Reading between the Borderlines: Cultural Production and Consumption across the 49th Parallel 9780773556089

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction Cultural Production and Consumption across the 49th Parallel: Negotiating Material Citizenship
Part One Cross-Border Cultural Production: Historical Processes
1 Writing Back to Massa: The Black Open Letter in Transnational Abolitionist Print Culture
2 The Industrial Newspaper and the Politics of Content
3 Music within Bounds: Distribution, Borders, and the Canadian Recording Industry
4 Heroes, Borders, and Canadian Culture: The Superman Reclamation Project
Part Two Beyond the Border: Ideals and Realities of Transnational Cultural Work
5 An Empire of Pixels: Canadian Cultural Enterprise in the Digital Effects Industry
6 Commemorating the (In)visible Border: The Underground Railroad Monument and the Production of Transnational Memory
7 Flexible Nations: Canadian Romance Writers, American Romance, and the Romance of Canada
Part Three Cross-Border Reading
8 Cross-Border Film Adaptation and Life of Pi
9 Acadian Identities, Arcadian Dreams: Revisioning Evangeline North of the Border
10 Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy: Reading across Borders
11 “We Have to Get Along with Others”: Cosmopolitanism and Cross-Border Literary History
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

reading between the borderlines

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Reading between the Borderlines Cultural Production and Consumption across the 49th Parallel Edited by gillian roberts

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2018 isbn 978-0-7735-5513-6 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-5608-9 (eP DF ) isbn 978-0-7735-5609-6 (eP ub) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2018 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Reading between the borderlines: cultural production and consumption across the 49th parallel / edited by Gillian Roberts. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISB N 978-0-7735-5513-6 (hardcover). – IS BN 978-0-7735-5608-9 (eP D F ). – ISB N 978-0-7735-5609-6 (eP UB) 1. Canada – Relations – United States.  2. United States – Relations – Canada.  3. Canada – Intellectual life.  4. United States – Intellectual life.  5. International relations and culture – Canada.  6. International relations and culture – United States.  7. Transnationalism.  8. National characteristics, Canadian.  9. National characteristics, American.  I. Roberts, Gillian, 1976–, editor FC 250.C84R43 2018     303.48'271073     C2018-904083-1  C 2018-904084-X

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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Contents

Figures vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction – Cultural Production and Consumption across the 49th Parallel: Negotiating Material Citizenship 3 Gillian Roberts pa r t o n e   c r o s s - b o r d e r c u lt u r a l p r o d u c t i o n : h i s to r i c a l p r o c e s s e s

  1 Writing Back to Massa: The Black Open Letter in Transnational Abolitionist Print Culture 41 Alyssa MacLean   2 The Industrial Newspaper and the Politics of Content 67 Michael Stamm   3 Music within Bounds: Distribution, Borders, and the Canadian Recording Industry 91 Richard Sutherland   4 Heroes, Borders, and Canadian Culture: The Superman Reclamation Project 113 Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson

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vi

contents

pa rt t wo   b e yo n d t h e b o r d e r : i d e a l s a n d r e a l i t i e s o f t r a n s n at i o n a l c u lt u r a l wo r k

  5 An Empire of Pixels: Canadian Cultural Enterprise in the Digital Effects Industry 143 Charles R. Acland   6 Commemorating the (In)visible Border: The Underground Railroad Monument and the Production of Transnational Memory 171 Brittney Anne Bos   7 Flexible Nations: Canadian Romance Writers, American Romance, and the Romance of Canada 199 Jessica Taylor pa r t t h r e e   c r o s s - b o r d e r r e a d i n g

  8 Cross-Border Film Adaptation and Life of Pi 225 Gillian Roberts   9 Acadian Identities, Arcadian Dreams: Revisioning Evangeline North of the Border 243 Jennifer Andrews 10 Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy: Reading across Borders 272 Kit Dobson 11 “We Have to Get Along with Others”: Cosmopolitanism and Cross-Border Literary History 290 Zalfa Feghali Contributors 311 Index 315

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Figures

1.1 Excerpt from “Interesting Correspondence,” featuring the runaway slave advertisement of slave-owner Richard Stockton and the open letter of former slave John Roberts, printed in the Toronto Christian Guardian, 12 July 1837, 142. Microfilm. Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library. 47 2.1 Advertisement, Editor & Publisher 53, no. 38 (19 February 1921), Cover. 74 2.2 Cartoon, “Grand Monster Parade of the Canadian Reciprocity Party before Election Day,” Montreal Star, 11 September 1911, 3. 78 2.3 Aerial view of the Thorold Mill, July 1928, Scrapbook 1926–1934, Volume 25177, Quebec and Ontario Paper Company Fonds, R6120, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, ON. 80 2.4 Baie Comeau mill construction, 1937, Volume 25195, Folder Baie Comeau, Mill and Town Construction (1 of 3), Quebec and Ontario Paper Company Fonds, R6120, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, O N. 81 2.5 Map, location of company properties, the Ontario Paper Company, Limited, and Quebec North Shore Paper Company, “The Company’s Properties and Production Activities in Relation to the Papers’ Newsprint Requirements,” no page number, August 1948, Volume 25316 (Acquisition No. 2006-00392-5, Box 27), Folder Baie Comeau 10th Anniversary Part 9, Quebec and Ontario Paper Company Fonds, R6120, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, O N. 82

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viii

figures

5.1 Digitally enhanced Montreal cityscape with downtown wall added, Warm Bodies (2013). Source: Screen capture, Summit Entertainment. 144 5.2 Digitally enhanced Montreal cityscape with Olympic Stadium in a new neighbourhood, Warm Bodies (2013). Source: Screen capture, Summit Entertainment. 145 5.3  V FX protest, Los Angeles, 2013. Source: http://www.occupyvfx.org/.  148 5.4 Rhythm & Hues’s Best Visual Effects Oscar for Life of Pi (2012). Source: Screen capture, A MP A S. 149 5.5 Location shot for Brick Mansions (2014) in St Henri neighbourhood, Montreal, 2013. Source: author. 158 5.6  B C premier Gordon Campbell at the opening of Pixar Vancouver, 2010. Source: Darryl Dyck, Canadian Press. 165 6.1 Brittney Anne Bos, International Memorial to the Underground Railroad, Detroit, Michigan, May 2014. 174 6.2 Brittney Anne Bos, International Memorial to the Underground Railroad, Windsor, Ontario – front-view detail, May 2014. 175 6.3 Brittney Anne Bos, International Memorial to the Underground Railroad, Windsor, Ontario – rear-view detail, May 2014. 176

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Acknowledgments

This volume of essays expands on work presented at the Cultural Crossings: Production, Consumption, and Reception conference hosted at the University of Nottingham in June 2014, part of the activities of the Culture and the Canada-US Border (C C U S B) international research network, which was funded by the Leverhulme Trust from 2012 to 2015. Thanks to the Leverhulme Trust for their financial support, which enabled the network to facilitate generative international collaboration. Thanks especially to the members of the network, whose tireless enthusiasm for Canada-US border studies drove this project and sustained it across continents and time zones. For assistance during the preparation for and running of the conference, an especially heartfelt thank you to CCU S B’s fabulous administrator, Catherine Barter. Thanks to those who helped on the ground at the University of Nottingham: April Perrie, Susie Colley, Michelle Green, Harriet King, Hannah Murray, Timo Schrader, and Wei Yan. ­I was consistently humbled by the brilliance and dedication of the contributors to this book, and I simply cannot thank them enough for their patience and their commitment. Thanks to Jonathan Crago at McGillQueen’s University Press for his faith in the project, and to the anonymous readers for their constructive suggestions. Material in Michael Stamm’s chapter appears in the following publication: Michael Stamm, Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America. © 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. As volume editor, I am full of gratitude for the support of friends and colleagues during the preparation of this book: Susan Anderson, Catherine Bates, Susan Billingham, Lee Carruthers, Kate Clark, Tara Deshpande,

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x

ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

Liz Evans, Rosie Garton, Terri Gilbertson, Andy Green, Anna GreenwoodLee, Caroline Herbert, Nasser Hussain, Cathy Johnson, Pete Kirwan, Kaley Kramer, Mike Lee, Stephanie Lewthwaite, Jon McGregor, Ruth Maxey, Sinéad Moynihan, Edel Porter, Maria Ryan, Carli Snowball-Hill, Charles Tepperman, Robin Vandome, Darrelle Villa, and Abigail Ward. Particular thanks to Jennifer Andrews, Celeste-Marie Bernier, Zalfa Feghali, and David Stirrup. Finally, thanks to my family, scattered across a number of borders: Delia, Jack, and Jonathan Roberts.

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reading between the borderlines

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Cultural Production and Consumption across the 49th Parallel: Negotiating Material Citizenship Gillian Roberts “They make movies in Toronto?” asks Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) in the 2010 film adaptation of Canadian graphic novelist Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series. Scott must be the last Torontonian to recognize this fact, even as he utters his question within a film that was itself made in Toronto. Film audiences the world over have been looking at Toronto without even realizing it, thanks to the runaway production phenomenon that has transfigured Toronto as a “Hollywood North” location. In Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Toronto plays itself (and the Canadian Cera, no stranger to Hollywood success, plays a Canadian). Yet the film, directed by Briton Edgar Wright, is credited as an American production. This film made in Toronto, then, adapted from Canadian source material and featuring a Canadian star, is not a Canadian film. What actually happens in cross-border cultural production and consumption? When Scott Pilgrim vs. the World opens with the titles “Not So Long Ago … in The Mysterious Land … of Toronto, Canada,” who is the audience for this cross-border film? For whom is Canada mysterious, and which audience requires the explanation of “Canada” alongside Toronto (but without the intermediary provincial location of “Ontario”)? The orientation of the viewer with respect to location arguably disorients the Canadian viewer, or at least signals to them that they are not watching a Canadian film: if they were, the explanation of “Canada” would be unnecessary. Thus, national recognition and affirmation become complicated in a text such as Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, its identifiable Toronto locations present (if muted, compared to the geographical specificity of the graphic novels themselves), yet overly explained for the nonCanadian viewer.

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At the same time, other Torontonian cues appear more subtly, offering local viewers rewards for their specialist knowledge, as it were. If Scott appears to be implicitly nationalist when he wears a CBC T-shirt on his first date with the American Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), elsewhere his clothing delivers more local messages. At one point, Scott wears a SA R S T-shirt, a reminder of the 2003 outbreak of sudden acute respiratory syndrome that was particularly pronounced in Toronto, a testament, in part, to the city’s prominence within globalized travel networks. Embedded within the film’s reference to the outbreak lies an implicit recognition of cross-border film production itself: the SARS outbreak, in conjunction with the rising value of the Canadian dollar, saw film production drop in Ontario by 40 per cent in 2003.1 Toronto occupies the position of “world-class city,” a discourse that, as Sarah Matheson notes, underscores “[t]he global flow of capital and the power of big business, offer[ing] a view of Toronto that looks above and beyond its borders.”2 The intersection of S A R S in Toronto with the city’s global status, which also facilitates a “placelessness” and enables Toronto to stand in for various other metropolises in film and television production, is perfectly encapsulated in Scott Pilgrim’s T-shirt in the Canadian cultural text masquerading as an American film, supplemented by local and national audiences through their interaction with a plethora of conflicting signifiers of place. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, of course, is hardly the only film to enact this cross-border negotiation through a confusion of national references. Indeed, another film starring Michael Cera, Jason Reitman’s Juno (2007), formed the focus of controversy when it was not nominated for any Genie Awards. Shot in and around Vancouver, with two Canadian leads (Cera and Ellen Page), directed by a Canadian, Juno, in fact, was not submitted for Genie consideration by its studio.3 Much of the uproar appeared to invoke the frustration of audiences weary of the expectation that a Canadian film cannot be popular, and vice versa. Yet, on closer inspection, the film goes out of its way to prove its US credentials, not only with close-ups of American vehicle licence plates, but also with the licence plate on the car-shaped bed of Cera’s character testifying to the narrative’s Minnesota setting. The narrative itself, in fact, hinges to a large extent on the American location: the prospective adoptive parents of Juno’s baby will be paying for her medical bills, a consideration that would not apply north of the 49th parallel, given Canada’s public health care.4 A border is a place of both division and connection. What Canadians refer to metonymically as the 49th parallel, the Canada-US border, might

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therefore be understood as the outer limits of these two nation-states, the site where their differences from and similarities to each other commingle and become manifest. But political borders can never be divorced from relations of power. As Jody Berland writes, “the most cursory review of Canadian scholarship confirms that the 49th Parallel has a huge symbolic status in the culture that has no parallel in American consciousness. This is the truism north of the 49th: Canadians live and write as though the border is everywhere, shadowing everything we contemplate and fear; Americans as though there is no border at all.”5 The focus of the United States on borders has tended to be directed south, towards Mexico. For many Canadians, the border signifies a relationship to the United States that is fraught with an imbalance of power, a concern that the border may not effectively demarcate Canada’s cultural, political, or economic sovereignty after all. The border often appears as a figurative mirror in Canadian scholarship, invoked by Russell Brown for its “central[ity] to Canada’s self-awareness, because it is a part of Canada’s own image as well as of the image that America reflects back to Canada.”6 Margaret Atwood and Berland both view that mirror as, in fact, a “one-way mirror,” illustrating how Canadians can and do look in on their American cousins across the border, while the reverse does not seem to be true; or, at least, in Reginald C. Stuart’s terms, Canada’s “fixed collective stare” contrasts sharply with the “episodic glances north” from the United States.7 It would seem that Canadians, with their “panoramic windows” facing south,8 are the perpetual audiences of US cultural production, in a flow of information that moves only in a northerly direction. The Canada-US border has loomed large in discussions of Canadian culture, particularly its perceived vulnerability to US culture seeping through – if not flooding over – the porous 49th parallel. While Canadian audiences have seemingly embraced this cross-border deluge, Canadian critics have long lamented it, concerned for the very nation itself, given the apparent absence of cultural sovereignty. If the state has financially supported the production of Canadian culture in compensation for its lack of market success, critics have identified the state’s inability – or unwillingness – to introduce legislation that would genuinely protect and foster Canadian culture, especially in broadcasting and cinema. Certainly, these long-standing concerns address crucial issues surrounding the economics of cultural production and the ways in which, in Canada, it is inevitably bound up in the country’s relationship to the United States. For Anglophone Canada, in particular, the ability to draw distinctions from the United States seems wedded to its cultural survival.

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But closer investigation of cross-border cultural production and consumption reveals a far more complicated picture, with a terrain more contested than the standard nationalist critique would suggest. For some areas of cultural production and circulation – such as recorded-music rights – the border is not so porous after all. In other areas, such as the phenomenon of Hollywood runaway productions, “Hollywood” culture is produced in Canada. Indeed, of his recent film Arrival (2016), Québécois director Denis Villeneuve has stated, “as a Canadian, it was a pleasure to bring US money back home,” at the same time as it was “strange for [him] to create something foreign in Quebec,”9 the Canadian province standing in for Montana in Villeneuve’s adaptation of an American short story, Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life.” Previous studies have demonstrated the integral role the financing of Canadian culture has played in its production. Working at the intersection of cultural studies and border studies, Reading between the Borderlines examines what actually happens in cross-border cultural production and consumption by tracing the cross-border movements of cultural objects, some of which are conventionally understood and circulated as Canadian, and some as American. This collection investigates the multiple ways in which not only cross-border representations, but also cross-border cultural materialities, circulation, and reception, signify. The chapters of this book engage simultaneously with textual properties, the economics that underpin cultural production, and the political contexts in which texts are produced and disseminated in order to chart new strategies of reading cultural texts across the Canada-US border. Collectively, the chapters interrogate nationalist conceptions of the border and its relationship to cultural production without simply adopting continentalist views that would agitate for a disregard of nation-state borders altogether. The authors included here identify the multiplicity of interests served, compromised, or negated by a number of modes and moments of the material cross-border production of print culture, visual culture, and music, not all of which are aligned with cross-border binaries. Although nation-state citizenship often features prominently in positioning cross-border cultural texts, economic, political, and racialized difference within nation-states features as prominently as national difference across the 49th parallel in the authors’ careful attention to the circulations of cultural power. If the examples indicated above consist of recently released films, the cross-border phenomenon of cultural production is hardly exclusive to the twenty-first century, or indeed to cinema. Cross-border flow was a major feature of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century

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Canadian literary production and literary culture in Canada. As Dallas W. Smythe points out, “Until 1911, Canada was forbidden by Britain to pass copyright laws in its own interest, which meant that Canadian authors effectively had to be published abroad.”10 Whereas Canadian literature in this period featured the southward emigration of many writers and the publication of Canadian writers by US publishers, literary culture in Canada consisted largely of “imported cultures, cultures that in a very real sense had become [Canadians’] own.”11 The phenomenon of Canadian publishing functioning as “re-producers, in the publication of American reprints”12 as well as, to a lesser extent, of British reprints meant that Canada’s emigrant writers in this period were themselves products of a cross-border literary culture, one in which creative publishing (as opposed to reprinting or producing textbooks) was identified with the United States. This cross-border publishing phenomenon resonates with much of Canada’s cultural as well as economic history: that of Canadian raw material having to cross borders in order to be processed into commodities. As Sourayan Mookerjea, Imre Szeman, and Gail Faurschou write, “It has been the contradictory privilege of Canada to be all of these things at once: a primary source of material resources for the United States and a major consumer of both its goods and its ideologies of consumption.”13 This distillation of Canada’s position echoes the work of Canadian historian and communications scholar Harold Innis, a major figure in the development of what would become Canadian cultural studies. As Innis famously theorized, “[t]he trade in staples, which characterizes an economically weak country, to the highly industrialized areas of Europe and latterly the United States … has been responsible for various peculiar tendencies in Canadian development.”14 If Canada’s history, in Innis’s view, was built on “the extractive industries that linked Canada to the imperial centres of the world,”15 Canada’s position on the margins has had not just economic but also cultural consequences, given that, as Charles R. Acland notes, “[t]he international flow of staples and commodities connects with a flow of ideologies in an example of media imperialism.”16 How materials and ideologies circulate reflects relations of power, and those relations are particularly visible at borders as “the materiality of the production, movement, and regulation of cultural products becomes a site of struggle among competing … factions.”17 Given uneven relations of power between Canada and the United States, questions of culture have long been bound up north of the border in nationalist anxieties about Canadian culture, anxieties that revolved

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around the permeability of the Canada-US border – the fact that “it acts more like a sieve than a shield”18 – and the desire to bolster that undefended border in cultural terms. The Massey Commission (or, more formally, the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences), which met between 1949 and 1951, “issued the first clear warning about the dangers of dependence upon American culture in the postwar world and proposed a deliberate and coordinated strategy for state-sponsored Canadian cultural development,” clarifying the relationship between Canadian cultural production and the anxieties about American culture, its influence, and its pervasiveness north of the border.19 Innis wrote after the Massey Report, “We are indeed fighting for our lives.”20 For the Massey Commission, “[t]he American invasion by film, radio and periodical [was] formidable.”21 The Commission’s advocacy of highbrow culture in Canada positioned the United States as the source of a contaminating mass culture, as well as an “untrammelled liberal individualism,” to be countered by a strengthened Canadian culture’s “concern for the national community”;22 indeed, although the Massey Commission argued that “[m]uch of what comes to us [from the United States] is good,” it took issue with American cultural programs that it considered to have “no particular application to Canada or to Canadian conditions.”23 Thus, constructed cultural hierarchies intersected with national divisions across the 49th parallel in the Commission’s attempt to reconfigure what cultural production could genuinely be considered Canadians’ own and to forge “an ideal national culture, poised against an imported popular culture.”24 Thus, “a national identity that justified the existence of Canada as an independent nation”25 would reinforce the border through the production of a highbrow Canadian culture. Much Canadian cultural policy developed in response to the porosity of the 49th parallel and the sense of cultural invasion from across the border. The Massey Commission was a watershed moment for the development of Canadian culture, with institutions such as the National Library (1953) and the Canada Council for the Arts (1957) being founded on the strength of the Commission’s recommendations. But where questions of popular culture are concerned, the highbrow prejudices of the Commission have implications for Canadian culture in the present day. In her short story “Death by Landscape,” Margaret Atwood implicitly contrasts the Group of Seven – iconic, canonized, and nationally celebrated painters of the early- to mid-twentieth century – with US popular culture. The story’s protagonist, Lois, as an elderly woman, collects work by the Group of Seven and associated artists. The reader gradually learns that Lois’s

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fascination with these paintings stems from a traumatic incident in her adolescence, when her best friend, Lucy, an American girl she met years previously at summer camp, suddenly disappears without a trace during a canoeing trip. Lucy is exotically different: she is wealthier, more sexually active, and the child of divorced parents, implicitly endorsing the notion of Canada as a more morally upstanding – if less grown up and less exciting – country. Her Americanness itself, of course, creates an inferiority complex in Lois: the United States, the adolescent Lois recognizes, is “where the comic books came from, and the movies.”26 As Berland writes of colonial space, drawing on Innis, “In the tree-filled, uninhabited landscapes dominating its favourite paintings and postcards, Canada appears as a wilderness whose pristine nature counterposes a civilization that is presumably elsewhere.”27 In “Death by Landscape,” these wilderness images appear in both the Group of Seven paintings and the camp Lois and Lucy attend. But the mass culture eschewed by the Massey Commission, that civilization elsewhere, creates a sense of cultural disempowerment for Lois. The coupling of Lois’s stable but “boring”28 family relations with the national absence of mass culture condemns her to a sense of being unexciting. If “the movies” are considered by Lois to originate south of the border (effacing Canada’s – especially Anglophone Canada’s – own beleaguered film industry), as Acland observes, “One thing that Canadians have in common with each other, and something that is not shared with US audiences, is the recognition that US popular culture is an imported culture.”29 Similarly, Frank E. Manning, illustrating how the notion of “reversible resistance” operates in Canadian consumption of US popular culture, asserts that “Canadians import and eagerly consume American cultural products but reconstitute and recontextualize them in ways representative of what consciously, albeit ambivalently, distinguishes Canada from its powerful neighbour.”30 Thus, despite the considerable obstacles in the form of US economic and political interests that work to limit Canadians’ exposure to a cinema of their own, particularly where US-owned distribution is concerned, cinema culture in Canada is always already a culture distinct from that of the United States, even if Canada is incorporated into the “domestic” market in calculations of Hollywood box-office receipts. Canada’s cultural relationship to the United States figures prominently in both Canadian cultural policy and scholarship on Canadian culture. Examining issues of cultural production and consumption within a Canada-US border-studies framework, however, produces much-needed

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supplements to the notion of border as a one-way mirror. For culture does not simply flow north across the 49th parallel. However hard it may be to imagine a US writer identifying Canada as the place “where the music comes from,” the fact is that, as Richard Sutherland and Will Straw assert, “the United States [is] the largest market for Canadian music.”31 As Sutherland points out in his chapter in this volume, Canada is a place where the music comes from, especially if we consider the material form that music takes in the context of production and circulation. In terms of television, Due South (1994–99), initially a cross-border C T V - C B S co-production, then produced by C T V with assistance from the B B C , found popularity on both sides of the border. Serra Tinic notes that CBC’s Da Vinci’s Inquest (1998–2005) was not only “the highest rated domestic drama in Canada,” but it also, “to much national pride, was the first openly Canadian series to be purchased by an American broadcast network.”32 Atom Egoyan’s 1997 film The Sweet Hereafter adapted the 1991 novel of the same title by American Russell Banks, transplanting the setting from the Adirondacks to the B C Interior. If Da Vinci’s Inquest’s consumption south of the 49th parallel was cause for national celebration, so was the fact that The Sweet Hereafter not only received two Oscar nominations, but was also the first English-language Telefilm-funded film in twelve years that had made a profit.33 We see the reverse dynamic of this adaptation in the aforementioned Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, of course, but in this US film version of O’Malley’s graphic novel, it turns out – to contradict Atwood’s “Death by Landscape” – that sometimes, the comic books come from Canada as well, a point underscored by Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson in this volume. Moreover, Atwood, who has been “featured on American Barnes and Noble shopping bags,”34 is both a recognizably Canadian (for Canadians) and a complex cross-border figure herself, as Kit Dobson illustrates in this volume, precisely because of the movement of texts across the border and the differently situated audiences who consume these texts. Due South’s RCM P officer Benton Fraser (Paul Gross) figures differently on the Canadian and US sides of the border, given the self-aware irony, from a Canadian perspective, of his character as a national stereotype circulated internationally. Yet the T V program “received respectable ratings among American audiences and generated a fiercely loyal and active fandom,” an illustration, according to Rhiannon Bury, of Chris Barker’s notion of “reverse flow.” But where Barker defines reverse flow as “the impact of non-western ideas and practices on the west,” Due South, in Bury’s view, represents not a non-western marginality but one that stems from Canada’s position north

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of (and, apparently, culturally invisible to) the United States.35 This invisibility, according to the American-Canadian Carol Shields in her bordercrossing novel The Stone Diaries, suggests “a huge eraser has come down from the heavens and wiped out the top of the continent,”36 indicating the momentousness of Due South’s “reverse flow” success south of the border. At the same time, as Berland observes, “[i]n the cultural industries, we export musicians, actors, and writers (along with one or two select series) and import the schedules of entire T V networks”;37 thus, we must keep the scale of reverse flow in perspective, even as we attend to the particularities of signification that arise through the production and mobility of texts across borders. Scholarship on cultural production from the Canadian side of the border, notably that based in dependency theory, has repeatedly turned to the relationship between Canada and the United States, especially in discussions of the economic and political contexts for that production. As Marc Raboy observes in Missed Opportunities, “Historically … the principal Canadian policy issue has always been how to deal with American cultural domination.”38 The perceived need to counter a threat from south of the border has not subsided since the Massey Commission, with Max Wyman writing in the early twenty-first century, “Fifty years on, the US threat remains real, and if anything more acute. We live beside the most powerful grouping of cultural industries on the planet, all devoted to the widest possible dissemination of (and the largest possible profit from) American cultural expression. Canada, with its shared language and immediate accessibility, is a sitting-duck market.”39 Raboy’s study of Canadian broadcasting policy, however, demonstrates the extent to which Canadian governments and their arm’s-length agencies (such as the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission), despite their rhetoric of protecting, supporting, and promoting Canadian culture, have consistently favoured the interests of capital over those of the public, especially when it comes to the production and dissemination of Canadian television programming. If “the Americanization of Canadian broadcasting [has] continued apace,” this unchecked momentum is largely the responsibility of the Canadian state: “The Canadian audience was created by American television but delivered to Canadian advertisers by Canadian cable systems, to the profit of Canadian broadcasters, thanks to Canadian legislation and regulation, and without any benefit to Canadian programming or production.”40 For Smythe, Canada – the United States’s “largest and most loyal colony” – is essentially “part of the United States core of monopoly capitalism,” tying Canadian culture

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irrevocably to the United States.41 In Smythe’s view, “Canadian popular culture has been produced and marketed by businessmen more concerned with short-term profits than with nation-building.”42 Canada is “a dependent market for United States cultural imperialism,” as evidenced in concerns surrounding film production and distribution. Given that “[t]he implicit policy of the Canadian government has been consistently to accept the dominant presence of United States films and their industry,”43 the status quo has been maintained. Incorporation of the economics of cultural production and the larger relationship between Canada and the United States is crucial to our study of cross-border cultural objects. At the same time, as David H. Flaherty argues, “culture is not reduceable to economics.”44 Reading between the Borderlines reads texts as well as contexts as sites of struggle involving power in its national, cultural, political, economic, material, racialized, and gendered manifestations. Raboy’s study of the history of Canadian broadcasting prises apart “national” and genuinely “public” interests, revealing “a struggle involving different conceptions of Canada” as the Canadian audience multiplies and fragments along linguistic, regional, provincial, class, gender, ethnic, and racialized lines.45 An examination of the cultural objects actually produced as a result of the economic and political contexts, funding regimes, government legislation, and Canada-US relations offers more nuanced understandings of nation, publics, and the positioning of audiences in relation to these issues. Studies of national cultural phenomena tend to focus on a particular form, or perhaps extend their scope as far as the more encompassing category of “popular culture,” as with the example of Flaherty and Manning’s collection The Beaver Bites Back? and its focus on “the impact of American popular culture in Canada and the Canadian response thereto.”46 As Reading between the Borderlines illustrates, however, “[t]he saliency of the border as both a physical, cartographical point of demarcation as well as a marker of cultural similarity and difference cannot be overstated” in relation to all forms of cultural production, regardless of whether these forms tend to be categorized as low-, middle-, or highbrow.47 Certainly, it may be easier to determine how financial pressures influence production in such media as television or cinema, given the scale of production. But for all the Massey Commission’s hope that a nationally fostered Canadian culture could avoid “excessive commercialization,” even with continuing support from the state, the increasing concentration of the publishing industry, with large multinationals buying up smaller presses as subsidiaries, demonstrates that literature is hardly immune to the marketplace that

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“literary authors [must] navigate” as “publishing and marketing conditions influence – positively or adversely – their writing.”48 Further, in the context of independent, small-scale production,“[i]t’s very hard for small presses to distribute outside of Canada,”49 demonstrating the impact of capital on cross-border cultural flow. All the chapters in Reading between the Borderlines focus on cultural objects that are either produced out of cross-border relations or cross the border through consumption by different national audiences. These objects can “accrue … social and material value … by virtue of … border crossing,”50 especially where objects have been produced in Canada and find cross-border consumption. This dynamic enhances not only the material value of a greater audience in the United States, but also the social value “at home” of having been deemed worthy of US consumption. Theorization of material culture is often grounded in anthropological or phenomenological approaches that do not tend to address the nationstate. Yet, as Arjun Appadurai writes, “Value is embodied in commodities that are exchanged. Focusing on the things that are exchanged, rather than simply on the forms or functions of exchange, makes it possible to argue that what creates the link between exchange and value is politics, construed broadly.”51 Exchange in a Canada-US context raises the spectre of free-trade agreements such as the F T A (1989) and N AF T A (1994) and concerns about the material impact on the production of Canadian culture, leading to the much-debated cultural exemption for Canada. But, as indicated above, Canadian economic history (and, indeed, its present) is replete with raw materials accruing value through not just exchange across borders but also their manufacture into goods that are then imported back into the country. On the one hand, material objects need not always be subsumed within a function of or in relation to the nation-state; and, as Bruno Latour reminds us, an “object” is not the same thing as a “thing.”52 On the other hand, “things are not discrete entities … they exist in environments with other things, mean[ing] that locatedness and relative proximity become crucial considerations in material culture studies.”53 Michael Stamm, in this volume, for instance, illustrates how a tree located in Canada becomes the object not just of cross-border exchange but also cross-border contestation, bearing out the notion “that media are material, and have material effects.”54 Imre Szeman contends that the purpose of materialist literary criticism “is to try to understand the processes of literary and cultural transubstantiation: the processes by which an object composed of glue, paper, and ink, the product of printing presses, literary circles, and social machines of influence and reputation,

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all organized in particular ways given the social, historical, and political weightiness of every epoch, is mystically transformed from a state of material solidity into the spirit of the text.”55 As Stamm shows, the case of the Chicago Tribune reveals a “spirit” in conflict with the object, or indeed, the raw material that constitutes it, when read on one side of the border rather than the other. In their introduction to Material Cultures in Canada, Thomas Allen and Jennifer Blair question the “grant[ing of] some sort of citizenship status to things.”56 We see in the cultural texts under examination in Reading between the Borderlines, however, how often a kind of national citizenship is attributed to them or negotiated around them, and the interests served by these attributions and negotiations. For some of the objects under examination in this collection – such as open letters from formerly enslaved people written to their former masters; early-twentiethcentury commemorations of the Underground Railroad north of the border; the materially border-crossing Chicago Tribune; and the Nelvana of the Northern Lights comic book – the citizenship attached to them in fact preceded Canada’s National Citizenship Act of 1947. In this context, citizenship often presented itself through struggles of affiliation with the waning British Empire in contrast to the US empire in its ascendancy in the determination of what Canadian values might look like. Such political affiliations played themselves out in these cultural objects, as chapters on the above examples attest. Generally speaking, citizenship attributed to cultural objects often stems from the identities of cultural producers, depending on which side of the border forms the ostensible site of origin. If borders operate “to distinguish us from them,” the status of citizen functions as “one of a pair of opposites”: the inverse being that of the “alien.”57 As both a sign and method of inclusion and exclusion, citizenship separates “who [is] ‘in’” from “who [is] ‘out.’”58 Inclusion, however, is no straightforward achievement, and not desirable in all contexts: not only do “First Nations politics often highlight that citizenship can also function not only through the violence of exclusion, but by inclusion,” but, as Darlene Johnston explains, the Canadian state insisted, from the mid-nineteenth century on, that Indigenous people “could only have a place in Canada if they renounced their heritage and denied their identity.”59 A clear illustration of the violence of inclusion and the stakes surrounding nation-state citizenship arises in Thomas King’s short story “Borders.” A Blackfoot mother, attempting to cross the Canada-US border with her son, in order to visit her daughter in Salt Lake City, refuses to submit to the demands of American and Canadian border guards that

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she self-identify as either a Canadian or an American citizen. Her citizenship, the mother insists, is “Blackfoot”; when asked which side of the border she comes from, the “Canadian side or American side?” she responds, “Blackfoot side.”60 Here, the mother vehemently “refuse[s] the ‘gifts’ of American and Canadian citizenship”61 imposed upon Indigenous peoples. For the Blackfoot woman, to articulate a settler-colonial nationstate citizenship would be to undermine Blackfoot territorial sovereignty, and to legitimize the Euro–North American border that is “a figment of someone else’s imagination.”62 In Indigenous contexts, the Canada-US border figures as a settler-colonial scar bisecting Indigenous territories and attempting to forge discrepancies between “us” and “them” that both impose nation-state citizenship on Indigenous nations and deny crossborder solidarity within nations disrupted by the border.63 In its inclusions and exclusions, in the past and in the present, as well as in its assemblage of rights, protections, and obligations (often unevenly distributed) and its “continually reinventing itself,” citizenship therefore has “complex and sometimes conflicted stakes.”64 In Canada, Indigenous nations and Quebec feature prominently amongst those for whom inclusion in Canadian citizenship is, at best, problematic, and for whom the Canada-US border does not signify in the same way as it does for Anglophone Canadians, or certainly for Anglo-Canadian nationalists concerned about differentiation from the United States; the national projects for Indigenous peoples and Québécois are not coterminous with the Canadian nation-state. Yet, just as “the inclusion of Quebec within the federal state guaranteed a difference from the United States” for which Anglophone Canada can claim no credit,65 so too, as demonstrated in this volume’s chapters by Easton and Hewson and Jennifer Andrews, Indigeneity is sometimes recruited in Canadian cultural production in order to distinguish it from its US counterpart. If “[c]ultural understandings of citizenship are concerned not only with ‘formal’ processes, such as who is entitled to vote and the maintenance of an active civil society, but crucially with whose cultural practices are disrespected, marginalized, stereotyped and rendered invisible,”66 those sidelined to the margins of Canadian culture and / or included within it without their consent have not been the focus of Canadian cultural policy. As Acland writes in this volume, Canadian cultural policy has historically attempted “to orient people toward a national cultural project.” Given the political and cultural imposition of the settler-colonial boundary that is the 49th parallel on Indigenous territories, the various attempts throughout Canadian and US history to impose nation-state citizenship on Indigenous peoples,67 and

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the divergence of Indigenous nationhood from nation-state projects, this volume does not absorb Indigenous cultural production and consumption into its study. A full and considered treatment of how the border impacts upon Indigenous cultural production and consumption is worthy of a volume of its own, a much-needed development in how we think about culture and the Canada-US border. Rather than attempt to incorporate Indigenous cultural production and consumption into the settler-colonial framework that this volume examines, therefore, we underscore those points at which settler-colonial culture tries to deploy discourses and representations of Indigeneity in articulating the settler-colonial state’s cultural relationship to the border. Citizenship circulates around and through cultural objects by virtue of the positioning of cultural producers and consumers. For Canadian culture, of course, much of the material resources for culture come from the state itself. In the nation-state’s cultural project, citizens produce the national culture, to be consumed and celebrated by other citizens. When a Canadian writer becomes celebrated internationally, for instance, citizenship becomes “bound up with issues of national pride and achievement,” as Lorraine York argues in considering the success of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.68 Although there is much to contest in the construction of citizenship and national cultural projects, Danielle Fuller argues in her conception of the “citizen reader” that “affective connections and … affective experiences of citizenship … are made possible” through shared cultural consumption.69 This mode of citizenship offers Lauren Berlant’s notion of a “promise of belonging,” enabling the “express[ion of] a version of citizenship outside the public domain of politics,” as the consumption of national cultural projects “reaffirm[s] [a] sense of belonging to a nation.”70 Fuller’s notion of the citizen reader emerges from the examination she and DeNel Rehberg Sedo undertook of mass reading events and the kinds of community forged from a combination of private and shared consumption of culture (usually national culture, for the Canadian events studied by Fuller and Rehberg Sedo). For Fuller, however, the affective dimension of citizenship produced by mass reading events is also bound up in the material realities of Canadian publishing and distribution. As much as One Book, One City events in Canadian cities may wish to work with small publishers and independent bookstores, such events “need the financial support that [larger, foreign-owned] companies can provide such as free copies and ‘deep discounts.’”71 Thus, foreign capital supports at the same time as it structurally contradicts an affective Canadian citizenship.

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Although the citizen and the consumer are often presented in opposition to each other, “the lines between the two categories are less sharply drawn than ever.”72 Serra Tinic’s work on international co-productions in Canadian television, and the ways in which they do and do not fulfill criteria of Canadian content, deploys the notion of the “citsumer” to address the position of the Canadian audience and its exposure to both “the market model of television treat[ing] audiences as consumers” and “the public model’s emphasis on audiences as citizens.”73 For Tinic, the C B C ’s position as “home to culturally proximate programming while, at the same time, generating advertising revenue for part of its production budget” means that the network “addresses its audience as the ultimate ‘citsumers.’”74 While international co-productions, particularly in the science-fiction or action-adventure genres, “qualify as Canadian content through the citizenship of the key creative participants in the production agreement,” most international joint ventures “seek to exploit market borders by homogenizing cultural narratives into the global generic.”75 The economic rationale of such projects, to produce export-friendly television, excludes the possibility of their addressing Canadian locations or concerns. At the same time, however, Canadian cultural consumers (and citizens) are attuned to the materialities of production in Canada and by Canadians, most often in the recognition of Canadian locations or personnel that punctures the fiction that the locations and people appearing on their screens are always situated south of the border. If, as Marshall McLuhan claims, “[t]he majority of Canadians are very grateful for the free use of American news and entertainment on the air,”76 Canadians are not just observers of US culture, as McLuhan positions them, but also, in many cases and in many capacities, its producers. This is not to suggest that the market can meet the “continuous historic demand for socially involved broadcasting in Canada”77 or deliver adequate Canadian content to audiences wishing to see their national, regional, or local communities reflected in their viewing. Rather, it is to argue that just as Canadians recognize US popular culture as an imported culture, so they also recognize its components that are, in fact, domestic to Canada. If “English-Canadians are especially good at masquerading as Americans,”78 Canadian audiences are equally good at reminding themselves that this masquerade is taking place. This masquerade often appears in the parentheses of journalism and scholarship that acknowledge Canadian presence within ostensibly US culture without probing the implications of such a cross-border

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performance and how it might be negotiated back across the 49th parallel in the production of the meaning of the text. Raymond Williams points out that, whereas “in archaeology and in cultural anthropology the reference to culture or a culture is primarily to material production … in history and cultural studies the reference is primarily to signifying or symbolic systems.”79 In Reading between the Borderlines, we bring the material into dialogue with the symbolic, exploring how they function in a cross-border context. As Michael Dear and Gustavo Leclerc assert, “culture concerns us, our stuff, and how we use it to define who we are.”80 In the case of cross-border cultural products branded as (symbolically) American but comprised of (materially) Canadian “stuff,” as is often the case, we need to think through more carefully the extent to which those products might contribute to these national definitions. Citizenship features in both cultural production and consumption, and not simply in relation to the producers and consumers themselves. Just as “commodities, like persons, have social lives,”81 so too it seems that cultural objects can also have national identities that approximate citizenship. Such objects can even have dual citizenship, as in the case of the aforementioned The Stone Diaries, winner of the Governor-General’s Award north of the border and the Pulitzer Prize south of it. For many of the cultural objects under discussion in this volume, it is not simply the producer or consumer that determines citizenship, but also the material itself, which sometimes raises the issue of contested citizenships for (trans)national cultural objects. Reading between the Borderlines focuses on the materiality of cross-border print, visual, and musical texts, on the methods and location of production, and on the political and economic contexts that enable, curb, and inflect production, circulation, and consumption. In doing so, it probes the multiplicity of national claims made for the ways in which cultural objects are produced and consumed. The Canada-US border operates as a key site in the configuration of the material citizenship of these cultural objects. Canadian cultural texts have often featured representations of the Canada-US border, given how central that nation-state demarcation is to Canada’s sense of self. As Ian Angus writes, “Canada is this making of a border separating us from the United States.”82 Attempts to cross the Canada-US border – successfully or unsuccessfully – recur throughout Anglophone Canadian culture in particular. But if cultural texts, especially those produced in Anglophone Canada, often look to the 49th parallel for their subject matter, and studies of the border have tended to focus on its representation in cultural texts,83 for the most part the role that the border plays

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in the production and consumption of culture constitutes a curious gap in Canada-US border studies. Border studies is more generally associated with the site of the Mexico-US border, considered the “birthplace”84 of the field. Given the considerable discrepancy in economic, political, and cultural power between Mexico and the United States, the border between these two nation-states has been famously characterized by leading Chicana scholar and poet Gloria Anzaldúa as “una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”85 In Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa devises innovative poetic and prose forms to articulate her embordered identity and her conception of a “mestiza consciousness.” In cultural theory and cultural production, the Mexico-US borderland has been theorized as a site conducive to cultural hybridity and transgressive cultural performance and practice, such as that associated with the Border Arts Workshop / Taller de Arte Fronterizo, and particularly with former member Guillermo Gómez-Peña. As the editors of Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border recount, this border city has attracted a spectrum of cultural theorizations, ranging from the “highly utopian” to the “highly dystopian,” by virtue of such events as the Maquiladora de Dueños (Factory of Dreams) that stages a “factory [that] would assemble art and culture for local consumption” and thereby tweaks the export-focused maquiladora.86 Despite the development of more mobile concepts in border studies scholarship and in border art, such as Ila Nicole Sheren’s “border mentality and the portable border,”87 however, site specificities cannot travel very far, certainly not without a great deal of translation and transfiguration. Comparisons between the southern and northern borders of the United States tend more towards gaping contrasts. The materialities of the borders themselves – the physical walls erected between Mexico and the United States contrasting with what used to be celebrated as the longest undefended border in the world – reflect the political relations between the countries on either side of them. The Mexico-US border operates “both as a subject and as a site” for border art: the physical demarcation, intended to keep out migrants who risk their lives trying to cross into the United States, also becomes a musical instrument or canvas for cultural expression as artists respond to the “poetics of the wall itself.”88 Rendering the border as an aestheticized object runs counter to its intended purpose, and is likely of little comfort to those seeking to cross it to forge a better life while believing “the US government designed the Wall to kill people.”89 Richard Lou’s The Border Door (1988), an installation along the border

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outside Tijuana, fuses aesthetics with the politics of border-crossing, for “[t]he only invited ‘audience’ were potential border-crossers – invited as ‘users’ rather than spectators.”90 Aesthetics can be subversive, as also demonstrated more recently when Mexican-American artist Ana Teresa Fernández painted the border fence at Nogales Sonora blue in order to make it indistinguishable from the sky and thus to “erase” it.91 Canada-US border policing has certainly increased since 9/11, but neither the scale nor the material presence of this border approximates those of the Mexico-US boundary. Similarly, cultural production at the border site between Canada and the United States is not nearly as common an occurrence, although Brittney Anne Bos’s chapter on the transnational Underground Railroad monument in this volume examines an exception to this tendency. Mohawk artist Alan Michelson’s Third Bank of the River, a public art installation in Massena, NY, at the United States Port of Entry, offers another example, projecting a doubled panorama of Cornwall Island – and the intersection of territorial claims of Canada, the United States, and the Akwesasne Mohawk – that also presents as a two-row wampum, thus “conjur[ing] an image of cultural / national encounter and separation.”92 Some cultural texts may not be sited at the border, but their existence depends upon it. In Rick Mercer’s recurring “Talking to Americans” segment of This Hour Has 22 Minutes, the border functions as a “one-way mirror-wall to reflect two sides of the border, one gullible and the other wily and even deceptive,”93 as the Canadian Mercer exposes the ignorance of Americans about Canada for the amusement of a Canadian audience. The Canadian poet Rachel Zolf’s collaborative Tolerance Project provides a very different example. It was born in 2009 out of her having to pursue an MFA program in the United States because the US government would not recognize the same-sex relationship that brought her across the border when her partner took up a university position there.94 The asymmetry of power relations between Canada and the United States has often been symbolically rendered in gendered terms, including in the realm of cross-border consumption of culture, as Frank E. Manning notes in his contesting of “the conventional assumption that Canada is a passive receptacle for the phallocentric domination of American culture. The metaphor of a masculine America’s penetration of feminine Canada has been frequently evoked by those seeking a vivid imagery for the Canadian experience on a continent shared with an incontinent partner.”95 Gender is treated significantly – if very differently – in chapters by Jessica Taylor, by Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson, and by Jennifer Andrews in this volume. Taylor’s essay on the contested Canadianness of the romance

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genre (despite Harlequin’s Canadian origins) demonstrates how a longstanding dismissal of feminized culture has placed Canadian romance writers beyond the pale of what is considered national cultural production, even as Canadian romance writers seek to negotiate their Canadianness alongside the perceived (and sometimes explicitly articulated) demands of the market. Easton and Hewson’s and Andrews’s chapters explore variations on the conventional gendering of the Canada-US relationship. The Superman Reclamation Project undertaken by the Harper government, as Easton and Hewson argue, constituted an attempt to masculinize Canada, thus ignoring a more obviously homegrown Canadian superhero (herself the product of wartime Canada-US border relations) in Nelvana of the Northern Lights. In her discussion of the Confederation Centre’s staging of Anne of Green Gables and the cross-border adaptation of Longfellow’s Evangeline, Andrews draws attention to the ways in which the conventional gendering of Canada as feminine has been strategically deployed by the Centre in order to promote Canadian content, often to a tourist audience. The gendering of Canada-US relations, of course, is inflected by the power relations between the two countries. Cross-border negotiations of political, economic, and cultural power inform the chapters of this volume. The chapters in the first part, “Cross-Border Cultural Production: Historical Processes,” focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century newspaper circulation across the border, the history of the Canadian music industry as a branch plant of the US industry, and the politics of comicbook production and commemoration in relation to the border. Each chapter addresses both the production and circulation of cultural objects, with a range of movements across the border determined by political and economic forces. In the case of open letters by formerly enslaved people, addressed to their former masters, circulation was intended to cross the border that allowed them to assert their liberty and negotiate their terms of belonging, in an example of what Nancy Kang calls “a collaborative model of cross-border emancipation.”96 Later, the Chicago Tribune’s use of Québécois spruce generated controversy early in the Second World War, as American journalism printed on Canadian trees published anti-British sentiment during a period of international conflict. If the Tribune Company operated a branch-plant system in Canada, this model has structured the recording industry in Canada throughout its history, one that has been determined by changes in tariffs and the response of US companies to them in how they shaped their Canadian operations. Finally, despite Superman’s global circulation as a quintessentially

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American comic-book hero, efforts to reclaim his Canadianness have attempted to reconfigure cross-border flow by positing Canada as his origin, with serious implications for this reclamation project under the Harper government. In Chapter 1, Alyssa MacLean examines open letters written by formerly enslaved people, which circulated in nineteenth-century abolitionist newspapers on either side of the Canada-US border. Arguing that such letters constitute a black Canadian genre and an important “mode of dissent” from the late 1830s to the 1860s, MacLean demonstrates how the authors of the letters expressed “their newfound physical, political, material, and social agency” and “participat[ed] in a transnational conversation about the benefits and responsibilities of citizenship in Canada and the United States.” In Chapter 2, Michael Stamm illustrates the border’s simultaneous porosity and reinforcement in relation to print culture through a case study of the Chicago Tribune, whose conservative publisher Robert McCormick established a paper mill in Quebec to supply the Tribune with newsprint produced from Québécois spruce. Whereas, for McCormick, “the border effectively did not exist” (the international boundary was effaced from his company’s charting of its holdings), the disinterpellation of Canadian citizens reading anti-British invective in the lead-up to the Second World War reinserts the missing Canada-US border into the Tribune’s map, in relation to both McCormick’s politics and support for regulation of the presence and influence of American mass media within Canada. In Chapter 3, Richard Sutherland explores Canada’s role in a continental recording industry. Through an economic history of the tariffs to which recordings were subject at different points, Sutherland argues that music’s material circulation, within Canada and across the 49th parallel, “may offer us insight into how it contributes to and is inflected by Canadian nationality in a way that often escapes analysis of its content.” Further, throughout the Canadian music industry’s branch-plant history, this chapter contends, American companies also have been required to “become, in some sense, Canadian” in order to operate north of the 49th parallel. Conversely, in Chapter 4, Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson examine claims that comic-book hero Superman was already Canadian. Juxtaposing Canada Post’s and the Royal Mint’s Harper-era commemoration of Superman with the Golden Age of Canadian Comics (1941–46), “a period both produced and destroyed by border practices,” Easton and Hewson examine one

