Celebrating Canada: Holidays, National Days, and the Crafting of Identities ed. by Matthew Hayday and Raymond B. Blake (review)

This volume charts how holidays, commemorations, and annual celebrations from the 1840s to the present function as shifting sites that configure and reconfigure Canadian identity. The articles, moreover, hinge upon the commitment that investigating the histories and presents of national holidays such as Thanksgiving, National Flag of Canada Day, Canada Day, and Victoria Day will yield insights into the scaffolding – the how, the why, and the who – of nation-building processes. By attending to the co-implicated relations between what the editors identify as the national and the subnational (the provincial, the regional, and the communal), the articles provide a diachronic approach to celebrations that sets out to account for the ways in which celebrations must adopt to changing cultural, political, and social contexts to ensure continuity and relevance.

The collection begins with Gillian I. Leitch's insightful examination of nineteenth-century street parades in Montreal in which she documents how various groups inhabited public spaces by appropriating buildings and deploying performance language. The collection, then, moves to Peter A. Stevens's discussion of Thanksgiving Day, which traces the nationalist origins of the holiday that have, for Stevens, been lost. Further, Chris Tait's article brings attention to the vexed politics surrounding Canada's creation of Victoria Day following Queen Victoria's death in 1901.

From here, the collection extends three different inquiries into Empire Day, which constellate around the holiday's failed goal of forging a "common Canadian identity based on imperial ties." These articles construct a context of the observance from its transition from a civic, to a national, to an inter-Commonwealth holiday while also exploring its complicated reception in French Canada and its elasticity amid fluctuating social conditions and demographics. Moving from Thanksgiving to Remembrance Day, Teresa Iacobelli examines the conversion of Armistice Day to Remembrance Day to rethink Canada's past, especially how the holiday has been, and continues to be, appropriated to varying political ends: "[T]he day has never simply been about mourning; it has been about business interests, veterans' interests, national myth making, and social policy."

The volume turns its attention towards a sustained engagement with Dominion Day and Canada Day that spans six chapters. Each of these articles explore the holiday through disparate registers that range from analyses of the regionally specific valences of Dominion Day in British Columbia from 1867 to 1937, to the symbolic expressions of Dominion Day in Edwardian Britain, to the ways in which Dominion Day became an occasion to resist and respond to the racist and xenophobic Chinese Exclusion Act through the creation of Chinese Humiliation Day. The latter three articles take up the transfiguration of the holiday with a vested interest in outlining its difficult genealogy in the larger contexts of the precarity of Canadian identity, Pierre Trudeau's creation of a new sense of national identity, and how the holiday can be situated within larger global changes to the civic during the "end-of-empire-era." Finally, the collection concludes with studies of public policy relating to Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, Acadian neo-nationalism in the context of Le 15 août, and the political status of National Flag of Canada Day in the broader context of Canadian political culture.

While this collection provides exhaustive and erudite histories of the many fragile and fraught sites of celebration and commemoration in Canada, the project, at times, remains firmly entrenched within the national, so much so that cultural, social, and ethical-political differences are recuperated in the name of the nation. It is fitting, then, that the concluding lines of the volume limn an image of a "diverse" community enjoying fireworks and celebrating the nation. This liberal turn to diversity and multiculturalism is a typical manoeuvre that legislates and erases difference by containing it within the logic of the nation.

The framing of these articles through a lexicon of success and failure regarding national...