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Reviewed by:
  • A History of Canadian Culture
  • Candida Rifkind
Jonathan F. Vance, A History of Canadian Culture (Don Mills: Oxford University Press 2009)

Jonathan F. Vance’s A History of Canadian Culture is an ambitious project to account for the emergence, consolidation, and sponsorship of the arts in Canada from pre-Confederation to the present. In his introduction, Vance defines “culture” as a “synonym for the arts” and acknowledges that this is a limited definition, albeit one that allows him to cover a lot of ground. This book extends beyond the arts as they are usually understood – the literary, visual, and performing arts – to also study architecture and its patronage in Canada. This interest in state-sponsored buildings and architectural styles as part of larger governmental arts programs and policies adds a richness to the discussion that also highlights the differences between ephemeral artistic performances and the solid endurance of buildings. Another way that Vance restricts this vast topic to reasonable proportions is to focus more on the institutions of culture, and particularly on cultural funding by various state and arms-length institutions, than on the cultural production or artists themselves. As a result, the overarching thrust of this book is that Canadian culture should be understood as part of nation-building projects as defined by various state institutions and governments. While the author acknowledges that such a study will have to leave out some iconic and much-loved cultural producers (Neil Young, Mr. Dress-Up), Vance’s focus on the history of institutions of nationalist culture rather than cultural history itself means that whole segments of independent, internationalist, radical, and dissident Canadian culture do not make it in to this study, and neither does the role of the arts in contesting the state or offering alternate visions of the nation.

The first two chapters cover pre-contact Aboriginal culture and European contact respectively, and Vance is particularly strong in detailing the artistic and artisanal practices of First Peoples across what is now Canada. While there is not necessarily new material here, these opening chapters offer a balance between detail and concision to suggest a larger picture of the diversity of artistic endeavours from the Northwest Coast to the Arctic. The second chapter argues that, in the contact period, religion and [End Page 292] culture went hand-in-hand such that there were possibilities for the intermingling of Aboriginal and European cultural practices, such as music, to form a new hybridized culture. As this chapter concludes, however, European colonizers were less interested in adaptive cultural forms than in expanding their cultural and political dominance across the continent. Regrettably, Vance leaves Aboriginal artists and culture behind at this point and proceeds to tell the story of non-Aboriginal Canadian culture for another two hundred years before returning to contemporary Aboriginal artists in the final chapter, “Towards the Future.” What happened to Aboriginal, Inuit, and Métis culture and artists between the early 18th century and today? By following an all-too-predictable narrative of the pre-contact fertility of Aboriginal cultures and their dormancy until the end of the 20th century, Vance writes out two centuries of cultural resistance, adaptation, and survival. Instead of integrating this cultural history into the rest of the book, Vance backtracks chronologically in the final chapter to mention the 1950s federal government sponsorship of Arctic artistic cooperatives rather than including this discussion in the long chapter on “The Cultural Flowering” of the 1950s. His comment in the final chapter that a continuity worth noting today is “a revived interest in Aboriginal art that echoes the fascination expressed by the first Europeans to encounter Canada’s natives centuries earlier” assumes that Aboriginal artists only ever produce for non-Aboriginal audiences, that this work only occurs under government sponsorship, and that it is not part of the mainstream history of Canadian culture that takes up the rest of the book.

Vance is strongest, in terms of detailing actual cultural production as well as its institutional sponsorship, in the chapters on the primarily Anglo-Saxon cultures of the 18th and 19th centuries. He offers some lively descriptions of theatre productions in the military and religious institutions of...

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