic, and political contexts today. The first of its kind, this collection features sixteen essays by leading scholars in Canada, each of whom examines a different object of study, including the beaver, geraniums, comics, water, a musical playlist, and the human body.

The book’s three sections focus, in turn, on objects that are persistently material, on things whose materiality blends into the immaterial, and on the materials of spaces. Contributors highlight some of the most exciting new developments in the field, such as the emergence of “new materialism,” affect theory, globalization studies, and environmental criticism. Although the book has a Canadian centre, the majority of its contributors consider objects that cross borders or otherwise resist national affiliation.

This collection will be valuable to readers within and outside of Canada who are interested in material culture studies and, in addition, will appeal to anyone interested in the central debates taking place in Canadian political and cultural life today, such as climate change, citizenship, shifts in urban and small-town life, and the persistence of imperialism.

“The Work of the Beaver”

Jody Berland

“The Work of the Beaver” examines the role of Canada’s national animal in the creation of a Canadian iconography. For Berland, the beaver signifies Canada’s endurance, resource wealth, and longevity, but it also invites a critical analysis of the ecological, and specifically animal, forms of inhabitation of Canadian lands.

“Night in a Box: Anne Carson’s Nox and the Materiality of Elegy”

Tanis MacDonald

Looking specifically at the book-as-object, this chapter considers the poetic memoir that Anne Carson wrote about her late brother, especially in terms of the generic features and material elements of the elegy. MacDonald argues that insofar as Nox does not assume the sturdy, durable form of the conventional book, it evokes the experience of loss by calling attention to the fragility of matter.

“Maxims and Contraries: Notes from a Project in Process”

Alison Calder

Alison Calder combines her skills as poet, academic, and knitter in this chapter that outlines a multidisciplinary project on the Mary Maxim sweater. After first tracing the history of the sweater and its role as a nationalist object in the Canadian cultural imaginary, Calder demonstrates how the sweater’s “commemorative values” can be mobilized to critique key events in Canadian cultural history.

“The Geranium in the Window: One Plant’s Literary Hardiness in the Canadian Imagination”

Shelley Boyd

This essay examines how and why a plant native to Africa—the geranium—became so popular in Canadian literature and culture. Considering numerous examples throughout Canadian literary history, Boyd argues that the geranium brought socio-cultural ties with it when it was transported across the Atlantic, and that these ties also transfer to its appearances in Canadian texts.


“Is It Still a Cinch? The Transformational Properties of Objects in Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Last Crossing

Susan Birkwood

The “cinch” in this essay is a gamekeeper’s belt that features in Vanderhaeghe’s novel as a tool, a gift, a weapon, and, finally, a powerful sign of the gender inequality that shaped social life in frontier-era Canadian west. Through her analysis of this wearable object, Birkwood explores the possibility that clothing can maintain a palpable “material agency” such that it carries certain meanings with it even as it shifts from wearer to wearer.

“Obama’s Playlist: Materializing Transnational Desire at the CBC”

Mark Simpson

Simpson’s essay explores CBC Radio 2’s contest to design a playlist of Canadian music for Barack Obama as an example of “prosthetic franchise”—one that enabled Canadians to vote for (some songs for) Obama during the American election campaign. As Simpson argues, not only did this contest explore the decoupling of the nation and the global in neoliberal contexts, but it also materialized a “hope-for-the-future” affective state that drew from the emotional engineering so central to the Obama campaign.

“Grinning Things: Object Lessons in Violent Labour”

Michael Epp

If the term “weapon” calls to mind guns, rifles, and grenades, Epp’s essay argues that one of the most deadly weapons brandished in modern warfare is the smile. Epp anchors his discussion in a 1921 YMCA publication called Entertaining the American Army, which is a testament to the necessity of managing emotional labour for the production of an effectively violent body of soldiers, if not also a public culture affectively invested in war.
“Moses Cotsworth and the Authenticity of Time”

Thomas Allen

Allen’s essay traces the successes and failures of the calendar reform movement championed by Canadian Moses Cotsworth in the early twentieth century. These reformers imagined the calendar as one of many objects capable of fixing time in a material form. In this way, the reformers cast themselves as experts capable of authenticating “true time” in an age in which time itself had become a commodity circulating in the market.

“Materializing Climate Change: Images of Exposure, States of Exception”

Nicole Shukin

Assessing representations of the north in an artwork and a film, Shukin critiques spectacularized treatments of climate change that prompt public declarations of emergency. Such declarations, she suggests, do more to establish the authority of those who make these declarations, as well as confirm their affiliations with European nation-state sovereignty, than they do to address the conditions of climate change itself.