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Golden-Age comic, Nelvana of the Northern Lights. The first female superhero, Nelvana is an Inuit demi-goddess whose gendered and racialized identity presents a profound challenge to the Harper government’s (re) appropriation of the ultra-masculine Superman as a model Canadian citizen during a period of Harper’s extractivist interest in the North. The volume’s second part, “Beyond the Border: Ideals and Realities of Transnational Cultural Work,” examines film and television production and post-production, commemorative statuary, and genre publishing in the context of the Canada-US border. These chapters address aspects of cultural production that complicate cultural nationalist perspectives, given the tendency to sidestep the work done by Canadians, in Canada, on what is ultimately billed as Hollywood product; the difficulty of assessing transnational commemoration; and the exclusion of genre production from national cultural canons. The details of each production context, however, raise specific and difficult questions about the nation’s role in cultural products that are not easily read as “Canadian.” Given the tendency of such cultural products to be read as American – or “Americanized” – the suspicion is likely to arise that they cannot sustain the cultural life of Canadian citizens in national terms (or, particularly in the case of romance writing, in highbrow cultural terms either). But to ignore the material Canadian provenance of such cultural products, or the negotiations involved in transnational cultural work, is to turn a blind eye to a key feature of North American cultural production and circulation. For cultural nationalists, the Canada-US border draws clear distinctions between Canadian and US identities, values, and culture. But there is no merit in refusing to engage with the Canadianness of products so often overlooked in cultural scholarship, with the careful negotiations of national cultural expression that take place within these forms of production, or with the possibilities of transnational production – particularly when a cross-border consciousness enriches our understanding of historical and cultural phenomena beyond the confines of a narrow nationalism. In Chapter 5, Charles R. Acland interrogates the politics of visual media production and post-production across the Canada-US border. A key player in ostensibly “Hollywood” production, Canada is both integral to and largely rendered invisible by Hollywood at the same time as Canadian film and television producers – and the tax incentives offered by Canadian provinces – have been increasingly blamed for the precarious job security of their American counterparts. Work done by Canadians on so-called “runaway” productions falls through the cracks of most scholarship and much policy, given that Canadian cultural policy has tended to privilege

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“a national cultural project [that might] ameliorate modern Canadian citizenship.” Rather than acquiesce to an “infrastructural elsewhere” that simultaneously draws productions to Canada and appears to reduce their Canadianness, Acland proposes that we acknowledge “a culture of craft” in order to recognize and celebrate “the actual below-the-line labour that … is indispensable to the work that ultimately circulates.” In Chapter 6, Brittney Anne Bos probes the commemoration of the cross-border history of slavery from early-twentieth-century monuments in Canada to the twenty-first-century international Underground Railroad monument that straddles the Detroit River, the very location of the Canada-US border. Bos details how ostensibly national values on either side of the border manifest in commemorative discourses, and argues that these are negotiated in the international Underground Railroad monument in a way that produces “a transnational memory that simultaneously highlights and destabilizes” the border. In Chapter 7, Jessica Taylor explores the extent to which genre cultural production in general, and romance writing in particular, appear to be always already American for writers and audiences across the 49th parallel, despite Harlequin’s founding in Winnipeg in 1949. Using the anthropological methodology of participation-observation, Taylor examines Canadian romance writers’ simultaneous exclusion from the purview of national cultural production by virtue of the denigration of the genre in which they work and the pressure either to minimize or to deny their national location in order to access their target market south of the border. Examining the work of Canadian writer Kate Bridges, whose historicalromance Mountie Collection both is set in western Canada and appeals to American audiences’ associations of Canada with the globally recognizable Mountie figure, Taylor demonstrates how the Canadian production of genre fiction operates as a kind of staple that is primarily exported to audiences outside Canada’s borders. The volume’s third and final part, “Cross-Border Reading,” analyzes the movements of literary, cinematic, and dramatic texts across the 49th parallel in both their production and their consumption. Each essay deals with adaptation and / or appropriation of cultural texts across the border, either through production or interpretation, or both. In any crossborder flow, texts are inevitably altered by the positioning of the audiences that consume them. Adaptation of source texts from literature to film, or from the page to the stage, resituate the original work in a new form and in a new location across the border – even in cases where, paradoxically, some of the labour in producing the adaptation has taken place in the

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source material’s national “home.” Canadian author Yann Martel, in two different texts that form the focus of two chapters here, asserts a connection between cultural production and citizenship. At the same time, however, histories and texts can be appropriated by cultural producers and audiences on the other side of the border, inserting them simultaneously into two (or more) national cultures. As a result, the border both blurs and sharpens, acting as a site of translation or transfiguration, a different lens that produces different readings and therefore remakings of texts that may otherwise be inserted with certainty into national literary canons. Yet these rereadings coexist with what may be considered the “original” object of the source material, the border enabling a palimpsest of nationally inflected meanings potentially in conflict with each other. In Chapter 8, I posit the Canadian literary text as raw material that is processed, refined, altered, and sold back to Canadian and international audiences via “Hollywood” film adaptation. In the case of the film of Life of Pi, directed by Ang Lee (2012), Canada-US border crossings in the film’s production coexist with multiple international border crossings, with most of the film shot in Taiwan, but the film’s other shooting and post-production locations also incorporating Canada, the country of the source material’s author, Yann Martel. This chapter argues that adaptation scholarship must address questions of production and post-­production in thinking through the adaptation process and its implications, especially in relation to Life of Pi, “a case study [that] requires attention to multiply embordered national production contexts” and the circulation of its source text. In Chapter 9, Jennifer Andrews traces a cross-border adaptation process that translated Evangeline, the long nineteenth-century poem by American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, into a musical at the Confederation Centre in Charlottetown, P E I . Andrews examines the complexities and contradictions of both Longfellow’s appropriation of the Acadian Expulsion and the ways in which Acadian communities themselves have taken up Evangeline as an affirmation of their history and identity, as well as the musical’s attempt to redress the fact that Longfellow’s stripped Acadian identity of the historical intermarriage of Acadians and the Mi’kmaq. In this adaptation, the “raw material” is itself inherently cross-border, with the roots of Longfellow’s poem lying in the history of the Acadians themselves, appropriated and reappropriated multiple times en route to the Charlottetown stage. Kit Dobson turns to Canadian literary “raw material” in Chapter 10, in his discussion of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, in which

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national questions blur through the uncertain status of the post-9/11 Canada-US border in these three novels, in which neat national distinctions are both invited and resisted. In the dystopia Atwood envisions, the rise of the “privatizing security state” signals “the threat of neo-liberal governance,” which is in evidence on either side of the Canada-US border, “though with different overtones in each country.” The fact that some (Canadian) critics read the novels as commenting on Canada’s “ambivalent attitude toward US actions, paralyzed and uncomprehending,” reinstalls the border that Atwood leaves hazy in the trilogy; at the same time, as Dobson argues, the texts offer a more fundamental interrogation of borders through the distinction between the human and the non-human. If Atwood is read differently on either side of the 49th parallel, Yann Martel, as argued by Zalfa Feghali in the final chapter, provides a “modelling of cross-border reading” in 101 Letters to a Prime Minister, a compendium of letters sent to accompany fortnightly reading suggestions (in the material form of the books themselves) from Martel to Stephen Harper. With just over half of the books comprising Martel’s reading suggestions written by Canadian and American authors, Martel folds US texts into a Canadian project, offering “a practice or economy of reading that reorients Canada’s role in the Canada-US relationship,” while “formulat[ing] a cross-border literary canon at a time of both crisis at, and skepticism of, borders.” As both a “citizen of the arts” and a citizen of Canada, writing ostensibly unread letters to his prime minister, Martel forges a cross-border neighbourliness that simultaneously emphasizes Harper’s own unresponsiveness to the arts and to the Canadian citizenry. The closing of the volume with Feghali’s essay on cosmopolitanism in cross-border contexts is all too timely, given recent political developments. Following the federal election in October 2015, of course, Canada has a new prime minister. It is hard to imagine that Justin Trudeau, in possession of an English degree from McGill, would require cajoling by Canadian authors to engage in reading literature. As Reginald C. Stuart points out, for Canadians, “how prime ministers and presidents have seemed to get along has been a barometer of the overall relationship.”97 Certainly, this barometer appears to have been in play in the shifts from Harper to Trudeau as prime minister and from Bush to Obama to Trump as president. Trudeau has had a very different relationship to Obama than his predecessor, with international media commenting on Trudeau’s friendship with Obama as a powerful “bromance,” an indicator of greater political and cultural affinity across the 49th parallel. (As Feghali notes, even Martel’s relationship with Obama was markedly better than his non-reciprocal

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relationship with Harper.) But Obama is no longer Trudeau’s cross-border counterpart. And given that Yann Martel’s enormously successful novel Life of Pi was first published on 11 September 2001, and with a very different president from Obama in office in the United States, and given the inauguration of the extremely divisive Donald Trump as US president in January 2017, we must remember how the details of the Canada-US relationship, as shaped by political parties and individuals in power, are always subject to change. Reports of Canadians who were en route to join the anti-Trump Women’s March on Washington in 2017 being refused entry at the Canada-US border98 pointed to a policing of gender and nationality that invoked the gendering of Canada-US relations at the same time as they bore out concerns about Trump’s hostility to difference and his desire to see borders as sites of division rather than connection. Further, Trump’s signing of an executive order to allow the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, protested locally and globally, demonstrates not only the complicity of Canadian capital and politics through the oil industry, and its support (even from the Liberal Trudeau) in the abrogation of Indigenous sovereignty, but also how cross-border concerns of cosmopolitan citizenship are becoming increasingly, and urgently, visible. The temporal span of the cultural texts under discussion in this collection, from the open letters by formerly enslaved people from the 1830s on to the publication of 101 Letters to a Prime Minister in 2012, demonstrates the long-standing impact the Canada-US border has had on North American cultural production and consumption. Cross-border production and consumption have been a consistent feature of North American cultural life. This is not to homogenize political, economic, and cultural contexts across nearly two centuries. Rather, this collection illustrates how shifts in these contexts have engendered new ways of producing, circulating, and consuming print, visual, and musical culture. If, as Mark Simpson writes, “[t]he condition, process, or dynamic popularly termed globalization discombobulates long-standing boundaries between nations as between cultures, reconfiguring and recombining – to often dizzying effect – the relations among spaces, peoples, and practices,”99 the Canada-US border in the era of globalization continues to inform and inflect North American cultural production, circulation, and consumption, as cultural producers and consumers adapt both to changing political and economic regimes and their implications for cultural objects and to the ways in which these objects either seek out or avoid interpellating audiences as national citizens. In identifying how cultural objects are made, moved, and used across the Canada-US border, this collection presents

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us with the means to think through those movements and to account for cross-border culture both in the past and the present day.

N otes 1 2 3 4

Christopherson, “Divide and Conquer,” 26. Matheson, “Projecting Placelessness,” 128. See Lewis, “Juno Not Canadian Enough for Genie.” See Latimer, Reproductive Acts, 7–8, for observations on the relationship between cross-border cultural production and reproductive policy. 5 Berland, “Writing on the Border,” 474. 6 Brown, “The Written Line,” 12. 7 Atwood, “Canadian-American Relations,” 440, and Berland, “Writing on the Border,” 476; Stuart, Dispersed Relations, 97. 8 Ibid., 26. 9 Quoted in Johnson, “The Arrival of Denis Villeneuve.” 10 Smythe, Dependency Road, 120. 11 Mount, When Canadian Literature Moved to New York, 30. 12 Quoted in ibid. 13 Mookerjea, Szeman, and Faurschou, “Introduction,” 21. 14 Innis, “The Importance of Staple Products in Canadian Development,” 20. 15 Stamps, Unthinking Modernity, 41. 16 Acland, “Histories of Place and Power,” 249. 17 Ibid., 258. 18 McKinsey and Konrad, Borderlands Reflections, 1. 19 Litt, The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission, 3. 20 Innis, “The Strategy of Culture,” 13. 21 Canada, Report, 18. 22 Litt, The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission, 5. What qualifies for insertion into such categories as “highbrow,” “lowbrow,” and “­middlebrow” culture is notoriously in the eye of the beholder, of course. Indeed, as Lawrence W. Levine writes, “because the primary categories of culture have been the products of ideologies which were always subject to modifications and transformations, the perimeters of our cultural divisions have been permeable and shifting rather than fixed and immutable” (Highbrow / Lowbrow, 8). With respect to the Massey Commission, specifically, Litt observes that it distinguished “between high culture, popular ­culture, and mass culture” (84). Although “high culture” has often “had the negative connotation of undemocratic exclusivity” (84), “[f]or both the commissioners and the culture lobby,” high culture was linked to “the

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acquisition of knowledge and insight” and “involved a process of exploration, reflection, and intellectual growth”: “they considered high culture to be thoroughly democratic because it opened to the individual a path of self-improvement leading to intellectual freedom” (84–5). In contrast, ­popular culture in the context of the Massey Commission consisted of “the folklore, customs, and pastimes that traditionally existed in close relation to a people’s social culture,” and “[m]ost members of the culture lobby appreciated popular culture in its grassroots forms” (85). This definition of popular culture resembles Raymond Williams’s fourth definition of ­popular culture in Keywords, namely, “culture actually made by the people themselves” (the other definitions being “inferior kinds of work,” “work deliberately setting out to win favour,” and culture that is “well-liked by many people” [237]). If the Massey commissioners and the culture lobby approved of what they conceived of as popular culture, in contrast, “mass culture they despised. They believed that its inspiration was purely commercial rather than communal or critical” (Litt, The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission, 85). Mass culture was considered a threat by the cultural lobby because they viewed it as “monolithic and menacing; it stultified and then manipulated a gullible public,” with consequences for “a society which entrusted political power to the independent judgment of its citizens” (85). 23 Canada, Report, 18. 24 Acland, “Histories of Place and Power,” 248. 25 Litt, The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission, 254. 26 Atwood, “Death by Landscape,” 114. 27 Berland, “Space at the Margins,” 299. 28 Atwood, “Death by Landscape,” 117. 29 Acland, “From the Absent Audience to Expo-Mentality,” 282. 30 Manning, “Reversible Resistance,” 8. 31 Sutherland and Straw, “The Canadian Music Industry at a Crossroads,” 143. 32 Tinic, “The Borders of Cultural Difference,” 34. 33 See Everett-Green, “Hereafter Pays Off.” 34 Walton, “Introduction,” xi. 35 Bodroghkozy, “As Canadian as Possible …” 581; Bury, “From a Cyberspace of Their Own to Television 2.0”; Barker, Television, Globalization, and Cultural Identities, 42. 36 Shields, The Stone Diaries, 93. 37 Berland, “Space at the Margins,” 291. 38 Raboy, Missed Opportunities, 339.

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39 Wyman, The Defiant Imagination, 23. 40 Raboy, Missed Opportunities, 339, 308. 41 Smythe, Dependency Road, xi, ix. 42 Ibid., 98. 43 Ibid., 129, 134. 44 Flaherty, “Preface,” xiii. 45 Raboy, Missed Opportunities, 8, 18. 46 Flaherty, “Preface,” xi. 47 Tinic, “The Borders of Cultural Difference,” 30. 48 Canada, Report, 58; Dobson, “Introduction,” 5. 49 Quoted in Justice, “To Hear this Different Story,” 84. 50 Allen and Blair, “Introduction,” 7. 51 Appadurai, “Introduction,” 3. 52 Latour uses the example of the 2003 Columbia disaster to illustrate how the object of the shuttle became, as “a sudden shower of debris” (“Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” 160), a thing. However, his description of the debris “falling on the United States, which thousands of people tried to salvage” (160) does suggest a sense of national kinship, or shared citizenship, that persisted between those attempting to salvage the wreckage and the material thing itself. 53 Allen and Blair, “Introduction,” 17. 54 Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 204. 55 Szeman, “Introduction,” 3. 56 Allen and Blair, “Introduction,” 6. 57 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 25; Smith, “Is Citizenship a Gendered Concept?”139. 58 Menzies, Adamoski, and Chunn, “Rethinking the Citizen in Canadian Social History,” 27. 59 Chariandy and McCall, “Introduction,” 5; Johnston, “First Nations and Canadian Citizenship,” 363. 60 King, “Borders,” 134, 136. 61 A. Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 7. 62 King, “Introduction,” 10. 63 As Arnold E. Davidson, Priscilla L. Walton, and Jennifer Andrews explain, non-Indigenous settlement was encouraged along the border, and reserve land confiscated, with the explicit intention of undermining Blackfoot solidarity across the border and rendering the Blackfoot “more manageable” (Border Crossings, 124) for the purposes of settler-colonial governance. 64 Menzies, Adamoski, and Chunn, “Rethinking the Citizen in Canadian Social History,” 22; Chariandy and McCall, “Introduction,” 5.

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65 Angus, A Border Within, 113. 66 Stevenson, Cultural Citizenship, 23. 67 See Johnston, “First Nations and Canadian Citizenship”; Grinde, “Iroquois Border Crossings”; and A. Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 134–7. 68 York, Literary Celebrity in Canada, 161–2. 69 Fuller, “Citizen Reader,” 1. 70 Ibid., 4, 17. 71 Ibid., 14. 72 Miller, Cultural Citizenship, 30. 73 Tinic, “Walking a Tightrope,” 416. 74 Ibid., 418. 75 Ibid., 415, 419. 76 McLuhan, “Canada,” 247. This “free use” of US news and entertainment ended with the FTA, after which Canadian broadcasters had “to pay royalties for the use of US broadcast signals they had previously taken off the air gratis” (Clarkson, Uncle Sam and Us, 366). 77 Raboy, Missed Opportunities, 342. 78 Acland, “From the Absent Audience to Expo-Mentality,” 283. 79 Williams, Keywords, 91. 80 Dear and Leclerc, “Introduction,” 11. 81 Appadurai, “Introduction,” 3. 82 Angus, A Border Within, 127. 83 See, for instance, Sadowski-Smith, Border Fictions; Adams, Continental Divides; Siemerling, and Casteel (eds.), Canada and Its Americas; Roberts and Stirrup (eds.), Parallel Encounters; and Roberts. 84 Michaelsen and Johnson, “Introduction,” 1. 85 Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 25. 86 Kun and Montezemolo, “Introduction,” 3, 2. 87 Sheren, Portable Borders, 66. 88 Berelowitz, “Border Art since 1965,” 143; Sheren, Portable Borders, 16. Marcello Di Cintio describes the musician Glenn Weyant playing “the Wall [as] a musical instrument” at Nogales, Arizona: “I stood behind Glenn on the American side of the Wall and watched him attach a contact microphone to a steel panel with black electrical tape. He ran a wire from the microphone to a compression amplifier and flicked the power switch, turned the volume knob, and stepped forward to play the Wall” (Walls, 195). 89 Ibid., 167. 90 Berelowitz, “Border Art since 1965,” 164. 91 See Neuendorf, “Artist Paints Mexico-US Border.” See also Grynsztejn, “La Frontera / The Border”; Bonansinga, Curating at the Edge; Dear and

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Leclerc (eds.), “Introduction”; and Sheren, Portable Borders for further examples of visual and performance Mexico-US border art. 92 Stirrup, “Bridging the Third Bank,” 165. 93 Berland, “Writing on the Border,” 476. 94 See Zolf, “Statement to the mfa Workshop.” 95 Manning, “Reversible Resistance,” 4. 96 Kang, “As If I Had Entered a Paradise,” 444. 97 Stuart, Dispersed Relations, 5. 98 See Kassam, “Canadians Traveling to Womens’s March.” 99 M. Simpson, “Obama’s Playlist,” 139.

B ib liog r ap h y Acland, Charles R. “From the Absent Audience to Expo-Mentality.” In Passion for Identity, 4th ed., edited by David Taras and Beverly Rasporich, 275–91. Scarborough, ON : Nelson Thomson, 2001. – “Histories of Place and Power: Innis in Canadian Cultural Studies.” In Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions, edited by Charles R. Acland and William J. Buxton, 43–60. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. Adams, Rachel. Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Allen, Thomas, and Jennifer Blair. “Introduction: Material Cultures in Canada, Material Cultures Now.” In Material Cultures in Canada, edited by Thomas Allen and Jennifer Blair, 1–22. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015. Angus, Ian. A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999. Appadurai, Arjun. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Atwood, Margaret. “Canadian-American Relations.” In Second Words: Selected Critical Prose 1960–1982, 424–48. Toronto: House of Anansi, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central. First published in 1982. – “Death by Landscape.” In Wilderness Tips, 107–29. London: Virago, 1992. Barker, Chris. Television, Globalization, and Cultural Identities. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 1999. Berelowitz, Jo-Anne. “Border Art since 1965.” In Postborder City: Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California, edited by Michael Dear and Gustavo Leclerc, 143–81. New York: Routledge, 2003.

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Berland, Jody. “Space at the Margins: Critical Theory and Colonial Space after Innis.” In Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions, edited by Charles R. Acland and William J. Buxton, 281–308. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. – “Writing on the Border.” In Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader, edited by Sourayan Mookerjea, Imre Szeman, and Gail Faurschou, 472–87. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2009. Bodroghkozy, Aniko. “As Canadian as Possible … : Anglo-Canadian Popular Culture and the American Other.” In Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, edited by Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc, 566–89. Durham, N C: Duke University Press, 2002. Bonansinga, Kate. Curating at the Edge: Artists Respond to the US / Mexico Border. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014. Brown, Russell. “The Written Line.” In Borderlands: Essays in CanadianAmerican Relations, edited by Robert Lecker, 1–27. Toronto: EC W Press, 1991. Bury, Rhiannon. “From a Cyberspace of Their Own to Television 2.0.” Interview with Henry Jenkins. 8 November 2010. . Canada. Report: Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences, 1949–1951. Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier, 1951. Cavell, Richard. McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Chariandy, David, and Sophie McCall. “Introduction: Citizenship and Cultural Belonging.” West Coast Line 59; 42, no. 3 (2008): 4–12. Christopherson, Susan. “Divide and Conquer: Regional Competition in a Concentrated Media Industry.” In Contracting Out Hollywood: Runaway Productions and Foreign Location Shooting, edited by Greg Elmer and Mike Gasher, 21–40. Lanham, M D: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Clarkson, Stephen. Uncle Sam and Us: Globalization, Neoconservatism, and the Canadian State. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Davidson, Arnold E., Priscilla L. Walton, and Jennifer Andrews. Border Crossings: Thomas King’s Comic Inversions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Dear, Michael, and Gustavo Leclerc. “Introduction: The Postborder Condition: Art and Urbanism in Bajalta California.” In Postborder City: Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California, edited by Michael Dear and Gustavo Leclerc, 1–30. New York: Routledge, 2003. Di Cintio, Marcello. Walls: Travels along the Barricades. London: Union, 2012. Dobson, Kit. “Introduction.” In Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace, edited by Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli, 1–10. Waterloo, ON : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012.

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Everett-Green, Robert. “Hereafter Pays Off for Telefilm.” Globe and Mail, 26 March 1998: C2. Flaherty, David H. “Preface.” In The Beaver Bites Back: American Popular Culture in Canada, edited by David H. Flaherty and Frank E. Manning, xi–xv. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. Fuller, Danielle. “Citizen Reader: Canadian Literature, Mass Reading Events, and the Promise of Belonging.” The Fifth Eccles Centre for American Studies Plenary Lecture. London: Eccles Centre & The British Library, 2011. Fuller, Danielle, and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. Reading beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literature. London: Routledge, 2013. Grinde, Donald A., Jr. “Iroquois Border Crossings: Place, Politics, and the Jay Treaty.” In Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at US Borders, edited by Claudia Sadowski-Smith, 167–180. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Grynsztejn, Madeleine. “La Frontera / The Border: Art about the Mexico / United States Border Experience.” In La Frontera / The Border: Art about the Mexico / United States Border Experience, 23–39. Exhibition cat. San Diego: Centro Cultural de la Raza / Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993. Innis, Harold A. “The Importance of Staple Products in Canadian Development.” In Staples, Markets, and Cultural Change, edited by Daniel Drache, 3–23. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995. – “The Strategy of Culture: With Special Reference to Canadian Literature – A Footnote to the Massey Report.” In Changing Concepts of Time, 1–19. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Johnson, Brian D. “The Arrival of Denis Villeneuve.” Maclean’s, 8 November 2016. . Johnston, Darlene. “First Nations and Canadian Citizenship.” In Belonging: The Meaning and Future of Canadian Citizenship, edited by William Kaplan, 349–67. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. Justice, Daniel Heath. “To Hear this Different Story.” Interview with Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli. In Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace, edited by Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli, 75–91. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012. Kang, Nancy. “‘As If I Had Entered a Paradise’: Fugitive Slave Narratives and Cross-Border Literary History.” African American Review 39, no. 3 (2005): 431–57. Kassam, Ashifa. “Canadians Traveling to Women’s March Denied US Entry after Sharing Plans.” Guardian, 21 January 2017. .

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King, Thomas. “Borders.” In One Good Story, That One, 131–45. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1993. – “Introduction.” In The Native in Literature, edited by Thomas King, Cheryl Calver, and Helen Hoy, 7–14. Toronto: E C W, 1987. Kun, Josh, and Fiamma Montezemolo. “Introduction: The Factory of Dreams.” In Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border, edited by Josh Kun and Fiamma Montezemolo, 1–19. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Latimer, Heather. Reproductive Acts: Sexual Politics in North American Fiction and Film. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013. Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” In Things, edited by Bill Brown, 151–73. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 1988. Lewis, Nick. “Juno Not Canadian Enough for Genie: Award Rules Leave Out Popular Films.” Calgary Herald, 29 February 2008. Nexis. Litt, Paul. The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. McKinsey, Lauren, and Victor Konrad. Borderlands Reflections: The United States and Canada. Orono, M E: Borderlands Project, 1989. McLuhan, Marshall. “Canada: The Borderline Case.” In The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture, edited by David Staines, 226–48. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977. Manning, Frank E. “Reversible Resistance: Canadian Popular Culture and the American Other.” In The Beaver Bites Back: American Popular Culture in Canada, edited by David H. Flaherty and Frank E. Manning, 3–28. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993. Matheson, Sarah. “Projecting Placelessness: Industrial Television and the ‘Authentic’ Canadian City.” In Contracting Out Hollywood: Runaway Productions and Foreign Location Shooting, edited by Greg Elmer and Mike Gasher, 117–39. Lanham, M D: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Menzies, Robert, Robert Adamoski, and Dorthy E. Chunn. “Rethinking the Citizen in Canadian Social History.” In Contesting Canadian Citizenship: Historical Readings, edited by Robert Adamoski, Dorothy E. Chunn, and Robert Menzies, 11–41. Peterborough, O N: Broadview, 2002. Michaelsen, Scott, and David E. Johnson. “Introduction.” In Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics, edited by Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson, 1–39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Miller, Toby. Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007.

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Mookerjea, Sourayan, Imre Szeman, and Gail Faurschou. “Introduction: Between Empires: On Cultural Studies in Canada.” In Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader, edited by Sourayan Mookerjea, Imre Szeman, and Gail Faurschou, 1–33. Durham, N C: Duke University Press, 2009. Mount, Nick. When Canadian Literature Moved to New York. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Neuendorf, Henry. “Artist Paints Mexico-US Border Fence Sky Blue to ‘Erase’ It.” artnet news, 16 October 2015. . Raboy, Marc. Missed Opportunities: The Story of Canada’s Broadcasting Policy. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990. Roberts, Gillian, and David Stirrup, eds. Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border. Waterloo, ON : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013. Sadowski-Smith, Claudia. Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Directed by Edgar Wright, 2010. London: Universal, 2011. DVD. Sheren, Ila Nicole. Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the US Frontera since 1984. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. Shields, Carol. The Stone Diaries. 1993. Toronto: Vintage, 2002. Siemerling, Winfried, and Sarah Phillips Casteel, eds. Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010. Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, N C: Duke University Press, 2014. Simpson, Mark. “Obama’s Playlist: Materializing Transnational Desire at the C B C .” In Material Cultures in Canada, edited by Thomas Allen and Jennifer Blair, 131–53. Waterloo, ON : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015. Smith, C. Lynn. “Is Citizenship a Gendered Concept?” In Citizenship, Diversity, and Pluralism: Canadian and Comparative Perspectives, edited by Alan C. Cairns et al., 137–62. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. Smythe, Dallas W. Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness, and Canada. Norwood, NJ : Ablex, 1981. Stamps, Judith. Unthinking Modernity: Innis, McLuhan, and the Frankfurt School. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995. Stevenson, Nick. Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitan Questions. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2003.

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Stirrup, David. “Bridging the Third Bank: Indigeneity and Installation Art at the Canada-US Border.” In Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border, edited by Gillian Roberts and David Stirrup, 163–85. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013. Stuart, Reginald C. Dispersed Relations: Americans and Canadians in Upper North America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Sutherland, Richard, and Will Straw. “The Canadian Music Industry at a Crossroads.” In How Canadians Communicate II, edited by David Taras, Frits Pannekoek, and Maria Bakardjieva, 141–65. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2007. Szeman, Imre. “Introduction: A Manifesto for Materialism.” Essays on Canadian Writing 68 (1999): 1–18. Tinic, Serra. “The Borders of Cultural Difference: Canadian Television and Cultural Identity.” In Beyond the Border: Tensions across the Forty-Ninth Parallel in the Great Plains and Prairies, edited by Kyle Conway and Timothy Pasch, 29–38. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013. – “Walking a Tightrope: The Global Cultural Economy of Canadian Television.” In The Television Reader, edited by Tanner Mirrlees and Joseph Kispal-Kovacs, 412–24. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2013. Walton, Priscilla L. “Introduction.” In Pop Can: Popular Culture in Canada, edited by Lynne Van Luven and Priscilla L. Walton, ix–xii. Scarborough, ON: Prentice Hall Allyn and Bacon, 1999. Williams, Raymond. Keywords. Revised ed. 1983. London: Fontana, 1988. Wyman, Max. The Defiant Imagination: Why Culture Matters. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004. York, Lorraine. Literary Celebrity in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Zolf, Rachel. “Statement to M FA Workshop October 13.” The Tolerance Project (blog), 15 October 2009. .

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pa r t o n e

Cross-Border Cultural Production: Historical Processes

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1 Writing Back to Massa: The Black Open Letter in Transnational Abolitionist Print Culture Alyssa MacLean

On 22 September 1852, sixteen years after escaping slavery in Kentucky, a fugitive writer in Canada named Henry Bibb published an open letter to his former owner, Albert G. Sibley, which appeared in Bibb’s crossborder abolitionist newspaper, Voice of the Fugitive. Bibb’s letter – a blend of personal attack, political commentary, religious instruction, and wit – challenges Sibley’s belief in black inferiority and condemns his hypocrisy as a Christian slaveholder. Bibb ridicules Sibley for believing that Bibb didn’t have the willpower to escape: “you then held me as an article of property, and sold me as such; but my mind soon after became insubordinate to the ungodly relation of master and slave; and the work of selfemancipation commenced and I was made free.”1 It seems that Bibb enjoyed this new “work,” for after engaging in his own work of selfemancipation, he facilitated the escape of his mother and brothers from Sibley’s plantation. In a decidedly paternalistic tone, Bibb explains to Sibley that his brothers “are now all at my house in Canada, with our dear mother, free and doing well on British soil … They have all served you as slaves for 21 to 30 years without compensation, and have now commenced to act for themselves.”2 Sibley did not deign to answer Bibb’s letter, so Bibb wrote three more, all of which he published as open letters in the Voice of the Fugitive. In an era when multiple US states had laws prohibiting teaching literacy to slaves, formerly enslaved authors in Canada recognized the act of writing back to a master as a profound political statement. Their letters demonstrated their intellectual independence from the system of slavery and transformed them into their former owners’ social peers. Bibb acknowledges this shift

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in his own social power by concluding his second letter with a flourish and a threat: “Yours with due respect, Henry Bibb. P.S. If you do not answer this soon you may expect to hear from me again.”3 This chapter examines a fascinating mode of black writing produced and circulated in the Canada-US borderland: letters written by former US slaves to their former owners, which were published as open letters in cross-border abolitionist newspapers and slave narratives. Certainly, many fugitives sent private letters to their former owners, but few took the extra step of publishing their communications. Formerly enslaved authors used the intimacy of the letter to urge their former owners to abandon slaveholding; however, by publishing their letters in anti-slavery print media, black authors transformed this private missive into a public attack. These open letters gave rise to a new transnational abolitionist discussion, one that turned a former slave into a prominent advocate for, and symbol of, the possibilities of black citizenship in North America. From the late 1830s to the 1860s, the genre of the open letter became a mode of dissent through which formerly enslaved authors discussed the future of US slavery, the meaning and importance of citizenship, and the ethics of colonization. Letters written by authors in Canada to readers in the United States generated a particularly strong response. Although these letters were not numerous – I have collected thirteen, written by four different authors – they were widely shared among abolitionist newspapers. Moreover, their popularity inspired other kinds of open letters, some written in protest to political figures and others in solidarity with abolitionist sympathizers and relatives. These Canada-US epistles were most frequently published in anti-slavery newspapers on both sides of the border, including The Liberator, The National Anti-Slavery Standard, the Anti-Slavery Bugle, the New York Daily Tribune, and Voice of the Fugitive.4 Many of these newpapers reached readers in Britain and Europe. Through these letters, erstwhile US slaves in Canada described their newfound physical, political, material, and social agency, imagined future possibilities of education and self-improvement, and attained their right of “public collective cultural expression,”5 which was denied to them in the US public sphere. yo u r o b e d i e n t s e r va n t ? theorizing the open letter to t h e f o r m e r m a s t e r

Frederick Douglass’s open letter to his former master, Captain Thomas Auld, published in the North Star on 8 September, 1848, and widely

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circulated thereafter, is certainly the most familiar open letter written by a formerly enslaved author to a former owner, and has been the subject of much scholarly study. Its high profile leads American studies scholars Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Carla L. Peterson to suggest that Douglass was “[p]robably the first black American to make use of this form.”6 They argue that Douglass began using the open letter’s dialogic quality to respond to numerous abolitionist interlocutors and political figures (including Henry Clay), culminating in his letter to Auld. The open letter to the former master would eventually gain wide popularity as a form of abolitionist propaganda. Perhaps the most noteworthy examples (which now circulate virally on the web) are Jermain Wesley Loguen’s 1859 print altercation with his former owner, Sarah Logue, and Jourdan Anderson’s caustic exchange with Col Patrick Anderson in 1865. Yet, if we study the letters to former masters that were sent by black authors located in Canada (rather than those who stayed within US boundaries), it is clear that this genre developed much earlier than scholars have previously imagined. Indeed, scholarly emphasis on Douglass as a black American author limits in both time and space our understanding of the genre. Contrary to Fishkin and Peterson’s claim, Douglass was not the first black American writer to respond to his former owner, nor was he the first to publish a private letter publicly as an open letter: a number of letters were sent from former US slaves to US slave-owners from locations outside the United States, notably Canada. The nationalist structure of scholarship has arguably obscured our understanding of this transnational archive. Letters were also sent from former Canadian slaves in the United States to Canadian owners: as historian Afua Cooper has found, one early cross-border letter to a former master was sent privately by a fugitive named Henry Lewis. In what now seems an unexpected reversal of the Underground Railroad “from Canada into the United States,”7 Lewis escaped from slavery in Upper Canada to freedom in Schenectady, New York, in 1798, and sent a letter back to his owner in Niagara-onthe-Lake to negotiate the terms of his own purchase.8 In the mid-nineteenth century, black authors in the Canada-US border region came to realize the value of commenting publicly on the differences in political protections available to black people fleeing slavery. In a noteworthy example from 1837, a enslaved coachman named John Roberts escaped from Rochester, New York, to Toronto, Ontario. His owner, Richard Stockton, published a runaway slave notice in the Rochester Daily Democrat in July 1837. A few days later, Roberts sent him a scathing missive, published as an open letter in the pages of the Toronto Christian Guardian. Stockton’s notice and Roberts’s reply were

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later republished together (most often with added editorial material) in The Liberator and many other abolitionist newspapers. Roberts’s letter was particularly successful as a propaganda piece, and it predates all of Douglass’s open letters by almost a decade, raising the striking possibility that black writers in the United States like Douglass, who have received the largest share of scholarly attention, were actually inspired by this black writer in Canada. The widespread distribution and discussion of Canada-US open letters in mainstream venues such as the New York Daily Tribune suggests that members of the black community in Canada were instrumental in changing the conversation about US slavery in the antebellum period. In writing these letters, most formerly enslaved authors were not looking for an apology. Rather, they wanted to make a statement about their independence and explain how the full and equal participation of black people in Canadian society could provide a model for US emancipation. As literary scholar Elizabeth Hewitt has noted, epistolary discourse is an important recurring feature of abolitionist literature, and the Underground Railroad depended on epistolary practices in symbolic and practical ways. For example, conductors characterized “fugitive slaves as ‘packages’ that are ‘forwarded’ and ‘delivered’ to their destinations,”9 while some slaves, such as Henry “Box” Brown, were literally mailed to freedom. The open letters written by black authors in Canada make up part of this set of epistolary practices. These letters deserve particular examination, however, because the presence of the border offered black authors unique representational possibilities as they described their transformation from slave to free person in a transnational context. Some published their open letters in Canadian newspapers to help establish their position in Canadian society. Others attempted to minimize their Canadian experience in order to justify their continued relevance to the US anti-slavery cause. Each author made different choices about how to represent the transition to freedom and the future of the black Canadian community. Nineteenth-century newspapers carried a dizzying variety of editorials, letters, articles, and letters to the editor. As textual studies scholar Ryan Cordell explains, newspaper editors regularly “borrowed content promiscuously from each other’s subscriptions. Texts of all kinds were reprinted – typically without authors’ or publishers’ permission – across books, newspapers, and magazines.”10 Within this context of print-­cultural exchange, the genre of the open letter took on a particular function in anti-slavery discourse. The open letter has a long history as a protest tradition, reaching back at least to the biblical letters of St Paul through

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to examples in more recent African-American literature, such as Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Open letters appeared frequently in nineteenth-century newspapers as a form of reprinted reportage that summarized news and ideas in circulation. Formerly enslaved authors wrote their letters (or had them transcribed) with the intention of disseminating them publicly, as demonstrated by the layout of the letters. They were designed as visually recognizable protest pieces in a newspaper, given their standard formatting: a heading with a date and a location, a salutation, an addressee, and a conventional closing.11 These formatting details are important, because they invoke a power structure between the writer, the stated recipient, and the letter’s wider public readership that gives the open letter its rhetorical power. Slaveowners maintained the practice of slavery by vigilantly controlling the flow of information to slaves, and by using modes of communication such as newspapers and postal services to circulate pro-slavery information. Lewis Clarke, who escaped to Canada in 1841, recounts the chilling effect of these master narratives: “The master tells him [the slave] that … if he goes to Canada, the British will put him in a mine under ground, with both eyes put out, for life.”12 By writing an open letter, slaves who had escaped to Canada could contradict pro-slavery propaganda. The very act of responding to a slave-owner further challenged slavery, for “[t]he slave construes the mere fact of his master’s talking to him as an acknowledgement that he is a man and … a speaking subject.”13 Convention normally prevented a slave from hailing a master, impersonating his voice, or revealing his secrets. In the open letter, however, the former slave has no fear of censure. As one formerly enslaved author, Jackson Whitney, explained to his erstwhile owner, “You must not consider that it is a slave talking to ‘massa’ now, but one as free as yourself. I subscribe myself to one of the abused of America, but one of the justified and honored of Canada.”14 Whitney brags that he is now being paid to work on a farm in Canada that is “much more desirable … than any part of Kentucky that I ever saw,”15 including his former master’s farm. Similarly, Bibb ridicules his former master for stealing his neighbour’s hogs and sheep.16 The master must either respond, and thereby address his slave as an equal, or silently tolerate the public ridicule. In short, these letters functioned by enabling the fugitive, once the property of the slave-owner, to reveal the domestic secrets of slavery to what I call the “anticipated readers,” newspaper readers who were not explicitly identified as addressees, but who were implicitly invited to pass judgment on the exchange.17 Through the open letter, the former slave

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challenges the master’s authority, exposes his secrets, and hijacks his communication system. Furthermore, the anticipated readers are called upon to witness the writer’s transformation from a “piece of property” in the domestic sphere into a “speaking subject” in the public sphere.18 Indeed, by taking up “real estate” in the pages of the newspaper, the black writer is claiming ownership of his or her voice – a feat seen as a key aspect of citizenship in the nineteenth century.19 By contrast, the “deaf” and silent addressee is rendered politically powerless in the eyes of the readers who empathize with the black author. Thus, for many black authors, the larger purpose of these open letters was not simply to change a master’s mind: it was to be seen and heard speaking about abolition in multiple national contexts and to be accepted as a full participant in civil discourse.20 Canada had long been a destination for both free and enslaved African Americans, especially after the Slavery Abolition Act took effect in 1834, thereby ending slavery in most of the British Empire. Eric Foner explains, “While hardly free from racism or, on occasion, incursions by slave catchers seeking to track down fugitives, Canada offered blacks greater safety and more civil and political rights – including serving on juries, testifying in court, and voting – than what existed in most of the United States.”21 Even though Canada did not offer democratic citizenship per se, black refugees in Canada invoked their acquisition of Canadian civil and political rights to advocate for citizenship in the United States.22 Furthermore, black writers also recognized that the act of disseminating these letters to different national audiences would change the kinds of claims they could make about the meaning of black citizenship. All of the writers I discuss make specific choices about how to represent their formerly enslaved status in the United States, their nationalist feeling, and their new status in Canada. t h e o p e n l e t t e r to t h e f o r m e r m a s t e r a s   a   b l ac k c a n a d i a n g e n r e

The earliest cross-border open letter sent by a formerly enslaved author that I have located was written by a fugitive named John Roberts to a Baltimore planter named Richard Stockton in 1837. The letter’s early date and its wide circulation in papers such as The Liberator raise the striking possibility that later African-American writers such as Frederick Douglass may have been inspired by the words of this black writer in Upper Canada. Indeed, John Roberts uses many of the subversive dialogic techniques that Fishkin and Peterson see in Douglass’s letters in the

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Fig 1.1  Excerpt from “Interesting Correspondence,” featuring the runaway slave advertisement of slave-owner Richard Stockton and the open letter of former slave John Roberts, Toronto Christian Guardian, 12 July 1837.

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mid-1840s, such as quoting the master directly, reclaiming the master’s words, identifying the master’s ideological inconsistencies, and asserting the slave’s moral and intellectual superiority over the master.23 Whether Douglass’s open letter to his former master was inspired by Roberts’s, or even whether both open letters had been inspired by other textual predecessors (such as the master-slave exchange in The Columbian Orator), it is clear that the black open letter had developed a popularity in abolitionist print culture that stretched further than previously thought across time and national borders. After Roberts escaped from Rochester to Toronto, Stockton posted a runaway slave advertisement in the 4 July 1837 edition of the Rochester Daily Democrat, complaining that Roberts had been “seduced from [his] service” by abolitionists, and promising that, should Roberts “be desirous of returning, he will be kindly received and treated as heretofore.”24 Roberts’s response was published, alongside Stockton’s runaway-slave advertisement, in the Toronto Christian Guardian eight days later. Roberts responded from Toronto with a defiant rhetorical question: “Sir: I have seen in the Rochester Democrat of the Fourth of July, your publication inviting me again to assume the bonds of a Slave. And can you think, that I would voluntarily relinquish Freedom, fully secured to me by the British Government, to return to American Slavery, the vilest that now crushes man and defies God? Is this the appreciation you have of liberty?”25 These questions introduce Roberts’s first goal: to use his freedom of speech in Canada to assert his rightful place in the US public sphere. In his response to Stockton, Roberts demonstrates many skills and responsibilities associated with US citizenship. For example, he emphasizes Stockton’s inability to think critically about US slavery by noting the irony of asking a slave to return to slavery on Independence Day. He demonstrates his own financial acumen by calculating the value of his unpaid labour for Stockton over the years and argues that he deserves to have his family sent to him by Stockton in compensation. Roberts also carefully quotes Stockton throughout his letter, a rhetorical move that contrasts Stockton’s failure to control Roberts with Roberts’s persuasive power over his anticipated readers. By addressing his former master in this way, Roberts shows himself performing the rhetorical rights and responsibilities normally offered only to white US citizens. He also criticizes the United States by invoking the idea of Canada’s moral superiority over the United States on slavery. As Brittney Anne Bos argues in this volume, this idea would come to dominate representations of the Underground Railroad in later periods.

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The fact that Roberts invokes Canada’s moral superiority is important, because it shows the complexity of the position of many former slaves in borderland locations. In effect, Roberts’s words – and his invocation of Canada’s stance on slavery – demonstrate his need to assert his rightful position in a Canadian context, as well as an American one. Instead of responding to Stockton in the Rochester paper, Roberts published his open letter in the Toronto Christian Guardian, a Methodist paper read by many of Upper Canada’s conservative elite. Stockton’s advertisement and Roberts’s response thus appear, somewhat incongruously, alongside sermons preached by Egerton Ryerson and columns discussing the Wesleyan Methodist Church’s role in Upper Canada. Therefore, while Roberts may have gained a certain amount of personal satisfaction from responding to his master, he and his supporters at the Christian Guardian were equally intent on addressing Roberts’s fellow Torontonians – especially the power brokers of Upper Canada who were men of faith – and advocating for his own acceptance in Canadian society. Ultimately, Roberts does this by balancing his triumph about his individual success with statements attributing his freedom to Canada’s protection. Roberts thanks New York abolitionists for helping him “strike from the helpless Slave his long worn chains!” and tells Stockton, “If you should ever be so unfortunate as to be in Slavery, may you find those who will deliver you as I have been delivered – who will make you, as I am made a FR EEMA N .”26 Strikingly, Roberts begins by highlighting his own independence of thought, but concludes by downplaying his own agency and thanking American abolitionists and British law for making him a freeman. He must describe his instantaneous transformation from slave to free person, because he wants to defend the idea of universal equality, the idea that slaves are created by legal systems rather than inherent racial inferiority. However, his awkwardly passive explanation of his success at the end of an otherwise defiant letter reflects the complex nature of his transnational appeals to his anticipated readers. He describes Canada as a place where he stops, and he attributes his freedom to others – perhaps to make his participation in Canadian society less threatening to a white Canadian readership still resistant to the idea of Black equality.27 In a Canadian context, he portrays himself as a deferential black man; however, in a US context, he ridicules a slave-owner and claims rights that would normally be inaccessible to him. By contrast, the fugitive Jackson Whitney would emphasize the notion of black Canadian agency. In his letter, Whitney upbraids his former owner, William Riley, for his cruelty and commands Riley to send him

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his wife and children, arguing that freeing them would be the only way Riley could “go to the next world and meet a God of love, mercy, and justice, in peace.”28 Furthermore, Whitney forces his former master to consider his feelings and achievements in Canada. He explains, “I am comfortably situated in Canada, working for Geo. Harris, one of the persons that act a part in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He was a slave a few years ago, in Kentucky; and now owns a farm so level that there not hills enough on it to hide a dog, yet so large that I got lost in it the other day. He says that I may be the means of helping poor fugitives and doing them as much good as he does, in time.”29 Whitney’s letter cites the radical George Harris of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin – a character who forcefully articulates the case for black freedom in the novel and successfully escapes to Canada with his family. As C. Peter Ripley et al. explain, the fugitive Lewis Clarke, who settled in Sandwich, Ontario, was widely recognized as the inspiration for George Harris, and likely provided Whitney with work.30 In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, George Harris chooses to move his family from Canada to Liberia; he thus plays a key role in articulating Stowe’s support for colonization as a solution to US slavery. Yet Whitney points out to his former owner that the real-life Clarke is not in Liberia: he is still in Canada, helping black refugees in a project of racial uplift, and is enabling Whitney to do the same. Thus, while John Roberts may have once hesitated to describe his own agency as a black man arriving in Canada, Whitney highlights the radical possibilities of Canada’s black community.31 The differences between Roberts’s and Whitney’s letters show the challenges of navigating the transnational and racial politics of the Canada-US borderland. Another formerly enslaved author, Lewis Richardson, would engage in one of the most overtly political attacks on an erstwhile owner in a speech at an abolitionist meeting in Amherstburg, Canada West, in March 1846. Two aspects of this event are particularly noteworthy. First, though Richardson may have been unable to write his own letter, the meeting’s organizers publish a transcript of Richardson’s speech (along with Detroit-based abolitionist speaker Henry Bibb’s closing remarks) in abolitionist newspapers. They would have been especially eager to do so because of the high-profile identity of Richardson’s former owner: Henry Clay, the US senator, one-time president of the American Colonization Society, negotiator of the 1820 Missouri Compromise and the Great Compromise of 1850, and de facto representative of the conciliatory approaches that were being used to maintain slavery in the 1840s and 1850s.

