Visibly Canadian: Imaging Collective Identities in the Canadas, 1820–1910 by Karen Stanworth (review)

In Visibly Canadian, Karen Stanworth positions visual culture as central to understanding modern Canadian identity in its earliest iterations. As part of the McGill-Queen's/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History series, the book does much to remind social, cultural, and political historians of the value of visual sources for studies of collective identity. Cutting across disciplines, Stanworth crafts a narrative that makes boundaryless an otherwise siloed scholarly terrain. This renders the work flexible in its reach, useful to historians, curators, and educational specialists, and scholars interested in intersectionality, post-colonial studies, and gender studies. Overall, the book introduces novel entry points into the long Canadian preoccupation with identity, making space for visual culture in nineteenth-century studies.

The book is organized into three parts, each containing three chapters that, read together, bridge the Confederation divide. Each chapter is a distinct case study—or microhistory—of some form of visual representation of Canadian culture in the nineteenth century. Stanworth argues the visual realm was an ideally suited public domain wherein to affirm or resist cultural norms and forge a new set of relational identities between nation and empire. In this way, Stanworth carefully envelops the emerging Canadian and canadien identities expressed in the visual world within the project of British imperialism. While these connections may have long been obvious to Canadian and imperial historians, Stanworth's exposure of the visual clues embedded in museum collections, public spectacles, and portraits remind the historian there is much to be found beyond the documentary archive. Positing that visual culture is "the primary mode through which social identities are produced and consumed in the nineteenthcentury Canadas," Stanworth runs the risk of according visual elements too much credit, neglecting other forms of producible and consumable culture (3). However, she mitigates this by attending to the many dimensions of everyday life; the private home, the public spectacle, school, and work are spaces where Canadians, both before and after Confederation, constructed their local, national, and international identities.

Part one examines museums and educational institutions as visual collection points participating in the nation-building exercise of "civic identity formation" (26). In these three case studies, Stanworth examines the collections and curatorial work of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec (lhsq) and the Educational Museum of the Toronto Normal School before Confederation. She argues that museums in the two Canadas (Upper and Lower) consciously disseminated and normalized an imperial citizenship that was white, English-speaking, and educated. Part two argues that after Confederation, Canadians codified their national and imperial identities through public spectacle in three examples: The Dominion and Industrial Fair of Toronto (later the Canadian National Exhibition), a souvenir booklet from Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, and the Jubilee parade in Montreal. Unsurprisingly, the celebrations wrote liberal, industrial, and imperial tropes onto an emerging national consciousness. In chapters five and six, Stanworth argues that the French embrace of the Jubilee suggests "an imperial cohesion" in Quebec at the close of the nineteenth century (185). Forging connections between civic government, local business, and the Jubilee celebrations reveals that Quebec's modernity had evolved alongside and because of empire. Stanworth's intimate knowledge of Quebec both personally and historically allows her to drill the narrative down to the local level. Once there, she makes a convincing case that canadien loyalty to the British Crown was palpable. In part three, Stanworth takes the group portrait—both photographic and painted—as visual evidence that in representations of the self there remain connections to the whole. Group portraits were tools of social construction, depicting ideal relations between gender, race, and class in early Canada.

Anchoring the case studies are personal archival notes where Stanworth takes pause to consider the limits and possibilities of the archive on both the researcher and the work. These notes, reminiscent of Antoinette Burton's and Ann Laura Stoler's challenges to the presumed neutrality of archival...