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

In North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space, Jody Berland creates a fruitful dialogue between cultural studies and Canadian communication theory as “intellectual traditions” that present “powerful challenges to discourses of economic rationality and technological progress” (8). Drawing on the work of Canadian communication giants such as Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, Berland examines a wide range of social practices, media technologies, and other cultural phenomena, from the popular Molson Canadian “Rant” of 2000 to our contemporary obsession with up-to-the-minute weather forecasts, with the goal of unraveling the “hermeneutic loop” that connects space, culture, media, and empire (23). This diversity of subject matter means that the book as a whole is less unified than it could be, but as Berland readily acknowledges, North of Empire contains “more than 30 percent previously published material” (4)—a fact that might account, in part, for the sometimes disjointed narrative thread between and among its nine core chapters.

According to Berland’s definition, the “cultural technologies” of her title denote “the formal, phenomenological, and social properties of media technologies together with the machineries of knowledge and power through which they emerge and within which they work” (12). In short, “cultural technologies” are the very “processes and practices that comprise culture” (12), and they have a formative role in everything from “the development and transformation of national communities” to “the exploitation and management of the physical environment” (13). While Berland’s understanding of “cultural technologies” is admirably comprehensive, the concept itself as she describes it is also disconcertingly all-encompassing, in that the term may simply be too broad to be useful. At the same time, perhaps the extensive scale of so-called cultural technologies and the scope of their reach were part of Berland’s motivation for undertaking her study to begin with; indeed, North of Empire ultimately proposes that it is precisely because cultural technologies are so pervasive that they must undergo continual critical scrutiny. If we can “critique the compulsions of modernity,” says Berland, we can both “abandon the rhetoric of inevitability” that is so often attached to teleological notions of progress and avoid the associated tendency toward complacency and indifference (26).

In order to resist “theorizing culture in the abstract,” Berland frames her study as the work of a self-aware scholar who “investigates the trajectory of specific cultural technologies as they mediate and alter relations between human bodies, technology, space, and empire” (11, emphasis added). Throughout the book, her probing style enacts this call for a move away from “obfuscation” in favour of a critical practice that rejects the easy conflation of “analytical” and “substantive” terminology (26). Many of her chapters include series of pointed questions and concrete examples taken from popular culture that allow readers to remain actively (and reflexively) engaged with the material at hand, and several are organized around keywords or cultural artefacts that Berland re-envisions from a perspective that deftly combines cultural studies with communication theory (see, for example, her rendering of the “49^th parallel” in chapter 1).

The book’s first three chapters will likely be of most interest to literature scholars, particularly those who specialize in the field of Canadian literature and culture. Chapter 1 focuses on the ways in which the border between Canada and the United States has been variously imagined, contested, and reconstructed. Citing Stephen Slemon’s conception of Canada as a “Second World” nation, Berland determines that the country’s ambivalent role as both colony and colonizer has resulted in a national self-image governed largely “by the chronic questioning of its own possibility” (53). The uncertain status of Canada’s cultural identity is well-worn ground for Canadian literary critics; the originality of Berland’s contribution comes through in chapter 3 where she returns to the subject in explicitly spatial terms. As a kind of intermission between the first and third chapters and their...