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Richardson had escaped from Clay’s Kentucky plantation in December 1845, and gave a public address against Clay three months later. Given that Clay was such a respected political figure, with a reputation as a reluctant slave-owner, Richardson’s scathing words, and the accompanying closing remarks made by Bibb, were subsequently republished in multiple abolitionist venues. In his speech, Richardson attacked Clay’s reputation as a benevolent slave-owner by exposing the violence committed by an overseer on Clay’s plantation (who, Richardson implies, was acting as a proxy): “It has been said by some, that Clay’s slaves had rather live with him than be free, but I had rather this day, have a millstone tied to my neck, and be sunk to the bottom of Detroit River [sic], than to go back to Ashland and be his slave for life.”32 Here, Richardson portrays slavery under Clay as a fate worse than death, but his imagined drowning in the Detroit River (with a noose around his neck, no less) represents slavery as a specific kind of violence against the black voice, a form of political suffocation analogous to lynching. Furthermore, his focus on the Detroit River, an interstitial space belonging to neither nation, helps Richardson emphasize that US slavery is a political convention rather than a natural condition: “Such usage as this caused me to flee from under the American eagle and take shelter under the British crown. (Cheers.) Thanks be to Heaven that I have got here at last: on yonder side of the Detroit river, I was recognized as property; but on this side I am on free soil. Hail, Brittania [sic]! Shame, America!”33 Like Roberts, then, Richardson uses a comparison of his potential and his accomplishments in the two countries to advocate for black American citizenship. Later, in describing his new life in Canada, Richardson uses images of masculine action like standing and running to describe himself: Here I stand erect, without a chain on my limbs … I now feel as independent as ever Henry Clay felt when he was running for the White House. In fact I feel better. He has been defeated four or five times, and I but once. But he was running for slavery and I for liberty. I think I have beat him out of sight … I am elected to Canada, and if I don’t live but one night, I am determined to die on free soil. Let my days be few or many, let me die sooner or later, my grave shall be made in free soil.34 Anyone familiar with Clay’s political reputation in the United States would have recognized the irony in Richardson’s comments. By embracing his own status as a “runner,” Richardson smugly compares his own success

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in evading Clay’s grasp to Clay’s numerous – and unsuccessful – attempts to run for president. But Richardson’s self-description advocates for a change in Canadian politics too. Richardson positions himself as a dynamic new figure in the Canadian landscape, a political leader for black refugees who has dedicated himself to “running for Canada” in all kinds of ways – even, potentially, running for office himself in an attempt to transform Canadian society. He concludes by echoing Patrick Henry’s famous motto “but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” and symbolically transforming himself into an American revolutionary. Through these rhetorical moves, Richardson deliberately positions himself in opposition to the career politician Clay. Richardson insists that his move to Canada is permanent and will inspire profound social change, not only in US society (because he will serve as an example of racial uplift to other black refugees), but also in Canadian society (because his ability to participate in Canadian society will effect its own kind of social progress in Canada).35 t h e t r a n s n at i o n a l p o l i t i c s o f h e n r y b i b b

While Richardson revels in his status as a new Canadian, other formerly enslaved authors such as Henry Bibb would make more qualified claims about their national alignment. Bibb escaped from slavery in Kentucky in December 1837 and left for Canada; however, he stopped at the border in Detroit, Michigan, in 1838, where he turned back towards Kentucky to free his wife and daughter. This initial escape and return was the first of many unhappy odysseys across the continent as he attempted to free his family, evade slave-catchers, and (after his recapture) liberate himself again.36 After multiple unsuccessful rescue attempts, Bibb made a final escape and settled in Detroit in 1841. He became an abolitionist speaker and published his autobiography in 1849. Still, even as he made a new life for himself in the US North, Bibb took a strategic approach to living on the border; after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Bibb and his second wife, Mary, moved across the Detroit River to Sandwich, Canada West, where Bibb remained until his death in 1854. With financial support from leading New York abolitionist Gerrit Smith, Bibb founded and edited Canada’s first black newspaper, Voice of the Fugitive, from 1851 to 1853. Circulating in Canada and the United States, this publication served to rally the black community in southern Ontario and disseminate information and encouragement to US fugitives who wanted to settle in Canada. Bibb would also become the founding director of the

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Refugee Home Society, a Canadian colonization project for formerly enslaved African Americans.37 Although Bibb became a vocal supporter of Canadian emigration, he would choose to represent himself as Canadian, American, or vaguely both in different texts, depending on his current location, his political context, and the perceived importance of his nationality to his anticipated readers. In his earliest letters, for example, he alternates between a US position and an assumed Canadian identity. Slave-owners and slaves alike in the 1840s and 1850s regularly used the term “running away to Canada” as shorthand for a slave’s escape, whether or not the fugitives ever succeeded in actually crossing the Canada-US border.38 Bibb’s first open letter, to his former owner, William Gatewood, in Kentucky, was dated from Detroit on 23 March 1844 and appeared as an appendix to his 1849 slave narrative. Bibb begins by revelling in his successful escape: “I thank God that I am not property now, but am regarded as a man like yourself, and although I live far north, I am enjoying a comfortable living by my own industry.”39 He then expresses forgiveness towards Gatewood, conceding that it was “the custom of your country, to treat your fellow men as you did me and my little family.”40 Curiously, Bibb’s letter focuses on his own moral and geographical positioning, “far north” of his former owner, and his choice of the word “country.” The letter’s stated point of origin – Detroit – suggests that the nation to which Bibb “belongs” is technically the United States. However, later in the same letter, Bibb speaks of his escape “to Canada,”41 despite never having lived in Canada; he also offers information about mutual acquaintances, “King and Jack,” who are “here, well, and doing well. They are both living in Canada West. They are now the owners of better farms than the men who once owned them.”42 As a black man in the northern United States, Bibb could not represent himself as an equal to Gatewood, because he was not recognized as a citizen. Bibb negotiates this dilemma by invoking a symbolic geographic construct of “far north,” a space in which the Canada-US political border is rendered irrelevant, and where morality becomes the key factor dividing the slaveholding “Gatewood’s country” from the free “far north” regions of North America (that is, the US North and Canada). Classifying himself within this imagined “far north” zone allows Bibb to speak simultaneously as outsider and insider. In presenting himself as a fugitive in Detroit, he addresses US readers as co-nationals and argues that his firsthand experience of slavery has led him to criticize US slaveholding. Yet by claiming an identity as a “far northerner” and making strategically

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vague claims to be “here” in Canada West with King and Jack, he also symbolically rejects his homeland, and aligns himself morally with the British Empire, which has made the legal decision to abolish slavery that the United States has failed to make. Two years later, in 1846, Bibb would more forcefully assume an imagined Canadian identity in his closing remarks on Lewis Richardson’s public address against Henry Clay. Bibb begins by welcoming Richardson: “Dear friend, in behalf [sic] of the citizens of Canada, we hail you with joy – we hail you as a brother – we bid you welcome to all the privileges and immunities of a citizen of Canada, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You are no longer a slave – no longer threefifths of a man – the very moment you set your foot on British soil, the fetters fell from your limbs. You are now in a new country, among strangers, and far from your friends, and we can sympathize with you.”43 Bibb’s welcome on behalf of the “citizens of Canada” is problematic for two reasons. First, Canadian citizenship as a status separate from British identity would not exist until the passage of the Canadian Citizenship Act in 1947. Second, Bibb was living in Detroit at this time. His assumed Canadian identity in this speech enables him to emphasize Canada’s moral superiority over the US.44 However, anticipating that many in the interracial audience would be US expatriates well versed in US politics, and that the transcript would be circulated to US readers, Bibb concludes his welcome in terms that a US readership would recognize and value: that is, he effectively maps US citizenship onto the Canadian political landscape. Bibb promises Richardson, the new Canadian, all the “privileges and immunities” of US citizenship promised to white Americans in the Declaration of Independence: namely, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This invocation of US political philosophy legitimizes the successes of black Canadians to US audiences, and suggests that Canada has fulfilled the promise of American democracy. Similarly, his “threefifths” comment invokes the famous Three-Fifths Compromise of the US Constitution to highlight how the US legal system (in contrast to the British one) systematically dehumanizes slaves.45 Bibb concludes his closing remarks by joining Richardson in his attack on Clay: “My advice is, go to work for yourself – the land is rich and fertile, and let us prove to Henry Clay and to the world, that we can take care of ourselves, and let honesty and integrity be our motto now and forever.”46 Although Bibb begins by praising Canada, he closes by encouraging black individuals on the border to “work for themselves” (not for a specific national community) and to fulfill classically American political ideals

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of independent work, in an indefinite “land” that is “rich and fertile.” Canada is a site that African Americans can use to establish their potential as US citizens. After the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Bibb moved to Sandwich and, as the spokesperson of the Refugee Home Society, became the foremost advocate of African American emigration to Canada. At this point, Bibb would no longer need to impersonate an identity as a British subject. However, his letters in the 1850s reflect a new problem: how to remain a relevant voice in the US anti-slavery struggle when there was a wide perception that African Americans who had emigrated to Canada had turned their backs on the cause. Bibb’s later letters struggle to explain how members of the black community in Canada could support the US anti-slavery effort while also participating actively in Canadian society. While Bibb once exaggerated his proximity to Canada, he would, after 1850, attempt to represent himself and the black Canadian community as US expatriates. In a 2 July 1851 editorial (which probably takes its cue from Douglass’s letter to Clay), he addresses Henry Clay as a symbolic father of slavery and a slave-owner. He begins by purporting to speak on behalf of “the Refugees in Canada,” and especially on behalf of Clay’s former slave Lewis Richardson.47 However, Bibb’s letter, written five years after Richardson’s anti-Clay address, ignores Richardson’s political ambitions and the enthusiasm Richardson had once expressed for his new Canadian home. Instead, Bibb engages in a theoretical discussion of Clay’s support for African colonization. Clay was a long-time supporter of African colonization and expressed opposition to slavery in principle, but opposed any plan of abolition without colonization on the grounds that the “two races could not and should not attempt to live together under terms of political and social equality.”48 Bibb’s 1851 letter to Clay is noteworthy for the way that it shows how complex transnational positioning was for formerly enslaved African Americans in Canada, whose loyalties were often divided between honouring a local situation in Canada and encouraging change in a US political context. Many of Bibb’s fellow writers in Voice of the Fugitive recognized that US readers would perceive emigrants from the United States as outsiders who, at best, were too distant from the US conversation to comment on the abolitionist project, and, at worst, had consciously chosen to abandon enslaved African Americans to their fates. In “Interesting Letter from Vermont,” an article printed in the same issue as Bibb’s editorial, the anonymous author argues that colonization plans proposing “a distant removal from the scene”49 are designed to rid the United States

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of an undesirable free-black population, quell anti-slavery dissent, and perpetuate slavery. By contrast, he argues, Canadian colonization schemes offer colonists a proximate location from which black people can express their dissent with the US system: “Canadian colonization … is a project that the mass of our people may avail themselves of without losing the prestige of their position, as a beacon of hope to the slave and a rock of terror to the oppressor.”50 In “To the ‘Hon.’ Henry Clay, of Kentucky,” Bibb supports emigration to Canada as a strategy that enables black criticism of the United States to be voiced, unlike Clay’s favoured African colonization scheme, which was designed to silence black voices by sending them to distant shores. This approach requires Bibb to engage in some remarkable silencings himself: most notably, he ignores Richardson’s expressed enthusiasm for Canadian society and even Bibb’s own pro-Canadian rhetoric in his 1846 address. Instead, Bibb describes Canada in primarily geographical terms. He begins with a diplomatic approach: ‘Dea r Sir ’: – In behalf of the Refugees in Canada, among whom is Lewis Richardson, who escaped from your plantation for cruel treatment inflicted by your overseer during the year of 1846, we would most respectfully address to you a few lines on the American Colonization scheme, as you are the President of that society, and solicit your friendly aid also in behalf of an improved plan … You have avowed yourself to be a universal philanthropist, “knowing no geographical lines north, east, or west,” therefore you cannot object to this plan.51 Despite its feigned friendliness, this letter’s ultimate goals are to support emigration to Canada and to reveal that Clay’s support for Liberian colonization is actually based on a white supremacist fear of racial equality in North America. Bibb predicts that, despite Clay’s public avowals, he will object to Canadian emigration precisely because of his segregationist views. Bibb goes on to emphasize the hypocrisy between Clay’s “philanthropic” support of African colonization and his political involvement in crafting the pro-slavery Compromise of 1850 (including the Fugitive Slave Act), noting that British laws offer “the blessings of that liberty which the American government, by the enactment of the ‘Fugitive Slave Law,’ have so earnestly strove to extort from them.”52 However, whenever Canada comes up as a topic of conversation, Bibb describes it

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not so much as a permanent community, but as an instrumental location that can be used by African Americans to further their anti-slavery action. The Canadian lands for purchase through the Refugee Home Society, for example, offer black North Americans a space for their “educational purposes”; the larger goal is for these lands to serve as a refuge “while slavery exists in the United States.”53 This letter, then, represents a significant change of strategy for Bibb. If previous letters depended on his Canadian connections, in this particular letter, he positions himself and the black individuals in whose name he speaks as US expatriates whose new lives in Canada are described in only the most limited of terms. Instead, he uses the open letter to address this public figure as an intellectual equal, to expose Clay’s inherent racism, and to criticize the white supremacist power structures that Clay is constructing. In a biting closing statement, Bibb encourages Clay to promote black emigration to Canada, where the law makes no distinction among men, based on complexion; and where we can exert a strong influence for the abolition of slavery in the United States. But time forbids that we should protract our remarks upon the subject, your political friends say that you are an abolitionist at heart and the colored man’s friend; if they have not misrepresented you, may we not expect to receive, at least a word of cheer from you, in this cause of Christian philanthropy.54 The irony is that Clay has been instrumental in passing laws that distinguish among men based on complexion. Moreover, Bibb knows that Clay would have no intention of providing Bibb with a “word of cheer” – Clay’s silence would prove that Clay has, indeed, been misrepresented as a “colored man’s friend.” In effect, Bibb’s larger aim is not simply to debate Clay, but also to communicate his opinions about the responsibilities of black people in Canada to his anticipated readers. He implies that black refugees must not allow themselves to relinquish their rightful claims to American citizenship as they pass into Canada; they must publicize their success, expose the inherent racism of the US system, advocate for racial equality, claim their right to participate in the US system, and attack the major supporters of slavery (such as Clay) who may once have seemed unassailable. Unlike many of his predecessors, Bibb represents emigration to Canada as a strategic option that is

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attractive as long as slavery and segregation exist in the United States. This often means overlooking the value of black Canadian society and ignoring the lived experiences of members of the black community in Canada in whose name he is apparently speaking. In conclusion, these open letters do much more than air the personal grievances of former slaves: they offer black authors and speakers an opportunity to write themselves into a political identity of their own definition and to participate in a transnational conversation about the benefits and responsibilities of citizenship in Canada and the United States. Through these letters, black authors made arguments about their capacity for citizenship in both countries. Indeed, the genre’s popularity lay in the way it confronted notions of black inferiority. By publicly addressing their former masters, formerly enslaved authors implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) invoked the threat of rebellious slaves who, in “struggles with their oppressors, compelled the acknowledgement of their claims to equality.”55 However, these black authors rejected the need for violent retribution. Instead, they presented themselves as forceful advocates for civil rights, who had, through their own initiative, “acquired the art of communicating [their] thoughts intelligibly on paper to be read by tyrants.”56 They publicized their disciplined, prosperous, and peaceful new lives in Canada in order to represent a form of black subjectivity that would counter the white supremacist assumptions of US and Canadian culture. The border facilitated this transformation by offering black refugees access to some freedoms in Canada that were unattainable in the United States, and which black authors used to argue for their rights to equality and full legal citizenship in the United States. A full study of these texts shows how authors strategically situated themselves within national and transnational discussions of citizenship that evolved from the late 1830s until the end of the Civil War.

N otes

I am indebted to Katja Thieme, Teresa Goddu, and Mary Chapman for their insightful comments on this paper.  1 Bibb, “Letter to Sibley [23 September 1852],” 50.  2 Ibid.  3 Ibid., “Letter to Sibley [7 October 1852],” 54.  4 I have located thirteen open letters sent by former US slaves in Canada to their former slave-owners in the United States. John Roberts’s letter to Richard C. Stockton appeared in the 8 July 1837 edition of the Toronto

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Christian Guardian and was republished in The Liberator. Lewis Richardson’s public address against Henry Clay was first printed in the 30 March 1846 edition of The Signal of Liberty. It was reprinted in many abolitionist papers, including The Liberator, The Anti-Slavery Bugle, and The Emancipator, often with additional editorializing (see Binga, “Speech of Lewis Richardson”). Henry Bibb wrote ten texts of this kind: one to William Gatewood in 1844, which was published in his slave narrative (Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 129–30); a transcribed oral address to Henry Clay in 1846 (also recorded by Binga); a ­letter to Henry Clay published in Voice of the Fugitive, 2 July 1851; a series of editorials entitled “To Our Old Masters,” published in Voice of the Fugitive, 29 January, 12 February, and 26 February 1851; and a fourpart series to his former owner, Albert G. Sibley, published in Voice of the Fugitive, 22 September, 7 October, 4 November, and 2 December 1852. Jackson Whitney addressed a letter to his former owner, William Riley, from Canada West in 1859; it appeared in the Jamestown, New York Evening Journal, 1 July 1859, and was republished widely in newspapers such as The Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Some fugitives in the United States also published letters to their former owners: for example, Jermain Wesley Loguen’s exchange with Sarah Logue, was republished in his 1859 autobiography (The Rev. J.W. Loguen, As a Slave and As a Freeman, 452–5), and Jourdan Anderson’s 1865 letter to Col Anderson first appeared in the Cincinnati Commercial and was reprinted in the New York Daily Tribune. On the west coast of Canada, Victoria resident Emily Allen wrote an open letter to US vice-president Hannibal Hamlin in support of a Union regiment of fugitive slaves, which was published in the New York Daily Tribune on 13 April 1863. I do not discuss her letter here, because she is not addressing a slave-owner directly, but I would argue that she is inspired by the rhetorical precedent that had been established by these earlier authors. See Blassingame, Slave Testimony; Ripley, Hembree, and Yacovone, Witness for Freedom; and Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers series for more letters from formerly enslaved authors.  5 Schoolman, Abolitionist Geographies, 70.  6 Fishkin and Peterson, “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident,” 80.  7 Cooper, “The Fluid Frontier,” 133.  8 In this period, slavery was still legal in Upper Canada, but the importing of slaves into New York had been outlawed by the 1787 Northwest Ordinance. Enslaved Canadians could thus emancipate themselves by crossing the Detroit River (Cooper, “The Fluid Frontier,” 134).  9 Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 130.

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10 Cordell, “Viral Textuality in Nineteenth-Century US Newspaper Exchanges,” 37. See Ellen Gruber Garvey’s description of the sharing practices of nineteenth-century newspapers (Writing with Scissors). Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss’s concept of rhetorical velocity, describing online writing practices in which “a document [is] specifically and deliberately strategized by a writer or writers with inventive considerations conscious of third-party recomposing” (Ridolfo and DeVoss, “Composing for Recomposition”), could also be usefully applied to patterns of exchange and composition in nineteenth-century print culture, as Ryan Cordell points out (38). Authors of open letters clearly intended their compositions to be publicized and reprinted, despite the promise of privacy offered by the epistolary genre. 11 In practice, the differences between, for example, an editorial and an open letter written by a newspaper editor could sometimes be quite slight. As I collected the archive for this chapter, I looked for many of these visually recognizable traits, but I did not exclude letters that did not contain all these features. 12 Clarke, Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis Clarke, 31. 13 Fishkin and Peterson, “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident,” 73. 14 Whitney, “Jackson Whitney to William Riley,” 407. 15 Ibid. 16 Bibb, “Letter to Sibley [7 October 1852],” 53. 17 I am building on Samuel McCormick’s categorization of the four groups of readers of open letters: “addressees, who are known, ratified, and engaged directly” (in this case, slave-owners); “auditors [who] are known and ratified, but not engaged directly” (i.e., newspaper editors); “[w]itnesses … who are neither ratified nor addressed” (the readers of the first newspaper in which the letter was published); and eavesdroppers, who are neither known nor ratified nor addressed, their identities being strictly potential” (Letters to Power, 7) (i.e., the reading public of other newspapers in which letters may be reprinted). My phrase “anticipated readers” would encompass the three latter categories. See also Stephanie Li (“Performing Intimacy Using ‘Race-Specific, Race-Free Language,’” 347). 18 Fishkin and Peterson, “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident,” 71. 19 Scholars of nineteenth-century US political culture have recognized voice as a key element of citizenship. In their analysis of female suffrage discourse, Mary Chapman and Angela Mills express this point most succinctly: “to use republican oratorical traditions was, by definition, to participate in the political processes and institutions of the United States …

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Oratory was understood in nineteenth-century America as a means of both securing and exercising political rights” (“Declaring Sentiments,” 11). When speech was met with hostility, many suffrage activists “eschew[ed] oratory entirely” (12) in favour of literature as an alternative form of ­persuasion. See also Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers, 19. 20 My analysis is inspired by Katja Thieme’s excellent point about writers who publicly supported pro-suffrage petitions in letters to the editor: they seemed “more interested in talking about petitions, and being heard talking about them” (“Constitutive Rhetoric as an Aspect of Audience Design,” 40) than in actually collecting signatures or presenting the petitions to politicians. 21 Foner, Gateway to Freedom, 137. 22 After the enactment of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1834, Canada provided full legal protection to people of African descent and offered limited regional voting rights, yet Canadians were considered British subjects, given Canada’s status as a British colony at the time. 23 Fishkin and Peterson, “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident,” 81. 24 Stockton, quoted in Roberts, “They Don’t Know What Is Good for Themselves,” 1. 25 Roberts, “Interesting Correspondence,” 142; see also Roberts, “John Roberts to Richard C. Stockton,” 65. 26 Roberts, “Interesting Correspondence,” 142. 27 Roberts displays similar concerns about the perception of black Canadians throughout much of his later political activism. As Karolyn Smardz Frost explains, Roberts became a vocal member of the black community in Toronto. He joined other black Torontonians in signing an 1841 petition demanding that Toronto city council enact a ban on the performance of a blackface minstrel show. The petition argued that such shows were degrading and “deleterious to the general regard in which White city residents might hold [black Torontonians]” (“Communities of Resistance,” 18). Roberts also participated in abolitionist discussions taking place in the United States. He moved to Lockport, New York, in late 1852 (Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers 2: 67 n3). 28 Whitney, “Jackson Whitney to William Riley,” 407. 29 Ibid. 30 Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers 2: 407, n8. 31 It is unclear whether Whitney was able to make good on his commitment, given that there is little information about his fate in Canada. His name is not listed in later Canadian censuses.

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32 Quoted in Binga, “Speech of Lewis Richardson,” 164. 33 Quoted in ibid., 165–6. 34 Quoted in ibid., 166. 35 Richardson’s speech suggests he intended to stay in Canada, but historians have not been able to determine any further details about his fate (see, for example, Hendrick and Hendrick, Black Refugees in Canada, 75). 36 In this period, Bibb faced enslavement in multiple states before the death of his final owner enabled him to escape. He ultimately abandoned his efforts to free his wife and daughter. 37 Bordewich, Bound for Canaan, 380–8; see also Morton, “Henry Walton Bibb.” 38 Bibb often speaks of his escapes in this way. See also Harriet Jacobs, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” 39 Bibb, “To William Gatewood,” 48. 40 Ibid., 49. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., emphasis added. 43 Quoted in Binga, “Speech of Lewis Richardson,” 166. 44 Quoted in ibid. See Arenson, “The Union’s Fake Canadians,” for more details about African Americans who falsely claimed a Canadian identity during the Civil War period. 45 Bibb seems to suggest that the Three-Fifths Compromise determined the human status of slaves and relegated them to a partial human status. This is an overstatement. The Three-Fifths Compromise did not confer or deny legal personhood; rather, it outlined a system for determining taxation and representation in the US House of Representatives, in the states where ­slavery was legal, “by counting each slave as three-fifths of a person” (Newborn, “Correcting the Common Misreading of the ‘Three-Fifths’ Clause of the US Constitution,” 94). Bibb’s comment seems designed to encourage his audience to recognize how the US legal system opportunistically acknowledged the humanity of enslaved people in some contexts, while denying it in others. 46 Quoted in Binga, “Speech of Lewis Richardson,” 166. 47 Bibb, “To the ‘Hon.’ Henry Clay of Kentucky,” 2. 48 Bowman, “Comparing Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln,” 505. 49 “Interesting Letter from Vermont,” 1. 50 Ibid. 51 Bibb, “To the ‘Hon.’ Henry Clay of Kentucky,” 2. 52 Ibid.

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53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Bibb, “To Our Old Masters,” 121. 56 Bibb, “Letter to Sibley [7 October 1852],” 52.

B ib liog ra p h y Allen, Emily. “Emily Allen to Hannibal Hamlin, 13 April 1863.” In The Black Abolitionist Papers, 5 vols., edited by C. Peter Ripley et al., 2: 510–12. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. [Anderson, Jourdan.] “Letter from a Freedman to His Old Master.” New York Daily Tribune, 22 August 1865: 7. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. . Arenson, Adam. “The Union’s Fake Canadians.” New York Times, 16 September 2014. . Bibb, Henry. “Letter to Mr. Albert G. Sibley [23 September, 7 October, 4 November, 2 December 1852].” In Slave T ­ estimony: Two Centuries of ­Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, edited by John W. ­Blassingame, 55–7. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. – Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2007. – “To the ‘Hon.’ Henry Clay, of Kentucky.” Voice of the Fugitive [Windsor], 2 July 1851: 2. I n k: odw Newspaper Collection. . – “To Our Old Masters.” In The Black Abolitionist Papers, 5 vols., edited by C. Peter Ripley et al., 2: 121–9. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. – “To William Gatewood [Detroit, 23 March 1844].” In Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, edited by John W. Blassingame, 48–9. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. Binga, J. “Speech of Lewis Richardson.” In Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, edited by John W. Blassingame, 164–6. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. Blassingame, John W., ed. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977.

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Bordewich, Fergus M. Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Bowman, Shearer Davis. “Comparing Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln.” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 106, nos. 3/4 (2008): 495–512. . Chapman, Mary, and Angela Mills. “Declaring Sentiments, 1846–1891: Introduction.” In Treacherous Texts: US Suffrage Literature, 1846–1946, edited by Mary Chapman and Angela Mills, 10–17. New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 2010. Clarke, Lewis. Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis Clarke, during a Captivity of More Than Twenty-Five Years, among the Algernines of Kentucky, One of the So Called Christian States of North America. Dictated by Himself. Boston: Ela, 1845. Documenting the American South. . Cooper, Afua. “The Fluid Frontier: Blacks and the Detroit River Region: A Focus on Henry Bibb.” Canadian Review of American Studies 30, no. 2 (2000): 129–49. Cordell, Ryan. “Viral Textuality in Nineteenth-Century US Newspaper Exchanges.” In Virtual Victorians: Networks, Connections, Technologies, edited by Veronica Alfano and Andrew Stauffer, 29–56. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Douglass, Frederick. “Letter to Henry Clay.” North Star [Rochester, NY ], 3 December 1847: 2. 19th Century US Newspapers. – “To My Old Master.” North Star [Rochester, NY ], 8 September 1848: 2. 19th Century US Newspapers. – “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” In The Heroic Slave: A Cultural and Critical Edition, edited by Robert S. Levine, John Stauffer, and John R. McKivigan, 127–32. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, and Carla L. Peterson. “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident: The Rhetoric of Frederick Douglass’s Journalism.” In The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays, edited by Todd Vogel, 71–92. New Brunswick, N J: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Foner, Eric. Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad. New York: Norton, 2015. Frost, Karolyn Smardz. “Communities of Resistance: African Canadians and African Americans in Antebellum Toronto.” Ontario History 99, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 44–63. Garvey, Ellen Gruber. Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

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Hendrick, George, and Willene Hendrick. Black Refugees in Canada: Accounts of Escape during the Era of Slavery. Jefferson, N C : McFarland & Co., 2010. “Henry Clay’s Slave.” Signal of Liberty 6, no. 9 (1846): 34. . Hewitt, Elizabeth. Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. “Interesting Letter from Vermont.” Voice of the Fugitive [Windsor, ON], 2 July 1851: 1. I n k: Odw Newspaper Collection. . Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In Why We Can’t Wait, 64–84. New York: Penguin, 2000. Li, Stephanie. “Performing Intimacy Using ‘Race-Specific, Race-Free Language’: Black Private Letters in the Public Sphere.” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 2 (2010): 339–56. M LA International Bibliography. doi: 10.1215/00382876-2009-037. Library and Archives Canada. “Census of 1851 (Canada East, Canada West, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia).” Government of Canada, 21 April 2016. . – “1842 Census for Canada West.” Government of Canada, 3 January 2018. . – “1861 Census.” Government of Canada, 30 August 2017. . Loguen, Jermain Wesley. The Rev. J.W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman: A Narrative of Real Life. Syracuse, N Y: J.G.K. Truair & Co, 1859. Internet Archive. . McCormick, Samuel. Letters to Power: Public Advocacy without Public Intellectuals. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. McHenry, Elizabeth. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Durham, N C: Duke University Press, 2002. Morton, Nanette. “Henry Walton Bibb (1815–1854).” In African American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 42–6. London: Greenwood Press, 2002. Newborn, Brooke E. “Correcting the Common Misreading of the ‘ThreeFifths’ Clause of the US Constitution: Clarifying the ‘Hostile Fraction.’” Pennsylvania Bar Association Quarterly 80, no. 3 (2009): 93–8. HeinOnline. .

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“Richardson, Lewis.” Notable Kentucky African Americans Database. University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center, 2 December 2017. . Ridolfo, Jim, and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss. “Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery.” Press Release. Kairos, 15 January 2009. . Ripley, C. Peter, et al., eds. The Black Abolitionist Papers. 5 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Ripley, C. Peter, Michael F. Hembree, and Donald Yacovone, eds. Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. [Roberts, John.] “Interesting Correspondence.” Christian Guardian [Toronto], 12 July 1837: 142. Microfilm. Toronto Public Library (Reference Library). Microfilm Services (4 December 1833–26 December 1838): Reel 3. Roberts, John. “John Roberts to Richard C. Stockton, 8 July 1837.” In The Black Abolitionist Papers, 5 vols., edited by C. Peter Ripley et al., 2: 65–7. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. – “They Don’t Know What Is Good for Themselves.” The Liberator, 25 August 1837: 1. 19th Century US Newspapers. Schoolman, Martha. Abolitionist Geographies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Thieme, Katja. “Constitutive Rhetoric as an Aspect of Audience Design: The Public Texts of Canadian Suffragists.” Written Communication 27, no. 1 (2010): 36–59. Whitney, Jackson. “Jackson Whitney to William Riley.” In The Black Abolitionist Papers, 5 vols., edited by C. Peter Ripley et al., 2: 406–8. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Winks, Robin W. The Blacks in Canada: A History. 2nd ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997.

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2 The Industrial Newspaper and the Politics of Content Michael Stamm

In the twentieth century, Canada became the world’s leading producer and exporter of newsprint. According to mid-century estimates, nearly 60 per cent of all newspaper pages printed around the globe were on Canadian newsprint. In fact, one trade association boasted in 1950 that “the tremendous increase in newspaper circulation throughout the world has chiefly been made possible by the efforts of Canadian producers.”1 The United States, by far the world leader in newspaper circulation, became the most important export destination for Canadian newsprint. In 1948, nearly 80 per cent of the newspaper pages printed in the United States were on newsprint that had been manufactured in Canada using Canadian trees.2 This chapter shows how that paper crossed the US-Canada border, first as blank sheets going south, then as printed newspapers going north. It is about the lifecycle of a printed text, starting with a tree in the Canadian forest, being manufactured in a Canadian paper mill into a roll of newsprint, and then going south across the border to the United States to be printed upon and made into a newspaper. Finally, some of these newspapers are sent back to Canada, where the words printed in the United States on Canadian paper become the subject of concern and debate because of what they say about Canada’s place in the world. In following the newspaper’s industrial production in North America and in tracing this flow of paper in the twentieth century, we can see emerging debates about forestry, trade, empire, and culture across the US-Canada border. As a chapter linking political economy, communications media, and Canadian natural resources, this project follows a path charted by Harold

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Innis. To Innis, the exploitation of what he called “staple products”3 had shaped Canadian history, and in analyzing the transition of the dominant staples being traded as they moved from fish and fur in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to wheat, minerals, and forest products in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Innis argued that one could follow the evolution of Canada’s ties to the global economy and to foreign empires. Over time, Innis believed, the dominant commercial and political connections that oriented Canada across the Atlantic to France and Britain shifted south to the United States. One of the most important factors promoting Canada’s shift toward a closer relationship with its North American neighbour was the trade in “pulp and paper,” the majority of which came in the form of newsprint. In terms of its effects on Canadian political economy, this was the most important staple traded during Innis’s scholarly career, and, to Innis, the increasing importance of staples from Canadian forests to the production of American newspapers in the first half of the twentieth century motivated a shift in which “American imperialism has replaced and exploited British imperialism.”4 Trade in newsprint involved both trade in staples and trade in ideas, and it was an important link in the related North American histories of empire and communications, as Innis would title one of his later monographs. Considered as both a medium of communication and a part of international trade, newsprint in North America was both the enabler of some of the most powerful media institutions on the continent and a key part of the evolving political and economic relationship between the United States and Canada. As communications scholar Jody Berland argues, “the rise of American newspaper monopolies in interdependence with Canada’s pulp and paper industry … form part of the apparatus whereby space is transformed into colonial space.”5 What I attempt to do in this chapter is to extend Innis and Berland’s general insights to show the specific political and institutional arrangements that created this largely overlooked material history of media. The objects assembling “imagined communities” were manufactured by industrial firms using forest products.6 In the United States, the freedom to print is a cherished and constitutionally protected right. The practical ability to print was an operational challenge, and to do so on a mass scale involved a supply chain that marshalled natural resources, many of which were on the other side of the US-Canada border. The figure at the heart of this story is an American, Robert McCormick, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune and one of the most prominent conservatives in US media in the first half of the twentieth century. Like Fox News and Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers today, the Chicago Tribune

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was widely thought to be a partisan outlet dominated by a reactionary leader, and it was correctly perceived as not only championing conservative positions on its editorial page but also slanting its coverage of the news in that way. One 1941 magazine profile remarked that McCormick’s personality dominated the paper’s political coverage, which had the “brash partisan tone of frontier journalism,” and Nation publisher Oswald Garrison Villard called the paper’s editorial stance one of “bitter narrowness and ultra-conservatism.”7 The combination of audacious tone and political support of the Republican Party may have helped contribute to one of the most famous gaffes in media history, when McCormick’s Tribune boldly, wishfully, and incorrectly declared in a front-page banner headline that Thomas Dewey had defeated the Democrat Harry Truman in the 1948 presidential election. Beyond this spectacular reporting failure, one could see daily demonstrations of McCormick’s patriotism, nationalism, and chauvinism on the Tribune’s masthead, which contained the slogans “American Paper for Americans” and “World’s Greatest Newspaper.” Whatever its merits or faults, the Chicago Tribune was not a paper well known for its cosmopolitanism or modesty. Besides being politically conservative, Robert McCormick was also one of America’s most prominent isolationists, and between the time he took over the Tribune in 1911 and the time of his death in 1955, a period encompassing both world wars, McCormick’s published views and public statements also gave him a well-deserved reputation as one of the most virulently anti-British figures in North America. Considering how much reach and presence McCormick’s US-based newspaper had in promoting a conservative nationalist position, it is rather ironic that McCormick’s corporation in fact relied heavily upon Canadian newsprint to print its content after 1912, when McCormick began building paper mills in Canada as part of an international process of vertical integration. McCormick came to own and operate a company that was both a generator of what we might now call “media content” and a manufacturing enterprise that operated across the US-Canada border. As a material object, the printed Chicago Tribune would come to be seen by many Canadians not only as an avatar of a particular and objectionable brand of US politics, but also as a commercial product made out of their natural resources. To Chicagoans, the Tribune was a powerful local media presence. For the many Canadians who considered the Tribune’s content and printed materiality, the Tribune’s presence loomed large across North America. In tracing the cross-border circuit of the production and

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consumption of the Chicago Tribune, we can see the development of the imperial and colonial processes that Innis and Berland outline, and we can see some of the tensions and contradictions that Canadians saw as they considered the relationship between the conservative and anti-British content of Robert McCormick’s newspaper and the conditions of his newspaper’s industrial production. m a n u fac t u r i n g t h e i n d u s t r i a l n e w s pa p e r

Although much of the media content in present-day North America is distributed and consumed digitally, in the twentieth century this was not the case. Culture industries were manufacturing industries – as Richard Sutherland shows of the recording industry in this volume. The same was true for printed newspapers. Newspapers are today often called “deadtree media,” a trope used mostly to portray them as lifeless and hopelessly anachronistic remnants of the past, which somehow linger on in an era of vibrant and participatory digital media. However, there is a generally unacknowledged truth to this term: printed newspapers really are the products of felled trees. A “newspaper” in the twenty-first century is understood to be the product of an organization that produces content accessed by the public not only as text that is on newsprint, but also as multimedia content on various digital devices. But, until well into the twentieth century, a publisher who wanted to operate a “newspaper” business needed a printing plant – a factory – and a great deal of paper, and the difficulties involved in getting adequate and affordable supplies of paper were a hallmark of publishing. In making newspapers into the powerful institutions that they became, publishers employed many of the strategies of other mechanized industries. Starting in the 1830s, but expanding rapidly in the 1880s, publishers applied the technologies of the Industrial Revolution to the production of newspapers by employing new methods of papermaking and printing. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, newsprint had been made from cloth rags, and the process could yield a durable sheet of paper. The problem for publishers was the supply of raw materials. Rags could often be scarce, and, as circulations increased in the era of the penny press, publishers sought alternatives. They found one in 1839, when inventor Friedrich Gottlob Keller pioneered a method of using ground wood to make paper, and, over the following forty years, papermakers improved on this process and took advantage of the much-steadier source of raw material that wood provided. By 1880, the majority of papermakers had

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switched to using wood to make newsprint, and this dramatically expanded both the amount of paper available and the amount of information circulating publicly.8 Publishers were quick to take advantage of this and to extend the existing penny-press business model – low-cost papers with high circulations and advertising revenues – to a larger scale. By the early twentieth century, publishers in the United States, such as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, created metropolitan institutions with circulations well into the hundreds of thousands. In many ways, the American mass-circulation daily newspaper was enabled by advances in the mass industrial production of newsprint. Because of the incessant need for large supplies of newsprint, masscirculation newspapers like the Chicago Tribune came to have significant effects not only on society and politics but also on the environment and on North American trade. Many of the plentiful trees in the United States initially proved ill-suited to newsprint manufacturing, as the wood of the Douglas fir trees of the West Coast and the pine trees of the South was too dark to make desirable newsprint. In addition, there were transportation costs associated with getting the finished paper to the Midwest and northeast, where the major American metropolitan newspapers were located at the time. Spruce proved to be an ideal wood, and the location of its dense forests along and north of the US-Canadian border, particularly near navigable waterways on the Great Lakes, made the tree even more attractive to American publishers.9 Canadian government officials understood this, and they were determined to secure favourable terms with the Americans in the newsprint trade. Put simply, as historian H.V. Nelles writes, the “United States wanted cheap, secure, raw materials; Canada hoped to export more expensive, semi-processed goods.”10 In this context, corporations and policy-makers on both sides of the border saw Canadian newsprint as an ideal product to trade in the early twentieth century. t h e c o n t i n e n ta l p r e s e n c e o f t h e lo c a l n e w s pa p e r

Robert McCormick had taken over the Tribune in 1911, right in the middle of these related expansions in both newspaper circulation and hopes for increased Canada-US trade in newsprint. In the process of becoming the Tribune’s publisher, McCormick extended his family’s control over the paper, which had begun in 1855 when his Canadian-born grandfather Joseph Medill purchased an ownership stake. (Medill was

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born in New Brunswick in 1823 and moved to the United States in 1832.) When McCormick took over publishing the Tribune, it was a moderately successful morning newspaper, selling some 220,000 papers each day. By the early 1920s, the paper had a circulation of 460,000, and by 1941 this had climbed to more than one million. By the time of his death in 1955, McCormick had built the Chicago Tribune into not only the highestcirculating newspaper in Chicago but also the second-highest-circulating newspaper in the entire United States.11 The only paper with greater circulation was the New York Daily News, the revolutionary tabloid that the Tribune Company had started in 1919 as a wholly owned subsidiary.12 Through his newspaper corporation, Robert McCormick came to exert a tremendous influence over not only the cities of Chicago and New York, but also over the continent. McCormick developed this media empire both through creating newspapers that had a broad, popular appeal and through being one of the most technologically innovative publishers in the United States. The Chicago Tribune was one of the earliest adopters of the then-new medium of radio. It started station WGN (the call letters were an acronym for “World’s Greatest Newspaper”) in 1924, creating in the process a powerful new multimedia corporation. However, while extending the Tribune’s reach from print into an important new medium, McCormick’s company remained firmly focused on printing a newspaper. Here the Tribune Company was also innovative as a manufacturer, and the aims of streamlining and controlling the newspaper’s industrial production would lead McCormick to create a vertically integrated supply chain that stretched across the US-Canada border. A newspaper is in some respects a strange commodity, because the publisher faces the particular challenge of having to remake his or her product from scratch every single day. Although the layout of a Tribune printed on a Wednesday was in a broad sense the same as the layout of a Tribune printed on the following Thursday, the content of each was almost completely different. News, features, advertisements, comics, columns, and all the other material that went into a daily paper had to be recompiled, reorganized, and reproduced on a daily basis. And beyond the challenges of constantly creating and selling new content, the publisher was also selling that content in the form of a material object that was mass-produced through a process using a diversified labour force and drawing upon a variety of raw materials, most importantly trees to make newsprint. Ironically, the arch conservative and American nationalist publisher Robert McCormick was able to achieve the influence that he did by exploiting Canadian forests to secure

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regular and affordable supplies of newsprint. What we might now call the “dead-tree” edition of the Tribune began in Canada. The Tribune celebrated its continental production network in 1921 with a full-page advertisement in Editor & Publisher, the leading trade journal for the American newspaper business (Figure 2.1). “Cut off from the world by snow and ice,” the advertisement claimed, “several hundred men in distant Canadian forests are chopping down trees from which Chicago Tribunes will be made late this year.” This cutting took place in Quebec in “a wilderness on the north shore of the Gulf of St Lawrence, far down towards Labrador,” where the Tribune had obtained “virgin forests” of spruce trees. After cutting, the logs were “loaded on steamers” and taken “up the St Lawrence, through the Grand Lachine and other canals, then the length of Lake Ontario and up the Welland Canal to the Chicago Tribune’s paper mill at Thorold, Ontario, near Niagara Falls.” This “independent newsprint supply” afforded the newspaper commercial and political benefits: “The economic independence of the Chicago Tribune parallels independence of editorial stand, of newsgathering facilities, and of advertising policy, which have combined to establish this great newspaper in its unique position.”13 In many respects, and in its own words, the Tribune based its success on the exploitation of Canadian land and trees. The fact that US newspaper publishers like Robert McCormick even had the option of developing operations in Canada had to do not just with entrepreneurial initiative but also with politics, specifically in the form of policies that enabled free trade in newsprint across the border. The special status afforded newsprint was created during a significant cluster of continental debates between 1910 and 1913 about the lowering or removing of tariffs on certain goods and the moving away from the protectionism that had characterized trade policy in North America for much of the previous half-century. From 1854 to 1866, the United States and Canada operated under the Elgin-Marcy treaty, which allowed the United States permission to fish in some Canadian waters and instituted reciprocal free trade in many commodities. The United States abrogated the treaty in 1866, and the debate over protectionism versus free trade remained vigorous in the coming decades, with the protectionists largely carrying the day. In Canada after Confederation in 1867, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald instituted the so-called National Policy in 1879, a measure designed to use high tariffs as a way to stimulate domestic industry.14 On the US side, policymakers enacted the McKinley Tariff of 1890 and the Dingley Tariff of 1897, which, as historian L. Ethan Ellis remarks, “raised the principle of protection to the status of a fetish.”15

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Fig. 2.1  Advertisement, printed in Editor & Publisher, 19 February 1921.

Although protectionism prevailed in both countries, some in various commercial and political circles maintained steady and organized lobbying efforts to change tariff policy, and fitful negotiations on free trade between American and Canadian policy-makers began after 1900. Some of the most aggressive advocates of free trade were American newspaper

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publishers, who coveted the Canadian forests that could be used for cheaper newsprint. As one publisher encouraged his peers in 1907, the solution to the problem of presently high newsprint cost was to remove the tariff on it and allow Canadian supply to come to the United States more affordably. “We’ve got to go to Congress and cut down the barriers under which these paper makers are hiding,” the publisher stated. “The paper makers don’t need the protection of the tariff tax. Let’s carry the matter to Congress and try to get the tariff on wood pulp and white paper removed. There is enough timber in Canada to supply the demand for white paper for years. We must show that the press has influence. Let’s get in line and do something.”16 Over the following four years, policy-makers in Canada and the United States began discussing in general terms a new trade policy that took the form of a reciprocal removal of duties on certain products, mostly natural goods. Publishers continued to exert public pressure on North American lawmakers to come to an agreement on this trade reciprocity, and newsprint remained a major specific subject in the debates. By early 1911, the United States and Canada had reached an agreement about reciprocity that removed duties on many agricultural products. Hardly any manufactured goods were included in the pact, but one was: newsprint. Rather than formalizing reciprocity as a treaty, it was to be implemented by concurrent legislation on either side of the border. On the US side, Congress readily approved the trade pact with Canada in July. The Chicago Tribune was steadfastly supportive of reciprocity, calling it an act of “farsighted statesmanship,” pitting “the continental view of two peoples essentially one in race, in law, and broad political and social ideals, in economic conditions and commercial needs, against … the guerilla warfare of selfish privilege and local interest.”17 As the measure went to Canada for legislative approval, however, public opinion turned against the pro-reciprocity Liberal majority in Parliament. After a series of increasingly acrimonious debates between the Liberals and anti-reciprocity Conservatives, Parliament was dissolved in July 1911. In the September election, Canadian voters recoiled from reciprocity by electing a majority Conservative government opposed to reciprocity. Prior to the election, Liberals outnumbered Conservatives 135 to 85, while the new Conservative majority was 134 to 87.18 “Canada,” L. Ethan Ellis remarks, “had spoken a most emphatic ‘Nay’ to the American proposal.”19 Reciprocity failed in Canada for a variety of reasons, and one of the most significant of these was the fear of annexation by the United States. This was not as irrational an apprehension as it seems today. The United

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States in 1911 was barely a decade removed from the Spanish American War of 1898, as a result of which the US had taken control of the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, and the United States had spent the intervening thirteen years taking an increasingly aggressive stance toward Latin America, including support for the creation of Panama. At the tail end of the imperial age, prior to the First World War, many Canadians feared that, at the hands of the United States, they might suffer a similar fate as other smaller nations around the world that were being swallowed up by the great powers. As the Montreal Star assessed the situation, “France is trying to annex Morocco at this minute. Italy is talking of annexing Tripoli. Germany would like to annex Holland. Austria has just annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. Great Britain’s annexations spot the world with red. Why shouldn’t the Americans want to annex Canada?”20 Some Canadian anxiety about the idea of annexation following reciprocity stemmed from the fact that there were members of the US Congress who spoke about this with what was, to Canadians, an unnerving frankness during Congressional debates about the trade pact. South Dakota Republican representative Eben Martin remarked, “I have often said that I would like to see Canada annexed to the United States. Her people and our own are of kindred blood and have a common history and common ideals … Indeed, I am willing to take up our tariff wall altogether and place it down on the northern boundary of Canada.”21 Perhaps the most prominent of these exhortations to annexation came from Champ Clark, a Democratic member (and later Speaker) of the House of Representatives, who made the intemperate and buffoonish remark in February 1911 that he was for reciprocity “because I hope to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British–North American possessions clear to the North Pole. They are people of our blood. They speak our language. Their institutions are much like ours. They are trained in the difficult art of self-government.”22 Still, these were extreme views. For many Americans, the trade pact was simply a way to get certain commodities to the United States more affordably. However, for many Canadians, these public proclamations about annexation raised deep concerns about the country’s relationship to the United States. The debate about the trade pact was also about a threat to the integrity of the national border and, indeed, the nation. As the Montreal Star remarked, Champ Clark spoke his mind freely, he spoke frankly, and he spoke for his fellow-countrymen. What Champ Clark said, millions of the

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people of the United States – in fact, all the people with but a few exceptions – think and believe and are acting upon. Champ Clark’s reason for supporting reciprocity is the real reason for the support of practically every United States citizen who favors reciprocity … Looking to the north that neighbor sees another country, equal in extent to its own, and equally rich, but sparsely settled and comparatively undeveloped. Here is an acquisition worth making, here is a prize worth striving for. It is Canada.23 Rejecting reciprocity not only meant rejecting a trade relationship with the United States but also meant stopping a slide toward being made a part of the United States. Besides being concerned about annexationists in Congress, many in Canada were also made defensive and angry by the widespread belief that American newspaper publishers were trying to force through a trade policy that benefited them at the expense of Canada and its forests. Publisher William Randolph Hearst came in for particularly vigorous criticism. The Montreal Star claimed in September 1911 that Hearst had “intervened with a malignant mendacity”24 into the debates about reciprocity in Canada through his papers’ biased coverage of the issue. Perhaps the most evocative statement of this position was a September 11 editorial cartoon entitled “Grand Monster Parade of the Canadian Reciprocity Party before Election Day” (Figure 2.2). In the cartoon, President William Howard Taft leads a parade party, including William Fielding, the Liberal minister of finance who negotiated the trade agreement for the Canadians. The “paid reciprocity press” brings up the rear, and the line is anchored by a drum labelled “Hearst’s Yellow Fanfare” and topped with a sign reading “Canadians must vote for reciprocity as I tell them or it will be worse for them.”25 Animus against Hearst proved so strong that an estimated eight to ten thousand people showed up to a public demonstration in September in Montreal denouncing Hearst for his role in the reciprocity debates.26 As congressional supporters of reciprocity could be portrayed as annexationists, powerful US newspaper publishers could be portrayed as media and cultural imperialists, and they too were to be opposed. If many North American reciprocity proponents were disappointed by Canada’s rejection of the 1911 trade agreement, that rejection meant something rather different for US newspapers and Canadian newsprint manufacturers, because of what the United States Tariff Commission later described as a “special provision” for newsprint that negotiators had put  into the pact. The provision “was enacted by the United States

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Fig. 2.2  “Grand Monster Parade of the Canadian Reciprocity Party before Election Day” cartoon, appearing in Montreal Star, 11 September 1911.

independently of the rest of the agreement,” and it unilaterally went into effect “in spite of the failure of Canada to accept the remainder of the measure.” Thus, as a result of the US Congress approving the reciprocity agreement, newsprint paper manufactured in Canada became a duty-free import, at least conditionally, despite the fact that Canadians had rejected the full accord. According to the specifics of the US policy, the newsprint had to be imported from provinces that did not have export duties on wood pulp or newsprint, and it had to be manufactured from wood cut from privately held lands, as the Canadian provinces still required that all wood cut from public lands be processed domestically.27 Despite these conditions, significant quantities of newsprint paper began to come to the United States from Canada duty free, and one historian describes this as the result of the major “loophole” that was “the only legislative result of the months of negotiation and agitation” over reciprocity.28 In 1913, the American passage of the Underwood Tariff would make all imported Canadian newsprint duty free, regardless of whether it had been manufactured from wood cut from public or private lands. In effect, during this two-year period, the policy decisions in the United States and Canada created an integrated continental economy in the most important and

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costly input to the newspaper business, and they allowed US newspapers ready access to the vast Canadian spruce forests that they coveted for the paper that they needed to keep their businesses operating. t h e c h i c ag o t r i b u n e i n c a n a da