“Waters As Potential Paths to Peace”

Rita Wong

This essay addresses the materiality of water, emphasizing how much of the world and of human, animal, and plant life it comprises, and the extent of its circulation. Through an examination of various activist initiatives and cultural texts, Wong outlines a “participatory water ethics” which, she argues, is a crucial aspect of the movement for peace.

“The Biotopographies of Seth’s George Sprott (1894-1975)

Candida Rifkind

With a focus on the material possibilities of the graphic narrative, Rifkind considers Seth’s George Sprott (1894-1975) for its experimentation with reverie. Reverie, Rifkind argues, is a mode that counters “biographical authority,” as well as the temporal conventions of the life narrative and the comic book.

Woodrow: Memory and Nostalgia at Play”

Jessa Alston-O’Connor

The materialization of the rural is the subject of this chapter, which considers Graeme Patterson’s multimedia installation Woodrow. For O’Connor, the model buildings Patterson constructed of his family’s home town of Woodrow, Saskatchewan, function as both monument and counter-monument, enlivening this near ghost-town without subscribing to forms of nostalgia that idealize the past.

“Plaques and Persons: Commemorating Canada’s Authors”

Carole Gerson

This essay traces the material manifestation of Canadian literary history but not, as one might expect, in the form of the book. Instead, Gerson considers the commemorative plaque as the object that signals the state of the Canadian literary landscape (actual and figurative) and of the public’s investment in preserving the past.

“Archaeological Detritus and the Bulging Archive: The Staging of He Named Her Amber at the Art Gallery of Ontario”

May Chew

In this chapter, May Chew explores the archive as a “choreography of objects and bodies through space” through Iris Häussler’s He Named Her Amber installation. According to Chew, this installation is a product of a “new museology” which aligns multiculturalism with neoliberal values, in this particular case regenerating the imperial fascination with collection.

“Poetry and Globalized Cities: A Material Poetics of Canadian Urban Space”

Jeff Derksen

This chapter explores poetry’s unique capacity to articulate the ways in which neoliberalism governs urban life today, and also to document and inspire “the dynamism of urbanization.” The two cities addressed in Derksen’s essay are Prince George, B.C., which is featured in Barry MacKinnon’s In the Millennium, and Vancouver, which is the focus of Triage, by Cecily Nicholson.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Title Page, Copyright Page
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. v-vi
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  1. Acknowledgements
  2. pp. vii-viii
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  1. Introduction: Material Cultures in Canada, Material Cultures Now
  2. Thomas Allen and Jennifer Blair
  3. pp. 1-22
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  1. Part I: Materialities
  1. 1. The Work of the Beaver
  2. Jody Berland
  3. pp. 25-50
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  1. 2. Night in a Box: Anne Carson’s Nox and the Materiality of Elegy
  2. Tanis MacDonald
  3. pp. 51-64
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  1. 3. Maxims and Contraries: Notes from a Project in Process
  2. Alison Calder
  3. pp. 65-82
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  1. 4. The Geranium in the Window: One Plant’s Literary Hardiness in the Canadian Imagination
  2. Shelley Boyd
  3. pp. 83-106
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  1. 5. Is It Still a Cinch?: The Transformational Properties of Objects in Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Last Crossing
  2. Susan Birkwood
  3. pp. 107-128
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  1. Part II: Immaterialities
  1. 6. Obama’s Playlist: Materializing Transnational Desire at the CBC
  2. Mark Simpson
  3. pp. 131-154
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  1. 7. Grinning Things: Object Lessons in Violent Labour
  2. Michael Epp
  3. pp. 155-170
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  1. 8. Moses Cotsworth and the Authenticity of Time
  2. Thomas Allen
  3. pp. 171-188
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  1. 9. Materializing Climate Change: Images of Exposure, States of Exception
  2. Nicole Shukin
  3. pp. 189-208
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  1. 10. Waters as Potential Paths to Peace
  2. Rita Wong
  3. pp. 209-222
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  1. Part III: Materials of and for Spaces
  1. 11. The Biotopographies of Seth’s George Sprott (1894–1975)
  2. Candida Rifkind
  3. pp. 225-246
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  1. 12. Woodrow: Memory and Nostalgia at Play
  2. Jessa Alston-O’Connor
  3. pp. 247-264
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  1. 13. Plaques and Persons: Commemorating Canada’s Authors
  2. Carole Gerson
  3. pp. 265-282
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  1. 14. Archaeological Detritus and the Bulging Archive: The Staging of He Named Her Amber at the Art Gallery of Ontario
  2. May Chew
  3. pp. 283-300
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  1. 15. Poetry and Globalized Cities: A Material Poetics of Canadian Urban Space
  2. Jeff Derksen
  3. pp. 301-322
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  1. Afterword: Endless Material: The Future of Things in Canada
  2. Thomas Allen and Jennifer Blair
  3. pp. 323-332
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  1. Contributors
  2. pp. 333-338
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 339-352
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