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  • The Search for a New National Identity: The Rise of Multiculturalism in Canada and Australia, 1890s–1970s by Jatinder Mann
  • Lee Blanding
The Search for a New National Identity: The Rise of Multiculturalism in Canada and Australia, 1890s–1970s. Jatinder Mann. New York: Peter Lang, 2016. Pp. 354, $96.95 cloth

A comparative book-length study of Australian and Canadian multiculturalism policy is long overdue. As author Jatinder Mann points out, past attempts to address the topic–Freda Hawkins’s Critical Years in Immigration: Canada and Australia Compared (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), and an edited collection by Howard Adelman, Allan Borowski, Meyer Burstein, and Lois Foster, Immigration and Refugee Policy: Australia and Canada Compared (University of Toronto Press, 1994)–fell short of offering the kind of critical analysis that this subject warrants. Though there are obvious superficial comparisons to be made between these two British settler colonies that would, by themselves, warrant a comparative study–including their colonial histories, relations with Indigenous peoples, and political systems–Mann is also keen to point out another area of comparison: their Britishness and how “this identity came under considerable strain in both countries” (9). As such, the author sets out to explore the linkages between “the demise of British race patriotism,” the redefinition of national identity in the postwar period, and the rise of multiculturalism policy.

Unlike any prior work on the history of multiculturalism, The Search for a New National Identity attempts to periodize the evolution of multiculturalism policy in these two countries; in this regard, the author is mostly successful. Each half of the book is organized around three [End Page 424] eras, which, because of the countries’ differing histories, vary in their chronologies; nonetheless, the categorizations largely hold true. The first period chronicled is the era of “assimilation” or what Mann at times calls the “nationalist” era (1890s to 1953 in Canada and 1890s to 1963 in Australia). During this era, these countries adopted “White Canada” and “White Australia” policies, respectively, and tied their national identities to the “wider British race” and to notions of “whiteness.”

In the postwar period, as Britain sought membership in the European Economic Community and as imperial economic ties began to break down, both countries began to look inward as they attempted to reimagine their national identities. At the same time, immigrants from non-British source countries (including displaced persons) began to change the ethnic composition of Australia, and second and third generation Canadians began to assert their rights in Canada. With a nod to C.P. Champion’s work, The Strange Demise of British Canada: The Liberals and Canadian Nationalism, 1964–68 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), Mann describes this period as one that saw the “demise of Britishness” (49). This is the most fascinating part of each half of the book because Mann is able to detail the ways in which elites in both countries wrestled with the conflicting imperatives to embrace immigrants and ethnic minority communities and also to create cohesive national identities that were separate from older “British” conceptions of the nation.

During the “integration” period in Australia (1962–72) and Canada (1953–63), these countries at first adopted assimilation policies, which were designed to help immigrants become part of the dominant “Anglo-centric or Anglo-Celtic cultures” (211). The hope remained, however, that the bulk of immigrants would continue to come from Britain. Mann shows that, especially in the case of Australia, the state attempted to encourage greater immigration from Britain by loosening naturalization law as it applied to Britons. In other words, assimilation was made easier by encouraging “easily assimilable” individuals to immigrate. Although such policies were less effective in Canada, as it had accepted non-British immigrants in great numbers since the late nineteenth century, there was nonetheless a notion that certain groups were more suited to becoming Canadian. By the early 1960s in Canada, and the late 1960s in Australia, there was an acknowledgement that immigrant groups could enrich and contribute to emerging Canadian and Australian national cultures that were distinctive from that of Britain. By the end of the second period, though both countries had, more or less, officially accepted that...

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