Almost immediately after the United States Congress removed the duty on imported Canadian newsprint in 1911, the Tribune Company moved to take advantage of this new free-trade status by building a mill in Canada. After scouting locations in the winter of 1911–1912, Robert McCormick settled on a site on the Welland Canal at Thorold, Ontario, which offered not only cheap power from nearby Niagara Falls (only ten miles away) but also the means of cheap water transport to Chicago via the Great Lakes. Mill construction began in 1912, and the first machine commenced operation on 5 September 1913. By the end of the year, the mill was producing an average of fifty-seven tons of newsprint per day. Annual production figures increased dramatically over the following years as the mill expanded, going from 31,707 tons in 1914 to 173,000 tons in 1950 (Figure 2.3).29 The Thorold mill solved some of the Chicago Tribune’s newsprint supply problems and allowed the company to rationalize production better, but the company still had to purchase some paper on the open market to meet occasional extra needs, facing the perpetual challenge of getting raw material in the form of trees. Also, as the parent company was finding ways to become self-sufficient in the production of the Tribune, it faced further challenges after starting to publish the New York Daily News in 1919. The origins of the Daily News trace back to a meeting between Robert McCormick and his cousin Joseph Patterson on a farm in France, while both were serving in the military during the First World War. The pair agreed that Patterson would found a new tabloid in New York modelled on those that he had been intrigued by in Britain. The Daily News, a wholly owned Tribune Company subsidiary, was a quick and spectacular success, and it would have the highest circulation of any paper in the United States by 1924.30 To ensure its supply of trees to make newsprint for both papers, company executives negotiated timber leases with provincial policy-makers in Ontario and Quebec. In Ontario, the company eventually obtained 781 square miles of land near Heron Bay on the north shore of Lake Superior.31 In Quebec, the company obtained timber leases near Shelter Bay and Franquelin on the North Shore of the St Lawrence River, and by

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Fig. 2.3  Aerial view of the Thorold Mill, July 1928.

early 1941 had licensed some 2,215 square miles of timberlands.32 The company continued to add large tracts of Quebec and Ontario timberlands to its leaseholdings in subsequent years. According to one estimate published in the Tribune in 1954, the total by that point covered more than seven thousand square miles across both provinces, an area in the aggregate larger than that of the combined states of Connecticut and Delaware.33 The Tribune Company’s newsprint needs were massive, and by 1940 the company estimated that it was using one-tenth of all the newsprint in the United States to print the Tribune and Daily News.34 While securing the supply of trees necessary to print their newspapers for the foreseeable future, officials within the Tribune Company began to rethink their relationship with Quebec’s North Shore and consider building a newsprint mill in Quebec from which the enterprise could transport the paper to New York City via the Atlantic Ocean and to Chicago via the Great Lakes. Construction on a newsprint mill and the company town of Baie Comeau began soon after (Figure 2.4). The mill commenced operation in 1938 to

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Fig. 2.4  Baie Comeau mill construction, 1937.

great fanfare in the press. One Quebec newspaper, Le Progrès du Golfe, remarked in June 1938 that the area had been “deserted and desolate … just a year and a half ago,” and now there was a “beautiful little city with a huge paper mill … it seemed that a fairy had waved her magic wand.”35 This was, by 1938, a vertically integrated and multinational industrial firm producing two of the most successful US newspapers. For the Tribune Company as manufacturing enterprise, the border effectively did not exist (Figure 2.5). t h e s e c o n d wo r l d wa r and the politics of newsprint

The conditions under which the Tribune Company operated across the US-Canada border changed with the outbreak of the Second World War, and the company began facing significant political opposition to its operations. For many Canadians, the content of the Chicago Tribune now came to be seen as posing significant and immediate threats to their domestic politics and culture. As one journalist noted, even before Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, the Tribune and the Daily News “make up what is perhaps the most effective isolationist bloc in the daily press.”36 Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September, and Canada followed on 10 September. The United States would not enter the war for more

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Fig. 2.5  Map, location of company properties, the Ontario Paper Company, Limited, and Quebec North Shore Paper Company.

than two years, and then only after being attacked by Japan in December 1941. The Tribune’s editorial politics during this interval would prove controversial in Canada. In his thorough account of the paper’s foreignpolicy position in the 1930s, the historian Jerome Edwards remarks that the Tribune was “the only major American newspaper with a large foreign staff which did not support a liberal international foreign policy.” Robert McCormick remained a vocal and resolute critic of the European powers throughout the decade, in a style that Edwards describes as a “spirited chauvinism,” but he reserved a particular disdain for Great Britain, which to him “appeared the summation of all that was wrong with Europe.” As tensions in Europe increased before September 1939, McCormick’s antiBritish views cohered into strongly declared positions in favour of appeasement with Germany and avoidance of American military involvement. This was simply not a matter with which the United States should concern itself, McCormick believed.37 The Tribune’s isolationist stance during the gap between September 1939 and December 1941 increasingly made Canadians question the morality of this American entity using the

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country’s forests to manufacture its influential newspapers. Maybe it was time to rethink the porousness of the border, some wondered, both in terms of allowing Canadian-made newsprint to go south and in allowing the American-made Tribune to come north to subscribers through the mails or through importation by independent newsdealers. This line of thinking picked up momentum into 1940. In May, the Ottawa Journal claimed that, for “sheer malice against the British Empire and the Allied cause … [and] for absolute misrepresentation of Allied aims,” the Tribune was “surpassed only by the propaganda of Herr Goebbels.” The Journal’s editors pointed out that the paper’s “manufacturing department” was located in Canada, and it was outraged that “Canadian forests and Canadian water power” were being used by a “bitter, sinister enemy,” which it claimed should be “barred from this country – if not dealt with more drastically.”38 These sorts of editorials against the Tribune appeared across Canada. In Ontario, the Peterborough Examiner chastised the paper for its “hatred for and … scorn of the Allies and their war efforts,” and it suggested that it might be a good idea to “cut off the supply which keeps the Tribune operating.”39 The Lindsay Post editorialized that it “goes against the grain to have Canadian forest products manufactured into paper which is destined to circulate anti-British journals in the republic to the south.”40 The Tribune was giving Americans a “daily dose of … trash” in its pages, and the Post claimed that its coverage could “do more harm than all the Lindberghs and the noisy isolationists because it can influence more people directly.”41 In Manitoba, the Winnipeg Free Press called McCormick a “stupid and unscrupulous man” and claimed that he was “an outright Anglophobe, a hater of Britain,” with opinions that were “false, detestable and poisonous.”42 Even in Quebec, where support for the war was not as strong, L’Illustration Nouvelle criticized the Tribune’s isolationist news and editorials and claimed that it was “remarkable that these articles are published in newspapers printed on paper that is the product of our natural resources!”43 As Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson point out in this collection, this was a moment in which cross-border flows of another kind of print culture – comics – were reshaping Canadian conceptions of war, citizenship, and North American relations, and the Chicago Tribune as an industrial newspaper likewise prompted many Canadians to think about the border in a different way. This anti-Tribune sentiment filtered into the Canadian parliament, where some worried about the messages the Tribune was promoting widely in the United States and distributing to some readers in Canada. In 1940, one M P , T.L. Church, asked that the government

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prevent the circulation of newspapers and magazines publishing “articles detrimental to the cause of Britain and Canada and the prosecution of the war,” and he named the Chicago Tribune (along with the Saturday Evening Post) as being among the worst offenders.44 In the Senate, P.E. Blondin and Arthur Meighen took up the attack, with Blondin claiming in June 1940 that the Tribune was the source of “vicious and virulent anti-Allied propaganda.” Meighen called it a “nauseating mixture of ignorance and malignancy from the first line to the last,” and he claimed that it “will do more harm among ignorant people than anything else I know of published on the continent.” Although unclear about what specifically ought to be done about the Tribune, Meighen did suggest that legislators might well consider restrictive policies against the paper. “I do not believe times are such that ordinary rules can be applied,” Meighen concluded, “and I think we might well inject a little virility into our policy with respect to this kind of mendacity.”45 These diatribes against the Chicago Tribune struck a chord with ordinary Canadians, some of whom wrote letters to the government criticizing it, while others went so far as to engage in grassroots attempts to stir up public sentiment against the paper. One activist named J.H. Sherrard wrote an open letter to the Montreal Star that he also independently had duplicated and distributed. After blasting the Tribune for its anti-British attitudes, Sherrard pointed out the contradiction manifest in the fact that it was Canadian paper that was affording the newspaper the platform to present these views. Displaying a kind of everyday Innisian perspective in equating staples exploitation with cultural and economic imperialism, Sherrard believed that it was time to stop allowing the Tribune to use Canadian trees to print content hostile to Canadian national interests. “Are we supposed to conserve our forests in order to assure the Chicago Tribune of ample newsprint wherewith to assail us further?” Sherrard wondered. For critics like Sherrard, the Tribune’s coverage was so offensive not only because it assailed a long-standing imperial allegiance to Britain, but also because Canada was currently fighting a war alongside Britain. For a US paper to criticize this, while using Canadian resources, seemed outrageous. Ultimately, Sherrard concluded, “These people are not our friends.”46 c o n c l u s i o n : n e w s pa p e r s , b r a n c h p l a n t s , a n d   n o r t h a m e r i c a n r e l at i o n s

Although they considered it, Canadian officials ultimately declined to censor or ban the Tribune, and the issue changed after the attack on Pearl

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Harbor, when the paper began strongly supporting the Allied war effort. The Tribune not only toned down its anti-British rhetoric, but also used its Canadian industrial operations to assist in the war effort in other ways. This included using its own fleet of ships to help move vital supplies of coal and bauxite, the raw material used in aluminum production, between the United States and Canada.47 It also involved the Tribune Company developing innovative processes of using industrial waste produced at its Thorold mill to manufacture industrial alcohol that had a variety of uses in the war effort.48 But Robert McCormick remained a resolutely nationalist American during the war, and he added to this an ardent anti-­communist position thereafter. His anti-British views also returned to his paper in a prominent way, and profiles of him and the Tribune regularly commented on this until his death in 1955. As one Canadian journalist noted in 1947 in the Standard Magazine, McCormick had “succeeded in building a powerful Canadian empire which supplies his violently anti-Canadian daily with all its paper.” Having his own Canadian operations afforded him a “distinct advantage over other Canadian and American publishers, who must buy their newsprint in the hard-pressed open market … Unconcerned about the general shortage of paper, the colonel continues to publish thick papers and fat headlines preaching hate against Canada, Britain, Russia, Eastern Americans, and the United Nations.”49 Robert McCormick is not that well known to most Canadians today but, in a broad sense, the concerns expressed in Canada about McCormick and his paper have never gone away. Ultimately, the criticisms that were raised in the Canadian press, by public officials and by ordinary citizens, demonstrated an interesting variant of persistent anxieties about and criticisms of the United States. On the one hand, these were concerns about American cultural influence through the mass media, as many Canadians worried about how US-based outlets could influence their domestic politics and culture. These sorts of concerns are in many ways very much in line with those that would later lead to regulations mandating that a certain amount of “Canadian content” be broadcast on radio and television. American culture and the American mass media needed to be regulated as they came north across the border, many believed, if an independent Canadian culture was to develop and persist. On the other hand, the concerns about the Chicago Tribune were not just about content. They were also about trade and empire, and they were about the threats posed to Canadian politics and culture by the fact that newsprint exports to the United States were so important to the country’s economy in the mid-twentieth century. As the economic historians W.T.

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Easterbrook and Hugh Aitken noted in 1956, pulp-and-paper manufacturing had “established itself as Canada’s leading industry, whether the criterion used was value of output, capital invested, wages paid, or contribution to export earnings.” Newsprint was “the industry’s most valuable product,” and its continued success was intimately tied to exports to the United States. “In so far as the Canadian industry is concerned,” Easterbrook and Aitken noted, “stability depends largely on the maintenance of effective demand in the United States.”50 For Harold Innis, the consequences of this aspect of North American trade had become disastrous for Canadians. As he argued in 1952, US publishers had “shown their power in securing a removal of tariffs on imports of pulp and paper from Canada” between 1911 and 1913, and since then the “finished product in the form of advertisements and reading material is imported into Canada with a lack of restraint from the federal government which reflects American influence in an adherence to the principle of freedom of the press and its encouragement of monopoly.” With the help of Canadian newsprint, Innis concluded, powerful US publishers had created “entrenched positions” for themselves that involved the “continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity” in North America.51 These views are in many respects connected to the criticisms of US newspapers generally, and the Chicago Tribune specifically, that had been circulating in Canada for decades. Many Canadians well understood the fact that industrial newspapers like the Tribune were taking Canadian staples – trees – and using them in the manufacturing process. To many Canadians, the Chicago Tribune as a media outlet was a purveyor of a particular kind of American nationalism they believed to be narrow and jingoistic. In addition, to those considering the paper as a material object, the Tribune offered a physical reminder of a pattern of US foreign investment that they found deeply troubling. For much of the twentieth century, newsprint production was one the most important sectors of the Canadian economy. Today, oil production is much more significant, but Canada’s economy remains resource- and export-driven, and strongly oriented toward the United States. Indeed, one might suggest that, as Canada’s economy is today inordinately dependent upon American drivers, it was for much of the twentieth century inordinately dependent upon American readers.

n otes 1 Canadian Pulp and Paper Association, From Watershed to Watermark, 10, 51.

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2 Ellis, Newsprint, 5. 3 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 385. 4 Innis, Essays in Canadian Economic History, 395. 5 Berland, “Space at the Margins,” 286. 6 Anderson, Imagined Communities. 7 Alexander, “The Duke of Chicago,” 70; Villard, “The Waning Power of the Press,” 142. 8 McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine. 9 Guthrie, The Newsprint Paper Industry; Oden, “Charles Holmes Herty and the Birth of the Southern Newsprint Paper Industry.” 10 Nelles, The Politics of Development, 308. 11 Edwards, The Foreign Policy of Col McCormick’s Tribune, 32. 12 Perry, “N.Y. News, Now 15, Holds Grip on Masses.” 13 Editor & Publisher, advertisement on cover. 14 Hart, A Trading Nation, 49–52, 61–5. 15 Ellis, Reciprocity, 1911, 8. 16 “War on Paper Trust.” 17 “The Real Issue of Reciprocity,” 10. 18 Dutil and MacKenzie, Canada 1911. 19 Ellis, Reciprocity, 1911, 184–5. 20 “British Politicians and British Opinion,” 3. 21 Cong. Rec. 61st Congress, 3rd Session, House. Volume 46, Part 3, 2457. 22 Ibid., 2520. 23 “Annexation the End,” 30. 24 “Hearst,” 3. 25 “Grand Monster,” 3. 26 “Great Mass,” 15. 27 United States, Tariff Commission, Reciprocity with Canada, 39–40. 28 Ellis, Reciprocity, 1911, 191. 29 Wiegman, Trees to News, 10, 19, 22, 352. 30 Smith, Newspaper Titan, 228–9. 31 Wiegman, Trees to News, 196. 32 Becker, “Wilderness Has Not Disappeared at Baie Comeau,” 17. 33 M. McCormick, “Distaf Side,” F3. 34 “US-Owned Mill Argues against Being Prorated,” 13. 35 Deschenes, “Baie Comeau,” 7 (my translation). 36 Alexander, “The Duke of Chicago,” 71. 37 Edwards, The Foreign Policy of Col McCormick’s Tribune, 28–9, 45, 53, 131. 38 “One US Newspaper That Might Be Dealt With,” 6. 39 “Two Sides to This Drum,” 4.

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40 “Has Been Using Canada Long Time,” 2. 41 “Using Our Pulp to Print Its Lies,” 2. 42 “Chicago Tribune,” 11. 43 “L’Illustration nouvelle a lancé la première le cri d’alarme et avec raison,” 4 (my translation). 44 Dominion of Canada, House of Commons, Sessional Paper No. 167, 2. 45 Dominion of Canada, Senate, Official Report of Debates, 118–19. 46 Sherrard, “Two Enemies of Britain,” 3. 47 “Chi. Tribune Ships Carry Coal to Canada,” 44; “Tribune Ships Help Canada Produce Aluminum.” 48 R. McCormick, “Paper and By-products,” 16. 49 Clark, “Bertie’s Canadian Empire,” 3. 50 Easterbrook and Aitken, Canadian Economic History, 538, 540, 546. 51 Innis, Changing Concepts, 15.

b ib liog r ap h y Alexander, Jack. “The Duke of Chicago.” Saturday Evening Post, 19 July 1941: 10–11, 70–2, 74–5. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. “Annexation the End; Reciprocity Is Merely the Means.” Editorial. Montreal Star, 16 September 1911: 30. Becker, Bob. “Wilderness Has Not Disappeared at Baie Comeau.” Chicago Tribune, 23 July 1941: 17. Berland, Jody. “Space at the Margins: Critical Theory and Colonial Space after Innis.” In Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions, edited by Charles R. Acland and William Buxton, 281–308. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. “British Politicians and British Opinion.” Montreal Star, 15 September 1911: 3. Canadian Pulp and Paper Association. From Watershed to Watermark: The Pulp and Paper Industry of Canada. Montreal: Canadian Pulp and Paper Association, 1950. “The Chicago Tribune.” Editorial. Winnipeg Free Press, 4 February 1941: 11. “Chi. Tribune Ships Carry Coal to Canada.” Editor & Publisher, 12 September 1942: 44. Clark, Gerald. “Bertie’s Canadian Empire.” The Standard Magazine, 22 February 1947: 3, 16. Deschenes, L. “Baie Comeau – Baie des Miracles.” Le Progrès du Golfe, 24 June 1938: 7. Dominion of Canada. House of Commons. Sessional Paper No. 167, 3 July 1940.

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Dominion of Canada. Senate. Official Report of Debates. 19th Parliament, 1st Session, 6 June 1940. Dutil, Patrice, and David MacKenzie. Canada 1911: The Decisive Election That Shaped the Country. Toronto: Dundurn, 2011. Easterbrook, W.T., and Hugh G.J. Aitken. 1956. Canadian Economic History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Editor & Publisher, 19 February 1921: Advertisement on cover. Edwards, Jerome. The Foreign Policy of Col McCormick’s Tribune, 1929– 1941. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1971. Ellis, L. Ethan. Newsprint: Producers, Publishers, Political Pressures. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1960. – Reciprocity, 1911: A Study in Canadian-American Relations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939. “Grand Monster Parade of the Canadian Reciprocity Party before Election Day.” Cartoon. Montreal Star, 11 September 1911: 3. “Great Mass Meeting Denounces American Interference in Canada’s Elections.” Montreal Star, 11 September 1911: 15. Guthrie, John. The Newsprint Paper Industry: An Economic Analysis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941. Hart, Michael. A Trading Nation: Canadian Trade Policy from Colonialism to Globalization. Vancouver: U BC Press, 2002. “Has Been Using Canada Long Time.” Editorial. Lindsay Post, 31 May 1940: 2. “Hearst – The Trouble Maker!” Editorial. Montreal Star, 7 September 1911: 3. “L’Illustration nouvelle a lancé la première le cri d’alarme et avec raison.” Editorial. L’Illustration Nouvelle, 31 May 1940: 4. Innis, Harold. The Fur Trade in Canada. 1930. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. – Essays in Canadian Economic History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956. – Changing Concepts of Time. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952. McCormick, Maryland. “The Distaf Side.” Chicago Tribune, 8 August 1954: F 3. McCormick, Robert. “Paper and By-products.” Chicago Tribune, 20 June 1943: 16. McGaw, Judith. Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making, 1801–1885. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Nelles, H.V. The Politics of Development: Forests, Mines, and Hydro-Electric Power in Ontario, 1849–1941. 2nd ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2005.

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Oden, Jack P. “Charles Holmes Herty and the Birth of the Southern Newsprint Paper Industry, 1927–1940.” Journal of Forest History 21, no. 2 (1977): 76–89. “One U.S. Newspaper That Might Be Dealt With.” Editorial. Ottawa Journal, 28 May 1940: 6. Perry, John W. “N.Y. News, Now 15, Holds Grip on Masses.” Editor & Publisher, 30 June 1934: 5–6, 39. “The Real Issue of Reciprocity.” Editorial. Chicago Tribune, 10 February 1911: 10. Sherrard, J.H. “Two Enemies of Britain: The Saturday Evening Post and The Chicago Tribune.” 21 June 1940. Reel C3567, v.175. Arthur Meighen Fonds, MG2 6 -I, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, ON. Smith, Amanda. Newspaper Titan: The Infamous Life and Monumental Times of Cissy Patterson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. “Tribune Ships Help Canada Produce Aluminum.” Chicago Tribune, 1 November 1942: D2, D 8. “Two Sides to This Drum.” Editorial. Peterborough Examiner, 1 June 1940: 4. United States. Congressional Record, 61st Congress, 3rd Session, House. Volume 46, Part 3 (1911). – Tariff Commission. Reciprocity with Canada: A Study of the Arrangement of 1911. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920. “US-Owned Mill Argues against Being Prorated.” Toronto Globe and Mail, 8 May 1940: 13. “Using Our Pulp to Print Its Lies.” Editorial. Lindsay Post, 30 May 1940: 2. Villard, Oswald Garrison. “The Waning Power of the Press.” The Forum, September 1931: 141–5. “War on Paper Trust.” Editor & Publisher, 21 September 1907: 1–2. Wiegman, Carl. Trees to News: A Chronicle of the Ontario Paper Company’s Origin and Development. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1953.

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3 Music within Bounds: Distribution, Borders, and the Canadian Recording Industry Richard Sutherland

introduction: distribution and the canadian recording industry

“Canada does have a music industry. It is a branch plant.”1

In 1993, when John Shepherd made this observation in his assessment of English-Canadian musical identity, it was basically (although not entirely) true, and had been so for at least forty years. Depending on one’s definition of a branch plant, it may have been true for the better part of a century, at least as long as there had been a Canadian recording industry, and it remains the case today. However, despite the pejorative sense in which the term “branch plant” is generally understood, it is worth considering more closely what it means. To call the Canadian music industry a branch plant is, for Shepherd and many others, to suggest that it is simply an extension of the global music industry, or more specifically the American music industry. While this is true in general, the details allow for a more nuanced account. In some respects, the fact that the Canadian music industry is a branch plant suggests that it is not simply a part of the American industry. In the film industry, Canada is treated as part of the domestic US market,2 but this is not so much the case for the music industry. Even on a global level, the music market, despite being controlled by a small number of multinationals, is, as Patrick Wikström notes, “structured as a large number of distinct local markets,”3 to which firms have to adapt.

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This also applies to Canada in distinction from the United States. As Shepherd’s account suggests, differences in musical production and consumption are not great, at least between English Canada and the United States. It is certainly true that English-Canadians overwhelmingly buy music from other countries, mostly the United States. Nonetheless, there are some differences between the two markets. Despite the close integration of the economies between the countries, and their many similarities in cultural consumption, the border between the two continues to matter to the music industry. It acts as a formidable barrier in certain respects and not at all in others; its effects differ, depending on what is crossing it and in which direction. All of this has an effect on the way in which recordings circulate – their distribution. In the simplest terms, distribution is the means by which recordings make their way from producers to consumers, although the specific means by which they do so are considerably more complex. These specific means are always material and almost always industrial, but they are no less musical for all that. Sociomusicological accounts such as Antoine Hennion’s challenge the notion that music could exist separate from such “contextual” considerations.4 They are integral to the way in which the vast majority of Canadians and Americans encounter and experience music, which is to say they are part of music. In his assessment of the digital effects industry in Canada in this volume, Charles Acland asserts the need to be more attentive to the ways in which the nationality of cultural industries is not only cultural, but also industrial. Ignoring the necessary, and often industrial, materialities of culture has consequences for scholarship, as well as for policy-making, in these industries. Scholarship on Canadian popular music has tended to concern itself almost entirely with the nationality of musical content, rather than on the (largely industrial) means by which it circulates, which is to ignore the means by which music is able to participate in Canadian nationalism in any meaningful way. Yet aspects of distribution and circulation do figure in the work of some Canadian scholars. Jody Berland makes it clear that radio’s accessibility and portability, as well as its spatial and temporal properties, are fundamental aspects of its particular role in shaping communities.5 Will Straw calls for closer examination in cultural studies of the “movement of cultural forms [that] presumes and creates the matrices of interconnections which produce social texture.”6 Elsewhere, he discusses the forms of reception and connoisseurship that have arisen in Canada around the consumption of music from elsewhere, often in the form of imports, that is not released domestically.7

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Building on this, we might say here that music’s circulation (again, largely through industrial means) within and across Canada’s borders may offer us insight into how it contributes to and is inflected by Canadian nationality in a way that often escapes analysis of its content. To understand the role that distribution plays in establishing a Canadian musical identity, we have to re-embed music in the shared patterns of production and consumption that, as much as anything, define music communities. What recordings are available to us? On what terms and through what channels are they available? These matters are largely determined by the practices of distribution, which have affected the scarcity or abundance of certain recordings or even styles of music. Even in Quebec, where linguistic and cultural differences are more obvious, this is also reflected in its somewhat distinct distribution system. The particular confluence of these various recordings, their sites of consumption, and of our own tastes and attitudes in relation to these is unique to us and constitutes much of what music is in Canada. Distribution is crucial to any understanding of music industries in general, but even here it is seldom the focus of analysis. Steve Jones notes the lack of attention distribution has received compared to the production or consumption of popular music, despite its importance to the music industry.8 Other scholars, such as Simon Frith and Robert Burnett, note the control of distribution as the basis of the dominance of multinational labels in the recording industry in the latter half of the twentieth century, but there has been relatively little close examination of these systems.9 Systems for music distribution, more than any other factor, are responsible for the structure of the Canadian industry and its attendant government policies. Most of these policies, including tariffs on sound recordings, Canadian content regulations, and copyright, fundamentally involve circulation. Tariffs (discussed in more detail below) are quite clearly concerned precisely with the circulation of music in material form. Canadian content is also an intervention into the circulation of music, intended to affect, on either side, both the production and reception of Canadian music. Music-industry practices and associated government policies that do not take account of distribution are themselves likely to fail, creating “boxes of C D s that pile up in public or private storage,” or the digital equivalent.10 Copyright in music (or in other sectors) is based on the possibility of circulation across various media, from print to digital files, from performance to broadcast media. Taking the measure of the considerable transformations of the music industries over the past two decades also demands attentiveness to the

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ways in which music circulates; the transition from physical to digital distribution is at the heart of these changes. Discussing distribution reminds us that there are two elements that go into the making of a record, each of which is affected differently by the border. One is the musical content; the other is the physical form in which it is embodied. For virtually all of the twentieth century, distribution of recordings involved the mass manufacture of physical copies (successively, wax cylinders, shellac discs, vinyl singles and L P s, eight-track and cassette tapes, and compact discs), all of which had then to be conveyed to consumers. At its height, the physical distribution system included a number of businesses, not just distributors, but also manufacturers, sub-­distributors, rack-jobbers, one stops, and, of course, retailers, most of which have now disappeared. A key distinction between the film and recording industries (and the main reason why the border plays a very different role for each) is that the recording industry has, for most of its existence, been a manufacturing industry. The bulk of the recordings sold in Canada have generally been manufactured here. In this sense, there has been a domestic Canadian recording industry for more than a century. This chapter argues that many of the consequences of this situation are still with us, despite the fact that recordings increasingly circulate as digital files or signals conveyed over telecommunications networks. Although the physical recordings may be manufactured in Canada, the musical content has generally not been Canadian since the earliest days of the recording industry. The musical content is equivalent to the design of other industrially produced goods. As with many other “branch plant” industries, the research and development of products is carried out at company headquarters outside Canada, and the Canadian branch plant exists simply to serve the domestic demand for these products.11 This is perhaps especially problematic for recordings. With many manufacturing industries, the bulk of the costs are involved in the manufacture of each item; for recordings, a far larger proportion of the costs arise from the “design” elements, such as the performance and the composition, while the cost of manufacturing each copy is quite low. As we will see, inasmuch as the border has presented a barrier for the circulation of recordings, it has usually done so predominantly for the material components and very little for the musical content. Although the border has been deployed effectively as a way of creating Canadian jobs in the manufacturing, distribution, and marketing of recordings, the benefits to Canadian musical production are not nearly as clear. As a result, for much of its history, the most important policies for the Canadian music industry were not

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cultural, at least in intention. The Massey Commission’s assertion of Canadian cultural sovereignty, as described by Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson elsewhere in this volume, did not extend to the Canadian recording industry, which is nowhere mentioned in the Commission’s report. Recording distribution systems are, like any networks created to undertake action at a distance, composed of various material, social, and legal elements that allow for effective control from the centre.12 In this case, the centre consists of the headquarters of the handful of multinational corporations that dominate the music industry worldwide. Not only is it necessary to get the goods to consumers, but an exchange must also take place. As Fernand Braudel puts it in his history of global trade, “any journey from A to B must be balanced by a return journey”;13 in other words, you have to make a full circuit. In this case, the return journey is the payment for music. Because the product was for so long embodied in a physical object, the logistics and relative costs of transporting finished product globally, as opposed to manufacturing locally, were partly responsible for the growth of local distribution and manufacturing networks.14 But in Canada, with its proximity to the United States, this was less of a concern. Instead, the most compelling reason for local manufacture, as both Paul Audley and Will Straw note in their respective studies of the Canadian recording industry, was a tariff of 15 per cent on the importation of manufactured goods, including sound recordings.15 It is clear, then, that national borders can impose particular challenges for the conveyance of commodities to their destination, beyond the simple matter of distance, and that overcoming these requires changes to the structure of the network. The border makes a difference to the return journey as well, requiring a network structured to ensure that payment crosses back to the centre with as little disruption or deduction as possible. The precise nature of the barriers and blockages has changed over time, but the border remains in effect. t h e n at i o n a l p o l i c y a n d t h e e a r ly c a n a d i a n recording industry

The 15 per cent tariff was one of the measures of the National Policy, a macroeconomic strategy to ensure Canada’s economic independence and viability, instituted by Canada’s Conservative government in 1879. Such tariffs were aimed at building up Canadian manufacturing industries.16 This led to a good deal of direct foreign investment in Canada in order to access the market, and this investment often took the form of the

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creation of branch plants: foreign-owned (usually American) companies operating within Canada. The goal of the National Policy was essentially import substitution – the domestic manufacture of goods that would otherwise have to be imported from elsewhere. For American manufacturing companies wishing to enter the Canadian market, there were a number of options. One could simply export the goods into Canada directly and pay the tariff. Alternatively, one could find a Canadian manufacturer to undertake production under licence. The other option was to become, at least in some sense, Canadian, by setting up one’s own operation within Canada, a true branch plant. American recording companies have utilized all three options over the years. Initially, the Canadian recording industry was not a branch plant. The first record company to operate in Canada was the Berliner Gramophone Company, which commenced operations in 1899. It was owned and operated by German émigré Emile Berliner, who had moved up to Canada after a number of years in the United States. Berliner was a key figure in the early recording industry, as the inventor of the gramophone, which used discs made out of hard rubber, as distinct from the cylinders played on Edison’s phonograph. Having sold his shares in the Victor Recording Company in the United States, Berliner set up his own operation in Montreal. The two other firms comprising the Big Three (as the dominant firms in the market were called) were based on different kinds of arrangements. Edison used a Canadian agent, R.S. Williams, an old Toronto firm, to import and distribute its product, and Columbia set up a wholly owned subsidiary with headquarters in Toronto.17 Of the three, then, only Columbia was truly a branch-plant operation. Whatever their particular relationship to foreign interests, however, all three companies were engaged primarily in selling foreign titles in Canada. The Berliner Company licensed product for manufacture in Canada from a number of other record companies around the world, including the Victor Talking Machine Company in the United States and Deutsche Grammophon in Germany,18 but eventually the company came to make a significant number of its own recordings. Columbia also produced some Canadian recordings, although not nearly as many. Eventually a truly branch-plant model would become dominant in the Canadian recording industry, but this would take some time. By 1924, Berliner had become a branch-plant operation with its takeover by Victor, but the global decline of the recording industry would arrest this process for at least a decade. Over this period, much of the recording industry went out of business in Canada, as it suffered from a major decline in

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sales of both equipment and discs, as a result of both the Depression and competition from radio. By 1930, Columbia had sold its Canadian operation to local interests, and Edison abandoned the phonograph business altogether. Only Victor, or R C A Victor as it had become, maintained a consistent Canadian presence during the 1930s and 1940s. The sole Canadian record company to survive the Depression was Compo Company, a pressing plant based in Lachine, Quebec, set up by Emile Berliner’s son Herbert as an independent concern in 1918, thanks in part to its status as Canadian licensee for multinationals such as Brunswick and Decca during this period.19 It was joined in 1939 by the Americanowned manufacturing company Sparton, which took on manufacturing and distribution of the newly revived Columbia label, after its sale to C B S . As late as the mid-1960s, such companies carried on the bulk of record manufacturing in Canada. During this time, most American labels operated in Canada at arm’s length, maintaining licensing arrangements with Canadian record manufacturers, who took responsibility for both pressing and distributing records here. p o s t wa r g r ow t h a n d t h e m u lt i n at i o n a l record labels

The period from the end of the Second World War to the late 1960s saw the recovery of the global recording industry. This period also represents by far the greatest growth of American direct investment in the Canadian economy, including in manufacturing.20 Arrangements between multinational labels and local manufacturing in Canada gradually began to change again, and it is this that marks the arrival of a true branch-plant music industry in the country. Although the result was an industry dominated by branch plants, these companies utilized a number of different strategies for entering the Canadian market, including takeovers, mergers, and the setting up of new companies. The American record company Decca (confusingly there was also a British label of the same name) had contracted with Compo to manufacture and market its releases in Canada, and in 1951 it had purchased Compo outright. Although Compo was left as a separate operation, this gave Decca (later Music Corporation of America, or MCA) a considerable presence in the Canadian market. Capitol Records, a relatively new American label, had first attempted to create a Canadian branch in 1948, but ran afoul of Canadian investment guidelines. In the interim, the company licensed its product to Regal Records, based in London, Ontario, which was formed specifically for that purpose. 21

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Capitol Records had finally launched a proper Canadian operation in 1954, switching to Quality Records in Toronto for manufacturing.22 Columbia Records had also transferred its manufacturing contract to Quality Records from Sparton and began its own distribution and marketing operations in Canada. While the multinationals continued to contract out their manufacturing for the most part, they began to take direct control over distribution of their products in Canada. It also meant managing sales accounts with Canadian retailers, as well as developing the necessary transportation and warehousing capabilities to reach retail outlets quickly and in sufficient quantity. This meant a diminishment in the responsibilities of Canadian manufacturers, who were increasingly simply tasked with pressing the records, and little else. This process intensified in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as multinationals continued to enter the market and the existing Canadian operations consolidated and expanded their operations. In 1968, Columbia became a fully national operation, with branches and warehouses across Canada.23 Capitol (by now owned by British company EMI) and London (subsidiary of the British Decca) both restructured their Canadian operations at about the same time, taking on a larger role in both distribution and manufacturing. This development was part of a larger trend in the industry toward consolidation of control over the various functions of marketing sound recordings. It was not simply a question of expansion into Canada but also part of a wider move on the part of these labels to take control of their own manufacturing and distribution in a number of territories throughout the world, including the United States, a central strategy in the majors’ move toward “reoligopolization.”24 The same process was playing out also in Britain at roughly the same time.25 One of the last of the major labels to open offices in Canada was Warner Brothers, which decided to start setting up its own distribution system in 1967, beginning with Canada. The company’s ad in the 24 May 1969 issue of Billboard asked, “Why Did Warner Bros.–Seven Arts Records Open Their Own Canadian Office?”26 The responses were “To Search Out Talent! … To Sell Records and Tapes! … To Have Warner-Men in This Great Country.”27 In fact, as the following quotation from former Warner Music executive Stan Cornyn makes clear, the most compelling reason for setting up a branch-plant operation (in Canada, or anywhere else) was the realization that licensing one’s catalogue, although relatively low risk, left most of the profits with the licensee: Compo had sent back 12½ percent of suggested list minus tax for all of its sales of WB albums. Our Burbank label had enjoyed only that

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percentage and paid its record artists out of it; Compo kept three times that amount. After Warner opened W BR of Canada, the new company sent not only the same 12½ percent to Burbank but also all of WBR  / Canada’s profits … WB R  / Canada started making money after one month in business.28 Although licensing product was an effective way of getting around the tariff, setting up a truly branch-plant operation in Canada had as much to do with the return leg of the circuit – getting paid. But to do so it was necessary, as historian Michael Bliss would have it, to “Canadianize”:29 to establish a physical presence in Canada. Through the 1970s, the major multinational labels strengthened their hold over the Canadian recording industry, based largely on their control of manufacturing and distribution, and by 1980, only one Canadianowned manufacturer – Quality Records – remained.30 Nonetheless, the branch plants ensured that most of the records sold in Canada were manufactured here, 46.6 million of them in 1974.31 As was intended by Canada’s National Policy and its encouragement of direct foreign investment, the branch-plant operations provided Canadian jobs, not only in pressing plants and warehouses, but also in other areas, such as sales and promotion. But although there was some economic benefit to be had from this arrangement, the cultural benefits were rather more limited and indirect. Of those 46.6 million records, 94 per cent were manufactured from foreign-produced master tapes.32 The branch plants’ overriding function was to sell recordings of foreign, mostly American, material to Canadians. Just as we see in Michael Stamm’s discussion of the American newspaper industry in this volume, in the continental division of cultural industrial labour in North America, Canada’s role was limited to providing material rather than cultural inputs. Cases such as the production of the film of Life of Pi, using a Canadian novel for its basis, as described by Gillian Roberts in her essay, are still the exception. The production of cultural content has generally remained an American preserve. However, the presence of the multinationals’ branch plants did offer some benefits for Canadian music. The introduction of Canadian content regulations for commercial radio in 1970 stimulated interest in Canadian musical talent by providing more opportunities for promotion over the airwaves. The multinational major labels maintained small Artist & Repertoire departments in their Canadian operations, with responsibility for scouting and developing local talent, and in the early 1970s, the period during which the major labels were at their most expansive in their embrace of local music talent beyond the Anglo-American mainstream,

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they did sign a number of Canadian artists.33 English-Canadian rock acts such as Bachman Turner Overdrive and Trooper were examples of artists able to attain considerable popularity and develop international careers while remaining in Canada. French Canada had its own music tradition of chanson, which was popular with local audiences even in advance of Canadian content regulation. But Québécois rock acts such as Robert Charlebois, Harmonium, and Beau Dommage also attracted major label contracts and achieved considerable success at this time. Major label involvement gave these artists powerful distribution networks, along with all the associated promotional and marketing resources, as well as the potential to reach international markets through the multinationals’ operations in other countries. The distribution networks were of at least equal importance to the small-but-significant independent Canadianowned recording sector. A number of small record companies had developed in the wake of Canadian content regulations, as artist managers or agents formed labels such as Aquarius (April Wine), True North (Bruce Cockburn), or Anthem (Rush) to release recordings by their clients, often only one act, at least initially. Even as they competed with the major multinational labels for market share and for Canadian talent, these small labels relied upon the multinationals for distribution in Canada. In many respects, Canadian independent record labels benefited enormously from the creation of these distribution networks, obtaining greatly enhanced access to retail outlets, discounted manufacturing rates, and the ability to use promotional support – at a price. Such pressing and distribution deals with the major labels also provided Canadian independents with much needed capital from advances against future sales. Still, Canadian-owned labels remained at a distinct disadvantage to their multinational counterparts. Lacking anything like the same access to capital, these labels had difficulty competing for the most in-demand Canadian artists; nor could they afford to promote or manufacture on the same scale. The distribution systems of the major labels were vertically integrated, with control of the largest rack-jobbers, which controlled access to non-specialist retail outlets, such as department stores. Independents complained that their access to these was very limited. Above all, Canadian labels did not have the same easy access to foreign content as did the Canadian branches of the multinationals. They imported master tapes into Canada, which could then be used to manufacture copies for sale in this market. These tapes entered the country with duty charged only on the value of the virgin tape (which might be as little as five dollars), not on the cost of creating the music on the tape (often as

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much as $100,000 USD ). Canadian branch plants did not pay up front for these tapes, but, as Cornyn notes above, returned a high royalty rate back to the head office, along with the profits.34 This also had some economic consequences: the outflow of royalties on those recordings was estimated at anywhere between $15 to $36 million C A D , not including the profits of the Canadian operations, which also left the country. The border was even less of an impediment to the royalties from the sales of these records (payable to music publishers in the form of mechanical royalties, and to the record companies that owned the rights in the recordings as lease fees), which flowed back across the border the other way. By 1995, these amounts were estimated at $35 million C A D in mechanical royalties payable to music publishers and $127 million CAD in fees to lease foreign masters.35 Canadian companies were far more likely to record their own content, and to bear the costs of production themselves. They could and did also license the Canadian rights to some foreign recordings, but this required paying advances to the licensor upfront. A temporary but steep decline in record sales worldwide around 1980 saw a sharp curtailment of Canadian artists on major-label rosters. This was especially the case for francophone artists, with the result that, in Quebec, regional independent labels and distributors were able to develop a much more autonomous, self-contained distribution network for Quebec’s concentrated and distinct recording sector.36 A 1994 report on the Canadian music industry by consultants Ernst & Young noted that Quebec’s music industry was distinct from English Canada’s not only in terms of its self-sufficiency, but also in its structure.37 It was vertically integrated, with larger regional distributors, such as Trans-Canada or Select Distribution, also running their own record labels. Quebec’s music companies were also much more integrated into a regional entertainment industry as divisions of local conglomerates engaged in broadcasting, publishing, and film, which was notably not the case with the EnglishCanadian industry.38 This integration conferred a distinct advantage for promoting local artists and gave the francophone industry much more of a stake in developing and marketing these acts. The major multinational labels were by no means absent from Quebec (in fact PolyGram Canada’s head office remained in Montreal until 1991, when it relocated to Toronto), but these companies did not dominate the market to nearly the same extent as in the rest of the country. However, in English Canada, majorlabel branch plants remained firmly in control, headquartered in large administrative and warehousing facilities, all located around the periphery

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of Toronto, with regional offices in major centres across the country. The situation did not change a great deal even as the format changed from vinyl L P s, to cassettes, to compact discs. By the time the compact disc had become the dominant format in the 1990s, the Canadian disc-­ manufacturing sector was competitive with that in the United States,39 thanks in part, no doubt, to a low Canadian dollar. In a mid-1970s report on the Canadian industry, a number of independents had called for “a more realistic and comprehensive evaluation,”40 reflecting the actual value of imported masters. However, most of these demands had died down by the end of the decade, and, although the independent sector’s representatives continued to bemoan their lack of access to capital, they concerned themselves more with trying to obtain tax deductions for Canadian-produced recordings or, failing that, government programs that might assist with the costs of production. In the end, the benefits conferred by the pressing and distribution deals offered by the majors were considerable, and a tariff high enough to level the playing field would also remove much of the rationale for maintaining a separate Canadian operation at all. The arrangement also worked very well for the major labels, which were able to derive even more revenue from distribution infrastructure through the fees they charged to independent labels to use it. Over time, the independent sector actually became increasingly fearful that the branch-plant operations of the major multinationals would be closed – absorbed into a continental distribution system run out of the US head offices. e l i m i n at i n g t h e ta r i f f

In the late 1980s, the Canadian government under Brian Mulroney embarked on negotiations for a free-trade agreement with the United States. This occasioned considerable anxiety among many in the cultural sector, who worried that some of the government measures taken to protect Canadian culture would be lost under such an agreement. For the Canadian-owned recording sector, the chief worries were that measures such as Canadian content regulations on radio would be eliminated, and that the elimination of tariffs on sound recordings would result in consolidation of the major labels’ distribution operations within North America, a sentiment expressed at government hearings on the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (C I R P A 1988). While the Mulroney government hastened to assure Canadians that culture would be “off the table” in any agreement, and, indeed, the United States did agree to exempt most

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cultural measures from trade liberalization, when the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement was extended to include Mexico under a new North American Free Trade Agreement (N A F T A ), recordings were included among the many goods on which tariffs would be eliminated. At the time the agreement was signed in 1993, the tariff was 9 per cent for most recorded formats and 11 per cent for tapes.41 These tariffs were eliminated in five yearly increments to zero as of 1 January 1998. If this had resulted in the dismantling of Canadian operations of the major labels’ branch plants, it would have been much more difficult for Canadian labels to secure distribution deals with the majors in a continental system. Their importance to a distribution system ten times larger than Canada’s would be relatively small, and perhaps not enough to make them attractive as customers. This concern was heightened by the fact that, by this time, through a series of mergers, the number of multinational major labels had dropped to five – BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner. Canadian independents might also lose what little access they had to foreign repertoire, as licensors from abroad might simply opt to deal with American labels for North America as a whole. Evidence of this concern can be found in the formation of Song Corp., a short-lived attempt at creating a Canadian-based full-service music company and distribution service. Song was the creation of Allan Gregg and Jake Gold, the management team for the Canadian group the Tragically Hip. Launching as a publicly traded company in 1999, Song moved to purchase the largest Canadian independent publisher, TMP, The Music Publisher, from Alliance-Atlantis Films, and also purchased Attic Records, one of Canada’s most established and successful independent labels. More important than Attic’s roster of Canadian acts were the prominent foreign independent labels it distributed in Canada, making the label’s business model more like that of one of the major multinationals. Attic was, in its turn, distributed by Universal Music, allowing it to access that major label’s distribution and sales network, as well as its manufacturing arrangements. When Song bought Attic Records, this ended Attic’s relationship with Universal. Song Corp. had set up its own distribution arm, Oasis, with regional offices across Canada, and Attic Records would form much of the volume for Oasis, which then also signed a number of other Canadian independent labels. Despite the attempt to access stock markets, however, Song was undercapitalized, especially in comparison to its major-label competitors, who showed no sign of quitting Canada at this point. Losing Attic and its not-inconsiderable sales had been problematic for Universal’s Canadian operations; however, they

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were able to recoup much of this when they outbid Attic for the Canadian distribution rights for Roadrunner Records in 2001. This also spelled the end of Song Corp.’s brief existence. Clearly, the major labels were not about to leave Canada simply because discs could now be imported from the United States duty free. However, the music business was changing, with less reliance on selling recordings to consumers. It had never been just a manufacturing industry; it was also, as Frith notes, a rights industry.42 Major labels became more occupied with managing the rights to their enormous catalogues of music, exploiting their use across a number of media. As a result, the role of the branch plant would shift decisively away from manufacturing and physical distribution over the next several years. In Canada, these functions have fallen mostly to the Canadian disc manufacturer Cinram. Based in Scarborough, Ontario, Cinram is now the largest manufacturer of discs in North America, having positioned itself to take advantage of the opening borders between Canada, the United States, and Mexico by setting up plants in all three countries. This process began with the sale of Warner Music by its parent corporation Time Warner in 2003. While the record label was bought by a group of investors, headed by Canadian Edgar Bronfman, the entire North American distribution operation was sold to Canadian disc manufacturer Cinram. The other major labels in Canada also divested themselves of their physical distribution infrastructure over the next three years, likewise handing responsibility for this to Cinram.43 During this period, the material aspect of recordings was transformed, as digital networks emerged as an increasingly important means of distributing recordings, both legally and otherwise, without any need for manufactured product. It appears that, within a few years of its elimination, the tariff on recordings would no longer have meant much anyway. t h e d i g i ta l wo r l d : c o p y r i g h t a n d t e r r i to r y

Even if the tariff on physical copies of recordings is no longer a factor, the border still matters in the digital realm, both for accessing the market and for extracting revenues from it. The massive reconfiguration of the music industry in the twenty-first century has introduced new kinds of music-related enterprises, even as it has caused the decline of others that already exist. Arguably, the role of the major labels in Canada has diminished, yet they still account for the overwhelming majority of the recordings sold in Canada. All the major multinationals (now numbering three: Sony, Universal, and Warner) continue to maintain separate Canadian

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operations to this day. Although they are still nominally distributors, this has come to have more to do with rights management and marketing. Major labels are still in control of the industry, because they still own the most-valuable material and control the resources necessary to sign – and, just as importantly, promote – the most commercially viable artists. As the largest clients of the manufacturing and distribution services, they can also receive favourable terms for their business. Even so, the question remains: why maintain Canadian offices, especially when, over the past fifteen years or so, the sales of physical copies of music have dropped by roughly 50 per cent, and digital distribution has become more important? There are perhaps two main reasons. First, the recording industry is less and less a manufacturing industry. At this point, the major labels no longer control distribution of either physical or digital product; however, the cost of maintaining these operations has also dropped dramatically without the need to maintain the physical infrastructure of distribution and manufacturing. In this respect the major labels resemble their music-publishing counterparts, most of which have maintained Canadian offices for decades. The Canadian operations of the major multinationals have moved from Toronto’s suburbs to the downtown, with greatly reduced space and staff. From these smaller offices, they can continue to manage the marketing and promotion of their products, engage in lobbying Canadian governments (both federal and provincial), and perhaps even scout for Canadian talent. The second, and most important, reason is precisely to do with rights management. As we will see, it is simply more effective to do this within Canada than abroad. Digital distribution is dominated by another set of companies, most notably Apple, whose online store, iTunes, is the largest music retailer in the world – and, arguably, the single largest distributor of recordings as well. Yet iTunes also maintains a separate Canadian store, as do all digital distributors operating in this country, even with the evident ease of digital networks to transcend national boundaries. This is mostly because of copyright laws. Apple launched its iTunes online store in April 2003 in the United States, but it did not open in Canada until more than eighteen months later. At the time it was rumoured that the delay was due to difficulties in negotiating copyright arrangements.44 Whether or not the rumours about these difficulties were true, Apple was certainly required to negotiate separate agreements with the holders of Canadian rights in order to access the Canadian market – in this case, the Canadian branches of the major labels, as well as the Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency, acting on behalf of music publishers in Canada.

