Rethinking the Great White North
Race, Nature, and the Historical Geographies of Whiteness in Canada
A path-breaking exploration of racism in Canada and its deep-rooted ties to notions of nature and the North.
Description
Canadian national identity is bound to the idea of a Great White North. Images of snow, wilderness, and emptiness seem innocent, yet this path-breaking book reveals they contain the seeds of racism. Informed by the insight that racism is geographical as well as historical and cultural, the contributors trace how notions of race, whiteness, and nature helped construct a white country in travel writing and treaty making; scientific research and park planning; and in towns, cities, and tourist centres. Rethinking the Great White North offers a new vocabulary for contemporary debates on Canada’s role in the North and the meaning of the nation.
Reviews
Is the issue race or whiteness? Nature or wilderness? The best papers in this collection engage the tensions between key concepts, offering not only theoretically engaged analyses of the Canadian situation but also seeking to advance conceptual understanding of race or whiteness and nature or wilderness.
- Shannon Stunden Bower, University of Alberta
Innovative. ..the book is also particularly stimulating in its attempt to read urban geographies against and/or as part of Canada's constitutive interaction with “nature. ”
- Bruno Cornellier, Centre for Globalization and Cultural Studies, University of Manitoba