Commemorating Canada: History, Heritage, Memory, 1850s-1990s by Cecilia Morgan (review)

Hot off the heels of her 2015 book, Creating Colonial Pasts: History, Memory, and Commemoration in Southern Ontario, 1860–1980, Cecilia Morgan has offered us Commemorating Canada: History, Heritage, Memory, 1850s–1990s. Unlike her previous effort, an important contribution to the scholarly study of Canadian public memory, this new book is part of University of Toronto Press' Themes in Canadian History series. As its back cover explains: "Books in this series are designed to open up a subject to the non-specialist reader. They pull together a large body of research and lay out the main themes and interpretations in a clear, accessible fashion."

The book is composed of eight chapters including an introduction and an epilogue. The first two substantive chapters—which cover the 1750s to the 1870s, and the 1870s to the 1920s, respectively—continue an encouraging trend in Canadian cultural historiography of recognizing that Canadian cultural institution-building pre-existed both Eric Brown's arrival on Canadian shores and the Aird Commission. The final four substantive chapters are organized by specific sites of public memory: war and public memory, built heritage and commemoration, public memory and tourism, and the teaching of national history. The chapters narrate how those various memory practices were articulated, propagated, and contested over the course of the late nineteenth to the end of the twentieth centuries.

To cover all of this ground, Morgan draws upon, and impressively summarizes, many of the most important specialized scholarly studies of Canadian public memory. Because the book tries to cover so much ground in only 180 or so pages, and because it is aimed at non-specialists, Morgan had to repackage a great deal of disparate data into an easily recognizable and digestible form. The form she chose is the left-liberal narrative that came out of post-1960s identity politics about how institutionalized hegemonic memory-practices reinforced the dominance of white, upper-class, straight central Canadian men by propagating a self-serving version of national history and culture, how those practices were contested by women, Indigenous peoples, Quebecois, regionalists, workers, members of racialized groups and sexual minorities, and how the voices of these latter groups slowly began to be heard as they successfully gained access to public memory institutions.

In structuring her narrative this way, Morgan is on solid scholarly ground. Much of the literature on Canadian memory culture still tends to be organized around questions of hegemony and resistance, or of exclusion and access. While such questions continue to be politically pertinent, the rise of trauma studies or of affect theory, to take two examples, augur a far messier version of memory studies in which clear lines between memory and imagination, or resistance and complicity, are harder to draw. To her considerable credit as a writer, Morgan does what she can within the constraints in which she was working to bring out some of that messiness. For example, in spite of the fact that her thirty-page chapter on Canadian war memory covers the history of Canadian commemorative efforts beginning with the Crimean War (the commemoration of the War of 1812 was dealt with in a previous chapter) and stretching to the War in Afghanistan, she still manages to bring out the complexities and contradictions of that history. She does an excellent job in demonstrating how every commemorative project or form was challenged by diverse and often dissonant views, forms, and practices. To give one example, her two-page account of the forms of World War I monuments is a gem of descriptive precision and concision. She identifies the dominant monumental form that portrayed the soldier as a "Christ-like figure who willingly, one might even say joyfully, sacrificed himself for country and home" (82), locates alternative forms that evoke war's violence or grief and loss, and insightfully discusses why images of mechanized warfare at a distance were not used.

If I have one disappointment about Commemorating Canada, it is that it is very much...