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Canada remains a separate territory for copyright, with a separate regime that, although it is in many respects harmonized with that of the United States and other countries, retains some important distinctions, and is, above all, enforced locally by the government and its courts. Where unauthorized file sharing is concerned, we know very well that digital files cross borders seamlessly; however, in terms of getting paid, owners of intellectual property depend upon national regimes to draft and enforce laws. The applicability of Canadian copyright law even where the Internet was concerned was reaffirmed by a decision of the Canadian Supreme Court in June 2004, in which the court found that Canadian copyright law was applicable to products available to Canadians, even if the material was housed on servers outside the country.45 In this case, the barrier to entering the Canadian market posed by the national border is arguably even greater than it was for disc manufacturers, as it is a question not simply of paying a tariff, but of operating in Canada. Nor does this scenario change with the move to music streaming. It is only with the clarification of Canadian copyright law in a 2011 Supreme Court decision and the recent establishment of a tariff set by the Copyright Board of Canada and paid to Canadian copyright collectives SOCAN and RE:Sound that many of the existing streaming services in the United States are now prepared to enter the Canadian market at all. Here again, there is the return journey. Rights payments may flow across borders, but not necessarily seamlessly. Canada’s various music copyright collectives such as S O C A N , Société professionnelle des auteurs et des compositeurs du Québec (S P A C Q ), R E :Sound, or the Canadian Music Reproduction Rights Agency collect copyright fees from various users in Canada not only on behalf of their Canadian members but also on behalf of their counterparts in other countries. But before remitting the money to foreign societies, they hold back a considerable amount for administrative costs. As such, many companies wishing to sell into the Canadian market (or any other, for that matter) opt to license their rights to a Canadian representative, who collects a higher royalty and deducts less than does the copyright collective. Alternatively, these companies may also set up their own offices within Canada to collect these rights. For payment to flow most effectively back to the owner, it is again necessary to become, in some sense, Canadian, in order to get around the barriers that the border throws up. Rights holders in the United States may be able to collect their master rights unconstrained by the border, but the considerable rights flowing from music publishing or from public performance are more difficult to collect. Thus, digital distribution has not meant greater integration of the Canadian and American music industries,

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especially as copyright plays a growing role in the revenue picture for music companies. conclusion

There have been a number of major changes in the distribution system over the century and a quarter, roughly, of the recorded music market that has existed in Canada. However, from the days of wax cylinders to the advent of music streaming, Canada and the United States have, in this respect at least, maintained largely separate music industries. We do not, for the most part, receive our music directly from the major centres of production in the United States, but rather mediated by Canadian agents or subsidiaries, no matter what the technology. The major exception here is, of course, unauthorized downloads, which do circulate with little or no regard for borders. But that is precisely the point: legitimate music markets, to be viable, need a legal regime enforced by nation-states, which continue to have borders. One might very well question whether the persistence of a Canadian music industry on these terms has done very much to protect our cultural distinctiveness from the United States, at least in English Canada. Generally, Canadian music accounts for less than 20 per cent of our recording consumption. Consistently, most of the recordings we consume are from outside the country (and most of these are American). What has almost always been imported, and what has accounted for the vast majority of sales in this country, is the content of sound recordings, in the form of master tapes, which, as noted above, have never attracted any special tariff from customs. From this perspective, all that we have shown is the ingenuity of the multinationals in getting around these trade barriers. The more substantial role played by Quebec’s distributors in their own market may offer a picture of what might have been in English Canada had the major labels not been so dominant. Clearly the effects of a separate operational structure have their limits. But the presence of branch plants is, as we have seen, not without its benefits for Canadian music, much more than if Canada’s music industry were even more integrated with that of the United States. Indeed, much of the growth in the number and profile of Canadian recording artists in the 1960s and 1970s commonly attributed to Canadian content may be as much a result of the development of these branch plants. Canada is also among the most successful exporters of musical talent, and the networks by which this takes place are still, to a large extent, through the offices of these multinational labels.

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As the music industry continues to evolve, there is little immediate prospect that the Canada-US border will diminish in importance – quite the contrary. As the live music industry is now worth more than the recording industry in both countries,46 the movement of performers across the border becomes more important. However, although free trade has opened borders for goods, labour is a very different matter, and crossing the border in this respect is perhaps more difficult than ever – certainly far more so than it has been for discs or for rights payments. Our recent issues in Canada with the imposition of extra costs and restrictions on foreign musicians touring in Canada47 are sharp reminders of the numerous instruments available to the state when it comes to exercising its power over the many forms in which music crosses borders. As the live music industry becomes more concentrated and integrated with the recording industry, it remains to be seen what forms of long-distance control, branch plant or not, may emerge to work around these kinds of barriers imposed by the border.

n otes 1 Shepherd, “Value and Power in Music,” 192. 2 Acland, Screen Traffic, 177. 3 Wikström, The Music Industry, 70. 4 Hennion, The Passion for Music, 5. 5 Berland, “Radio Space and Industrial Time,” 185–7. 6 Straw, “The Circulatory Turn,” 23. 7 Straw, “Dilemmas of Definition,” 99–100. 8 Jones, “Music that Moves,” 214. 9 Frith, Sound Effects, 138–9; Burnett, The Global Jukebox, 61. 10 Canada, Heritage Canada, 12. 11 Clement and Williams, “Resources and Manufacturing in Canada’s Political Economy,” 56. 12 Law, “On the Methods of Long Distance Control,” 234. 13 Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, 140. 14 Garofalo, “From Music Publishing to MP3,” 341. 15 Audley, Canada’s Cultural Industries, 172; Straw, “Sound Recording,” 105. 16 Hart, A Trading Nation, 530. 17 Moogk, Roll Back the Years, 31. 18 Ibid., 69. 19 Therien, The Virtual Gramophone. 20 Clement and Williams, “Resources and Manufacturing in Canada’s Political Economy,” 44.

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21 Jennings, Fifty Years of Music, 3. 22 Ibid. 23 “Man with a Briefcase.” 24 Lopes, “Innovation and Diversity in the Popular Music Industry,” 58. 25 Frith et al., The History of Live Music in Britain, 154. 26 “Why Did Warner Bros.–Seven Arts Records Open Their Own Canadian Office?” C27. 27 Ibid. 28 Cornyn and Scanlon, Exploding, 189. 29 Bliss, “Canadianizing American Business,” 34. 30 Canada, Federal Cultural Policy Review Committee, 175. 31 “Striving for Success.” 32 Ibid. 33 Straw, “L’Industrie du disque au Québec.” 34 Cornyn and Scanlon, Exploding, 189. 35 Ernst & Young, Report Submitted to the Task Force on the Future of the Canadian Music Industry, 51. 36 Grenier, “The Aftermath of a Crisis.” 37 Ernst & Young, Report Submitted to the Task Force on the Future of the Canadian Music Industry, 68–71. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 17. 40 “Striving for Success.” 41 Canada, North American Free Trade Agreement, 456. 42 Frith, “The Industrialization of Popular Music,” 53. 43 Leblanc, “Cinram Adds U N I ”; Leblanc, “Canada’s Big Chill.” 44 Thompson, “Music Giant Readies Canadian Launch.” 45 Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada v. Canadian Association of Internet Providers. 46 Music Canada, Economic Impact Analysis of the Sound Recording Industry in Canada, 21, 26; Resnikoff, “The Music Industry Has Only Declined 3% since 2000.” 47 Sutherland, “New Fees for Foreign Musicians Touring Canada.”

b ib liog ra p h y Acland, Charles R. Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture. Durham, N C: Duke University Press, 2003. Audley, Paul. Canada’s Cultural Industries. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1983. Berland, Jody. “Radio Space and Industrial Time: Music Formats, Local Narratives, and Technological Mediation” Popular Music 9, no. 2 (1990): 179–92. .

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Bliss, Michael. “Canadianizing American Business.” In Close the 49th Parallel: The Americanization of Canada, edited by Ian Lumsden, 27–42. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970. Braudel, Fernand. The Wheels of Commerce. Translated by S. Reynolds. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Burnett, Robert. The Global Jukebox: The International Music Business. London: Routledge, 1996. Canada. Federal Cultural Policy Review Committee: Summary of Briefs and Hearings. Ottawa: Minister of Supplies and Services, 1982. – Heritage Canada, Corporate Review Branch: Evaluation of the Sound Recording Development Program – Executive Summary. Ottawa: Heritage Canada, April 2000. – North American Free Trade Agreement: Tariff Schedule of Canada. Annex 302.2. Ottawa: Minister of Supplies and Services, 1992. . Canadian Independent Record Production Association (C IR PA ). Presentation to the Parliamentary Committee Hearings on the Free Trade Agreement with the United States. Ottawa, 25 July 1988. Clement, Wallace, and Glen Williams. “Resources and Manufacturing in Canada’s Political Economy.” In Understanding Canada: Building on the New Canadian Political Economy, edited by Wallace Clement, 43–63. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. Cornyn, Stan, and Paul Scanlon. Exploding: The Highs, Hits, Hype, Heroes, and Hustlers of the Warner Music Group. New York: Harper Entertainment, 2002. Ernst & Young. Report Submitted to the Task Force on the Future of the Canadian Music Industry. A Study of the Canadian Music Industry: Phase I – Industry Description. Toronto, 1994. Frith, Simon. “The Industrialization of Popular Music.” In Popular Music and Communication. 2nd ed., edited by James Lull, 49–71. Thousand Oaks, C A : Sage, 1992. – Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ’n’ Roll. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981. Frith, Simon, Matt Brennan, Martin Cloonan, and Emma Webster. The History of Live Music in Britain.Vol. 1: 1950–1967. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Garofalo, Reebee. “From Music Publishing to MP3: Music and Industry in the Twentieth Century.” American Music 17, no. 3 (1999): 318–53. . Grenier, Line. “The Aftermath of a Crisis: Quebec Music Industries in the 1980s.” Popular Music 12, no. 3 (1993): 209–27. .

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Hart, Michael. A Trading Nation: Canadian Trade Policy from Colonialism to Globalization. Vancouver: U BC Press, 2002. Hennion, Antoine. The Passion for Music: A Sociology of Mediation. Translated by Margaret Rigaud and Peter Collier. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Jennings, Nicholas. Fifty Years of Music: The Story of EMI Music Canada. Toronto: Macmillan Canada, 2000. Jones, Steve. “Music That Moves: Popular Music, Distribution and Network Technologies.” Cultural Studies 16, no. 2 (2002): 213–32. Law, John. “On the Methods of Long Distance Control: Vessels Navigation and the Portuguese Route to India.” In Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? edited by John Law, 234–63. London: Routledge, 1986. LeBlanc, Larry. “Cinram Adds U N I .” Billboard, 14 February 2004. Accessed June 23, 2010. . – “Canada’s Big Chill.” Billboard, 10 March 2007. Accessed 23 June 2010. . Lopes, Paul. “Innovation and Diversity in the Popular Music Industry, 1969 to 1990.” American Sociological Review 57, no. 1 (1992): 56–71. “Man with a Briefcase.” Billboard, 24 May 1969: C26. Accessed 5 December 2014. . Moogk, Edward B. Roll Back the Years. Ottawa: National Library of Canada, 1975. Music Canada. Economic Impact Analysis of the Sound Recording Industry in Canada. Toronto: Music Canada, 2012. . Resnikoff, Paul. “The Music Industry Has Only Declined 3% since 2000, Research Shows …” Digital Music News, 5 June 2014. . Shepherd, John. “Value and Power in Music: An English Canadian Perspective.” In Relocating Cultural Studies: Developments in Theory and Research, edited by Val Blundell, John Shepherd, and Ian Taylor, 171–206. London: Routledge, 1993. Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publishers of Canada v. Canadian Association of Internet Providers. [2004] 2 SC R 427 (Can.). . Straw, Will. “The Circulatory Turn.” In The Wireless Spectrum: The Politics, Practices, and Poetics of Mobile Media, edited by Barbara Crow, Michael Longford, and Kim Sawchuk, 17–28. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.

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– “Dilemmas of Definition.” In Slippery Pastimes: Reading the Popular in Canadian Culture, edited by Joan Nicks and Jeannette Sloniowski, 95–108. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002. – “L’industrie du disque au Québec.” In Traité de la culture, edited by Denise Lemieux, 831–46. Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2002. – “Sound Recording.” In The Cultural Industries in Canada: Problems, Policies, and Prospects, edited by Michael Dorland, 95–117. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1996. “Striving for Success.” Billboard, 2 October 1976: C10. Accessed 7 December 2014. . Sutherland, Richard. “New Fees for Foreign Musicians Touring Canada.” Live Music Exchange, 6 September 2013. . Therien, Robert. The Virtual Gramophone. History: Compo Company Limited. Ottawa: Library and Archives Canada, 2010. . Thompson, Robert. “Music Giant Readies Canadian Launch: Market Braces for Apple’s Download Division, iTunes.” National Post, 13 October 2004: FP1. Canadian Newsstand Complete. “Why Did Warner Bros.–Seven Arts Records Open their Own Canadian Office?” Billboard, 24 May 1969: C28. Google Books. . Wikström, Patrik. The Music Industry. Cambridge: Polity, 2009.

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4 Heroes, Borders, and Canadian Culture: The Superman Reclamation Project Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson Famed for his fight for truth, justice, and the American way,1 Superman, on his seventy-fifth anniversary, was nevertheless celebrated by two of Canada’s Crown corporations. On 9 September 2013, at the corner of Yonge and Dundas, in the heart of Toronto, Ontario, the Master of the Royal Canadian Mint was joined by the country’s then-minister of citizenship and immigration to preside over the unveiling of the Mint’s seven commemorative Superman coins. Also getting in on the commemorative action was Canada Post with a five-stamp set revealing different illustrators’ renderings of the Man of Steel. But the action was also on the ground: some months later, the 2014 Port Credit Canada Day parade featured a “Welcome to Canada” float, sporting an actor dressed as Superman, while in Guelph, Ontario, in the 2014 Santa Claus parade, the “Canadian Superheroes” float included Superman. Clearly the inclusion of the Man of Steel on a Canada Day float may cause a bemused eyebrow to rise, but the Conservative federal government’s involvement in the Mint’s coin launch seemed more surprising. To be sure, Superman’s historical connections to Canada aren’t entirely preposterous – as highlighted in the famous 1991 Heritage Minute featuring a young Canadian Joe Shuster getting on a Toronto-bound train, explaining to Lois his plans for a hero who could jump tall buildings in a single bound. The current fascination with superheroes might also account for this renewed interest. Superman’s anniversary celebration certainly provided the Royal Canadian Mint and Canada Post with opportunities to exploit the sizeable collectables market: the coin and stamp sets sold out within a matter of hours. But to have a high-ranking cabinet member, Chris Alexander, cap the Mint’s launch by stating, “Our

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government celebrates Canada’s history and heritage and the very values and strengths that Superman embodies”2 seemed more than an innocuous public-relations exercise. Here was the deliberate declaration of Superman as a Canadian hero and an alignment of his values with the Harper government’s version of national ones. Certainly, many superheroes have been subject to repurposing over the years: as critic Larry Tye’s detailed history of the Man of Steel shows, Superman himself has been reworked many times over his seventy-fiveplus years. However, this repurposing is different from the commercial and personal agendas Tye documents. We contend that the Superman Reclamation Project represents an aggressive intervention in Canada’s cultural politics: the metonymic properties inherent in the superhero figure, Superman specifically, are overridden in order to consolidate a metaphoric claim on the character for specific political ends. In other words, there is not so much a smoothing over of national differences, as cultural geographers Jason Dittmer and Soren Larsen propose of the nationalist superhero function,3 as an implanting of neo-conservative values best reflected in the former government’s approach to the arts, the Canada-US border, and, in some cases, foreign policy. What makes this reclamation project unique, with its positioning of an otherwise American hero as a Canadian superhero, is that it marks a reversal of long-standing attitudes and practices related to the CanadianAmerican border and American culture. This repurposing of Superman, deliberate or not, overwrites another homegrown history, the Golden Age of Canadian Comics (1941–46), a period both produced and destroyed by border practices, but whose characters have been re-energized by borderless “kick-starting” protocols. Drawing on re-evaluations of the Canadian Golden Age, we show that one such heroine, Nelvana of the Northern Lights, was ill-suited to represent the ideological changes that occurred following the Conservative Party’s victory in the 2006 federal election. The Superman Reclamation Project reveals significant moves over, toward, and away from the complicated “inferior / superior” trope that has characterized both national and individual responses to American culture on the Canadian side of the border. We return to Superman to draw on his metonymic promises and position him as a transnational hero whose fight for truth and justice inspires social revolutions around the globe – and, possibly, at home. The superhero – of whom Superman is the first – emerged from the 1930s explosion of American comic books started by the 1938 publication of Action Comics #1. Initially focussed on dealing with the problems

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of organized and random acts of crime, Superman, Batman, and other superheroes were quickly conscripted into efforts to win the Second World War. On cue, nationalist superheroes such as Captain America and Lady Liberty emerged to assist their country’s triumph over evil Axis villains and their dastardly plans of domination. As their deployment in the war effort showed, national superheroes are rarely neutral forms of popular entertainment. They typically function as metaphors, national symbols “notable for their purported embodiment of national values, effectively rescaling the complex and excessive nation-state into a single reductive body politic.”4 While Superman doesn’t fit Dittmer’s precise definition of a nationalist superhero – whose costume derives itself from the nation’s flag or whose powers are linked to the nation5 – this seems not have deterred the Superman Reclamation Project, the chief goal of which was to indicate a transfer of “Canada’s history and heritage” to “the very values and strengths that Superman embodies.” Perhaps Superman’s appearance in Canada Day parades speaks to the success of this metaphoric move: Superman has become Canada. However, rather than substituting for the nation-state and its values, superheroes – even nationalist ones – can also be associated with specific elements of the nation and its desires; that is, they can be read and operate metonymically. In his analysis of Captain America, for example, Dittmer suggests the Captain, while metaphorically embodying America, also functions as a metonym for the desires of a white American nation for racial supremacy.6 Reading Thor metonymically, Martin Arnold, professor of Scandinavian literature, associates the Viking god’s concerns about how to protect Earth with the military concerns of an all-powerful America.7 In the case of the Superman Reclamation Project, while Superman can safely stand for – be a metaphor for – Canada, when read metonymically, the Man of Steel productively triggers more complicated ideas about Canada, its relationship with America, and our shared border. While American nationalist superheroes have prospered over the years, their Canadian counterparts have had a hard time. The Canadian Golden Age heroes were quickly lost in the postwar period, when American comic-book publishers reasserted their presence in the Canadian market. Since then, the adventures of home-grown nationalist superheroes, such as Captain Canuck, have been only sporadically published. To find Canadian nationalist superheroes, Canadians have perforce relied on expatriates’ creations, such as John Byrne’s Snowbird and Northstar, or engaged in a timorous tug-of-war over characters such as Wolverine, who have been created by Americans for Canadians.8

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Perhaps this is why Wolverine has, according to Edmonton publisher Michael Hingston, received “short shrift”9 in Canada – because, while ethnically Canadian (Wolverine was born in Alberta), Wolverine was not created here. In 1974, in New York City, Marvel’s then-editor-in-chief, Ray Thomas, “detected a need to exploit the Canadian market,”10 so writer Len Wein and artist John Romita created Wolverine – his Canadianness, then, determined by our neighbours to the south.11 Still, even in his transition from strip character to blockbuster film star, Wolverine, unlike others, maintains his roots.12 In Michael Comeau’s cartoon, Hellberta, Wolverine, enraged over the degradation of his home province by the tar sands, challenges Prime Minister Stephen Harper to do something about the land. Accompanied by his posse of “crucivixens,” Harper, in a Pope hat, replies, “Whose [sic] got time to worry about land when you’re running a country? You can’t just S N I K T your problems away.”13 But Wolverine / Logan’s mutant body – steel grafted to skeleton, hybrid, uncontrollable – is not as open to cross-border appropriation and manoeuvring as Superman’s body appears to be. Despite the readiness of Canadian comic book readers to claim the Man of Steel for Canada, however, Superman’s Canadianness is hardly more “authentic” than Wolverine’s. On one hand, numerous scholars have repeatedly shown how thoroughly imbricated Superman is in Americanness: for art historian Bradley Bailey, Superman “landed in the United States, was raised in an American home (or orphanage), and learned American values in American schools”; for others, he has been and remains an embodiment of the American Dream, F D R’s New Deal Politics, and the rule of American law.14 On the other hand, Canadian claims to Superman are not new. In 1978, for instance, author Mordecai Richler argued, in Great Comic Heroes and Other Essays, that Superman was “a perfect expression of the Canadian psyche.”15 For Richler, Superman’s quintessential Canadian characteristic lies in the fact that “he is a hero who does not take any credit for his own heroism, a glamorous figure in cape and tights who is content to live his daily life in horn-rimmed glasses and brown suits.”16 The most vocal of claims, though, hinges on Superman’s illustrator, Joe Shuster, who collaborated with Jerry Siegel to create the hero. Born in Canada, Shuster acknowledged that the skyline of Metropolis is modelled on the skyline of Toronto, Ontario, in the 1920s, and the strip’s original newspaper the Daily Star (later to become Planet) was inspired by the Toronto Star.17 In 2005, the Joe Shuster Awards were organized to honour Shuster’s Canadian origins, his success abroad, and Canadian comic-book creators; however, no less an observer than Kevin

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Boyd, director of the Joe Shuster Awards, emphatically blogged “No, Superman is not Canadian.”18 So, to get out of the quandary (and given that former Liberal M P and Newfoundland premier Brian Tobin’s sobriquet “Captain Canada” has long since tainted allusions to nationalist superhero Captain Canuck), why not choose one of Canada’s original superheroes, created between 1941 and 1946, when Canadian law closed the border to American comic books? In fact, why not champion the first superheroine ever,19 Nelvana of the Northern Lights, created by Adrian Dingle and inspired by stories from artists returning from the Arctic, in particular, Franz Johnston, a member of the Group of Seven?20 Canadian credentials secured. Based loosely on an elder whom Johnston befriended, Nelvana is an Inuit demigoddess, born from the union of Koliak, King of the Northern Lights, and a mortal woman. Drawn, according to Dingle, to look like his wife, Patricia, but dressed “like an attractive doll,”21 Nelvana protects the Arctic and the “Eskimos” by fighting the Devil Ship, the Mammoth Men, Vultor the Villainous, and the Kablunet (evil white people). Later in the series, under the guise of Alana North, Nelvana works from Nortonville, Ontario, against the “Japs,” the ether people, the “insidious” Queen of Statica, Chicago Sade, and the Nazis.22 But despite Stephen Harper’s focus north of sixty, and his government’s penchant for using military history to promote Canadian identity, Nelvana, the original “Arctic mystery girl,”23 born of the Northern Lights, whose secret identity embodies the “North,” was (perhaps unsurprisingly) not the nationalist superhero through which to channel his program. This tug-of-war in Canadian culture over Superman and other “Canadian” superheroes is rooted in the dynamics of the Canadian-US border. As historian of Canadian comics John Bell outlines in Invaders from the North, Canada has its own history of comic-book development separate from the United States, but this history, we emphasize, is connected to the Canada-US border. For example, although various comic strips were produced in Canada from the late 1880s into the early twentieth century, the inability of Canadian publishers to sustain such strips for the long haul meant that “for most of the early years of the form main centres of comic art by English Canadians were New York City and Chicago.”24 The situation remained much the same when comic books exploded onto the American mass cultural scene in the 1930s: Canadians such as Albert Chartier and Charles Spain Verral, who were attracted to working in the medium, still found that they needed to move to the United States.25 Joe Shuster’s move to Cleveland and his frequent returns to

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Toronto can be seen within the larger context of comic-book producers moving across the border for work in this new field. It seems inevitable that competing claims, including those in the Superman Reclamation Project, would arise over the ownership of particular national super­ heroes. At the same time, the popularity of American comic books also became part of the growing anxiety in the 1930s about the prevalence of American cultural products in the lives of Canadians. Easy access to American radio programs, magazines, and, by extension, comic books was increasingly viewed as problematic to Canadians and Canadian culture. So, while the existence of the Canada-US border required Canadian artists to leave in order to work in the comic-book medium, the border was also seen as insufficient to block the American cultural products being sold to Canadians. The concerns about American culture and transnational flows were suspended when the Canadian parliament voted to enter the Second World War on 10 September 1939, and it became a matter of urgency for Canada to conserve its currency reserves for the war effort. In 1940, the federal government passed the War Exchange Conservation Act (WECA), which closed the border and Canadians to American cultural products deemed “non-essential,” including American comic books. The unforeseen consequence of WECA was a “Golden Age of Canadian Comics” – a brief, intense period in which Canadians produced and published home-grown “whites”: black-and-white comics with coloured cover pages that included newly created Canadian superheroes. This is not to say the border ceased to be important. In fact, many early Canadian heroes were adaptations or copies of American models. However, because of this derivativeness, comics scholar Bart Beaty dismisses these Canadian figures as inferior “knock-offs of better-established American originals.”26 And, although he concedes these works laid the groundwork for future Canadian contributions to the comic-book genre, he concludes of the heroes of Canada’s Golden Age of Comics: “They were to be exciting, but not overly exciting; active in the war, but not so active as to accomplish much of significance.”27 Here we find the border dynamic so familiar to us at work: an inferior Canadian copy is found wanting in relation to a superior American original. Other studies of these lost heroes suggest Beaty overlooked crucial aspects of the Golden Age superheroes. For example, media theorist Benjamin Woo notes that early Canadian superheroes were often connected to the R C M P , which, as a dominant representation of “idealized Canadian heroism[,] provided superhero comics with a ready-to-hand vision of what it means to be a hero in Canada.” 28 Perhaps this

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characteristic also represents a Canadian orientation to “peace, order, and good government,” in contrast to the vigilantism that underwrote the American superhero model; it certainly differentiates Canadian superheroes, who typically are employed by the Canadian government, from their more entrepreneurial American counterparts.29 The border also plays a role in later iterations of Canadian heroes, namely Captain Canuck, whose creator Richard Comely used the “idea of ‘Canadian’ quality to construct a national identity against that of the U S A.”30 Indeed, many readers felt that Captain Canuck “expressed a less aggressive and ultimately more authentic form of superhero than the American brand.”31 Interestingly, these views represent a significant reversal from Beaty’s judgment: now Canadian heroes – less aggressive, more authentic – are superior to their American counterparts. Perhaps more important, these early heroes also had (and contemporary ones continue to have) a particularly Canadian orientation to the idea of the North, which, while further differentiating Canadian heroes from their American counterparts, reveals something about the construction of Canadian identity. As Canadian literature scholar Sherrill Grace attests, Canadian ideas of the North have been organized into a “powerful discursive formation that ultimately privileges southern urban interests over those of northern residents.”32 Indeed, the North provides southern residents “with a way of distinguishing themselves nationally from their even more southerly neighbors in the United States.”33 And, through the logic of borealism, derived, as Woo acknowledges, from Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, the North also offers southerners the possibility of spicing up an otherwise bland identity with the exoticism of the Arctic.34 Woo and others have focused on how Canadian superheroes contain links to the wilderness and the North, and these connections are especially important in light of the Superman Reclamation Project. The story of Nelvana’s re-emergence underlines our point. “Frustrated” by the republishing of Superman coins and stamps, while “right in our very history” was a superheroine “so enmeshed with Canadian identity,”35 comic-book fans and historians Hope Nicholson and Rachel Richey crowd-sourced funds to publish reprints of the original Nelvana of the Northern Lights comic books, a welcome resource for the energetic critical re-evaluations of this demi-goddess. In one such examination, political scientist Samantha Arnold argues, “Nelvana’s adventures tell us something important about how the relationship between northern peoples and the south has been imagined – and still is.”36 In her early adventures, Nelvana’s allegiances are with the Inuit who summon her to help combat the

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Kablunet who are “stealing the fish and seals from the Northern waters and threatening the Arctic race with death by slow starvation.”37 Fighting in the name (and interests) of the Inuit, Nelvana, along with her brother Tanero, confronts the villain Toroff, who plans to extract resources – eerily and presciently, oil, albeit from whales – from the North. Indeed, although Nelvana is soon co-opted into the Canadian war effort, working to defeat Nazis and Japanese enemies, she clearly sees herself, at least initially, as separate from the Canadian nation.38 While these adventures (and later those of Snowbird in Marvel’s comic Alpha Flight) position the North as a site of “adventure and magical possibility to be secured to the rest of Canada from outsiders[,] … [t]he landscape of the Arctic North becomes a central element of the Canadian territorial imaginary.”39 Nelvana’s links to the North and Aboriginality make her an object of the tug-of-war over nationalist superheroes, but in this case between southern and northern Canadians. Nelvana complicates southern Canadians’ usual focus on the binaristic Canada-US border by positioning southern Canadians in the middle of two spaces – the mystical (exotic) North and the corrupting America to the south. Inasmuch as Nelvana reconfigures and exceeds the borders of superherodom and the superhero genre, Dingle’s particular appropriation of the Inuit myth of Nelvana erases its origins in the North and Indigeneity. This erasure emphasizes how the southern Canadian imagination is underwritten by the colonial discourses that shaped and gave rise to the Canada-US border. Taking heed of her revivers, Nelvana moves beyond Dingle’s appropriations, though not unproblematically. While Richey and Nicholson are quick to critique his representations of crude racialized stereotypes – in particular, of Japanese characters – each comic scholar offers Nelvana readers much to think about. When asked about the importance of Nelvana to Canadian culture, Richey remarks that “she had Canadians’ attention to be anything she wanted … [S]he was never overshadowed by American culture.”40 To the question of what makes Nelvana particularly Canadian, Nicholson answers: We’re a nation where our literature often blurs the lines of expectations. We usually can’t do superheroes unless they’re parodies, because the strict superhero genre is confining and inaccessible to us. American based creators do strict genre very well … but it’s not a format that most Canadians has [sic] been comfortable creating in. Nelvana succeeded and is so interesting precisely because it doesn’t need to stay within the confines of the superhero genre.41

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So, not only is Nelvana herself unencumbered, partially due to WECA, by American influence (and, as Richey states in the same interview, of “excessive romance”), but the Nelvana of the Northern Lights series also crosses genre borders as a Canadian superhero comic that blends crime, adventure, comedy, and science fiction. Canada’s Golden Age of comic books and its superheroes ended as W E C A was gradually rescinded after the war. On one hand, the newly reopened border meant a return to “normal” for the free flow of cultural products between the two countries; on the other hand, it reawakened the interwar period’s misgivings about the growing influence of American mass culture on Canadians, concerns reinforced by America’s new dominance on the world stage in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.42 These renewed fears were especially acute around publishing, radio, and the “new” technology of television, but they unexpectedly came to coalesce around comic books, a medium largely associated with children and adolescents. In the United States, as American teenagers took to reading comic books, a moral panic about the alleged deleterious effects of young people’s comic-book consumption took hold in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Canada was not immune to the comic-book moral panic, but as Beaty shows, the Canadian debates about crime comics appear less driven by moral panic than by fears that an immoral American mass culture posed a “threat to the entire process of Canadian nation building.”43 Using a well-established approach to policing unwanted cultural products entering the country, E. Davie Fulton, MP from British Columbia, proposed Bill 10, known as the Fulton Bill, which amended Section 207 of the Criminal Code to stop cold imported crime comics at the border.44 However, in a significant reversal of strategies, the use of regulations to harden the border would be discarded in favour of another tactic, one recommended by the Royal Commission on Arts, Letters, and Sciences, better known as the Massey Commission, in 1951. The Commission’s work and its report have been examined from a range of perspectives, and while not all agree on its ultimate impact, most concede it marks an important development in thinking about how best to nurture a distinctive Canadian culture, capable of resisting the growing dominance of American offerings. As historian Paul Litt remarks, the Commission “proposed a deliberate and coordinated strategy for state-sponsored Canadian cultural development” in response to the perceived danger that Canadians might come to have an “easy dependence on a huge and generous neighbour.”45 The commissioners were well aware that the United States had the luxury of extensive private wealth with which it could and

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did build its cultural infrastructure, a wealth that Canada could not match.46 The Massey Report also formalized a strong anti-American bias held among Canadian cultural and academic elites toward American mass culture. Long-standing concerns about American cultural imperialism were clear in the report, as commissioners fretted over the “formidable” “American invasion by film, radio, and periodicals.”47 Children’s radio programming was especially worrisome: not only did many of these American-produced “radio programmes have in fact no particular application to Canada or to Canadian conditions,” but “some of them, including certain children’s programmes of the ‘crime’ and ‘horror’ type, are positively harmful” as well.48 Indeed, looking ahead to the nascent world of television, the Commission felt that, without some intervention, the pressure on “uncontrolled private [Canadian] television operators to become mere channels for American commercial material will be almost irresistible.”49 Canadian magazines were also vulnerable in the Commission’s view. Unable to marshal the resources required to “invade” the American market, Canadian magazines were helplessly outnumbered in their own “limited and unprotected market.”50 While the commissioners may not have had comic books in mind when they composed their report, the fate of Canadian comics certainly proved the Commission’s point. In his reading of the Massey Report, Litt indicates its consistent positioning of American mass culture as “a threat to Canadian nationalism because it was foreign; to high culture because it was unedifying.”51 To offset this unseemly state of dependence, the Massey Commission advocated using state intervention and public policy to produce a superior home-grown Canadian high culture that would wean Canadians off their dangerous dependence on an inferior American mass culture, a bulwark against the invasion of American products coming across a porous border. According to Litt, the Massey Commission’s formulation of cultural nationalism “proffered a national identity that justified the existence of Canada as an independent nation”52 and undergirded the federal government’s policies and structures, which were designed to build a Canadian culture based on high cultural practices, such as theatre-going and poetry readings. A cross-border lens, however, takes a more nuanced view of this debate. Historian Jeffrey Brison’s work, for example, outlines a lengthy crossborder involvement between Canadian arts and American philanthropic organizations such as the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, whose support, Brison contends, ultimately helped “Canadian artists and intellectuals to organize and rationalize the cultural sphere.”53 While Litt notes

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that the Commission’s proposed alignment of high culture and Canadian national identity was one argument not open to American intellectuals, Brison argues that the forms of state sponsorship which emerged postMassey are equally the product of the “partnerships between the American foundations and a Canadian cultural elite.”54 In other words, the policies that followed from the Massey Commission’s report were more complicated than perhaps Litt suggests, and what followed was a way to address the ambivalence that Canadians have about supporting a state-sponsored culture based largely on high cultural practices of stage, television, and music. Stephen Harper himself returned to this ambivalence in 2008, marking it as a division between working Canadians and those whom neo-conservatives deem “sophisticates.” Speaking on the campaign trail in Saskatoon, Harper opined, “I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the T V and see a gala of a bunch of people at, you know, a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough, when they know those subsidies have actually gone up – I’m not sure that’s something that resonates with ordinary people.”55 This vision of division – between ordinary and elite Canadians – formed the basis for the Harper government’s cultural politics, highlighting the crux of the Superman Reclamation Project. In dividing “ordinary working Canadians” from those duplicitous complainers attending taxpayer-­ subsidized galas – presumably held to raise funds for “elite” organizations such as symphonies, operas, and theatre organizations – Harper drew a new line between the cultural practices of an imagined cultural elite and those of “ordinary working Canadians.” Here the form of state-sponsored culture advocated by the Massey Commission and whose design, Brison shows, American foundations helped to sponsor, is homogenized simply as a “bunch of people” who want more taxpayer money to fund their pursuits. This “bunch” and their galas are implicitly contrasted with a thoroughly middlebrow popular culture – one heavily tilted to conservative middle-class baby boomers – into which Superman, stripped of his American roots, is appropriated, alongside the Beatles, the Queen, and other nostalgic icons, to create a simulation of an idealized (but nonexistent) Canada imagined from the suburban Toronto where Harper grew up.56 This rearticulated image of a middlebrow Canadian culture played out in government cultural policies, which rejected the vision of the Massey Commission. If the implementation of the Massey recommendations represented “a typically Canadian form of public policy based on a concern for the national community over untrammelled liberal

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individualism,”57 the Harper neo-conservative vision enacted the opposite: Canadian culture was neither nurtured nor sustained through state intervention; rather, individuals were encouraged to give funds to projects of their choice. The Monument to the Victims of Communism – Tribute to Liberty project, to be built on the site formerly reserved for the new Federal Court of Appeal building, served as a convenient emblem for this reversal.58 While the move to encourage individual giving to fund the monument, as advocated by Harper-appointed Governor General David Johnston, is admirable, the approach emulated precisely the American model of private philanthropy that the Massey Commission rejected; or, if we accept Brison’s claim that the post-Massey approach was still connected to models of American philanthropy,59 the Conservative approach at the very least sought to bring about a new relationship that subordinated the Canadian state’s role in supporting culture to that of the private sector, whether individual or institutional bodies. Consider the following vignette as paradigmatic of the shift: at a highprofile charity gala at the National Arts Centre, arranged to raise funds for youth and the arts, then-prime minister Stephen Harper provided a rendition of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends,” accompanied by Yo-Yo Ma. We cannot help but note, as other commentators did at the time, that Harper was performing at a charity gala, the type of event he had a year earlier characterized as “the playground of elites.”60 And yet, his choice of song was resolutely one of mass culture, from the British Beatles, while American cellist Ma played second fiddle to Harper’s piano keyboard. While the irony of performing in a venue that the Massey Commission had recommended be built does not escape us, we underline how the charity gala represented precisely the American model of arts and culture funding that neo-conservatives tend to endorse: private money supporting individual causes, concomitant with the notion that the arts are individual, not collective, endeavours in the first place. Here, too, is another iteration of forces that have produced the Superman Reclamation Project: unabashed appropriations of mass cultural icons of both England and America projected as “Canadian.” The Harper government’s obsession with a number of things, including the Queen; the salvaging of ships from the Franklin Expedition; the fifty million dollars spent reminding Canadians (and Americans?) who won the War of 1812; and, to our point here, the government’s appropriation of Superman as Canada’s hero, we view as attempts to re-author the narratives of the nation in a nostalgic vision of Canada, one that Kit Dobson (in this

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volume) similarly identifies as part of a retrenchment of patriarchal and colonial ideals. Granted, most leaders do want to control the storylines, to leave a legacy writ large, to emphasize what they consider important. But Harper’s narrative choices have been described as the imaginings of “a conventional bean-counter who has surrounded himself with other conventional bean counters,” whose political team is “about as dynamic and diverse as a Rotary Club board circa 1960.”61 Not all Canadians found the narrative choices compelling, inclusive, or responsive to the times; in fact, many found the gaps glaring and appalling. Especially peculiar was the former prime minister’s unreconstructed transatlantic gaze, or, as one commentator has described it, his “adolescent infatuation with the royal family.”62 Consider his government’s insistence on the Queen’s picture being installed in all embassies and overseas missions, as well as the removal of the Maple Leaf and the reinstatement of British insignia and rank in the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Even H R H herself seemed flummoxed by the massive portrait of her that Harper had commissioned to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee, reportedly asking him how he actually got the thing into the palace!63 We contend there is a link between the prime minister’s unabashed admiration for the Queen and his government’s co-optation of a typically adolescent icon, a comic-book hero. Both of these icons feature on Canadian coins and stamps, albeit Superman on collectable versions. Under Harper’s tenure, and in order to prevent counterfeiting, Canadian banknotes were changed from paper to polymer and introduced into circulation between 2011 and 2013. In that material change, images were also changed. What has been rendered visible and invisible by these changes, and what does our revised currency still “say” about Canada? On the five-dollar bill, a diverse group of children playing hockey was replaced with images of the Canadian-produced Dextre and Canadarm2, key features of the International Space Station. Nationalism is equated with technological prowess, not people. The mostused banknote of all – the twenty-dollar bill – replaced Bill Reid’s (Haida) sculpture Spirit of Haida Gwaii (and hence, the relationship, however fraught, between that spirit and the Crown emblematized by the Queen on the front of the bill) with the Vimy War Memorial, thereby disappearing Indigenous presence or, if read generously, alluding to Indigenous peoples only via military co-operation. Also excised from the twenty-dollar bill is a quotation from the Franco-Manitoban writer Gabrielle Roy. It reads: “Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?”

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Was such a deletion payback for Harper’s failing to get a majority in 2008 because of his disparaging of the arts, a disparagement which did not play particularly well in Quebec? In addition to the Roy quotation, there were other deletions of women. An icebreaker supplanted both the Famous Five women from the Persons Case and Thérèse Casgrain, a prominent Quebec feminist, on the fiftydollar bill.64 Icebreakers, as those of us in Canada know, were key to Stephen Harper’s assertions of Arctic sovereignty, as were his annual trips to the region; his government’s development in 2007 of the unironically named “Operation Nanook,” whose exercises were an annual display of “interoperability” involving the R C N , the R C A F , and Canada’s Special Operations branch; and his particularly blunt charges against Russia for incursions into Canadian defences. As climate change, which the Harper government denied, makes Arctic seas more navigable, its many resources more easily extractable, its inhabitants’ lives and livelihoods more reliant on urban spaces, it becomes clear, as much as she’s needed, that Nelvana could not be the heroine in this version of the Canadian story. An embodiment and ideological conflation of the Sub / Arctic regions and aboriginality, Nelvana would have served only to highlight the Harper government’s unwillingness to address environmental degradation, its appalling inaction on missing and murdered Indigenous women, its infringements on treaty rights, and its refusal to provide adequate funding for Aboriginal education.65 Nelvana’s origins as an Inuit superheroine who acts independently of Canadian (read: white, south of 66.5) interests would represent more contradiction than even that government could manage. To the last banknote: when a focus group complained that the female scientist on the new hundred-dollar bill was “too Asian-looking,” the Bank of Canada capitulated, replacing her with a female scientist of what they deemed “neutral identity”: “Caucasian.” The “too Asian-looking” scientist’s ­erasure in favour of a more “neutral” white woman reiterates a similar reluctance to promote Nelvana as a nationalist superhero, who, despite her de-indigenizing as the Ottawa-based spy-smasher, Alana North, is still more ambiguously represented than white Superman. So how does the narrative read so far, and what kind of present did it attempt to secure? One that is white, colonial, militaristic, and gendercoded. It fictionalized the government’s attitudes to and funding of scientific development and research, and it erased from our plot the transformative capacities of the arts. Without the arts, we close down worlds of imaginative possibilities. We close down empathetic, figurative, and metonymic thinking. As Zalfa Feghali’s work in this volume elucidates,

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Man Booker Prize–winning author Yann Martel tried for years to convince Stephen Harper of much the same. With the arts, we can, for example, think of “Superman” in all his floating associative possibilities, not as tethered to “the strengths and values” of Canada, however vaguely defined, as our former minister of citizenship and immigration did. What is foreclosed in such a model is the power of the “reciprocative rejoinder.” For Heidegger, this means avoiding the “always already” chosen: it means, instead, a sympathetic but critical appropriation of the heroes of the past, with the aim of updating the mission of one’s chosen hero, so that it will meet the changed demands of one’s times.66 To illustrate: the reciprocative rejoinder would be the equivalent of a musician covering a song she did not write, but, through her particular choice of song and unique interpretation of it, allowing us to hear something anew. Stephen Harper did not learn this. One cannot even accuse him of playing unimaginative covers of songs (those which attempt to duplicate the original in every way); he simply chose mainstream songs and his renderings of them were bland. Perhaps he could add not only to his reading list but his playlist: perhaps, in his retirement, he could embrace his comic-book geekdom as Brad Roberts of Crash Test Dummies did, and cover their ironic “Superman’s Song”? From their 1991 album The Ghosts That Haunt Me, the elegiac song envisions Superman’s death as an occasion to mourn the Man of Steel and his lonely fight against villainy. Not for the former P M , however, was lead singer Roberts’s anxious question of whether we will ever see another Superman.67 Similar to the re-authorings we have outlined, nostalgia for a particular version of the past imbues the Superman Reclamation Project. Superman as a Canadian superhero presents a homogenous Anglo-Canadian national identity and a different claim to the Arctic from that which the Golden Age heroes represented. With the Fortress of Solitude’s imprecise location in the Arctic (Is it in Canada? Is it in Greenland?), some fans have identified Superman as a de facto Canadian.68 This attribute is significant because, like Nelvana, Superman can posit a southern claim to the North. But, unlike Nelvana, white, heterosexual, and unambiguously masculine Superman represents, to a neo-conservative mindset, a more powerful and conventional symbol of Canadian sovereignty. And interestingly, the Superman Reclamation Project uses a symbol of American mass culture – Superman, Man of Steel – articulated to phallic hardness to scribe a superior Canadian identity. The gendered metonymic operations are in play: Canada is the hard (American) body, not the fleshy (Canadian, feminized) one.69 Here we see a more aggressive stance toward American

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mass culture, to which the Massey Commission responded with such urgency. Unworried about American mass culture’s corrupting influence, the Harper government reached over the border and claimed for itself what it wanted, indifferent to the cultural artifact’s roots, or even its multiple meanings. In contrast to Nelvana (or even Captain Canuck), Superman offered a powerful masculine image befitting a supposed “energy superpower,” reassuring Canadians that they are not a feminized nation. Canadians are no longer, as our former P M said of Canada in 2000, “a second-tier socialist country … boasting about its … social services to mark its second-rate standing.”70 It may also be that Superman’s morally upright character aligned with the Harper government’s repositioning of Canadian foreign policy along “morally principled” lines. Superman certainly seemed more consistent with the Harper government’s economic perspectives on the Arctic than Nelvana, who from the outset resisted capitalist, imperialist encroachments on the North. Nor is it a coincidence, in our view, that Superman’s white, muscled body conveniently embodies both the same “British-derived, muscular Christian codes of behaviour” that Canadian literature scholar Daniel Coleman identifies as central to assimilating immigrant men into the ways of “a civilized Canadian man”71 and many of the fundamentalist beliefs of the Harper Conservatives’ muchdiscussed “base.” Fortunately, there are many Supermen. And the Superman we have in mind resists this recasting of the Man of Steel as metaphoric Canadian hero. Given the roots of Superman’s creators in the Jewish Diaspora, and Canadian and American immigration flows of the early 1900s, we suggest that, were Superman quintessentially anything, he would be transnational. From our border perspective, we find it fruitful to focus on the migratory patterns around the Great Lakes that we noted earlier. After all, it is Shuster’s migration, first to Cleveland and then to New York, along with his ongoing travel to visit his extended family in Toronto, that might be a more productive way to see Superman. In contrast to the monomyth propagated by the Superman Reclamation Project, we emphasize Superman’s roots as the product of two young Jewish boys from immigrant families, but we could also just as easily point to Superman as a product of male homosocial desire, best viewed as a transnational formation overriding the nation and its borders. Because of their fascination with, and reinvigoration of, the Man of Steel, two esteemed playwrights, one American and one Canadian, can also help us see, feel, and think about him more provocatively. For David

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Mamet, in his essay “Kryptonite: A Psychological Appreciation,” Superman is far from super. In fact, he is “the most vulnerable of creatures,” because “the fragments of his personality can only be integrated in death.”72 One need only read the title of Brad Fraser’s play, Poor Super Man: A Play with Captions, to recognize how it disrupts conventional glorification of a kind of white masculinity. Cited by Time magazine (1994) as one of the ten best plays in America, despite its Canadian author and setting, Poor Super Man, set in Calgary, is Fraser’s response to what queer theatre scholar Robert Wallace identifies as “the anti-sexual, homophobic nature”73 of Canadian culture. Inspired by the comics and cartoons that helped Fraser “survive a miserable childhood,”74 Poor Super Man not only queers Canadian theatre but also demythologizes the superhero, who cannot save those afflicted by the A I DS pandemic. A further example of Superman’s border-defying, even revolutionary, moves is evident in his several manifestations in Turkey’s Gezi uprising. News coverage of the occupation demonstrated the prominence of Superman as a symbol – on T-shirts and protest posters, as well as in his figurine state. As historian Mehmet Dőşemeci explains, many of the park’s occupiers identified themselves with both Clark Kent and Superman: by going to work during the day, they were acting out their Clark Kent identities; by returning to occupy the park at night, they were Supermen, committing, in their view, heroic acts. According to Dőşemeci, however, this was one of the major limitations of the uprising. For him, it is not revolutionary to split one’s self into two, to be part of the bourgeoisie by day and radical by night. For Dőşemeci and other radical activists, the real Supermen of the uprising were the textile workers. They actually occupied their work space, not just the park, and reorganized the means of production. Closer to home, Mariana Ionova, a journalist for the Toronto Star, asked in the aftermath of Canada Post’s issuing of the seventy-fifth-­anniversary commemorative stamps for the Man of Steel: “Why Superman?” Keisha McIntosh-Siung, the spokesperson for Canada Post, answered thus: “The thing about Superman is that he is like the ultimate hyphenated citizen. He is a Canadian-American-Kryptonian superhero.”75 Superman as a naturalized American-Canadian alien, reading Superman as neither American nor Canadian, resisting the metaphor and embracing the metonym, allows the play of hyphens to speak to superheroic productive possibilities. But the Superman Reclamation Project was not only about which superhero substituted for Canada; it was also about how government policies support a particular vision of Canadian culture

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and that culture’s relationship to our neighbours south of the border. We were initially intrigued by the Liberal government’s promise of a farreaching review of federal cultural polices, where, in the words of the Honourable Mélanie Joly, minister of Canadian heritage, “everything is on the table.”76 Would the liberal, humanist apparatus produced by the Massey Commission return to its former dominance? Would the neoconservative beliefs that undergirded the Superman Reclamation Project hold? Or will this review articulate a distinctive vision of Canadian culture and its relationship to the Canada-US border? We will have to see where Superman lands. e p i lo g u e

Canadians are fiercely proud of our creators and cultural entrepreneurs. The benefits that Canadian culture brings to the economy and to building identity, pride and a shared sense of values are undeniable. Canada’s creative sector supports countless high-quality jobs that help grow our middle class and support families right across the country. Through Creative Canada, we will enact policies that help our creators and cultural entrepreneurs address the challenges of today’s digital reality, and ensure that Canada’s voice will be heard loud and strong on the world stage.77 The Honourable Mélanie Joly, ­minister of Canadian Heritage

The ambivalence Canadians have historically expressed toward government policies related to our relationship to American culture remains in play: Creative Canada, one element of the Liberal government’s cultural-policy review, has been both criticized and applauded. While literature scholar Ira Wells, for one, laments the policy’s distance from the Massey Commission and sees art reduced to content, artists to content creators, and culture to “something to be streamed on Netflix,”78 others champion Creative Canada’s recognition of the necessarily entrepreneurial aspects of creative work, the rewarding of cross-border partnerships, and the tripling of funding to First Nations, Inuit, and Métis artists.79 And Superman? We are inspired by where he has recently landed. In Sonya Ballantyne’s timely and compelling reimagining, the Caucasian “he” becomes a First Nations “she.” A self-described “indiginerd” and filmmaker, Ballantyne has wondered about the absence of Indigenous people in superhero narratives, particularly, as she describes, when their experiences of being wrested from their homes overlap: “Batman lost his

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parents at a young age and was raised by another person. Superman lost his family and was being raised in another culture. Wonder Woman had to leave her original home to find her purpose in life.”80 Ballantyne’s bilingual (Cree and English), mixed-media short film, Crash Site, features two recently orphaned sisters who are reunited by an eighteen-year-old superhero named Maggie, alias the Thunderbird. Influenced as much by Superman as by Ballantyne’s mother, sisters, and grandmother, Maggie Thunderbird resonates strongly with the youth who have viewed the film.81 Ballantyne’s reconfiguring of Superman resonates with us, too. Here is the power of Heidegger’s reciprocative rejoinder: created independently to counter the absence of Indigenous women in popular, specifically geek and comic, culture, Maggie Thunderbird, “bad ass” and “awesome,” her message to Indigenous youth to work together to hone their powers, is a superhero responsive to the times.82 To focus critical attention on a superhero such as Maggie Thunderbird will entail setting aside debates about the relative superiority or inferiority of this or that colonial settler state. Instead, Ballantyne’s work draws attention to the borders within Canada, such as those between cities and reserves. It also reveals to and reminds its audience of the presence, power, and sustained influence of contained Indigenous space on the Canada-US borderlands and their cultures.

n otes 1 As quoted by Erik Lundergaard in The New York Times Opinion piece, according to Mark Waid, former DC Comics editor, the “American way” was added to Superman’s “fight for truth and justice” in 1942 on the Superman radio show (“Truth, Justice and [Fill in the Blanks]”). It disappeared until the Cold War era, when it made a comeback on the Superman television series from 1952 to 1958. The only Superman ever to utter the phrase was 1978’s Superman, Christopher Reeves. See also John Darowski’s extended discussion of the relationship between Superman and “the American way” in The Ages of Superman. 2 Thomaidis, “Royal Mint Unveils Superman Coin.” 3 Dittmer and Larsen, “Aboriginality and the Arctic North in Canadian Nationalist Superhero Comics,” 53. 4 Ibid. 5 Dittmer, Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero, 7. 6 Ibid., 57. 7 M. Arnold, Thor, 159.

