Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada (review)

What is a Canadian? These days, policy makers and pundits invariably have recourse to shared values of industriousness, inclusiveness, caring, and even politeness in describing who is "of the nation." Race is an unspoken signifier that can be more important even than legal citizenship, as seen in cases such as those of Maher Arar and Omar Khadr, two Muslim men whose Canadian citizenship did not move the government to insist upon their repatriation because they were identified with the "foreign" threat of terrorism. Sunera Thobani's Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada lays bare the state's enduring use of race to (re)produce Canadian national identity. Thobani focuses on processes she terms "strange" encounters between white settler society and racialized Others: not only Aboriginal peoples but also immigrants, particularly those from the global South.

Thobani's central theory is that national subjects are constructed through the process of "exaltation," whereby the state ascribes to them certain valorized characteristics, deemed quintessentially Canadian, and elevates these subjects as the natural inheritors of rights and entitlements and, ultimately, as the superior form of humanity. This process has the dual purpose of obscuring how these entitlements were taken by force during colonization, and maintained through racial domination, and complementing the disciplinary power of the state by "seduc[ing] subjects into reproducing their nationality" (p. 8). Racialized Others are cast as outsiders (both of the law and of the nation), having personal characteristics that are antithetical to Canadian aspirations. This further heightens the exaltation of the national and reconfigures the violence committed against the Other as lawful and necessary for "self"-preservation. The technique of exaltation makes it possible for the image of Canadian citizens (and, by extension, of Canada) as caring, tolerant, peace-loving, and law-abiding to coexist with the historical facts of Canada's past colonization of Aboriginal peoples, its discriminatory immigration policies, and, more recently, its targeting of these Others in the name of national security and anxieties over "accommodation."

Thobani's explanation of the transformation of explicit exaltations of the racial superiority of British and French settler subjects in Canada's early days of colonization into covert exaltations through the frameworks of tolerance and multiculturalism after World War II is one of the major strengths of the book. This technique of covert exaltation was forged in response to the "crisis of whiteness" caused by widespread denunciation of Nazi Germany, growing international acknowledgement of the injustices done to Aboriginal peoples, and the growing realization that immigrant labour would be required for Canada's economic prosperity. Thobani argues that after the status of Canada as a white nation was entrenched through past immigration policies, the policy of multiculturalism could continue to perpetuate the status quo by constructing racialized communities as the "bearers of difference" (p. 154), coded as "culture," against the normalized backdrop of whiteness. The trope of Canada's multiculturalism permits historic relations of racist oppression by the dominant settler society to be obliterated as either a thing of the past, left at the door of extremist white supremacists, or turned on its head (with whiteness identified with tolerance and projections of cultural conflicts and misogyny onto "backward" immigrant groups). In addition, it permits the marginalization of Indigenous peoples as just another (essentialized) culture and the recasting of colonization as Canada's first "multicultural" experience. Thobani uses these concepts to dissect two government consultations in the 1990s, the Immigration Policy Review and the Social Security Review. These consultations, she shows, relied on a narrative of white national subjects aligned with neo-liberal projects of using the state to repel foreign threats. These threats take the form of people who might abuse Canadians' caring nature, destroying the nation's prosperity and, ultimately, its very identity.

Thobani is obviously cognizant of gender's role in the process of exaltation, and she conducts an intersectional analysis as to how nationalist struggles are fought...