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8 Canadian Jeff Lemire’s new Cree superheroine, Equinox, who debuted in May 2014 in DC’s Canada-based Justice League United, offers up an interesting case in terms of how Lemire consulted with First Nations’ people to develop her character, but she remains within an American superhero paradigm. 9 Hingston, “Clap for the Wolverine, Man,” 28. 10 Quoted in ibid., 29. 11 Perhaps that is why the only place you’ll find Wolverine seriously commemorated (aside from a satirical petition demanding a three-hundredmetre-tall statue be built in downtown Edmonton – with Edmonton Arts Council approving funding – on … 1 April!) is on a postage stamp in the United States. See Hingston, “Clap for the Wolverine, Man,” 28. 12 In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, when Colonel Stryker tries to convince Wolverine to join a secret strike force by saying, “Your country needs you,” Wolverine turns him down, responding: “I’m Canadian” (though with an Australian accent). 13 See barbedcomics.blogspot.ca/2014/the-hellberta-trilogy-wolverine.html for images of the panels referred to from Michael Comeau’s very-hard-tofind Hellberta Issue #1. 14 Bailey, “O Superman,” 101; Sabin, Comics, Comix, & Graphic Novels, 61; Hylton, “Superman and the Rule of Law.” 15 Richler, Great Comic Heroes and Other Essays, 123. 16 Ibid. 17 Brad Ricca discusses Shuster’s early life in Canada, drawing attention to, among other aspects of Joe Shuster’s Toronto years, his early exposure and attraction to the Toronto Star comics page (Superboys, 12). 18 Boyd, “Is Superman Canadian?” 19 Nelvana first appears in August 1941 (Canada, “Superhero Profiles”). She predates Charles Moulton’s debut of Wonder Woman by four months. 20 Johnston was originally known as Frank, and later became Franz. We use the latter. 21 As quoted by Hope Nicholson in “Finding Nelvana: Canada’s First SuperWoman,” first posted on searchingforsuperwomen.com, 30 May 2014. 22 To read hilarious, informed commentary on Nelvana of the Northern Lights, and to view some panels from various issues, go to junglefrolics. blogspot.ca, the source of this particular reference. 23 Woo, “Who Is the Mystery Girl of the Arctic?” [4]. 24 Bell, Invaders from the North, 26. 25 Ibid., 36.

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26 Beaty, “The Fighting Civil Servant,” 429. One character, The Penguin, was so clearly an infringement on copyright that the character’s name was changed to the Blue Raven (Bell, Invaders from the North, 37). 27 Beaty, “The Fighting Civil Servant,” 430. 28 Woo, “Red and White Tights,” 59. 29 Ibid., 69. 30 Dittmer and Larsen, “Captain Canuck, Audience Response, and the Project of Canadian Nationalism,” 741. 31 Ibid., 742. 32 Quoted in Dittmer and Larsen, “Aboriginality and the Arctic North in Canadian Nationalist Superhero Comics,” 54. See also Grace, “From Nelvana to Ice Box.” 33 Ibid., 55. 34 Woo, “Red and White Tights,” 80. 35 From an embedded video of Richey and Nicholson speaking at the beginning of their KickStart campaign to raise money for the Nelvana reprint (Tepper, “Nelvana of the Northern Lights Will Rise Again”). 36 S. Arnold, “Nelvana of the North, Traditional Knowledge, and the Mythical Function of Canadian Foreign Policy,” 96. 37 Dingle, Nelvana of the Northern Lights, panel 1, 6. 38 Woo, “Who Is the Mystery Girl of the Arctic?” [5]. 39 Dittmer and Larsen, “Aboriginality and the Arctic North in Canadian Nationalist Superhero Comics,” 62. 40 Nicholson and Richey, “Interview with Hope Nicholson and Rachel Richey about Nelvana of Northern Lights.” 41 Ibid. 42 These concerns were hardly new even in the 1930s. In 1920, for example, Archibald MacMechan warned Canadians about the “gradual assimilation … [and] the subjection of the Canadian nation’s mind and soul to the mind and soul of the United States” (“Canada as a Vassal State,” 347). 43 Beaty, “High Treason,” 91. 44 Beaty provides a succinct summary of the various ways the Canadian government has used obscenity laws to regulate the entry of unwanted materials into the country (“High Treason,” 88–9). See also Susan Billingham’s analysis of Jane Rule’s work and its troubles crossing the Canada-US border (“Detained at Customs”). 45 Litt, The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission, 3; Canada, Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in The Arts, Letters, and Sciences, 273). The Massey Report noted that the Carnegie Corporation had spent $7,346,188 (U SD) in Canada since 1911, and the Rockefeller Foundation had donated $11,817,707 (USD) since 1914 (14).

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46 Canada, Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in The Arts, Letters, and Sciences, 274. 47 Ibid., 19. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 301. 50 Ibid., 18. 51 Litt, The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission, 250–1. 52 Ibid., 254. 53 Brison, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada, 80. 54 Litt, The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission, 254; Brison, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada, 8. 55 Quoted in Benzie, Campion-Smith, and Whittington, “Ordinary Folks Don’t Care about Arts.” 56 Harper’s self-construction as an average hockey dad and amateur historian of the game amplifies his position as the arbiter of “middlebrow” Canadian culture. 57 Litt, The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission, 5. 58 The Liberal government decided to move a scaled-down version of the monument to the Garden of the Provinces and Territories. Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly stated the Conservatives’ approach was “too political, too divisive, and ultimately far from its goal of remembering the horror of victims of communism” (Butler, “Victims of Communism Memorial to be Moved, Joly Announces”). 59 Brison, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada, 8. 60 Kilpatrick, “Stephen Harper Rocks Out.” 61 Graham, “Born in the Burbs,” 88. 62 Ibid., 77. 63 “Harper’s Diamond Jubilee Moments with the Queen.” 64 After a large-scale consultation with Canadians that saw more than twenty-six thousand suggestions proffered, the federal government announced that Viola Desmond, a black Nova Scotian cosmetics entrepreneur, would become the first Canadian woman to appear on the front of a bank note. Desmond was jailed, charged, and convicted of tax evasion when she purchased a ticket to a balcony seat, where blacks were to sit, and sat instead in the floor area, where whites sat (Annett, “Who’s the Woman on Canada’s New $10 Bill?”). 65 It is unclear the extent to which the Trudeau government will pursue a different approach to Indigenous peoples. While the Liberal government has struck a commission on missing and murdered Indigenous women, and promised significant new funding of Aboriginal education, it approved two pipelines, a decision that both raises questions about their

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commitment to climate change policies and could provoke further conflicts with Indigenous peoples. 66 Thomson, “Deconstructing the Hero,” 114–15. 67 Or have we? Justin Trudeau was initially visually and verbally pictured as Canada’s Superman. See, for example, “Justin Trudeau” and “Quiz.” In 2017, the PM entered the House of Commons disguised as Clark Kent. 68 May, “Truth, Justice, and the Canadian Way.” 69 The repositioning of Justin Trudeau as Superman runs counter to Conservative pre-election attack ads feminizing him. Trudeau’s nowfamous boxing interests also counter this representation, as best seen in his unexpected appearance on the cover of Marvel’s Civil War II: Choosing Sides #5. Canadian comic-book writer Chip Zdarsky felt that Trudeau’s appearance made sense, because he is “the popular culture association with Canada right now” (Canadian Press, “Justin Trudeau Joins Canadian Superheroes for Marvel Comics Cover”). Zdarsky’s repositioning of Trudeau as a metonym for Canada suggests an interesting rebuttal to ­earlier representations of Canada’s vulnerability to American culture. For example, Trudeau’s buff, masculine body makes a fascinating contrast to the figure of Miss Canada depicted in J.W. Bengough’s 1869 cartoon ­entitled “A Pertinent Question.” In her analysis of the cartoon, Jennifer Andrews argues the petite Miss Canada metonymically represents fears about Canada’s vulnerability to the blandishments of American culture epitomized in the figure of Cousin Jonathan (“Queer(y)ing Fur,” 30). In 2016, if we follow Zdarsky’s thinking, Canada appeared to contend with American blandishments. 70 Harper, “Separation, Alberta-style.” 71 Coleman, “Immigration, Nation, and the Canadian Allegory of Manly Maturation,” 88. 72 Mamet, “Kryptonite,” 175. 73 Wallace, Making, Out, 5. 74 Ibid. 75 Quoted in Ionova, “Able to Leap Tall Buildings.” 76 Leblanc, “Everything Is on the Table.” 77 Government of Canada News Release, 28 September 2017. 78 Wells, “Why Canada’s New Cultural Policy Will Be Terrible for the Arts.” 79 Finn, “Creative Canada Reunites Art and Technology for a Brighter Future.” 80 Quoted in Deerchild, “What Would Superman Look Like If He Was a Cree Girl?” 81 Ibid. 82 Crash Site.

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b ib liog r ap h y Andrews, Jennifer. “Queer(y)ing Fur: Reading Fashion Television’s Border Crossings.” In Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border, edited by Gillian Roberts and David Stirrup, 27–46. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013. Annett, Evan. “Who’s the Woman on Canada’s New $10 Bill? A Viola Desmond Primer.” Globe and Mail, 8 December 2016. . Arnold, Martin. Thor: Myth to Marvel. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011. Arnold, Samantha. “Nelvana of the North, Traditional Knowledge, and the Mythical Function of Canadian Foreign Policy.” Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 14, no. 2 (2008): 95–107. Bailey, Bradley. “O Superman: The Many Faces of the Man of Steel.” In ConFiguring America: Iconic Figure, Visuality, and the American Identity, edited by Klaus Rieser, Michael Fuchs, and Michael Phillips, 95–114. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Beaty, Bart. “The Fighting Civil Servant: Making Sense of the Canadian Superhero.” American Review of Canadian Studies 36, no. 3 (2006): 427–39. – “High Treason: Canadian Nationalism and the Regulation of American Crime Comic Books.” Essays on Canadian Writing 62 (1997): 85–107.  Bell, John. Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe. Foreword by Seth. Toronto: Dundurn, 2006. Benzie, Robert, Bruce Campion-Smith, and Les Whittington. “Ordinary Folks Don’t Care about Arts: Harper.” Toronto Star, 24 September 2008. . Billingham, Susan. “Detained at Customs: Jane Rule, Censorship, and the Politics of Crossing the Canada-US Border.” In Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border, edited by Gillian Roberts and David Stirrup, 261–78. Waterloo, ON : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013. Blumberg, Marcia. “Queer(y)ing the Canadian Stage: Brad Fraser’s Poor Super Man.” Theatre Research in Canada 17, no. 2 (1996). . Boyd, Kevin A. “Is Superman Canadian?” Blog post. The Joe Shuster Awards. 10 July 2013. . Brison, Jeffrey D. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada: American Philanthropy and the Arts and Letters in Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2005.

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Butler, Don. “Victims of Communism Memorial to Be Moved, Joly Announces.” Ottawa Citizen, 17 December 2015. . Canada. Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in The Arts, Letters, and Sciences, 1949–1951. Ottawa: Edward Cloutier, 1951. – “Superhero Profiles: Nelvana of the Northern Lights.” Guardians of the North. Library and Archives Canada. 12 July 2001. . Canadian Press. “Justin Trudeau Joins Canadian Superheroes for Marvel Comics Cover.” CBC News, 28 June 2016. . Chase, Steven. “Feds Unveil $110-million Reno Job for National Arts Centre.” Globe and Mail, 10 December 2014. . Coleman, Daniel. “Immigration, Nation, and the Canadian Allegory of Manly Maturation.” Essays on Canadian Writing 61 (1997): 84–103.  Comeau, Michael. Panels from Hellberta Issue #1. . Crash Site. Directed by Sonya Ballantyne. WFG Distribution, 2015. . Darowski, John. “In a World without Superman, What Is the American Way?” In The Ages of Superman: Essays on the Man of Steel in Changing Times, edited by John J. Darowski, 209–17. Jefferson, NC : McFarland and Co., 2013. Deerchild, Rosanna. “What Would Superman Look Like If He Was a Cree Girl?” Audio blog post. Unreserved. CBC Radio, 12 November 2017. Dingle, Adrian. Nelvana of the Northern Lights. Edited by Hope Richardson and Rachel Richey. Canada: CG A Comics, 2014. Dittmer, Jason. Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013. – “Captain Canuck, Audience Response and the Project of Canadian Nationalism.” Social & Cultural Geography 8, no. 5 (2007): 735–53. Dittmer, Jason, and Soren Larsen. “Aboriginality and the Arctic North in Canadian Nationalist Superhero Comics, 1940–2004.” Historical Geography 38 (2010): 52–69. Doody, Christopher. “Guest Post: Canada’s Superheroes (Made in USA ): American Depictions of Canadian Geopolitics in Alpha Flight.” Blog post. Culture and the Canada-US Border Blog. Culture and the Canada-US Border Network. 13 May 2014. . Dőşemeci, Mehmet. “Superman, Clark Kent, and the Limits of the Gezi Uprising.” Roarmag.org 13 January 2014. . Finn, Patrick. “Creative Canada Reunites Art and Technology for a Brighter Future.” The Conversation, 26 November 2017. . Fraser, Brad. Poor Super Man: A Play with Captions. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1995. Grace, Sherrill. “From Nelvana to Ice Box: Popular Constructions of ‘the Arctic.’” The Northern Review 21 (Summer 2000): 22–37. Graham, Ron. “Born in the Burbs.” The Walrus, October 2013: 74–88. Harper, Stephen. “Separation, Alberta-style: It Is Time to Seek a New Relationship with Canada.” National Post, 8 December 2000. Nexis. “Harper’s Diamond Jubilee Moments with the Queen.” CBC News, 6 June 2012. . Hingston, Michael. “Clap for the Wolverine, Man.” Swerve: Calgary Inside and Out, 18 April 2014: 28–9. Hylton, J. Gordon. “Superman and the Rule of Law.” Blog post. Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog. 3 June 2013. . Ionova, Mariana. “Able to Leap Tall Buildings: Superman Stamps Debut in City that Inspired Artist.” Toronto Star, 21 August 2014. . “Justin Trudeau représente l’avenir?” LaMetropole.com, 27 September 2012. . Kilpatrick, Sean. “Stephen Harper Rocks Out.” Toronto Star, 4 October 2009. . Leblanc, Daniel. “Everything’s on the Table.” Globe and Mail, 23 April 2016. . Litt, Paul. The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Lundergaard, Erik. “Truth, Justice, and (Fill in the Blank).” New York Times, 30 June 2006. .

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MacMechan, Archibald. “Canada as a Vassal State.” Canadian Historical Review 1, no. 4 (1920): 347–53. Mamet, David. Some Freaks. New York: Penguin, 1989. May, Ross. “Truth, Justice, and the Canadian Way.” Superman Homepage. 1 July 2014. . Nicholson, Hope. “Finding Nelvana: Canada’s First SuperWoman.” 30 May 2014. . – “Nelvana and the Northern Lights.” Accessed 4 February 2014. . Nicholson, Hope, and Rachel Richey. “Interview with Hope Nicholson and Rachel Richey about Nelvana of Northern Lights.” By Derek NewmanStille. Speculatingcanada.ca. 27 September 2013. Accessed 24 February 2015. . “Quiz – Who Said It? Justin Trudeau or Superman?” The True North Times.ca, 9 March 2014. . Ricca, Brad. Super Boys: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster – the Creators of Superman. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2013. Richler, Mordecai. “The Great Comic Book Heroes.” The Great Comic Book Heroes and Other Essays, 119–29. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1978. Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix, & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art. London: Phaidon Press, 2001. Tepper, Sean. “Nelvana of the Northern Lights Will Rise Again.” Toronto Star, 11 October 2013. . Thomaidis, Irene. “Royal Mint Unveils Superman Coin.” Toronto Sun, 10 September 2013. . Thomson, Iain. “Deconstructing the Hero.” In Comics as Philosophy, edited by Jeff McLaughlin, 100–29. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Tye, Larry. Superman: The High-Flying History of the Man of Steel. New York: Random House, 2012. Wallace, Robert. Making, Out: Plays by Gay Men. Toronto: Coach House, 1992. Wells, Ira. “Why Canada’s New Cultural Policy Will Be Terrible for the Arts.” The Walrus, 3 October 2017. . Woo, Benjamin. “Red and White Tights: Representations of National Identity in Canadian Comic Books.” Master’s thesis, Simon Fraser University, 2006. ProQuest (M R29424). 

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– “Who Is the Mystery Girl of the Arctic?” Foreword to Nelvana of the Northern Lights. By Adrian Dingle, [4–5]. Canada: C DG Comics, 2014. X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Directed by Gavin Hood. Performances by Hugh Jackman, Liev Schrieber, Ryan Reynolds. 20th Century Fox, 2010. DV D.

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pa r t t wo

Beyond the Border: Ideals and Realities of Transnational Cultural Work

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5 An Empire of Pixels: Canadian Cultural Enterprise in the Digital Effects Industry Charles R. Acland

Canadians are accustomed to being estranged from cinematic life. With movie theatres historically featuring international films, and top-tier talent fleeing to economically warmer climates, our image culture requires movie audiences to travel far before finding a cinematic home. This apparent distance between where we are and what our popular moving-image culture represents is prominently evident in the conventional use of Canadian locations for generic urban, Arctic, forest, prairie, historical, or futuristic settings. Occasionally, we glimpse a different representational possibility. Warm Bodies (2013), a slight adaptation of Romeo and Juliet as a zombie romance, is set in a nameless American post-apocalyptic city ruin, yet it surprisingly does not hide the fact that the city, and the site of the film’s shoot, is Montreal. One may need a certain amount of local knowledge to identify this, but the film features vistas of distinctive parts of Montreal’s cityscape, without any effort to disguise them: Olympic Stadium, Mount Royal Park, Lachine Canal, and even the soon-to-berazed Mirabel Airport. Yet each of these screen moments is a trompe l’oeil. In the opening credits, digital camera movement makes the distant Mirabel Airport seem close to the Olympic Stadium, which is surrounded by buildings from other neighbourhoods from across the island. Midway through the movie, an aerial shot presents a stylized vista of Mount Royal Park and the downtown core, with massive fortifications dividing the streets. The closing shot, from the Mount Royal Park lookout, depicts the same downtown from the reverse angle, along with the destruction of that

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Fig. 5.1  Digitally enhanced Montreal cityscape with downtown wall added, Warm Bodies (2013).

fictional wall. The landmarks may be instantly recognizable, but the vistas in which they appear do not exist. They are the product of computergenerated imagery (C G I ) and digital composites, with layers of images built around an initial shot to create an original futuristic cityscape. Moments such as these complicate the very concept of location work. Not only was Warm Bodies shot in Montreal, but much of its post-­ production visual effects (V F X ) were also performed in Montreal, by Intrigue FX , with some work done by Vancouver firm Look F X and Los Angeles–based Lola Visual Effects. In this way, both the actuality of local landmarks and the virtualization of their CGI ornamentation were locally produced, though for an American film. Deep in the image, then, are parallel forms of local labour, with the “place-specific” Montreal shoot next to the “place-less” V F X work, though this work, too, actually took place in Montreal, as well as in Vancouver and Los Angeles. Warm Bodies, then, is a form of familiar estrangement, simultaneously rewarding some

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Fig. 5.2  Digitally enhanced Montreal cityscape with Olympic Stadium in a new neighbourhood, Warm Bodies (2013).

viewers with city recognition and deracinating that view by pulling it into a fluid digital vista. Comparable geographical indeterminacy is found in the shifting ownership status of post-production firms. In August 2014, New York-based MassMarket V F X , which specializes in commercials, bought Look F X , partly as a bid to move into motion-picture post-production. Rebranded Psyop, and folded into the larger American corporate concern, they still boast of the work they have done for years on feature VF X. Their promotional clip reel includes spectacular effects Look FX had developed for Noah (2014), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), and Man of Steel (2014), but there is no acknowledgement that this is Look F X’s work, let alone that it was performed in Vancouver. Visual effects are what people used to call – and many may still think of as – special effects, but the dominance of C G I and digital image

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manipulation includes so many “non-special” facets of motion picture production that the earlier term no longer captures the state of the art. Under the “visual effects” umbrella one finds green-screen work, computer animation, compositing, and digital colour grading. These processes might be used to create and enhance the flashy spectacular sights of giant monsters and cities destroyed or the hidden shading of an actor’s lighting and the texturing of a scene’s appearance. A major transition in moving image production has been taking place for a while now, in which post-­production work – meaning work typically engaged in after the completion of principal photography – has become an expanded aspect of film and television. Digital cinema and computer-generated imagery are now broadly accepted parts of international entertainment media, and creators address their demands at all stages of production. This attention is especially intricate for the biggest-budget blockbusters and franchises, many of which rely on considerable effects work to fulfill contemporary audience expectations about how big-budget productions ought to look. Visual effects work is relatively mobile, and it can be transported from one location to another easily and rapidly. As a result, city, provincial, and national jurisdictions pursue post-production in the way that location shooting has been a long-standing category of competitive bidding among far-flung production venues. This chapter examines the way the visual effects sector in Canada advances mobile operations and labour as a characteristic appropriate to the digital economy generally. Placing this emergent sector into the history of Canadian cultural enterprise, we can see a continuing prominent theme: the alienation of the cultural worker. As a result, the visual effects sector has produced substantial participation in international media production, but with widespread acceptance of weakened labour power, or what I describe as “sustainable precarity.” To illustrate the issues involved with this mobile facet of media entertainment, consider what has become a familiar example among production culture scholars studying the visual effects sector. At the Academy Awards for the films of 2012, two notably public events transpired. Outside the usual glitzy award ceremonies, visual effects workers protested the flawed business model upon which the industry rests. Geographically dispersed companies compete in a fixed-bidding system for work on productions, the result of which is rampant underbidding that puts effects companies and their workers in vulnerable financial situations. Fixed bidding makes visual effects companies largely responsible for any additional effects and corrections that might be asked for by producers. The related financial tightening is often passed on to employees, who, in effect, work for little

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or no compensation if a contract goes beyond the original time estimate. Inside the Oscar ceremonies, celebrated effects outfit Rhythm & Hues accepted a visual effects Oscar for their work on Life of Pi (2012), even though the economics of fixed bidding had forced them to declare bankruptcy a few days earlier. To make matters worse, the broadcast’s producers brutally cut off their acceptance speech sooner than other winners, using the theme from Jaws (1975). A worldwide audience witnessed as their microphone was cut to the accompaniment of a crescendo on the familiar two-note suspenseful theme music. This happened just as the recipients began to mention something about the financial instability of visual effects firms. To some, this combination of elements appeared to make light of their troubles. To others, it seemed cruel in a deliberate and calculated way.1 As the picketing effects workers outside the ceremonies testified to, it wasn’t just Rhythm & Hues’s financial problem at issue, which, in their case, was resolved by a sale to India’s Prana Studios. Other VFX companies have faced financial hardship as well. Formerly too-big-to-fail Digital Domain had to go through bankruptcy in 2012, and in that case Digital Domain came under Chinese and Indian ownership, closed its Venice, California, studio, and moved to Vancouver.2 Sealing the nearly complete hollowing out of the Los Angeles effects business, Sony’s visual effects wing, Imageworks, packed up its LA office and shipped everything to its new headquarters in Vancouver in the summer of 2014. That year, the Association of Digital Artists, Professionals, and Technicians organized another protest to coincide with the Oscar ceremonies, though this time the focus was more directly on international subsidies for effects work that they claimed drew business elsewhere and cost jobs for American professionals.3 That “elsewhere” includes New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Canada, among other countries. The mobility of international production work is a regularized fact of contemporary film and television, and it has had a major impact on Hollywood. Post-production work has amplified this mobility. FilmL.A.’s Feature Film Production Study estimated that for Hollywood films in 2013 “California ranked fourth behind Louisiana, Canada and the United Kingdom in total liveaction feature projects, total related film jobs, and total related production spending.”4 “Related production spending” refers to post-production work, including visual effects. The Oscar protests and the Rhythm & Hues televised insult have been reported often, and several scholarly presentations on the visual effects industry since have recounted it, and with good cause. It’s an evocative

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Fig. 5.3  V FX protest, Los Angeles, 2013

anecdote, revealing some of the grit behind the digital sheen of our popular image world, and showing the economic pressures upon a facet of a globalized media industry that forces competition among a scattered skilled labour force. The story tells us something else, too. It is another US-centric tale – one often articulated as a specifically Californian matter, where the loss of production work to British Columbia or Louisiana amounts to the same depletion of the historic production might of that state – in which distant jurisdictions unfairly disadvantage the American worker by providing such things as tax incentives to draw work abroad. This tale, though, rests on pitting one geographically bound labour pool against another

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Fig. 5.4  Rhythm & Hues’s Best Visual Effects Oscar for Life of Pi (2012).

located across an international, state, or provincial border. The tale is hardly a bid for solidarity among workers. After all, Rhythm & Hues was a full beneficiary of Canadian tax credits, and it located a studio in Vancouver precisely to access BC tax advantages. Following its bankruptcy, however, a particularly American narrative reframed their troubles, now recounted as evidence of the pain inflicted by the vulture nations. In the otherwise interesting video document of their demise, Life after Pi (2014), Rhythm & Hues employees discuss the heartbreak of having to move temporarily to Vancouver for work, strategically leaving out the fact that most of their employees were Canadian, and were hence the ones primarily benefiting from the initial move to British Columbia and adversely affected by the bankruptcy. Gillian Roberts’s chapter in this volume takes up Life of Pi to trace more completely the complexity of its transnational and transmedia production. No question, the actuality of mobile contract work makes for a notably unstable work environment. But understand, too, that every so-called “runaway” production, seeking havens of financial advantage for media work, is also a “return-from-away” of employment prospects for the talent in most countries that has lived under the cultural and economic shadow of the United States for the better part of the last century. For Canada in 2013, this represented fifteen major studio films that spent a full 70 per cent of their $1.3-billion combined budgets shooting and doing post-production in Hollywood North (largely meaning Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal).5 These fifteen represent only the largest American blockbusters, and there were dozens of other film and television

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productions from around the world that availed themselves of Canadian visual effects and other production services. In the short term, influx of production and post-production work amounts to contract labour, and cultural economists demonstrate a multiplier effect of additional economic activity appended to such spending. Moreover, in theory, this activity translates into infrastructural investment and hence longer-term engagement of local talent. But what kind of investment has digital work on international productions actually provided? In April 2010, renowned American animation company Pixar launched a studio in Vancouver to focus on short films and Web content. The open-concept office of brick and glass, in an old refurbished downtown building, was a design-savvy addition to the already-gentrified area known as Gastown. This location was the first satellite branch for Pixar, which had always concentrated its operations in one Californian location. Landing a visible international and critically beloved company of this kind prompts a full range of self-congratulatory performances, especially from local policy-makers and politicians who claim success for the arrival. With this event, BC premier Gordon Campbell and Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson could be found smiling and shaking hands with costumed characters from Pixar’s stable of properties. They touted Pixar’s arrival in Gastown as a massive win for the local economy of cultural workers and for the revitalization of an historically underdeveloped part of town. New, architecturally impressive digs, so their reasoning went, supplanted the “embarrassment” of urban blight, doing so with a “clean” industry of pixels and monitors rather than industries of gas and smoke. None of these smiling faces, however, were seen three years later, when Pixar closed this same branch, opting to relocate all its animation operations back under one roof in California. And the boom-bust cycle continues. Five months after Pixar’s departure, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) opened a studio in Vancouver in the same building that Pixar had occupied. As arts reporter Marsha Lederman put it, “apparently when Buzz Lightyear closes a door, Luke Skywalker opens a window.”6 Disney owns both companies, though that fact has never been confirmed as a reason for what appears to be a coordinated swap. Meteor Studios, a Montreal VFX company owned by Evergreen Films, a subsidiary of the Discovery Channel, worked on Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D (2008) in 2007, one of the first of the latest wave of liveaction 3D films. As often happens, the effects work required substantial overtime, for which personnel were promised compensation. When the work was done, Meteor declared bankruptcy, leaving more than one

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hundred artists unpaid and unemployed. It was bad enough that Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D was a major box-office success, apparently making money for all concerned – except, of course, those who worked on creating the digital effects for the film. Meteor gallingly re-opened as Lumière, at the same address, with the same management, software, lawyers, demo reel, and movie-poster decorations, and then rehired some of the same key artists. The Canadian Labour Relations Board ultimately intervened on behalf of the artists, after some reported lobbying by the film’s star and fellow Canadian, Brendan Fraser, and negotiated a payment of 70 per cent of wages owed.7 Lumière, incidentally, went through bankruptcy in 2011. These are not simple stories of hijacking authentically American jobs, as American V F X workers tell it, nor of US cross-border cultural and economic domination, as traditional Canadian cultural nationalists claim. Canadian production labour does not enjoy job security that is being denied Californian media workers. As trade reporter Mirella Christou puts it, the V F X sector’s primary challenges are “borderless competition, tighter budgets, whip-fast deadlines, and unpredictable production pipelines – not to mention underbidding.”8 Moreover, Canadian cultural and industrial agents, who themselves stand to benefit economically and politically when landing a local contract for production and post-­ production work, aggressively pursue these production jobs. But this work introduces a high level of occupational and economic precariousness that is shared by V F X workers, entrepreneurs, and politicians who make it their stock and trade to champion new investment of this kind. Production culture scholarship has fixed on precarity as a distinctive characteristic of contemporary labour conditions among media workers, describing the limited prospects for long-term stable employment regardless of skill and seniority.9 In fact, the ebb and flow of temporary work and of shifting corporate venues is so regularized that it produces something akin to “sustainable precarity.” This oxymoronic stable instability is not a faulty or perverse by-product of economic policy but a calculated feature of this corner of the cultural industries. What has been routinely described as precarious is far from such for many agents involved, including policymakers, media corporations, and other economic stakeholders. Where media production and post-production incentives typically trumpet their intention to help build lasting infrastructures for continued work, what emerges instead is a complex and hybrid economic sector built for flexibility and adaptability. Similar claims have been proposed in Ben Goldsmith, Susan Ward, and Tom O’Regan’s Local Hollywood: Global

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Film Production and the Gold Coast, which challenges the critical presumption that a “global Hollywood” determines the power dynamics of our geographically dispersed production system. Instead, examining the Australian case, they study the construction of “film friendliness” that has as much to do with local political decisions, aspirations, and struggles as it does outside foreign economic or cultural domination. In the Canadian context, and certainly elsewhere, too, “sustainable precarity” makes this “friendliness” into something like “fickleness” by design. The acceptance of uncertainty as a quality built into the development of digital cultural agencies rests upon an embrace of the idea that we have indeed entered an entwined, changing, and mobile universe of global media. It wasn’t so long ago that the critical concept of the “post-nation,” with its language of hybridity and fluidity, inflected much of what cultural theorists claimed about the triumph of the global at the expense of nation. This presumptive withering away of nation was so powerful in the early 1990s that I can remember being told by notable scholars, when I was doing work on the emergence of a concept of national film culture in Canada, “How can you study nations and national culture? They don’t exist anymore.” Such limited ideational nonsense about “post-nation” came squealing to a halt with the attacks of 9/11, after which a renewed border consciousness among those who had enjoyed privileged ease of international movement was more visible and consequential than ever. But the earlier post-national moment led some to read the Canadian experience as an indication of where the global integration of cultural enterprises would end up. Scholar Richard Collins, for example, saw the Canadian situation as a “pre-echo of a post-national condition.”10 With Canadian television as his focus, Collins stated that Canada was a perfect counter-illustration to the claim that political sovereignty required cultural sovereignty. In his assessment, the absence of a unified, agreed-upon national cultural centre was not the failure so many Canadian nationalist critics feared it was; this absence was the future of cultural life in a global cosmopolitan era. Collins was on to something. After all, the Canadian cultural sector was and continues to be surprisingly, counter-intuitively, robust. For all the nationalist weeping about the lack of a distinctive cultural voice, there is a sizeable cadre of artists, creative workers, and producers who navigate, sometimes happily, most of the time not, the hazards of economic and reputational uncertainty to find careers as cultural producers. A considerable part of this vitality, though, involves facets of cultural work behind the creative spotlight that shines on stars,

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directors, and writers. And the V F X sector has emerged since Collins’s writing as a highly developed manifestation of his claims. The Canadian contributions to the hidden dimensions of the industrial processes of international entertainment have been extensive, and the service Canadian cultural enterprises have offered to Hollywood goes far deeper than is typically acknowledged, with most popular and scholarly attention directed to location shooting.11 An example of the ofteninvisible contributions to entertainment production and manufacturing is the decades-old company Cinram, a major designer, manufacturer, and distributor of C D s, D V D s, and Blu-rays based in Scarborough, Ontario, and a featured player in the music industry infrastructure outlined by Richard Sutherland in his chapter in this volume. Another example is Technicolor, which struck prints for Hollywood majors for years in Montreal. Post-production work is one strain of this industrial engagement, and a dominant form today is computer-generated visual effects, sound effects, and animation. As with location shooting, governments compete to establish favourable financial environments to prompt local entrepreneurs to launch visual effects companies and to entice the opening of branches of major international visual effects firms. Some such branches, beyond the aforementioned Imageworks, ILM, and Pixar, all in Vancouver, are Warners Digital, Framestore, MPC, Cinesite, and BUF, which have all expanded into Montreal.12 And incentives equally prompt local start-ups to enter into the digital effects business, for instance Montreal’s Intrigue FX and Rodeo F X . The Canadian VFX industry is a relatively recent development. Starting in 1986, TOPIX Computer Graphics and Animation was the first Wavefront 3D computer-graphics and animation company in Toronto, joined soon after by Mad Dog Digital and John Gajdecki Visual Effects.13 But there were only a few companies in the 1980s. By 1999, there were thirty in Ontario alone, interestingly still listed in the “physical effects” category of media operations, showing that, even at the end of the 1990s, the turn toward digital effects was novel enough that more specialized categories to track activity had not yet been adopted and standardized.14 The relative newness of Canadian V F X is such that effects / animation company Motion Works shut down in Vancouver in 1998, because there was simply not enough work there. It moved to Toronto.15 A few short years later, B C ’s visual effects business was thriving, now with more than forty companies. Vancouver’s post-production and VF X shops include Rainmaker, Technicolor, Northwest Imaging & F X , Lost Boys Studios, and Image

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Engine. Attuned to the importance of a favourable exchange rate between US and Canadian dollars, the BC government has at times provided extra incentives when the loonie’s strength increases. For example, in 2005, they “offset the decline of the US dollar by raising its labor tax credit for service producers to 18% from 11% … a move [Brad] Wright [an executive producer for the Stargate franchise] says directly ‘kept B C crews working on US projects.’”16 Even smaller film and television centres have attempted to build digital production incentives. In 1999, Halifax’s ImX Communications joined with Funbag Animation Studios and PIP Animation Services, both based in Ottawa, to launch Helix Animation in Halifax and Helix Digital in Sydney, Nova Scotia. The provincial government incentives that motivated this move included a 10 per cent rebate from Economic Development and Tourism on Helix Animation’s incremental payroll for four years, up to $425,000. The same applied to Helix Digital, though for five years and up to $642,867. The companies must hit their job-creation marks to receive the rebate, with the province recouping its investment via the payroll taxes on those new jobs.17 In all, over only five years, from 2006 to 2010, the visual effects industry in Canada, combined with animation, had operating revenue that grew by nearly 25 per cent (from $106,001,000 to $132,200,000).18 Canada’s V F X expenditures rose considerably from 2009 to 2011 by 67 per cent (from $261 million to $465 million).19 It is no simple matter to build a vibrant technology sector; it requires coordination with training institutions, tax breaks, and facilities, a coordination that policy agendas hope to facilitate. Tax incentives for labour are paramount. The federal government offers labour tax credits for this sector, and these can be supplemented by provincial plans with direct loans and infrastructural investment. A significant enticement is the BC Digital Animation or Visual Effects Tax Credit (D AVE ) of 17.5 per cent for qualifying B C labour on digital animation or VF X, with no ceiling. Ontario offers the comparable Computer Animation and Special Effects Tax Credit of 20 per cent for qualifying Ontario labour. For digital effects specifically, through 2013, million-dollar interest-free loans from the Quebec government helped to secure the opening of satellite facilities for U K visual effects companies Framestore, M P C, and Cinesite.20 Quebec, too, targets visual effects work with a tax credit top-up for C G I . The eligibility for this credit requires permanent, provincially based entities. The newly elected Liberal government in Quebec reduced this credit in 2014 from 20 per cent to 16 per cent, along with a reduction of the Production Services Credit from 25 per cent to 20 per cent.21 As the credit

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name indicates, provinces designate a difference between “cultural” productions originating in province and “service” productions. Many of these economic incentives treat out-of-province work as essentially the same as foreign, hence a production service credit. Provinces compete with one another so blindly that many call it a “race to the bottom.”22 It is frankly a challenge to discern a coherent cultural policy that motivates these sector-development directives. Canadians have witnessed several decades of fraught investment in public culture in order to produce an intricate expressive life, to orient people toward a national cultural project, and to ameliorate modern Canadian citizenship. Some lasting and notable initiatives resulted – the Canada Council, the N F B , and the C B C , for example – many of which people now mourn, as the agencies get whittled away by the slow death of a thousand budget cuts. But one thread linking these efforts was a desire to build a valued and appropriate national culture as distinct, legible, unique, and distant from actual cultural life. The reasoning went as follows: the popular was the site of American colonization, so Canadian cultural consciousness would transpire elsewhere. Other chapters in this volume, including those of Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson and of Jessica Taylor, take up the history and impact of the Massey Commission on Arts, Letters, and Sciences, which was a watershed moment in the embracing of this approach to national culture and for the institutionalization of Canadian cultural agencies. This rendition of ethical cultural “Canadianness,” then, rested on a program of instructing people how inappropriate their cultural preferences were. To this end, Canadian national culture was suffused with an “expo-mentality,” that is, the instrumentality of cultural directives as oriented toward the special venue, the school, the exposition, the festival, the celebration ritual, rather than the everyday.23 The tendency toward dutiful engagements with culture never covered everything, and an economic model of cultural development has grown considerably since the 1960s. Michael Dorland’s book So Close to the State/s is an illuminating examination of discursive regime change in policy when the logic of economic resilience, in particular through statistical portraits of cultural activity, began to exercise dominance over more conventional, paternalistic, ethical models. Today, for film and television, the economistic rationale is manifest in “commercial” Canadian production, designed for box-office success, and in incentives for international production to shoot in Canada, with the view that this sustains an infrastructure of facilities, technologies, training, and labour for the more specifically Canadian works that may arise. Many of these

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incentives for commercial and international shoots happen at the provincial level, with a distinction being made between service and official Canadian productions. Lighting Martin Scorsese’s Montreal-shot The Aviator (2004), you are a service provider; lighting David Cronenberg’s Toronto-shot Cosmopolis (2012), you are a cultural producer. Doing visual effects work on Duncan Jones’s Montreal-shot Source Code (2011), you are a service provider, but you are a cultural producer if you do the same thing on Erik Canuel’s Montreal-shot Bon Cop, Bad Cop (2006). International productions, however localized in Canadian cities and neighbourhoods, push service production work even further from the realm of local culture. At times, it is amazing how far Canadian cultural life is from international service productions. This gap continues to illustrate the distance from the everyday found throughout the history of public cultural initiatives in Canada. Service productions don’t count as Canadian content; they are not written about as Canadian productions; they don’t figure in cultural policy discussion or in tabulations of Canadian production; and they don’t qualify for awards as Canadian works. This is not to say that they should. Yet, should there not be a way to capture and represent the entirety of contributions from Canadian labour and talent? In effect, these alienating conditions, encouraged by economic policy incentives, treat Canadian media workers like members of an international pit crew. As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, the history of Canadian locations “passing” for other, frequently US, settings is a long one, and it is a well-honed, ordinary facet of production work in this country. For example, one of Montreal’s premier sound stages at Mel’s Cité du Cinéma boasts a permanent set for shooting White House interiors. This facsimile of the locus of American presidential power has been used by American films White House Down (2013) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004). Placelessness and the mutability of locations are production conventions, and the appeal of Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal is that they can stand in for specifically American urban environments. Mel’s permanent White House set opens us to an infrastructural elsewhere. Through the summer of 2013, sequences for the action flick Brick Mansions (2014) were shot in the St Henri neighbourhood of Montreal, transforming a four-block stretch into a decimated urban setting of car wrecks, vacant industrial works, and graffiti from the future. A FranceCanada co-production, it features US star Paul Weller and, in a fine example of geographical displacement, is set in Detroit. To achieve the dystopic, futuristic look needed for the film, the set dressed existing

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graffiti, vacant industrial facilities, and semi-operational warehouses. The availability of urban areas that have suffered partial economic collapse, have been hollowed out by the departure of industrial operations, and have been ignored by gentrification provides an environment suitable for such production and thematic needs. The related economic influx of cultural activity sticks to some parts of a city, and not others; one area serves creative purposes so that another may squeeze more infrastructural investment from the production spending. The closed streets and temporarily transformed buildings transfer wealth to the cosmopolitan services of downtown entertainment districts in more rarified parts of the city. The same is the case for production and post-production facilities, which can cluster in previously “underperforming” areas, thus becoming a vehicle for real-estate revaluation.24 When a location shoot arrives to work in a city, there may be some slight public awareness and local coverage, but often this attention consists mostly of informal fan networks posting information about celebrity sightings. In an age of syndicated reporting and reviewing, written for an “everywhere” of newspaper readership, a local shoot might not be mentioned in a review upon release, so there is a strange experience of reading about a film that springs from a city or neighbourhood, but whose reporting doesn’t actually utter that fact. Upon release, The Montreal Gazette ran Chris Knight’s review of Brick Mansions, which treated the film as though it really did arrive from a futuristic America.25 Some productions, for certain, buck this and selectively travel with a “made-in-Vancouver” or “made-in-Toronto” imprint, The X-Files and The Strain being two examples. But for every placed work, there are others that become visibly placed only when a motivated audience member seeks to back up a suspicion of recognition. With the repressed actuality of production location, in other words, what is proximate – in terms of locale, labour, and temporarily transformed neighbourhood – presents as distant, alien, and disconnected. Brendan Kelly, a local arts reporter and Variety stringer, who for years reported on the Canadian film and TV industry for that US trade magazine, wrote about another version of this constructed distance. For an arts reporter, having top-flight international talent in town offers opportunities for stories and interviews about their careers as well as their current work. Kelly noted that, around 2010, access began to change. Handlers began to block access to anyone who would not agree to embargo stories and interviews until international releases a year or so later.26 This delay in coverage meant that anyone who wrote about the film was fitted into a

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Fig. 5.5  Location shot for Brick Mansions (2014) in St Henri neighbourhood, Montreal, 2013.

tightly orchestrated multinational publicity track, one that had no special investment in the vibrancy of any particular cultural scene, least of all that of the city in which the production took place. These two illustrations reference location shoots. The presumptive virtuality and placelessness of the computer-based visual effects work appears to be even more “service-y.” Take note that there are examples of production initiatives that contrast this impression of a gated service sector. For example, Shanti Kumar has documented different developing relations between production and location in India’s “film cities,” which are equally touristic and real-estate ventures, bound up with an extended post-colonial relationship with Hollywood.27 Similarly, some have written about the ostensible “New Zealandification” of The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, with their combination of location shooting, visual effects, and post-production work by Weta Digital, and the sheer size of the films’ budgets, lifting the entire moving image production sector of the country.28 In the Canadian context for production and post-production work, site visits are limited and outreach is slim to the general public. The dominant critical apparatus has historically taken the service production as a lost opportunity or a colonizing force, without significant recuperation as a contribution to an international popular entertainment scene. In short, Canadian production and post-production work resides miles away from the “glamour zones” that critical geographer Saskia Sassen

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describes as part of the cosmopolitan global city. As per “expo-mentality,” those zones must wait to appear in relation to festivals. This alienation has always been part of the risky bargain of promoting branch-plant cultural production. In this model, one offers talent to fill relatively diminished creative roles in exchange for continuity of shortterm work and for investment opportunities for cultural entrepreneurs. The product of the time, energy, and skill becomes an equally diminished cultural contribution. But the geographic mutability of works and the expanding types of skilled artists demand a category between the cultural and the service production, something that opens up the identification of a proximate relation to a global popular for labour and audience alike. This category would feature a “culture of craft,” where we acknowledge the specific artistry of the moving image segment, sequence, or even single shot, as well as the grand author or rights-holding entity. A “culture of craft” builds over time and across successive contracts, establishing a pool of expressive works that concretely represent the labour and skill involved in production. This proposal stands at a distance from the affective economies approach,29 which advances a form of felt ownership of popular works on the part of audiences. Craft, contrarily, features the actual below-the-line labour that takes place in sundry locations and contributes in small and focused ways, but which is indispensable to the work that ultimately circulates. Set-dressers, make-up artists, and lighting crews can be easily appreciated for their specialized skills. There is a challenge, though, in conceptualizing a “culture of digital craft” in visual effects work, contained as it is behind a screen of computer work that could, theoretically, be done anywhere. Adding to that challenge, digital post-production work threatens to disappear into a larger digital economy. If the structural possibility for the recognition of the full contribution of all cultural work is discursively and materially stunted, as I have been arguing here, what drives the focus and interest, as Mike de Jong, B C finance minister, put it in 2013, “to send Warner Brothers a $30,000 cheque of public funds every time they blow up a Mercedes in our downtown”?30 Fundamental to the sector, and a rationale for governmental support, is an expectation of broader economic growth. Crucially, fostering activity in V F X counts upon an idea that skills are transferable between companies and technology. Many post-production, C G I , digital effects, computer animation companies are themselves hybrid creatures, operating between formats, between platforms, and between media. Many are multi-faceted digital design firms, with corporate and promotional accounts, spending most

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time on commercials and instructional media, rather than film and television work. For others, live spectacles are important, as is work on video games.31 Note that some of the government tax-incentive programs are for digital media, rather than film or television exactly. For example, Ontario, Manitoba, and British Columbia all have tax credit programs for “interactive digital media,” and Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Alberta have digital media development incentives, all of which can be accessed for a range of different kinds of media productions (though, in response to criticism about this ambiguity, some tightening of eligibility has recently been introduced). One example of such cross-media digital media work is Quebec’s Hybride. Located north of Montreal, Hybride specializes in visual effects for film and television. Founded more than twenty years ago, it was an early Canadian entry into the digital effects realm. The company does computer-generated animation, green-screen integration, compositing, motion graphics, and on-set effects supervision. They have worked on Canadian and Québécois films, but their most prominent work has been on big-budget American films, including Avatar (2009), Sin City (2005), and The Hunger Games (2012). France’s Ubisoft, one of the world’s largest game companies, with a large facility in downtown Montreal, purchased Hybride in 2008, and their work has since appeared in games, in trailers for games, in web-series and films based on Ubisoft games. But feature films, television shows, and now game-related productions are only ever part of Hybride’s work. Where they have contributed to fifty blockbuster films, they have done more than a thousand commercials. Hybride is a visual effects company, and as such it moves, as do many such firms, across category definitions. It may have one feature central to their corporate identity – digital work in high-profile films, television shows, and games – but it relies upon another – contracts for advertising and promotion – to stay afloat. The transportability of digital skills, over and above any specific cultural production milieu, partly accounts for the commonplace shuffling of policy-making between Heritage Canada and Industry Canada. More vitally, the policy determinations themselves don’t always have a clear account of company participation in the digital economy. Considerable problems arise when we try to reconcile an apparent rise in digital cultural work with the available statistical portraits, which nonetheless rule policy decisions for culture at federal and provincial levels. Statistics is a field of public ideological combat, where left-wing challenges to the surveillance via statistical data-gathering bumps into right-wing skepticism about

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science, experts, and governmental overreach. So where and how does digital labour get counted? The growth of the digital economic sector coincided with a change in procedures with Statistics Canada’s Cultural Statistics Program (C S P ). Beginning in 1972, the C S P was the primary agency that tracked the performance of different cultural sectors. It did so based on activity, meaning organizations that might not be defined as “cultural” – say an educational institution like a university – but which have some form of cultural output, would have their contributions counted. In 2003, C S P began moving data collection and processing to the Service Industries Division (SI D ), where they maintained a Business Register of more than two million listings, each with a specific operational focus noted. This move, they explained, was motivated by the lack of resources available to the CSP, made dire by a significant expansion of the Canadian cultural sector in general. The S I D ’s tracking of businesses on the registry of Statistics Canada–approved “cultural” enterprises included some new categories at the time, largely to recognize vertically and horizontally integrated aspects of cultural industries. Statistics Canada analysts Mary Cromie and Marla Waltman Daschko provided the example of a soundrecording production survey, which by 2005 included additional aspects of the business, such as publishing, distribution, and other uses of sound recording facilities. This shift also meant that cultural outputs of entities not designated on the Business Register as primarily cultural would no longer be captured in SI D ’s cultural tabulations. These changes rolled out in the years following 2003, and were part of Statistics Canada’s “Cultural Streamlining Initiative.” One goal was to make definitions of cultural enterprises commensurate with the North American Industry Classification System (N A I C S ) for businesses. In 1997, Canada, Mexico, and the United States adopted the N A I C S as a part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (N A F T A ) to harmonize definitions and improve the comparability of data across those countries. Doing so enforced definitions that might not match actual activity or earlier tracking. Statistics Canada’s post-production bulletin noted explicitly in 2006 that, as a result, “Some post-production activity which was previously included in the survey is now excluded if this represents secondary activity within another organization.”32 Statistics Canada adopted the associated definitions in 2005, and in so doing, they had brand new categories for media, including “Postproduction Services and Other Motion Picture Video Industries,” “Games, Computer Software, Publishing,” “Games, Computer Software, Mass Reproducing,”

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and “Commercial Production.” Again, the adoption of these categories for cultural industry activity coincided with the much-vaunted boom in V FX work. Yet, even with these new categories, the purported vibrancy of those visual effects service garrisons remains fuzzy, registering either incompletely or doubly in industry and national tabulations. In their film, television, and video post-production bulletin, Statistics Canada has a category called “visual effects and animation services,” and there is a breakdown for economic activity for this, and other, dimensions. But there are also information sector categories, such as “Postproduction Services and Other Motion Picture and Video Industries,” which lumps together editing, transfers, titling, subtitling, credits, closed captioning, animation effects, special effects, and C GI , as well as developing and processing of film. Digital labour and its products, thus, appear as part of both cultural and information sectors. My point is that post-production, visual effects, and computer graphic display and design are not simple categories of media production; CGI bleeds into any number of media formats, venues, and purposes. It also bleeds into industrial applications, and the businesses involved pursue work on multiple fronts and in multiple sectors. As such, it is no coincidence that, when the government of Quebec announced its million-dollar loan to Cinesite, it also announced a $10-million USD investment in White Star Capital, an international investment company that specializes in information technology start-ups.33 As of 2014, Ontario’s thirty-nine visual effects companies are part of an estimated twelve thousand technology companies in Toronto alone, with Ontario promising to invest $220 million.34 Similarly, companies and policy-makers reason that investments in Vancouver’s video game producers make sense, as they can seize “talent spun out of Vancouver’s ‘Hollywood North’ digital media industry.”35 A major 2010 industry report by the Computer Animation Society of Ontario uses “industry cluster” analysis, as advanced by American economist Michael Porter, to gauge the health and growth potential of the sector. Clusters are “geographic concentrations of interconnected companies, specialized suppliers, service suppliers, firms in related industries, and associated institutions (for example, universities, standards agencies, and trade associations) in particular fields that compete but also cooperate.”36 By definition, the intricacy of links to other companies, institutions, and industries reveals the more robust cluster, or so it is described in the ­language of business and policy analysts. Media and cultural scholars use terms like convergence, intermedia, and transmedia to produce new ­categories to designate the grey zones of intersecting media and media

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industries. Importantly, all these terms similarly capture a level of systemic integration that makes skills in software production, motion capture, 3D simulation, and so on sought after, not only by film and media producers, but also by medical, military, governmental, transportation, education, as well as other cultural initiatives, including art installations and museum displays. The transferability of labour is implied when games studies scholar Casey O’Donnell writes that convergence in the game industry pertains to a flow of labour practices and not strict technical capabilities, and cultural studies scholar Leon Gurevitch similarly captures this when he describes convergence as a “labour space,” meaning that it might best be seen as an intersection at which work is performed on a range of parallel forms and technologies, rather than a description of assimilating media or specific media characteristics. In other words, the Canadian VFX sector has been valorized as a service provider to border-hopping cultural works and has been aggressively pursued by Canadian policy-makers and technology entrepreneurs. This pursuit is not an example of a policy of cultural amelioration, wherein one sees the ethical self as an unfinished project that requires guidance. Rather, it is part of a wider commitment to creative industries and the digital economy. It takes up one vision of the creative class as an aspirational entity for post-industrial policy. What kind of work is at the heart of this priority? Mostly, these sectors offer short-term and transferable positions in the knowledge economy, such as design, coding, software, and information technology skills. In many ways, flexibility and transferability mark the VFX sector as post-industrial, instead of some idea about technological progress signalled by digital industries, and its development realizes a vision of the future city and the future employee. With these characteristics, the visual effects sector is consistent with what Luc Boltanski and Eva Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism describe as the projective city, namely one built on temporary, flexible, short-term projects, relying upon social connections and networks rather than set institutional frames.37 Jobs related to digital expertise are taken to be safe, highly valued, and clean. But the actuality of this labour market is quite different. Gina Neff’s Venture Labor offers detailed myth-busting about the work conditions in the high-tech industry, showing them to be rife with uncertainty and exploitation. VFX work – a structurally precarious sector – draws attention and policy support only to shuffle activity off to other para-cultural, if you will, productions, either inside a particular company’s ranks or onto parallel companies with orientations fixed upon broader informational and promotional needs. The role of

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work on glamorous international big-budget productions, then, is to act as an enticement into a world of stripped-down job security across the digital economy. Porter’s “cluster” analysis is responsible for the blending of economic objectives across sectors and policy portfolios. One of the implications of the “cluster” model for cultural work is the inclusion of all manner of digital, networked, high-tech, and consumer electronic formats and labour into media and cultural analysis. Media industries have long been exemplars of post-Fordist, “disorganized” capitalism, with flexible labour and high geographic mobility. Media industries are, in many ways, the vanguards for advanced digital capitalism, involving the production of an internationalized skilled temporary workforce, prepared for technological, industrial, and corporate change. The visual effects business, in this respect, reinforces a decades-old relation rather than overturns one. Transferability of skills and talent between industries identifies VF X as part of a meta-industry that gets tagged as “creative,” “technological,” and “algorithmic,” one that invites entrepreneurial experiments and individual responsibility for finding ongoing new employment opportunities. The digital economy project encompasses the making of a class faction of relatively well-educated contract workers. This class faction, sometimes talked about as a generation, supposedly expects little from its employers and is perpetually being prepared for change and economic uncertainty. Cultural studies scholar Angela McRobbie’s work has observed that these forces have produced an entrepreneurial self, where cultural workers are expected to be branding and promoting themselves as mini-corporate entities. These are the microserfs from Douglas Coupland’s 1995 novel of the same name, living a Generation-X and Millennial experience of low expectations and high self-awareness about their own instability. New investment in digital industries have become a Canadian obsession, and policy-makers value the associated jobs as suitably post-­industrial replacements for the depletion of labour needs in other sectors, especially manufacturing. The Canadian economy is primarily a resource economy, which means the extraction, refinement, and waste management of raw materials still sits at the centre of Canadian economic policy and investment, even as a growing environmental consciousness challenges the ethics of this economic priority. The Canadian resource economy features as part of the long history of staples, as elaborated by Harold Innis, and it has been at the root of colonization for the last four hundred years. The resource economy determined that the course of Canadian history would be deeply entwined with the economics of vast empires. It equally

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Fig. 5.6  B C premier Gordon Campbell at the opening of Pixar Vancouver, 2010.

implicates Canadian corporate and governmental action in the intricate chain of disastrous environmental consequences that have followed. In a forceful illustration of the role of staple economies, Michael Stamm’s contribution to this collection chronicles the historical consequences of the pulp and paper industry in structuring US-Canada relations. The digital turn in the Canadian economy banks on a different empire. Still relying upon an infrastructure of devices and electronics that equally require mineral and metal extraction, the advancement of the digital economy involves building an infrastructure for innovation that includes ideas about what “innovation” is. Cultural theorist Alan Lui has called this the “death spiral of creativity, development, innovation, production leading to an I.P.O.”38 Front stage is a knowledge and media empire that has its own labour needs. Digital labour utilizes skills and education, craft and imagination, in a way that satisfies a broad range of demands emerging from technological innovation-driven economies. The impact is not necessarily upon the expressive life of the country, but upon shifting labour

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resources for a growing digital economy. The localized efforts to integrate digital artists with big-budget international cultural enterprises continue the long-standing Canadian affection for the borrowed glamour of American popular culture. The efforts equally float an attractive lure to invite participants in a shifting pool of digital labour. The virtual film shoot realizes an idea about a wired creative class, readied for precarious economies that spring from the logic of “innovation.” At the Pixar studio’s Vancouver launch, in 2010, Premier Campbell spoke against a backdrop of a Canadian flag branded with Pixar’s signature lamp logo and next to a prop of Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear planting a Canadian flag on the podium. Such blunt iconography of harmonious relations between continental cousins reminds us how right Innis was when he wrote that “Canadian nationalism was systematically encouraged and exploited by American capital.”39 The founding of an empire of pixels signals an ultra-modern mode of skilled cultural work and cosmopolitan popular pleasure, siloed and garrisoned though it may be. But it is really just colourful static, drowning out the weaknesses of an innovation-driven industry. ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

This chapter benefited from Gillian Roberts’s perceptive editorial commentary, Ashley McAskill’s expert research assistance, and funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

n otes 1 Cohen, “Oscars an Ugly Tipping Point.” 2 Cohen, “Oscar Protest.” 3 For additional documentation of the issues and frustrations of these skilled digital post-production workers, though especially giving voice to an American anti-subsidy slant, see vfxsoldier.wordpress.com. 4 Vlessing, “LA Losing Live Action Movie Shoots to Canada.” 5 Ibid. 6 Lederman, “A New Hope for Vancouver’s Visual-Effects Sector,” Globe and Mail, L3. 7 Dougherty-Johnson, “Meteor Studios’ Unpaid Artists Update.” 8 Christou, “The VFX Report,” 14. 9 A good example of this is Mark Deuze’s “Film and Television Production” chapter in Media Work (171–200).

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10 Collins, Culture, Communication, and National Identity, xii. 11 See, for instance, Elmer and Gasher. Serra Tinic’s On Location is also a notable work on television production and city contexts. 12 Cummins, “France’s BU F Expands to Montreal.” 13 “Special Report on Post, Animation and SFX .” 14 “F X Shops Burgeoning.” 15 Edwards, “Motion Works Leaving Vancouver.” 16 Careless, “From X-Files to X3,” 22. 17 “Animation Studios Explode onto the Atlantic Scene.” 18 Cousineau, “How Far Will Quebec Go to Nurture Its Video Game Industry?” 19 Christou, “The VFX Report,” 14. 20 Seikaly, “Cinesite VFX to Open Montreal Branch.” 21 “Quebec Announces Film and Television Tax Credits to Be Reduced by 20%.” 22 “Canada’s Tax Credits.” 23 I proposed this argument in “From Absent Audience to Expo-Mentality” and “Northern Screens.” 24 For a compelling assessment of how labour incentives for film shoots influence textual and thematic dimensions, see J.D. Connor. Vicki Mayer similarly explores these dynamics. 25 Knight, “Deft Action Helps Redeem Silly Plot,” B4. 26 Kelly, “Quiet on the Set,” A20. 27 See Kumar, “Mapping Tollywood.” 28 See Thompson, The Frodo Franchise. 29 See Jenkins, Convergence Culture. 30 Quoted in Bailey, “BC Wants Truce with Ontario, Quebec, on Film Tax Credits.” 31 Paul Grainge and Catherine Johnson’s Promotional Screen Industries treats fully the integration of diverse corners of moving image production. 32 Statistics Canada, Film, Television, and Video Post-production, 1. 33 “Quebec to Fund Cinesite VFX, White Star.” 34 See Grant, “A $100-million Boost for Toronto’s Digital Ambitions.” 35 Marlow, “Japan Taps into Vancouver’s Video Game Talent,” B1. 36 Quoted in Tom Wesson Consulting, A Strategy for the Ontario Digital Animation and Visual Effects Industry, 4. 37 Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 103–63. 38 Lui, “Mickey Mouse Creativity.” 39 Innis, Essays in Canadian Economic History, 403.

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b ib liog r ap h y Acland, Charles R. “From Absent Audience to Expo-Mentality.” In A Passion for Identity: Canadian Studies for the 21st Century, 4th ed., edited by David Taras and Beverly Rasporich, 275–91. Toronto: Nelson, 2001. – “Northern Screens.” In Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture, 163–95. Durham, N C: Duke University Press, 2003. “Animation Studios Explode onto the Atlantic Scene.” Playback, 9 August 1999. . Bailey, Ian. “BC Wants Truce with Ontario, Quebec, on Film Tax Credits.” Globe and Mail, 17 June 2013. . Boltanski, Luc, and Eva Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Gregory Elliott. New York: Verso, 2007. “Canada’s Tax Credits.” Playback, 1 April 2001. . Careless, James. “From X-Files to X3: Vancouver Rules Sci-Fi.” Playback, 23 May 2005: 22. Christou, Mirella. “The VFX Report: Amidst Calls for Change to the Industry’s Business Models, a Look at How Consolidation, Outsourcing and Labour Trends Are Shaping Canada’s VFX Industry 2013.” Playback, Winter 2013: 14. Cohen, David S. “Oscar Protest: Visual Effects Protestors Take to Streets.” Variety, 2 March 2014. . – “Oscars an Ugly Tipping Point.” Variety, 28 February 2013. . Collins, Richard. Culture, Communication, and National Identity: The Case of Canadian Television. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Connor, J.D. “Like Some Dummy Corporation You Just Move around the Board: Contemporary Hollywood in Virtual Time and Space.” In Reading Capitalist Realism, edited by Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge, 140–76. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014. Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Cousineau, Sophie. “How Far Will Quebec Go to Nurture Its Video Game Industry?” Globe and Mail, 1 October 2013. . Cromie, Mary, and Marla Waltman Daschko. “The New Culture of Culture Statistics Program.” Focus on Culture 15, no. 3 (2006), 6–8. Catalogue no. C S 87-004.

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Cummins, Julianna. “France’s BUF Expands to Montreal.” Playback, 11 March 2014. . Deuze, Mark. Media Work. Malden, M A: Polity, 2007. Dorland, Michael. So Close to the State/s: The Emergence of Canadian Feature Film Policy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Dougherty-Johnson, Bran. “Meteor Studios’ Unpaid Artists Update.” motionographer.com, 22 September 2009. . Edwards, Ian. “Motion Works Leaving Vancouver.” Playback, 7 September 1998. . Elmer, Greg, and Mike Gasher, eds. Contracting Out Hollywood: Runaway Productions and Foreign Location Shooting. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. “F X Shops Burgeoning.” Playback, 7 February 2000. . Grainge, Paul, and Catherine Johnson. Promotional Screen Industries. London: Routledge, 2015. Grant, Tavia. “A $100-million Boost for Toronto’s Digital Ambitions.” Globe and Mail, 6 March 2014: B1, B6. Gurevitch, Leon. “Digital Workshops of the World: The Transactional Cultures of Images and Skills in the VFX Industries.” Address. The Magic of Special Effects Conference, Montreal, 5–10 November 2013. Innis, Harold. Essays in Canadian Economic History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Kelly, Brendan. “Quiet on the Set: Visiting Movie Stars Used to Go Out of Their Way to Introduce Themselves to Montreal Media. No More.” Montreal Gazette, 17 May 2010: A20. Knight, Chris. “Deft Action Helps Redeem Silly Plot; Drug Dealer Aims A-bomb at Detroit in Brick Mansions – A Clear Sign of Movie Desperation.” Montreal Gazette, 25 April 2014: B4. Kumar, Shanti. “Mapping Tollywood: The Cultural Geography ‘Ramoji Film City’ in Hyderabad.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 23, no. 2 (2006): 129–38. Lederman, Marsha. “A New Hope for Vancouver’s Visual-Effects Sector.” Globe and Mail, 17 March 2014: L3. Lui, Alan. “Mickey Mouse Creativity: New Media Arts after the Ideology of Creativity.” Lecture. Concordia University, Montreal, 3 April 2014.

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McRobbie, Angela. Be Creative! Making a Living in the New Cultural Industries. Cambridge: Polity, 2014. Marlow, Iain. “Japan Taps into Vancouver’s Video Game Talent.” Globe and Mail, 5 March 2014: B1, B9. Mayer, Vicki. “Almost Hollywood: The Cultural Dimensions of US Film Policy.” Lecture. McGill University, Montreal, 26 November 2014. Neff, Gina. Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovation Industries. Cambridge, M A: M I T Press, 2012. O’Donnell, Casey. “Games Are Not Convergence: The Lost Promise of Digital Production and Convergence.” Convergence 17, no. 3 (2011): 271–86. “Quebec Announces Film and Television Tax Credits to Be Reduced by 20%.” canadafilmcapital.com, 5 June 2014. . “Quebec to Fund Cinesite VFX, White Star; Foreign Financial Investment Companies to Open Offices in Montreal.” Montreal Gazette, 21 January 2014: B 3. Sassen, Saskia. “Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims.” Public Culture 8, no. 2 (1998): 205–23. Seikaly, Andrea. “Cinesite VFX to Open Montreal Branch.” Variety, 20 January 2014. . “Special Report on Post, Animation and S FX: Expanding the Sphere of Influence.” Playback, 13 January 1997. . Statistics Canada. Film, Television, and Video Post-production: Data Tables. 2005. Catalogue no. 87-009-XIE. Thompson, Kristin. The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Tinic, Serra. On Location: Canada’s Television Industry in a Global Market. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Tom Wesson Consulting. A Strategy for the Ontario Digital Animation and Visual Effects Industry. Computer Animation Society of Ontario, 2010. “V F X Soldier.” Blog. vfxsoldier.wordpress.com. Vlessing, Etan. “LA Losing Live Action Movie Shoots to Canada: Report.” Playback, 7 March 2014. .

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6 Commemorating the (In)visible Border: The Underground Railroad Monument and the Production of Transnational Memory Brittney Anne Bos The Underground Railroad wasn’t a place; it was one of the most important social, humanitarian movements in this history of this nation. It forged a bond between diverse people … and created one of the strongest, united forces for freedom that the world has ever known. United States National Parks Service director Roger Kennedy1

In 1996, the United States National Parks Service issued a press release on the importance of the Underground Railroad in American history. In a few short lines, this state-run national body linked a historic event to contemporary American values, particularly the quest for freedom. The same year, state-run Parks Canada launched a project to examine its own nation’s connection to the Underground Railroad, claiming: “[Formerly enslaved people] impacted upon the economic, political and social history of their new country and upon its diplomatic relations with the United States. The story is of national significance in Canadian history.”2 The Underground Railroad represented purportedly Canadian values as well, particularly its openness to and tolerance of migration. Four years after this statement, under separate direction and initiative, the International Memorial to the Underground Railroad was unveiled amidst binational fanfare, a seemingly fitting tribute to the narrative that impacted both Canada and the United States. However, this memorial represents a

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growing new direction in commemoration that significantly departs from its nationalistic predecessors. It demonstrates the tangled meanings of monuments, especially those positioned on multiple political and social borders, and reveals complicated twenty-first-century relationships between memory production and nationalism. International boundaries are not only official lines drawn on the map and imposed on the landscape, but also symbolic markers of collective memory. Especially in Canada, national historical myths often depend upon the imaginary line separating the country from the United States. Until the twenty-first century, the state-supported commemoration of the Underground Railroad in Canada reinforced this boundary, signifying where the evils of American slavery stopped, and the supposedly superior morality of Canada began. More recently, however, the production of commemoration relating to the Underground Railroad has shifted to a transnational approach involving multiple voices. While national bodies remain involved in memory production, other groups and local organizations spanning the border started directing commemoration programs. As a result, the border has been ascribed new meanings in a narrative frequently positioned as nationally divisive. This chapter examines the Underground Railroad Monument in Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, unveiled in October 2001. The creation of the monument, along with a number of meetings between the United States Parks Service and Parks Canada during the same period, marks a significant shift in the history of Canadian commemoration, particularly with regard to the American border. Previous anti-American rhetoric subsides, replaced with shared ideologies, such as diversity and cooperation; even more American concepts, such as freedom and individualism, emerge on the Canadian commemorative landscape. However, it is not simply an imposition of American iconography, by an American artist, on foreign territory. Rather, the monument destabilizes the divisive nationalist border that was once so prominent, particularly in state-run initiatives. In its place are the beginnings of a new language in commemorative practice: transnational memory. This chapter examines both the creation of the monument and the international meetings conducted prior to its conception. With this complex layering of local, national, and international organizations, the commemoration of the Underground Railroad (particularly in the form of the 2001 monument) is a transnational memory that simultaneously highlights and destabilizes the historical American-Canadian border. When compared with past commemorations, the new International Monument

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in Canada immediately appears more “American.” However, upon closer examination, this monument actually signals the beginnings of a shift toward transnational memory that can challenge nationalist meanings. Stripped of text and other written discourse, the two parts of the monument in both Detroit and Windsor visually emphasize a story of transnational migration. The addition of plaques, speeches, and newspaper reports seek to root the monument as either Canadian or American, but the visual forms continue to mark the historical narrative as “transnational.” For Canadian commemorators in particular, the softening of the border threatens a central facet of nationalist remembering: anti-Americanism and Canadian distinctiveness. Nonetheless, the visual language of transnational commemoration encourages the telling of counter-narratives often silenced by more monolithic approaches. The International Memorial to the Underground Railroad is distinct not only for its position on the actual border, but also for how its visual language incorporates this increasingly blurred division. The memorial features two parts: one situated in Hart Plaza in Detroit, Michigan, United States of America, and the other in the Civic Esplanade in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, separated by the Detroit River and an international boundary, but within distant sight of one another. Both were unveiled on 21 October 2001 as a part of the Detroit 300 celebrations. The Detroit portion of the monument (Figure 6.1) features seven life-sized figures cast in bronze. Five figures face toward Canada: a man pointing his finger forward; another man following the gaze; two women, one of whom is holding a baby in her arms; and a final man behind the main figures. The sixth and seventh figures, located at the rear of the monument, look back toward Detroit; they appear to be in conversation. Dressed in a variety of clothes, individuals in the group hold different personal items, and the facial features of each figure are distinct. The monument is accessible via a short pedestal on the north side, with a plaque affixed to the bottom, while the east and west sides feature stairs leading down to the riverfront walkway below, where the south side of the memorial looms above. Additional information and plaques are attached to the south-side wall below the figures. Two granite towers topped with flames frame the east and west sides. The Windsor portion of the monument is smaller in scale than its Detroit counterpart, including only three life-sized figures at the front and one at the rear. A plaque is displayed on the front south-facing pedestal. The main feature of this monument is the large granite tower, engraved with the motto “Keeping the Flame of Freedom Alive” (Figure 6.2). The tower

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Fig. 6.1  International Memorial to the Underground Railroad, Detroit, Michigan.

is also topped with a bronze flame and has a Canadian flag affixed. One male figure at the front of the monument raises his arms and lifts his gaze upwards. In the very front of the south side of the monument, one woman comforts another woman holding a baby. The north side features the lone figure of a young girl, clutching a doll and looking back toward Detroit (Figure 6.3). As with the Detroit monument, the figures are dressed in different types of clothing, and their facial features are distinct and expressive. The diverse figures and the array of complicated emotions are visual techniques used by the artist to encourage multiple readings that stretch beyond nationalist boundaries. In a historical narrative that is traditionally based on borders, the memorial opens a transnational discussion and reinforces increasingly blurred boundaries. t h e c o m m e m o r at i o n o f t h e u n d e r g r o u n d r a i l r oa d i n w i n d s o r : a b r i e f h i s to r y

Prior to the construction of the International Memorial to the Underground Railroad in 2001, national bodies in Canada have been interested in the story of escaping enslaved people. Since the 1920s, this “national historic event” has been reimagined, rewritten, reinterpreted, and ultimately refashioned to fit a variety of national, and eventually international, needs. The

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Fig. 6.2  International Memorial to the Underground Railroad, Windsor, Ontario – front-view detail.

result is a complex site of public memory that continually echoes its past recognitions, even as it attempts to create a new public memory. Nationalist commemorators in Canada turned to this narrative for nearly a century as “proof” of universal values, such as cooperation and freedom. Stories from the past offer lessons to citizens and are frequently used by nationalist leaders and organizations to promote unity. While individual groups and regions have proved able to resist and even reinterpret nationalist celebrations, it has been demonstrated by many case studies that statesponsored “public” history seeks to reaffirm connections to the nation.

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Fig. 6.3  International Memorial to the Underground Railroad, Windsor, Ontario – rear-view detail.

In his seminal text Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson demonstrates the connection different members of the nation feel with one another within an imagined community.3 Various methods are employed by the state and other members of the community in order to foster this connection, including traditions and commemorations. Historian Eric Hobsbawm explores the idea of invented traditions, rituals, and events that complement Anderson’s notion of the imagined community and

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further promote a member’s participation within the artificial boundaries of the nation.4 Paul Connerton also explores such rituals and argues that demonstrations and commemorations are necessary in order to build the collective memory of a group.5 Physical markers, such as monuments, not only delineate who belongs and who is excluded, but also promote particular values linked to that collective. For state-run initiatives, in particular, they help establish and reinforce borders between nations and other social groups. In Canada, the Underground Railroad was an ideal historical narrative to help draw a political and ideological boundary with the United States. The first physical commemoration of the Underground Railroad in the Windsor area appeared in the form of a plaque placed by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board in 1928. The board had approved the marker three years earlier.6 During this initial period, the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada (H S M B C ) was almost exclusively focused on commemorating military sites and forts. More than one hundred commemorations had been approved by that time, the significant majority of Eastern and Central Canadian sites relating to early settlement or military accomplishments.7 The Underground Railroad, named “The Fugitive Slave Movement,” is a rare narrative that does not fit the standard for early-twentieth-century commemorations. However, upon further analysis, the original plaque text seeks to reaffirm an anti-American sentiment present in other commemorations of the period. The original plaque text read: HE R E T H E SL A V E F O U N D F RE E D O M Before the United States Civil War of 1861–65, Windsor was an important terminal of the “UND E R GR O UND RAI L RO AD ” Escaping from bondage, thousands of F U G I T I VE S L AVE S from the South, men, women, children, landing near this spot, found in Canada Friends Freedom [sic], Protection UND E R T H E B R I T I S H F L AG The final emphasis on “under the British flag” confirms that this commemoration is linked to the initial imperialist undertones of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board. In his outline of the history of the early HSB MC , C.J. Taylor notes that, although the board was reformed in the 1920s, the influence of some of the older imperial-minded members

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remained.8 The promotion of imperial history, particularly with a tone of anti-Americanism, was standard in this period. Therefore, while the Underground Railroad may initially seem like a curious example of commemoration in the 1920s, the historic event served to underscore the constructed imperial values of openness, freedom, and tolerance that America, in contrast, was not perceived to share. Aside from the original plaque, there is no evidence that the Underground Railroad was memorialized again for many decades in Windsor. The commemoration was revived by the Parks Canada national plaque bilingualization program of the 1970s, when older H S M B C markers were modernized and reproduced in both official languages.9 “The Fugitive Slave Movement” quickly fell within the mandate of this program, and the plaque was eventually replaced in 1973 and renamed “Fugitive Slaves”: Fugitive Slaves From early in the 19th century, and particularly after the passage of the American Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, the towns along the Detroit River served as major terminals of the network of routes by which thousands of slaves reached Canada. Once in Canada the fugitive was often aided by philanthropic societies and individuals in securing land, employment and the necessities of life. In some cases separate colonies were established for former slaves. By 1861 an estimated 30,000 fugitive blacks resided in Canada West, but more than half of them returned to the United States following Emancipation. While the title, particularly the powerfully charged “fugitive slave” label, was retained, much of the text changed in order to reflect current scholarship. The background story and its statistics were added, while the very strong nationalist sentiments were removed. Even though Canada and the United States were still contrasted in the new text (and national values were still implied), the plaque read more like a history textbook than the British flag-waving demonstration of 1928. Nonetheless, a significant focus remains on those “aiding” the fugitive slaves, with no separate agency granted to those escaping bondage. Although much more subtly, the 1973 plaque still promoted the purported Canadian values of openness, tolerance, and mutual assistance, in contrast to their southern neighbours. Starting in the 1990s, the Historic Sites and Monuments Board sought to expand the themes of history designated through historic sites, people, and events. This expansion culminated in a 2004 “System Plan” that

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identified three under-represented themes of Canadian history at the national level: 1) women’s history; 2) Aboriginal history; and 3) ethnocultural history.10 A barrage of late-twentieth-century and early-twentyfirst-century Black history designations was included in the System Plan, as illustrations and evidence of the ethnocultural thematic priority. In fact, the late 1990s at the Historic Sites and Monuments Board was characterized by increased attention to black Canadian history, and particularly the Underground Railroad.11 New sites were designated, and, unsurprisingly, a new plaque in Windsor was unveiled, unintentionally coinciding with the completion of the International Monument to the Underground Railroad in 2001: The Underground Railroad in Canada From the early 19th century until the American Civil War, settlements along the Detroit and Niagara rivers were important terminals of the Underground Railroad. White and black abolitionists formed a heroic network dedicated to helping free and enslaved African Americans find freedom from oppression. By 1861, some 30,000 freedom-seekers resided in what is now Ontario, after secretly ­travelling north from slave states like Kentucky and Virginia. Some returned south after the outbreak of the Civil War, but many remained, helping to forge the modern Canadian identity. The 2001 version of the Underground Railroad plaque differs in a number of areas, but particularly in the stronger infusion of values (through the use of poignant adjectives and adverbs) and a more nationalist message that relates back to the 1928 version. The proposed plaque text from 1999 was even stronger in enforcing Canadian values. The original concluding sentence read: “their defiance of slavery was an important act of resistance which contributed to the end of the infamous institution as well as to the democratic ideals of our country.”12 Eventual chair of the Underground Railroad Monument Committee in Canada, Andrea Moore, quickly dismissed the overtly nationalist statement. In a letter to Parks Canada, she argues that it gives too much credit to the supposed democratic ideals of Canada and erased the racism experienced by formerly enslaved people upon their arrival.13 A Board of Citizens Concerned about the Underground Railroad Plaque was formed at the same time, and members expressed similar sentiments, eventually producing another letter to Parks Canada.14 While the final sentence was ultimately changed and the nationalist rhetoric (slightly) downplayed, the “forging of the modern

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Canadian identity” remains the concluding thought in the new commemoration. While ambiguous and vague, the sentence alludes to the values of openness and tolerance (compared to the United States) that appeared in the 1928 version. The anti-Americanism is far subtler in 2001, but is a curious juxtaposition considering the statement’s placement on the front of the “International” Memorial. Its nationalistic message, created by a state-sponsored organization, contradicts the visual forms of the monument that tell a contrasting story of cross-border struggles and international migration. The transnational commemorative narrative of the monument is significantly complicated by the presence of the nationalistic text, especially when considering the number of binational discussions held in the previous decade. While the Historic Sites and Monuments Board designated additional sites, people, and events, Parks Canada and the United States National Parks Service held a number of meetings to develop a binational strategy to commemorate the Underground Railroad.15 During these discussions, the public memory of the Underground Railroad, and slavery and racism more broadly, was starkly contrasted between the two nations. While little came out of these binational discussions, they provided the framework through which the International Monument was created and eventually interpreted. Various meeting minutes and policy papers from this discussion reveal that a detailed strategy was developed in Canada in order to recognize the Underground Railroad, but followed the lead of the National Parks Service.16 The N P S had already completed a major study of the Underground Railroad, which had been mandated by Congress in 1990.17 The emphasis of many of these discussions was the assertion that Canada had a stake in this story as well, and the commemoration needed to happen on both sides of the border.18 Before the monument was erected, the Underground Railroad was a story that marked the boundary between two nations that were separate, and, according to Canadian nationalists, held contrasting ideologies. However, after the introduction of the new visual forms created by the monument’s designer, Ed Dwight, the border took on new meanings in the story of the Underground Railroad: the monument presented the border not as a marker of difference, but rather a feature in the development of transnational memory. Despite the international committees behind the monument and an innovative transnational visual language, nationalist rhetoric remained. A nationalist plaque text, written by the state-run HSMB C , was affixed to a monument developed by an international body of local groups concerned with the production of transnational

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memory, but ultimately sponsored and directed by Americans. As a result, the distinctive border that once featured so prominently in Underground Railroad commemoration became increasingly complex and tangled with multiple meanings. a m e r i c a n r h e to r i c t r av e l s n o r t h : c o m m e m o r at i o n o f t h e u n d e r g r o u n d r a i l r oa d i n t h e l at e - t w e n t i e t h a n d e a r ly - t w e n t y - f i r s t century

As demonstrated, the rhetoric surrounding the commemoration of the Underground Railroad in Canada underwent a number of changes throughout the twentieth century. As the new century dawned, the HSMBC was reforming its practices to reflect an ever-changing commemorative environment that sought to include Canada’s diversity in the national narrative. However, adapting the practices of commemoration to fit multiple populations was not new. As historian Alan Gordon points out, the historical recognition of notable individuals, particularly in Quebec, was negotiated by diverse populations from the late-nineteenth century onwards. For example, French Catholics remembered figures like Jacques Cartier in many ways that differed from English elites. More recently, the insertion of “everyday” voices has become a concern for commemorators who hope to attract a wider audience. Anne Marie Lane Jonah explores how “everyday” voices have eventually made their way into the programming of a Parks Canada–owned site: The Fortress of Louisbourg. She argues that the insertion of multiple voices is a particular challenge for researchers working within public history, but an important element that eventually demonstrates the complexity of historical lived experiences. These scholars, and many others in North America, have revealed that commemoration also occurs outside of state-run institutions, with researchers, activist organizations, local groups, community leaders, unions, religious coalitions, and many others taking prominent positions. The commemoration of the Underground Railroad was not simply two staterun organizations directing a limited historical recognition; rather, it was a combination of different stakeholders with sometimes opposing goals. Even though they played comparatively minor parts in the commemoration of the Underground Railroad in 2001, state-run organizations did influence the rhetoric surrounding the monument and worked at directing interpretation. Because it was positioned directly on the border, the binational meetings revealed, at times, diverging nationalisms. When Parks

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Canada and the United States National Parks Service first began meeting in the 1990s, they discussed the differences between the two nations’ rhetoric surrounding the Underground Railroad, and their national history more broadly. This short Bi-National Underground Railroad Field Study and Charrettes compares the National Parks Service and Parks Canada history, strategy, and structure for commemorating the Underground Railroad. While the direct juxtaposition reveals a few policy differences, there are also some noticeable divergences in the interpretation and importance of this “shared history.” For example, the N P S asserted: “the story of the Underground Railroad carries with it a message of the yearning of an enslaved people for freedom, and of resistance on the part of common people … to a legally sanctioned system of oppression.”19 The statement focuses on the desire for freedom and the role played by supporters in helping people achieve freedom. In contrast, Canada’s importance is summed up: “Their presence cemented Canada’s image in the world as a country of freedom, tolerance, and colour-blind opportunity … Emotional border crossings by refugees from slavery are among the proudest movements in Canadian history.”20 Notably, the Canadian side of the document does not mention the yearning or desire for freedom, but rather emphasized the values of people already in Canada (and the forging of modern values). Similarly, “slaves” are replaced with “refugees,” a noticeable rhetorical shift that links the experience of the escaping African Americans to the contemporary period and other international refugees seeking asylum in Canada. The H S M BC plaque affixed on the front of Windsor’s monument included the strong values expressed in the Parks Canada study written four years earlier. While the plaque directed attention to familiar Canadian values, the visual forms were created by an American artist funded by American cash for an American city’s patriotic event. Within the Canadian context, the H S M B C plaque is the only major textual interpretation at the monument site. Therefore, when reading the text, the viewer sees the monument through the nationalist rhetoric of the H S M B C . However, neither Parks Canada nor the National Parks Service paid for the International Memorial to the Underground Railroad (although Parks Canada did pay for the plaque to be installed in Windsor). The International Memorial was not the inception of the major national bodies in either country, but rather of a small local association with a large mandate. Throughout the twentieth century, it has been common for local groups, working with the support (financially or not) of state-run commemorative bodies, to direct their own remembrances. While these

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celebrations often echo nationalist sentiments promoted by broader national organizations, there is additional room for local stories and interpretation outside the overseeing gaze of state-run groups. For example, Meaghan Beaton explores the Cape Breton Miners’ Museum established during Canada’s Centennial in 1967. She unravels a tangled situation involving multiple groups that were using the museum project for their own purposes. While the museum was celebrated as a legacy project of Canada’s one hundredth birthday (and was state funded), local groups were primarily responsible for its inception and development. In 2001, the city of Detroit faced a similar predicament: how to celebrate its grand birthday, coordinating the contributions of various local groups, state-run organizations, municipal interests, and corporate funding. Consequently, Detroit 300 was established in order to commemorate the three hundredth birthday of the “founding” of Detroit. Sponsored by the city and numerous private groups (including the Ford family and other major Detroit institutions), the committee embarked on an ambitious year-long plan for recognizing the event. Concerts, lectures, exhibitions, festivals, and monuments were planned throughout 2001.21 While smallerscale statues and memorials were erected throughout the city, the largest and most notable was the Underground Railroad monument. Part of the large-scale renovation of Detroit’s Riverfront, the memorial and the area surrounding it was to be a physical reminder of the Detroit 300 celebrations and a recognition of the city’s history.22 It was also considered by some of the organizers to be a good representation of Detroit’s AfricanAmerican heritage that was acknowledged as under-represented in the rest of the Detroit 300 celebrations.23 Because Detroit 300 was responsible for the monument’s erection on both sides of the river, the Canadian half of the International Memorial was actually funded by American dollars. Casino Windsor contributed a large sum of money to the celebration, and much of it paid for the Windsor memorial;24 however, this funding was funnelled through the American organization of Detroit 300. The historically anti-American narrative of the Underground Railroad was now about to be represented in Canada by Americans. Along with funding the monument, Detroit 300 was also primarily responsible for choosing the design and for organizing events. In Canada, there was an Underground Railroad Monument Committee of Windsor, chaired by Andrea Moore of the Essex County Black Historical Society. This group primarily directed the unveiling on the Windsor side, and a few members (including Moore) advised on the choice of design.25 The two committees otherwise worked relatively independently of one another,

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with Detroit 300 taking a noticeable lead in outlining the overall plan. The International Memorial, therefore, was similar to the NPS and Parks Canada meetings: a binational discussion, with the American organization taking primary control and the Canadian group vying for its own stake. The traditionally anti-American story in Canada that highlighted the boundaries of national values was also going to be represented by an American artist. The designer chosen for the International Monument was Ed Dwight, a notable American sculptor, who had already created an Underground Railroad statue and would later go on to create more commemorations related to America’s Black history. In October 2000, the Detroit 300 Underground Railroad Sculpture Committee, consisting of at least two Canadian representatives, chose Dwight’s design, with a few minor modifications.26 His design was singled out as representing the history of the Underground Railroad accurately, and was one of the most cost effective.27 Dwight was chosen from the final list of six, which was eventually narrowed to three. While Canadian artists did submit proposals, only one of them was included in the final six.28 While the meeting minutes mention Canadian artists and their submissions, there is no documented discussion regarding concerns over the choice of Dwight as an American. The state-run commemorative body of Parks Canada was still trying to position the Underground Railroad as a demonstration of unique Canadian values in opposition to the United States. However, the international group that made up the primary organizing committee seemed less concerned about national boundaries, focusing instead on a story of blurred-border migration. Dwight only had experience working within an American commemorative context, and thus turned to familiar visual forms usually linked to American nationalism. As a result, the monument relies on symbols largely foreign to the Canadian environment. Dwight needed to communicate his subject matter to the broader public using recognizable iconography. For this task he turned to many established American symbols to tell the Underground Railroad story. With almost exclusive direction and money coming from Americans, it is of little surprise that some of the final design resonates with American nationalism and commemorative values (particularly of the late-twentieth century). One of the most notable American concepts repeated throughout the memorial is “freedom.” The name ascribed to Dwight’s original design, and retained for the final monument, was the “Gateway to Freedom,” topped by the “International Flame of Freedom.” In fact, all six finalist proposals, except for one unnamed concept, contained “freedom” in the title.29 While Canada has used “freedom” in its commemoration in the

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past (including the 1928 and 2001 H S M B C plaques), the emphasis on this rhetoric is largely foreign in Canada’s overall commemorative landscape in comparison to that of its southern neighbour. Although freedom can certainly be found in multiple commemorative landscapes, it is very closely associated with American values (particularly as a “collective value”). The motto carved into the Canadian tower reads “Keeping the Flame of Freedom Alive,” confirming the precarious commemorative link between freedom and Canada. The choice of a progressive verb tense rather than a distinctive past tense in this statement implies a connection with the present and future. “Keeping” the flame alive links the values of this historical event to the present day. Not only is freedom alluded to within the title and markers of the monument, but the form of the statue also contains American iconography. The most apparent American symbol is the flame on top of both the Detroit and Windsor statues. The “International Flame of Freedom” very closely resembles the flame of the Statue of Liberty, a symbol reproduced throughout the twentieth century as a representation of American freedom. The presence of this flame is rather distinctively connected to the United States. However, affixed to the Canadian-labelled “Tower of Freedom” is a stylized Canadian flag. The inclusion of the Canadian flag (a very modern national symbol and detached from the Underground Railroad period) is never explained. The presence of this anachronistic flag is a rare Canadian nationalist symbol on the monument, a statue more dominated by transnational stories and American iconography. Although there are numerous American symbols (likely due to the background of the artist and the source of the funding), most of the visual forms tell the story of transnational migration and shared communities rather than national differences. The creators of the monument (especially the artist and Detroit 300 committee members) relied on recognizable (American) nationalist symbols to relate the narrative; however, most of the design attempts to convey a very different version of this story rooted in transnationalism. Nonetheless, more familiar Canadian nationalism (and its reliance on anti-Americanism) is distinctly absent from the memorial. d r aw i n g t h e ( i n ) v i s i b l e b o r d e r : c r e at i n g a n “ i n t e r n at i o n a l ” m o n u m e n t

The Underground Railroad monument begins to span the nationalist differences of commemoration that were intrinsically part of Canada’s Underground Railroad narrative in the twentieth century. Although there

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is distinctive American rhetoric and iconography present in the memorial, it still bears the label of “international.” While many scholars have written about the nationalism (or reinterpretation of nationalism) in twentieth-century monuments, very little research has been completed on international monuments. A major reason for this gap is the relatively tiny number of monuments and memorials labelled “international.” There are slightly more examples of monuments that are sponsored by or representative of multiple nations, but contained within the borders of a single nation (particularly war monuments or other major international events). In addition, there is the Peace Arch and surrounding park between British Columbia and the state of Washington, completed in 1921. It is one of the few examples of monuments positioned directly on the border. Considered as “international territory,” this monument functions as not only a symbol of friendship, but also a marker of unity. Nonetheless, these commemorations are very rare and largely unprecedented. The International Memorial to the Underground Railroad, in its positioning on both sides of a border, offers an important site of analysis for how commemoration, particularly directed by local groups, can span the historically divisive practices of state-run public history. Monuments are not simply directed by those in power and then remain static; rather, commemorations are often characterized by multiple and ever-changing interpretations. Public memory is not a simple “top-down” process, where those in power dictate and the others follow. In the American context, this flexibility of public memory is effectively proven by historian John Bodnar in his exploration of Cleveland. He examines the “middle ground” adopted by various immigrant groups for their participation in official commemorations. The result is a hybrid of American patriotism and ethnic pride.30 Similarly, in the Canadian context, Robert Cupido considers the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation ceremonies in Winnipeg. Initially intended as a tool of assimilation for the diversifying population of the city, the ceremony was used by ethnic groups to showcase their own cultures.31 Cupido argues that the Canadian nationalism intended by organizers was actually circumvented by various immigrant groups coming together as united communities for the first time.32 Bodnar and Cupido both demonstrate that, despite the intentions of official commemorators, the overall message of commemoration is often negotiated. The process of inserting interpretations of the past that run counter to national narratives is not simple. For example, James Horton suggests that slavery is not widely recognized in the American historical narrative because it counters the important national value of “freedom.”33 Histories

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that run counter to nationalist aims remain unpopular subjects for statesponsored celebrations of the past, despite “Other” communities calling for more representation. The renegotiation of monuments and their meaning happens not only on the national level, but locally as well. Victoria J. Gallagher and Margaret R. LaWare explore the contested memories in Detroit, embodied in the Joe Louis monument in the centre of the city. The authors reveal that the monument invokes strong emotional responses, depending on the public that is viewing the monument.34 They contend that the monument is symbolic of racialized power, a divisive message for the divided city.35 Far from a unifying physical embodiment of social memory, the giant fist dedicated to Joe Louis serves to split the population and act as a crux for major social issues surrounding race and power. Divisions regarding race and power within this region have an additional historical significance. Within this collection, Alyssa MacLean discusses the transnational abolitionist movement, and particularly the writings of formerly enslaved people (including significant individuals involved in the Underground Railroad) to their former American masters. Partially meant to enlist support for the abolitionist cause, these letters represent a transnational discussion that both blurs and secures the national border that also delineated the boundary of slavery. More than a century later, it was of particular significance that the International Memorial to the Underground Railroad was placed at the physical and symbolic site of these contested spaces of race and power. The International Memorial to the Underground Railroad’s iconography sends conflicting messages to the viewer regarding the border of the Detroit River. Placed within sight of one another, the monuments are separated by a waterway that also serves as a national boundary. The largely impassable river that splits the two related monuments emphasizes the distance between the commemorations, but also acts as a feature of the Underground Railroad story. The figures on both monuments make reference to the border, further drawing the viewer’s attention. Except for two figures in the back, every figure in the Detroit version is turned towards Windsor. The central figure is pointing across the river, while the other two major characters follow his gaze. Viewers are drawn to look across the river themselves and take the same view as the figures. On the other side of the river, the three major figures are turned towards the city of Windsor and have their backs facing Detroit. The minor figure, a young girl appearing near the rear of the monument, gazes back towards Michigan. As in Detroit, the viewer is encouraged to follow her gaze towards the United

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States. The figures, in both Windsor and Detroit, are looking directly at the border and highlighting its historical and contemporary presence. On one level, the memorial would not exist if there were no national border, as the Underground Railroad is predicated on this boundary. However, the invisible line in the middle of the Detroit River was once a point of commemorative separation. In the memorial’s iconography, the border is still a central feature of the narrative, but does not encourage the same type of nationalist division as the previous commemorations. Despite the gazes at the border and the historic recognition of its presence, iconographic elements actually blur the international boundary between the two sides of the monument. Two of the main figures in the Detroit version are almost exactly replicated on the Windsor side: the figures have identical clothing and facial features. This not only creates the narrative of movement across the border (two figures transposed to the other side of the river), but also erases the boundary between the two monuments. Additionally, the presence of the large granite towers topped with flames on both the Detroit and Windsor sides reaffirms the connection between the individual monuments. Creating a memorial with identical iconography (aided by the use of only one artist) means that the divisive border, a feature of historical commemorations in Canada, is gone. The presence of a nearly identical memorial in both Canada and the United States blurs the nationalist boundaries that were such an important feature in the commemorative programs of both nations. However, the continued reliance on some American symbols in this transnational monument further obscures Canada’s position in the story. With the removal of nationalistic divisions, Canada’s “unique” position is nearly absent (aside from the comparatively out-of-place plaque text at the front). There is one figure on the memorial that especially speaks to the complexity of the border in transnational commemorations. The aforementioned young girl on the back of the Windsor monument, who gazes back across the Detroit River, does not feature in the Detroit version. Conversely, the other formerly enslaved people at the front, the figure of a man and a woman (holding a baby) are prominent in the Detroit version. Based on the young girl’s facial expression, gaze, and isolation, it is likely that this figure is representative of diaspora and the number of African Americans that returned to the United States following the Civil War.36 As an embodiment of diaspora, this young girl shows the conflicted and contested meanings of cultural borders that are often drawn along political boundaries. Her longing diasporic glance, as she passes through Windsor’s Tower of Freedom, confirms that the Detroit River is not simply

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a political marker, but a cultural one as well. Her presence is yet another complicated recognition of the (in)visible border between the two cities and their histories. a blueprint for the twenty-first century: t h e i n t e r n at i o n a l m o n u m e n t to t h e u n d e r g r o u n d r a i l r oa d a n d t h e c r e at i o n o f t r a n s n at i o n a l m e m o r y

As this chapter has demonstrated, the International Memorial to the Underground Railroad disrupts common national commemorative ­narratives. The state-run HSMBC produced a plaque that remains affixed to the front of the monument, recalling previous commemorations that highlighted Canadian uniqueness with an undercurrent of anti-­ Americanism. However, the organizations responsible for creating the monument itself were international, comprised of individuals from both sides of the border who were seeking to tell common stories that spanned nationalist differences. The American artist chosen for the project relied on primarily American symbolism to tell this story, but also placed significant emphasis on the border and its tangled meanings. The design of the commemoration, its “international” label, and its position spanning the border contradict the historical divisions of the Detroit River. The memorial is also significant as a lesson in integrating diverse stories into “public” history. In particular, this monument offers a valuable case study in the representation of marginalized communities and their histories by the combination of state-run and local organizations. State-sponsored groups often have complex justifications for including diverse stories in national histories. Scholars in Canada have examined how the narratives of marginalized groups are often used by nationalists to demonstrate Canadian values of tolerance and openness by upholding false ideals of a morally superior and racially open nation. Rinaldo Walcott considers the porous Canada-US border, particularly for the diasporic Black community of Ontario. The border is historically understood as the boundary between racial intolerance to the south and “freedom” to the north, a notion that Walcott challenges throughout his work.37 Afua Cooper also tackles the constructed notion of Canada’s moral superiority regarding slavery. She reveals not only the historical presence of the institution of slavery in Canada, but also its continued erasure from the national narrative.38 Despite the construction of Canada as a pristine nation with no racist blemishes, some writers are continually contesting

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these limited narratives. Maureen Moynagh argues that the Underground Railroad narrative is used to defend the Canada-US border, and particularly the (constructed) distinctiveness of British North America.39 The border in particular is a prominent feature in the nationalist narrative of the Underground Railroad; however, these recent scholarly writings have sought to deconstruct this border as an imaginary line intended to uphold and prove imperial, and eventually Canadian, values. The International Memorial to the Underground Railroad exists in between these debates, attempting to create a new commemorative language that begins to address the nationalist shortcomings of public history, but is still partially rooted in this past. If the monument is not clearly nationalist or simply a layering of two different nations’ values, a new language is required to discuss commemorations that span borders, particularly the permeable Detroit River. The International Memorial to the Underground Railroad is not binational, but rather it engages in the production of transnational memory. Recently developed as a response to the increasing globalization and migration of the world’s population, transnational memory takes into account the blurring of national boundaries and the complication of collective memory. Scholars of transnational memory demonstrate the significance of this type of remembering by moving beyond national boundaries. They prove that transnational memory complicates monolithic interpretations and instead represents the complexity of all those involved, past and present. Geoffrey White, for example, considers the recognition of Second World War battles that are not simply nationalist in character, but rather represent a variety of competing interests from different sources.40 Similarly, S. Jonathan Wieson examines the memorialization of the Holocaust by Rotary Clubs, revealing a multinational cooperation that produced memory not rooted within a nationalist framework.41 Within this collection, Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson explore the heroic icon of “Superman” as a transnational figure that speaks to multiple nationalisms and is not confined as solely a superhero of Canadian origin. According to Easton and Hewson, despite the commemorative efforts of the early-twenty-first-century Harper government in Canada, Superman continues to speak to various social movements around the world, due to his positioning within global conflicts and the seemingly universal value of justice. Also within this collection, MacLean demonstrates the significance of cross-border interactions, particularly for those who left one national context for another. Her research demonstrates that particular ideas (such as abolition in the antebellum period) spanned the border and

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were not always tied to a specific national context. She proves that those working within abolition and during the period of the Underground Railroad were engaged in transnational discourses. Thus, in commemorating the event, it is especially relevant that a transnational commemorative language is adopted. Scholarship reveals that transnational memory is not simply about the recognition of multiple nations, but rather the blurring of nationalistic distinctions. It also reveals the significance of adopting transnational memory in new commemorative contexts in order to recognize the tangled national positions of these historical narratives. As commemorators delve into the best methods of representing transnational stories, it will be significant to develop a new iconographical language that does not rely on nationalist symbols. However, breaking with nationalism in commemoration is not simple. Creating a transnational monument involves relinquishing the powerful hold of single-state nationalism, a driving force in most commemorative projects. The loosening of nationalist connections means less control over the direction of these historic narratives. The public can often “read” monuments, because of their repeated iconography. As a result, artists (including Ed Dwight) often turn to repeated symbols and rhetoric to promote an understanding of the story. In the case of the Underground Railroad, American symbols were used in a Canadian context. It seems, initially, that Canadian symbols were simply pushed out in favour of American representations. However, given the international context of this monument and its emphasis on blurring the border, it is not merely an imposition of foreign values, but rather an initial attempt to move beyond them. As transnational memory evolves and becomes a more prominent feature in commemorative practice, nationalist symbols will no longer be needed. The use of the border offers a particularly important avenue for the development of iconography in this new area of transnational memory that does not rely on nationalist symbolism. As demonstrated by the International Memorial to the Underground Railroad, the representation of spanning or blurring the border is readable to a public that tends to be more globalized. Commemorators seeking to blur borders in transnational memory production can turn to the border itself as a key iconographical element. If the memorial is based on the border and historical divisions, what “collective” is being represented? Transnational memory does not seek to untangle the various imagined communities represented by the monument; rather, it considers the complicated production of multiple simultaneous memories in the creation of something unique. The International Memorial to the Underground Railroad challenges commemoration

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producers and scholars to consider how transnational memory impacts memorial practices. International monuments are still very rare, but with an increasingly globalized world characterized by human migration, such monuments will be a feature of the future. Commemorative programs are increasingly created by a collation of various groups representing a diverse set of goals – sometimes running counter to state-sponsored organizations. Therefore, it is imperative that scholars of nationalism and public history reconcile the process of transnational memory creation with commemorative programs. The International Memorial to the Underground Railroad offers an insightful window into the growing commemorative landscape of transnational memory by demonstrating how a complex web of multiple imagined communities deconstructed national boundaries in order to create a new memorial language. In their attempt to break with more traditional nationalism, some divisive elements remained. However, the memorial offers a view of the changing landscape of commemorative practice amidst increasing recognition of transnational stories. There are notable benefits in the development of transnational commemorations. First, these memorials to the past destabilize the inherent connections between nationalism and narratives of the past. Within a transnational context, national interests are not as much in the forefront. Similarly, there are substantial opportunities for diverse communities to add their own stories to the transnational narratives. Nationalist commemorations are inherently limiting (whether run by state-run organizations or not), and although marginalized communities have negotiated their own inclusions in these events before, their presence is often unacknowledged. Due to their recognition of multiple layers (rather than the silencing of dissenting voices), transnational commemorations offer a much more inclusive opportunity for stories that do not traditionally fit within the confines of collective memory. More broadly, transnational memory offers a new avenue for the contestation of national values. As increasing numbers of scholars deconstruct historical narratives, pointing out the idealization of historical events to uphold the nation-state, commemorative practices are slowly shifting to include more dissenting voices. The insistence of Andrea Moore and other board members that the stories of racism be included within the Underground Railroad event does not have a place within traditional national histories. A discussion of Canadian racism did not make it onto the state-sponsored plaque, nor into the official Historic Sites and Monuments Board reports. However, transnational memory offers an innovative avenue of inclusion, as it implicitly questions shared values in its blur of national boundaries.

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As the world is increasingly globalized and the migration of groups is more recognized in commemorations, transnational memory will become even more necessary. One difficulty for commemorators, evidenced in the creation of this memorial, will be the development of a new iconography that does not rely on nationalist symbols. The monument to the Underground Railroad is based on American visual forms and discourse. The plaque texts, in both the United States and Canada, deploy nationalist language and emphasize collective values. These nationalist meanings became even more heightened as the border was remilitarized following 11 September 2001 and the hope for physical, cross-border interaction faded. However, with the concurrent development of the Internet and additional and faster streams of communication, the symbolic borders of nations are increasingly challenged, and transnational identities are becoming easier to imagine. If commemorators hope to create a complete transnational monument, it will be important to remove nationalist references and rely on a new visual language to portray their message, particularly as militarized borders remain as formidable barriers between people. Due to their ongoing presence within an increasingly globalized world, transnational commemorations will need to be devoid of texts that tend to inspire nationalist interpretations. Nonetheless, the creation of this new transnational visual language is of critical importance, as this type of memory opens the door for new commemorations created from “the bottom up” that disrupt power imbalances. A framework of transnational memory, particularly when employed by non-state-sponsored groups, has the potential to present historical narratives without the nationalist underpinnings of many modern commemorations. The International Monument to the Underground Railroad is indicative of the early beginnings of this process, a gradual increase in dissenting and complicated voices making their way into historical commemorations. While state sponsorship will likely remain a prominent feature in recognitions of the past, working transnationally and tangling historical memory provides the opportunity to present complex narratives with multiple perspectives that require viewers to interpret the past for themselves.

n otes 1 Quoted in Russell, The Underground Railroad, 304. 2 Parks Canada, Bi-National Underground Railroad Field Study and Charrettes, 1. 3 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6.

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4 Hobsbawm, “Introduction,” 2–3, 9. 5 Connerton, How Societies Remember, 1–3. 6 H S MB C , Meeting Minutes, 1925. 7 H S MB C , List of Sites Marked by the National Parks Bureau. 8 Taylor, Negotiating the Past, 72. 9 Russell, The Underground Railroad. 10 H S MB C , System Plan. 11 Ibid. 12 Moore, Letter to Shannon Ricketts. 13 Ibid. 14 Citizens Concerned about the Underground Railroad Plaque, Discussion Notes. 15 Parks Canada, Bi-National Underground Railroad Field Study and Charrettes; Ricketts, Underground Railroad Canada / US Joint Initiative; Parks Canada, Underground Railroad Joint US National Parks Service / Parks Canada Initiative. 16 Parks Canada, Bi-National Underground Railroad Field Study and Charrettes; Ricketts, Underground Railroad Canada / US Joint Initiative; United States Department of the Interior National Parks Service, Underground Railroad Resources in the United States Theme Study; Ricketts, The Underground Railroad in Canada. 17 Parks Canada, Bi-National Underground Railroad Field Study and Charrettes. 18 Parks Canada, Underground Railroad Joint US National Parks Service / Parks Canada Initiative. 19 Parks Canada, Bi-National Underground Railroad Field Study and Charrettes, 1. 20 Ibid. 21 Detroit 300, Guide to Detroit 300; “Detroit 300 Tricentennial.” 22 City Planning Commission, Review of the Detroit Riverfront Civic Center Promenade Project Located in a PC Zoning District. 23 City Clerk’s Office of Detroit. City Council Presentation. 24 Underground Railroad Monument Committee of Windsor, Meeting Minutes, 10 April 2001, 1; Caton, “Casino Bankrolls Black Monument,” A 4. 25 Underground Railroad Monument Committee of Windsor, Meeting Minutes, 11 July 2000, 17 October 2000; Detroit 300, Underground Railroad Sculpture Committee Meeting Notes. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid.; Detroit 300, Underground Railroad Proposals.

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28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Bodnar, “Public Memory in an American City,” 80–3. 31 Cupido, “Public Commemoration of Ethnocultural Assertion,” 64–7. 32 Ibid., 71. 33 Horton, “Slavery in American History,” 36. 34 Gallagher and LaWare, “Sparring with Public Memory,” 87. 35 Ibid., 89, 104. 36 Bos, “The Underground Railroad Monument and its Position within a Visible Multicultural Discourse.” 37 Walcott, Black Like Who? 32–3. 38 Cooper, The Hanging of Angélique, 68–9. 39 Moynagh, “Eyeing the North Star?” 140. 40 White, “Remembering Guadalcanal.” 41 Wieson, “Service Above Self?”

b ib liog ra p h y Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 1983. London: Verso, 2006. Beaton, Meaghan. “‘I sold it as an industry as much as anything else’: Nina Cohen, the Cape Breton Miners’ Museum, and Canada’s 1967 Centennial Celebrations.” Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society 13 (2010): 41–62. Bodnar, John. “Public Memory in an American City: Commemoration in Cleveland.” In Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, edited by John Gillis, 74–89. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Bos, Brittney Anne. “The Underground Railroad Monument and Its Position within a Visible Multicultural Discourse.” In Diverse Spaces: Identity, Heritage, and Community in Canadian Public Culture, edited by Susan Ashley, 39–60. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013. Caton, Mary. “Casino Bankrolls Black Monument.” Windsor Star, 14 February 2001: A 4. Citizens Concerned about the Underground Railroad Plaque. Discussion Notes. 29 July 1999. Private Collection. City Clerk’s Office of Detroit. City Council Presentation re: Petition of Detroit 300 (No. 3342). City of Detroit, 17 January 2001. City Planning Commission. Review of the Detroit Riverfront Civic Center Promenade Project Located in a PC Zoning District. City of Detroit, 16 October 2000.

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Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Cooper, Afua. The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Cupido, Robert. “Public Commemoration of Ethnocultural Assertion: Winnipeg Celebrates the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation.” Urban History Review 38, no. 2 (2010): 64–74. Detroit 300. Guide to Detroit 300. Detroit, 2001. – Underground Railroad Proposals. Detroit, 2000. – Underground Railroad Sculpture Committee Meeting Notes. Detroit, 23 October 2000. “Detroit 300 Tricentennial.” Newspaper insert in the Detroit Free Press, July 2001. Gallagher, Victoria J., and Margaret R. LaWare. “Sparring with Public Memory: The Rhetorical Embodiment of Race, Power, and Conflict in the Monument to Joe Louis.” In Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, edited by Carole Blair and Brian Ott Greg Dickinson, 87–112. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010. Gillis, John. “Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship.” In Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, edited by John Gillis, 3–25. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Gordon, Alan. The Hero and the Historians: Historiography and the Uses of Jacques Cartier. Vancouver: U BC Press, 2010. – “Heroes, History, and Two Nationalisms: Jacques Cartier.” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association New Series 10 (1999): 81–102. Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. List of Sites Marked by the National Parks Bureau, on the Recommendation of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, up to 31 March 1940. Historic Sites and Monuments Board, 1940. – Meeting Minutes, 1925–1975. Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. – System Plan. Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, 2004. Hobsbawm, Eric. “Introduction: Inventing Traditions.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Horton, James Oliver. “Slavery in American History: An Uncomfortable Dialogue.” In Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff on American Memory, edited by James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, 35–55. New York: New Press, 2006.

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Lane Jonah, Anne Marie. “Everywoman’s Biography: The Stories of Marie Marguerite Rose and Jeanne Dugas at Louisbourg.” Acadiensis 45, no. 1 (2016): 143–62. Moore, Andrea. The Dedication of the Tower of Freedom. Windsor, 20 Oct. 2001. – Letter to Shannon Ricketts. Windsor, 22 July 1999. Moynagh, Maureen. “Eyeing the North Star? Figuring Canada in Postslavery Fiction and Drama.” In Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations, edited by Winfried Siemerling and Sarah Philips Casteel, 135–47. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010. Osborne, Brian. “Landscapes, Memory, Monuments, and Commemoration: Putting Identity in Its Place.” Canadian Ethnic Studies 33, no. 3 (2001): 39–77. Parks Canada. Bi-National Underground Railroad Field Study and Charrettes. Internal Report. September 1997. – Underground Railroad Joint US National Parks Service / Parks Canada Initiative. Parks Canada, June 1998. Ricketts, Shannon. Underground Railroad Canada / US Joint Initiative. Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada Status Report O B 7, 1998. – The Underground Railroad in Canada: Associated Sites. A Study Prepared for the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, December 1998. Russell, Hilary. The Underground Railroad. Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada Agenda Paper 1996-11 303-72, 1996. Taylor, C.J. Negotiating the Past: The Making of Canada’s National Historic Parks and Sites. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990. Underground Railroad Monument Committee of Windsor. Installation of the New Underground Railroad Monument Set to Begin on September 20th. Windsor, 2001. – Meeting Minutes. Windsor, 11 July 2001. – Meeting Minutes. Windsor, 17 October 2000. – Meeting Minutes. Windsor, 24 August 2000. – Meeting Minutes. Windsor, 11 July 2000. United States Department of the Interior National Parks Service. Underground Railroad Resources in the United States Theme Study. National Historic Landmarks Survey 1-49, September 1998. Walcott, Rinaldo. Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada. 2nd ed. Toronto: Insomniac, 2003.

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White, Geoffrey. “Remembering Guadalcanal: National Identity and Transnational Memory Making.” Public Culture 7, no. 3 (1995): 529–55. Wieson, S. Jonathan. “Service Above Self? Rotary Clubs, National Socialism, and Transnational Memory in the 1960s and 1970s.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 23, no. 1 (2009): 1–25.

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7 Flexible Nations: Canadian Romance Writers, American Romance, and the Romance of Canada Jessica Taylor

are we in america? borders and genre

When Torstar, the Canadian-owned news company, sold romance publisher Harlequin Enterprises Ltd to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in May of 2014, there was little outcry in the media about the sale of yet another Canadian-owned publisher to a non-Canadian company. As a Canadian researcher who examines the social context of romance publishing across Canada and the United States, I was not surprised that the nationalist concerns that might have arisen for the sale of another publisher did not appear in the media immediately surrounding the sale of Harlequin.1 When I conducted my ethnographic research on romance writers and the industry from 2008 to 2010, I often framed my research for other scholars, friends, and acquaintances in terms of a surprise: the fact that one of the largest romance publishers in the world, Harlequin, was a Canadianowned company. Yet romance was not seen (and continues not to be seen) as a particularly Canadian genre. Certainly, the bulk of Harlequin’s sales were not in Canada, and neither were the majority of its authors. But what is it that determines the nationality of an author, a novel, a company, or a genre?2 And how do writers learn to care about this issue? These questions are at the centre of this chapter, and form part of ongoing questions about the place of Canadian producers of culture in an increasingly global marketplace.

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The United States looms large in the imaginations, conversations, and practices of Canadian romance writers. In July 2008, as my Air Canada flight touched down in San Francisco, I overheard a child ask their parents, “Is this America? Do they speak English here?” I was on my way to the Romance Writers of America (RWA) National Conference in San Francisco, my major entry point into the field. For Canadian romance writers, the world of the circulation of professional knowledge is oriented toward the United States. Writers participate in R W A conferences, and in Canadian (“international”) chapters of the R WA , as there is no equivalent association for Canadian romance writers. The theme of the RW A conference that year was “Romance – Bridging the World,” and the conference’s logo included San Francisco’s famous Golden Gate Bridge and a representation of the globe. Like many of the new and aspiring writers I worked with, I wondered: how does a writer “bridge the globe”? How can she guarantee her work will reach the other side of that bridge and not simply sink unnoticed into the waves? This is a question all writers ask, but it holds a particular meaning for Canadian romance writers as they try to manage their careers in the shadow of the US market. To achieve success in the romance market, one’s work must circulate and circulate widely, through specific commercial channels. Yet the work of romance writers, the novels themselves, does not always circulate effortlessly. Writers know this, and they try to predict which factors will shape this circulation. The views of Canadian romance writers on the nationality of their own writings are shaped by the structures of the literary field,3 in particular by the practices of publishing across the Canada-US border. The promotion of forms of cultural capital (through the media and the structure of government funding, for example) works to centralize literary fiction in the Canadian literary field, and thus shapes the possible positions within the field for romance writers and publishers. The counterpart to this structuring of the national field is the identification of the subfield of romance literary production with Americanness.4 In the second part of the chapter, I look at how writers in a major Canadian city5 experience this division and try to write Canada into or out of their novels. Since the imagined audience for romance fiction is primarily an American one, writers often wonder whether American readers and editors are interested in reading books set in Canada. Finally, I examine how one particular romance author, Kate Bridges, combines the iconic Canadian symbol of the Mountie and Canada’s history of migration in a series of Western-set historical romances which both draw on a long-standing image of Canada known to have appeal in the United States and portray

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a Canadian nationalism centred around the rewards and anxieties of movements across borders. r o m a n c e w r i t i n g i n c a n a da

The shape of the literary field in Canada is highly influenced by its place in international publishing. Jeff Boggs argues that there are two book trades in Canada: the French and the English. While “prior to 1900 many publishers and others in the trade had produced titles for both markets,” Boggs argues that the market then divided into two monolingual markets, in part due to the growing influence of foreign-controlled houses from Britain, the United States, and France.6 This chapter concerns itself solely with the English-language literary field, as it follows the experiences of writers working in English. The borders that English romance writers are most interested in crossing are national (and to a certain extent cultural) ones, not linguistic ones. While romance is published in French in Canada, and some romance authors do write in French, there is little to no crossover between Canadian writers working in French and English.7 Publishing in Canada is thus a divided entity, and the publishing and writing of romance fiction is particularly oriented toward this division, as writers consider the transnational shaping of the genre and, in particular, the role of the United States in this shaping. Romance fiction is one of the largest genres currently published in both Canada and the United States, and also one of the most organized. In 2008, despite the shrinking book market, 7,311 new romance titles were published in the United States, and romance was “the largest share of the consumer market at 13.5 percent.”8 In 2009 in Canada, romance fiction was 15.06 per cent of the total sales by Canadian-owned publishers, beaten out only by juvenile fiction at 19.65 per cent, and 4.04 per cent of the total market, just behind suspense and thrillers at 4.15 per cent and ahead of mystery and detective fiction at 2.32 per cent (BNC Research 12, 22).9 As of 2011, the Romance Writers of America (an association with both aspiring and published members) had more than ten thousand members, with local chapters in such locations as Austin, Tampa, Nashville, New York, Vancouver, and Toronto.10 From the summer of 2008 to early 2010, I conducted ethnographic research with a Canadian chapter of RW A, as well as at other romance writing-related activities in the city, such as courses, a series of writer-inresidence talks, and at RWA national conferences and BookExpo America. This research draws on the methods and theories of participant

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observation as developed in contemporary anthropology, which foreground everyday practices and conversations as windows into the patterns and contingencies of social life. Drawing on an interest in networks of discourses and texts in the tradition of linguistic anthropology, where discourse is both an abstract set of repeated frames and a series of interactions, I am interested in how writers connect their practices to the way they talk about those practices, both in person and in circulating texts. In this vein, I conducted interviews with writers, editors, and agents, read romances, and read books, websites, and magazines directed at romance writers. My methodology is also influenced by what has been called “multi-sited” ethnography, which, as George Marcus puts it, “moves out from the single sites and local situations of conventional ethnographic research designs to examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space.”11 The Canadian chapter of RWA that I worked with, which I refer to as City Romance Writers (C R W ), was formed in 1986, and at the time of my research had approximately 120 members, mostly women, with ages ranging from the mid-twenties to the mid-fifties, mostly middle-class, white, English-speakers. I was interested not only in the novels themselves, but also in how writers learned to become “authors” and how they understood and managed the work of writing. g lo b a l au d i e n c e s a n d f l e x i b l e w r i t e r s

Through organizations like R W A and C R W , romance writers learn to think about their writing work and their identities as authors as enabled by flexibility: their abilities to shift subgenres or publishing houses and change along with readers’ changing tastes. This flexibility is increasingly required of both working- and middle-class labour in North America.12 One characteristic of flexible labour is its mobility.13 Books are expected to move across borders and across languages, and both publishers and writers are concerned with enabling this mobility, although only insofar as it enables accessing larger audiences for relatively low costs.14 The audience for media texts is disparate, spread over the city, country, and globe. These individual readers are joined together as audiences through the circulation of romances, which presents a problem for romance writers: in theory, to be successfully flexible in this context, one should know one’s audience; yet such a widely dispersed audience is not wholly knowable from the perspective of individual writers. Writers rely mainly on publishers’ knowledge of readers and networks of circulation and their own individual contacts with readers.

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For writers, this experience of the audience is in part mediated through organizations like R W A and C R W , which allow for the possibility of a collective, rather than an individual and idiosyncratic, picture of the global audience of romance novels. This picture is shaped by what writers know of the organization of the subfield of romance publishing specifically and publishing as a whole. Publishing in general, and romance publishing in particular, is an international enterprise. As Michael Stamm discusses in this volume in the context of newspaper publishing, this is the case not only for content and ownership, but also for the materials involved in the production of texts. While copyright and distribution rights are usually managed nationally, publishing has been part of the global tendency toward the international conglomeration of media corporations. Harlequin is one example of this trend in the romance-publishing world. A Canadian company, founded in Winnipeg in 1949, Harlequin began publishing reprints of U K publisher Mills & Boon’s romances in 1957 in Canada and in 1963 in the United States, as described by Paul Grescoe in his history of the company.15 Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Harlequin expanded its operations globally through buying local publishers (including Mills & Boon itself), starting joint ventures with local publishers, and opening separate ventures.16 During the 1960s and 1970s, Harlequin’s authors were almost entirely British (that is, white British), with a smattering of Canadians and Australians.17 In the 1980s, American publishers began publishing romance seriously, drawing on a backlog of American-authored manuscripts, and eventually Harlequin acquired one of the larger ventures, Silhouette Romance. This shift in the orientation of Canadian publishing from a British-facing to a more American-facing one parallels the more general turn in Canada toward a North American rather than Commonwealth identity. This internationality, or globality, is a large part of Harlequin’s corporate identity. When I asked a senior editor at Harlequin whether she thought of the imprint she was in charge of as Canadian or North American, she answered forcefully, “No”: Jessic a : Um, do you think of [the imprint] as like a Canadian imprint or [E di to r : No] North American? Editor: No, we think of it as a global imprint. We publish [the imprint], there’s a [imprint] publishing stream in the U K, in Australia. Of course in Canada and, and, the United States. So I think of it as a global – yeah.

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Karen Ho (as well as Anna Tsing and Lisa Rofel) has argued that anthropologists should not take the global as a given. In viewing global capitalism as imagined from Wall Street, Ho suggests that we must pay attention to how companies use the idea of the global in their own self-constructions. When a company describes itself as global, it is not simply a neutral descriptor, but also a claim to a certain kind of importance and mastery. Certainly, this was one of the motivations behind RWA’s 2008 conference theme. The claim that romance “bridges the world” is, to a certain extent, a claim for its (and its writers’) importance and legitimacy. Likewise, Harlequin’s emphasis on their global reach is also a claim for their importance as a publisher. A tote bag they distributed at RWA 2008 emphasized this with the tagline “One World. One Publisher.” While romance writers are geographically dispersed, the initial stage of Harlequin’s production process is highly centralized; at the time of my research, Harlequin only accepted manuscript submissions to its Toronto, New York, and London offices.18 If accepted, romances are published in Canada, the United Kingdom, or the United States first. After publication in English in the UK or North America, books are then picked up (or not) by any of the other local offices and translated (if necessary) locally. Most writers, whether publishing with Harlequin or with another romance publisher, have very little to do with the process of translation and simply receive news and copies of their translated works. The structure of the subfield of romance is underwritten by gender.19 One strategy writers use when trying to understand this mass audience that the circulation of texts joins together is that of positing a universal woman who is by nature interested in stories of romance, and then using themselves and their friends as stand-ins for this woman. Stories of love are understood to be eminently flexible. When asked about the international reach of romance novels, both editors and writers often reply that love is “universal.”20 Thus, in an effort to locate their writing in the context of a global mass audience, writers posit sameness in their readers. Women across the world are understood to be in some ways the same as the writer. This is enabled, for most of the writers I worked with, by the racialized structures of global publishing, where stories both about and by heterosexual white women are considered more “universal” than those by women of colour.21 Yet, because of the way the genre and its audiences are imagined within the literary field, Canadian writers encounter anxieties about their own abilities to stand in for readers in the writing process. While love is imagined to be universally appealing, Canadian writers believe they must produce national flexibility in their love stories in order to appeal to American audiences.

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t h e l i t e r a ry f i e l d a n d t h e n at i o n : “ c a n i s e t i t i n c a n a da ?”

Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the literary field is one way to understand why this might be. Bourdieu has described the literary world as a field, made up of “social positions that are both occupied and manipulated by social agents, which may be isolated individuals, groups or institutions,” where each position in the field depends on the existence of other positions.22 According to Bourdieu, “the literary or artistic field is a field of forces, but it is also a field of struggles tending to transform or conserve this field of forces.”23 The distribution of positions and capital across the field, and their connections to other social fields, establishes the “space of possibles”24 for individual writers – who are also in the process of shifting these spaces as they produce works. This concept of the field is helpful for thinking through how both published and aspiring romance writers experience the industry, pointing as it does to the connections between different players and their structural positions, as well as the power and economic, social, and cultural capital that accompany their struggles. For Bourdieu, a key division in the literary field in France in the 1800s was that between autonomous, small-scale production (“art for art’s sake”) and large-scale production (art for money, one might say).25 This division maps, albeit not identically, onto the current division between literary and genre fiction. In general discussions, the prototypical Canadian literature, nicknamed CanLit, is by default “literary” fiction. For instance, at the beginning of my fieldwork, the March 2008 issue of Quill and Quire, Canada’s publishing magazine, contained a list of the thirty most influential people in publishing in Canada. At the time, I was surprised to find that it did not mention anyone at Harlequin. Returning to my apartment in 2009 after a Valentine’s Day spent at a City Romance Writers meeting, I was met by my roommate, who told me about an interview on CBC Radio that had annoyed her. A Canadian academic had been a guest on the book show The Next Chapter to discuss “love and lust in Canadian fiction.” The academic had repeatedly said that it was difficult to find romance in Canadian fiction, describing us as “an icy country,” and wondering, “Where is the bodice-ripping passion that I assumed was there on my shelves?” When the host, Shelagh Rogers, pointed out, “We certainly have Harlequins galore. I mean Harlequin, isn’t Harlequin headquartered in Canada?” the guest brushed this suggestion off as if she had not even thought of it, saying, “I haven’t read very many of them.”26 These two acts of “forgetting” characterized the field of publishing in Canada during my research. As Bourdieu points out, central to these kinds

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of discussions is often “the definition and delimitation of the population of writers, meaning those and only those who, among ‘those writing,’ have the right to call themselves writers.”27 To be labelled CanLit or Canadian publishing, a book must fit certain criteria, which romance does not. National identity is seen as forming around literary fiction. The media position in this area in 2008–09 crystallized other divisions in the field. Authors I spoke with mentioned how hard it was to get publicity in Canada, and how they felt the Canadian newspaper the Globe and Mail was dismissive of Harlequin as a company.28 Because of Canada’s complicated relationship with the United States, national identity is most often attributed to writing that can be clearly distinguished from “commercial” fiction (including genre fiction), which is seen as being more American.29 National autonomy is thus conflated with economic autonomy within the field. Distinction is an important force in the literary field in Canada. This divides the literary field in Canada into literary and commercial / genre fiction; what is literary is CanLit and vice versa, while genre fiction such as romance is often seen as being unmarked by Canadian nationality. This division is also manifest in the industry itself, divided into Harlequin, which mostly publishes romance, and other large publishers in Canada (under various ownerships), which do not publish romance. Canadian writers writing romance are most likely published by a New York publisher, if they are not published by Harlequin.30 Likewise, most agents in Canada, not a large number to begin with, do not represent romance. These divisions are also maintained by the structure of government funding for literary culture.31 In November 2009, I talked to an author while she was signing books at a bookstore downtown, and she described how at the time the Canada Council for the Arts would not fund romance. This, she suggested, was the reason why the public library’s romance writerin-residence program, which had recently been put in place, had taken so long to happen. In these ways the part of the literary field in Canada that is identified as “Canadian” is formed and segregated. The effect of government policy on the shape of the literary field in Canada, and in particular on commercial publishing, is a long-standing one. For instance, as Carolyn Strange and Tina Loo, Michelle Smith, and Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson (in this volume) discuss, the cross-border movement of popular literature was of particular interest to policy-makers during the Second World War, when Canadian pulp-magazine publishing flourished due to restrictions on the importation of American pulp magazines. The War Exchange Conservation Act, intended to keep Canadian money in Canada, particularly restricted the importation of commercial

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literature, rather than that viewed as literary, restricting magazines that featured “detective, sex, western and alleged true or confession stories.”32 Smith argues that the growth of Canadian pulp-magazine publishers “drew out fears of the Americanization of Canadian culture. Canadian pulps were thus stigmatized as both a form of lower-class literature and a form of American mass culture.”33 The content of these pulps, however, was not necessarily “American.” Smith argues, for instance, that the pulps published by Toronto’s Alec Valentine “employed Canadian identity and national pride as a means of marketing the pulps to Canadian readers. Between the sensational covers, Valentine printed war-time rhetoric that set up the pulps as not only a socially legitimate reading practice, but also a way of patriotically participating in Canadian society.”34 This brief boom in Canadian-produced pulp magazines did not last, as postwar conditions found both a ban on pulp magazines and the increasing production of pulp novels edging out the magazines. As Smith suggests, this ban was “aimed at creating not only morally sound readers, but cultivated citizens.”35 Creating these citizens required the cultivation of particularly Canadian literature – that is, literature clearly distinguishable from American literature – as exemplified by the concurrent Massey Commission on cultural life in Canada. As Sabine Milz argues, the Massey Commission report proposed that “‘what is really needed is more good Canadian Books’ – that is, increased domestic literary output – through which English- and French-Canadians can find some essential ‘Canadianness.’”36 Genre literature such as romance, in this view, was not considered to contribute to national identity.37 Instead, mass culture was considered by the Commission to be, as Milz puts it, “a foreign, American threat that can best be countered through the public promotion of ‘high’ culture.”38 After the war, government agencies began this promotion of “high” culture through funding “both individual artists engaged in making ‘high’ art and academic institutions that increasingly structured their liberal arts programs to support the study of these works.”39 As Charles R. Acland argues in this volume, in the context of film production, the same workers’ activities are variously viewed in government tracking as “cultural production” and “service providing,” depending on the nationality of the final product. Policy, then, both shapes and is shaped by understanding of the literary field and the prestige and “national value” of various kinds of literature within it. Writers, while they may not deal directly with policy, feel its effects both practically, in the grants they are able to apply for, or not, and more generally in their sense of how the kind of writing they do fits in with the government’s vision of national development.

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a m i n c a n a da , b u t i d o n ’ t f o c u s o n t h e c a n a d i a n m a r k e t ”: 4 0 r o m a n c e w r i t i n g i n c a n a da

This is not to say that there are no romance writers who identify as Canadian. Certainly the meetings of the CRW that I went to were always well attended. Romance writers are well aware, however, of the ambiguous position they occupy in this field. As a market, the United States dominates the genre imagination in Canada. Canadian romance writers are primarily writing for an American audience. The structure of the literary field suggests to writers that this makes a difference and that romance writers, therefore, cannot seamlessly stand in for their audience in terms of nationality. Writers then try to gather information about these possible differences, a process that also serves to produce “Canadianness,” as different from “Americanness.” This information-gathering is intended to enable their book’s flexibility, its ability to be read by a wider audience, and therefore their own flexibility as authors. The counterpart, then, to the CanLit state of affairs I have described above is the feeling that romance is an American genre. A local romance author was the first romance writer-in-residence at the City Public Library in 2009, and she gave a number of talks on the romance genre and publishing. In one talk, she suggested that “romance is primarily an American genre.” When asked a question about subgenres and trends, she contrasted them with what one might expect them to be if interpreted from a “Canadian” perspective. “A lot of the trends are named out of New York,” she said. In this city, she went on to explain, one might expect “multicultural romance” to be just that, “multicultural,” but no, it means African American. Likewise, “inspirational” means Christian romance. It is “very American-centric,” she concluded. In a December 2007 interview with C B C podcast Q, Caribbean-Canadian romance writer Kayla Perrin similarly contrasted Canadian versus American expectations of romance through an anecdote about her experience pitching a book with two black characters and one white character to an editor in New York. She contrasted this editor’s reaction (paraphrased as “why is there a white girl in this book”) to her own experience living in Toronto, a “multicultural” city, and the book’s later publication by Harlequin. These discussions both accurately describe the reality of subgenre naming and draw on widely circulating discourses on the differences between Canadians and Americans, which are centred on the representation of Canada as “multicultural.”41 Canadian writers, then, are described as needing to translate

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their own experiences and writing into American terms, in a way that both naturalizes the Canadian terms and understandings for the writers and subsequently alienates the writers from them. Aspiring romance writers were uncertain of the ramifications of this positioning toward the American market. When I mentioned this subject to a friend who had worked at Harlequin (not an author), she reported that she was under the impression that Harlequin often changed the setting of novels originally set in Canada, substituting an equivalent US city for the Canadian one, for example Seattle for Vancouver. This would mirror the way in which Canadian cities like Vancouver and Toronto stand in for American cities in Hollywood films and American television (see Acland’s chapter in this volume for a discussion of this phenomenon). There are romance novels set in Canada, but the question of whether it was possible to set a novel in Canada arose many times in the course of my fieldwork, and was answered in ambivalent ways.42 At one of the public-library talks mentioned above, an audience member asked, “Can you set it in [Canadian city]?” and the speaker answered that “there are settings that sell better.” She went on to state that Italy, for instance, “is a tough sell,” whereas “Americans love Scotland,” and that a contemporary romance will have an “easier time” if it is set in an American city. At her second talk, structured as a panel with an agent and an editor, the writer-in-residence passed the question on to the panel, asking whether “Canadian settings are marketable.” The agent replied that she had sold a [Canadian city]–set suspense to St Martin’s Press (an American press owned by Macmillan), so it is possible, “if it’s well done and there’s a reason that it’s there.” The editor, in contrast, pointed out that writers need to “look at where the target audience is” for the kind of romance they are writing. If they are writing “category” romance (that is, the shorter, more strictly structured, romances that are usually released monthly), the target audience is American, and writers would want to “make it accessible.” Thus, for a romance to be set in Canada, there must be a reason; the setting must be purposefully Canadian, if it is to differ from the unmarked big American city. “Accessible” is a key word that operates in tension with “universal.” The plot of romance was understood to be universal, no matter where it took place. But particular romance novels needed to have “accessible” details. And yet what lies behind the reference to “accessibility” was slightly opaque. Would a romance set in Vancouver, after all, be so very different from one set in Seattle? Aspiring writers took this advice to heart, and wondered about their own manuscripts. When I discussed the talk

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afterwards with a woman with whom I had taken a romance-writing course earlier in the year, she wondered about the fact that her current manuscript was set in a Canadian city. Our course instructor, a former editor at Harlequin, had told her “it wasn’t a problem,” but she still wondered: would the romance be able to cross the border? Or, put another way, would readers themselves want to cross the border in their imaginations? As the writer-in-residence had said, “Americans stay home.” Here the gap between the writer and imagined reader in terms of nationality leads writers to wonder whether they can depend on their own knowledge of location to be understood, or desired, by readers. The fact that this question persistently recurred suggests that the mass nature of the audience was at times an issue for writers, especially those not fully integrated into publishers’ systems of audience management. The knowability of the audience and the universality of the romance story work in tension here, and writers turned to community spaces to try to resolve these tensions. I have suggested that certain sets of relations between social actors and institutions work to structure the field, such that romance written in Canada is seen as belonging to an American (and worldwide) literary field, rather than a Canadian one. This shapes what romance writers tell each other when they ask the question, “Can I set it in Canada?” mounties and the romance o f a n i n t e r n at i o n a l c a n a da

Yet setting a book in Canada was not ruled out completely. For example, Toronto writer Kate Bridges has written both Canadian- and Americanset western historical romances, and the Canadian-set romances have been relatively successful worldwide. These novels follow the romances of various fictional Mounties and women of varied employment at the end of the nineteenth century, generally set around Fort Calgary. For instance, The Proposition (2004), set in 1892, centres around the romance between recently widowed horse-trainer and Mountie Travis Reid and Jessica Haven, the mayor’s daughter and part-time medical journalist, recently returned to Calgary from Montreal. These romances make no effort to hide the fact that they are set in Canada, and a set of some of the novels is marketed by Harlequin as an e-book collection named “The Mountie Collection.” While it is Bridges’s writing style and plots that make her novels popular, it also cannot be denied that the Mountie is a circulating image of Canada

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that is understood to be recognizable and desirable elsewhere.43 Candida Rifkind has argued that Mountie fiction is at once thoroughly Canadian and intrinsically international, or at least late imperial, in its origins and circulation. Fictional Mounties crossed frontiers, both within their narratives as they traversed lawless territories and through the distribution flows of their books. This transnationalism is somewhat ironic, given the Mounties’ typical purpose to police territorial boundaries and maintain Canadian sovereignty.44 In their heyday, between 1890 and 1940, Mountie novels were published as boys’ adventure stories.45 Michael Dawson argues that, in a time of social change, they offered models of masculinity for their young readers, centred on physical activity and imperial duty.46 Women were mostly present as objects to be rescued and in the form of metaphors of empire, nature, and the Dominion.47 The border was an ambiguous space in Mountie fiction: a space that needed to be policed, but also a space of connections. This can be seen in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1940 film North West Mounted Police, produced during the Second World War, which focused on the theme of friendship between the United States and Canada through the developing friendship of Gary Cooper’s Texas Ranger, who crosses to Canada in pursuit of a whisky smuggler and gun-runner, and Mountie Sergeant Jim Brett (played by Preston Foster), in the midst of a Métis rebellion instigated in the film by the whisky smuggler.48 As Mountie novels, Bridges’s novels are recognizably Canadian in their setting and characters, yet, despite the centrality of agents of the Canadian state to their plots, they are not explicitly nationalist novels. Bridges’s Mountie novels differ in a number of ways from those of the early twentieth century. They do not centre around differences between American and Canadian policing or governance,49 but focus on women’s employment and agency, and are almost completely absent of Indigenous characters. They are women’s stories, not boys’ adventures. Yet the transnationality that Rifkind finds in earlier Mountie narratives is still an integral part of their stories. In their exploration of the territorial expansion of settlers in the West, they replicate a common discourse of Canadian history that places multiculturalism at the centre of the formation of national identity. The Canadian West of Bridges’s novels is one characterized by the movement of people and goods across national boundaries

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from the United States up to Canada, as well as from East to West and from Europe to North America. Informed by histories of the period, Bridges portrays Calgary not as an isolated outpost, but as a hub of movement. The emphasis on both immigration and women’s employment brings the past of the Canadian West closer to the concerns of today. Central characters who are recent immigrants and visitors arrive in the District of Alberta from England, Ireland, Scotland, the United States, and Eastern Canada, and the wider set of characters includes immigrants from other European regions, such as Ukraine and Germany. Goods, too, move through the city in the form of Christmas carols and music boxes from Austria, oranges from the American South, and carpets from Turkey. The novels make detailed reference to the importance of land in spurring on this movement, and the competition for land to grow wheat and cattle, which are then exported to the United States and England. The Canada presented in the novels is an international one, oriented not only to the United States as a neighbour and trading partner, but also to Western Europe. At the same time, the First Nations peoples, who also have a stake in the land, are mostly unmentioned, in contrast to some older Mountie novels that presented First Nations characters mainly as villains. In The Proposition, for instance, they appear only as absent correctives to their mistaken fictional representations, as Jessica Haven’s English butler Mr Merriweather is enamoured of Westerns written by an Englishman living in Hong Kong and featuring as their hero a man named Cherokee Joe, who is married to a European princess.50 Real life, Mountie Travis Reid replies, is not like fiction, as “there aren’t any Indians in the West named Joe. And Cherokee Indians have never lived in this territory.”51 Yet the dangers within the novels deal with the insecurities of this movement of goods and people. In The Long Journey Home (2003) the antagonists, the Grayveson gang, rustle cattle back and forth across the Canada-US border. At the beginning of the novel, the hero, Logan Sutcliffe, a Mountie veterinarian, returns to town after having been shot in the face by a member of the gang, briefly losing his memory and wandering aimlessly in the Montana territories. The Canada-US border, then, serves as a space of loss and confusion, something that is anxiously permeable. Money in movement is always in danger, as when the Stiller gang targets the Mountie payroll shipment in The Engagement (2004). Knowledge also moves uncertainly across borders, as in The Proposition, in which charlatan Dr Finch claims an unearned medical degree from the University of Glasgow. David, a reporter from New York who settles in Calgary,

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serves as a mischief-maker in a number of books in the series, moving information out of the control of the protagonists. These anxieties of movement centre on the Canada-US border as the closest location of uncertain movement, but they are not restricted to it. Women’s movement across the country, if not across borders, is essential to the creation of many of the romance plots, but it is also portrayed as being an uncertain prospect for women. In The Surgeon (2003), a mailorder bride comes to Calgary all the way from Halifax, only to discover that her exchange of letters with her supposed future husband was all a prank. In The Engagement, the heroine, having completed medical school in Toronto, has her engagement broken by a man who had moved west, and instead moves west herself to marry his brother – who is then shot and blown up when on a train. In The Proposition, the heroine has been seduced by a visiting professor from Oxford, who, unbeknownst to her, is already engaged, and who drowns on his journey back to England, leaving her pregnant and unwed. The heroines’ initial distance from the objects of their affection makes knowledge-gathering unreliable, and it is only once both characters are in the same place that they can truly learn about each other. The West, in this case, offers possibilities of both romance and employment for women, which, partly due to the genre expectations of the novels, are always resolved positively – yet which, in the course of the novels, are not always certain. Bridges’s Mountie novels offer up the possibility of romances set in Canada that “have a reason” for their setting, as requested by the agent discussed earlier, by tying them to the already popular and circulating genre of Mountie narratives. They portray an international Canada, not restricted to the local but a destination for immigrants and visitors. Yet, as in romance writers’ own experiences, the circulation of goods across borders is also a site of unpredictability and uncertainty. conclusion

While Canadian romance writers do set novels in Canada, the nationality of their own writing is an issue of concern for them. As cultural producers working in a small market for a dominant one, they wonder whether their own experiences and locations are of interest to American readers and, especially, to editors. These concerns are shaped by the structuring of the literary field in Canada, in which literary fiction is understood to be marked by Canadian nationality, whereas genre fiction is thought of as “American” in character. No romance writer wants to write romances

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only for Canadians: they want to cross the border, but they are not sure how to. Ethnographic research can show us how cultural production is not only shaped by the economic context, cultural policy, and authors’ individual literary styles, but also by the interactions within the writing community, where writers gather to share information and develop their own theories of how the literary field works and their place within it. The Canadian romance-writing community itself crosses the border between the United States and Canada regularly, and seldom talks about itself in terms of nation, but rather in terms of genre and, occasionally, city. In this sense, romance writing resembles other areas of cultural production in Canada, which organize themselves always in relation to the United States as their nearest consumer and producer. I have not discussed here the writers’ own patterns of reading, but they are another element of the field which shapes understandings of the nationality of genre, as most of the romances sold in Anglophone Canada (as is the case for films and television) are written in either the United States or the United Kingdom. The literary field of romance in Canada, initially formed across the Atlantic, is now a field that is inextricably bound to the Canada-US border. For Canadian romance writers, as for the protagonists in Kate Bridges’s novels, the border is a source of opportunity, but also of the anxiety of the unknown.

n otes 1 Nor was I surprised by the widespread use of romantic metaphors and parodic romance style in the coverage of the sale. 2 See Gillian Roberts’s chapter in this volume for a discussion of this question in the case of film adaptation. See also Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson’s chapter on the Superman Reclamation Project for a discussion of how claiming characters or texts as Canadian can be part of larger political projects. 3 See Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production” and The Rules of Art. 4 Interestingly, although beyond the scope of this chapter, the romance field is not currently associated with Britishness to the same degree as Americanness, despite the influence of British publisher Mills & Boon in the history of its development. 5 The city in question remains pseudonymous in this chapter due to reasons of confidentiality, as do the authors with whom I did research. 6 Boggs, “An Overview of Canada’s Contemporary Book Trade in Light of (Nearly) Four Decades of Policy Interventions,” 25, 26.

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7 In 1986, Marie-Andrée Dubrule wrote that the history of romance publishing in Quebec had yet to be written (Le cas Harlequin, 7), and this appears still to be the case today. Romances, or rather romans d’amour, were published in the mid-twentieth century in Quebec in the form of ­fascicules (pamphlet-like pulp magazines) by publishers like les Editions Police-journal and les Editions Populaires (7). Currently, Canadian French-language publishers such as Editions Libre Expression and Les Editeurs Réunis publish chick-lit (and the occasional romance) by Francophone Canadians. There are also French-language publishers in France, such as Delly, who publish romances (see Diana Holmes for a history of romance literature in France). Since 1978, Harlequin has been a large player in French-language romance publishing in both France and Quebec (Holmes, Romance and Readership in Twentieth-Century France, 119; Dubrule, Le cas Harlequin, 9). The majority of these novels, however, follow Harlequin’s general global publishing policy, in that they are originally written in English for the English market and then translated into French. Harlequin France began an e-book-only French-original imprint in 2013, but there does not appear to be an equivalent for Canadian francophone writers. 8 Romance Writers of America, “Statistics.” 9 These numbers track sales by volume. 10 Romance Writers of America, “About R WA .” 11 Marcus, Ethnography through Thick & Thin, 79; see also Hannerz. 12 See Martin, Flexible Bodies; Sennett, The Corrosion of Character; Ross, Nice Work if You Can Get It. 13 See Charles R. Acland in this volume for a discussion of the centrality of mobility and precarity in the film industry. 14 Grescoe, The Merchants of Venus, 28–58. For instance, francophone Canada does not appear to be a large primary audience for AngloCanadian romance publishing, as translated romances move first through the larger market, France. See Wirten for an ethnographic study of the translation and adaptation of English-language romances in the offices of Harlequin in Sweden. 15 In contrast with the current ambivalence about Canadian-set romances, the letter first written to Mills & Boon from Harlequin requesting reprint rights for romances about doctors and nurses (cited by Grescoe in his history of the company) explicitly mentions the publisher’s interest in author Mary Burchell’s Hospital Corridors, as it “might be particularly suited to Canadian readers if, as I understand, it has a Montreal setting” (The Merchants of Venus, 40).

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16 See Richard Sutherland in this volume for a discussion of similar business strategies in the distribution of music across North America. 17 Grescoe, The Merchants of Venus, 119. 18 This is always open to change. In 2011, Mills & Boon India (owned by Harlequin) was seeking writers from India to submit directly to that office. 19 See Nurse, “Gendering the Artistic Field,” for a discussion of the gendering of the artistic field in Canada, through the lens of Emily Carr’s career. Nurse argues that developments in the semi-autonomy of the field allowed for new possibilities for women as artists. 20 For instance, in a Romance Writers Report article, author Holly Jacobs quotes a director of global editorial at Harlequin saying: “‘romance is a universal language,’ which makes it natural for Harlequin’s books – both their series lines and their single titles – to travel worldwide” (“Books around the World,” 8). 21 African-American romance (there was no equivalent category of “AfricanCanadian romance,” in part because of the commonplace erasure of the black community in Canada, but also because of the genre’s orientation toward American-focused categories, as is discussed later in the chapter) is often talked about as expressing diversity, but with universal storylines and emotions, as seen in this Romance Writers Report interview with Celeste O. Norfleet: “Along with universal teen issues, Kimani TR U novels also explore believable African American characters that live and work in a realistic family or cultural setting” (“Writers on Writing,” 43). 22 Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production,” 312. 23 Ibid. 24 Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 234. 25 Ibid., 124. 26 “The Next Chapter Uncovers Canadian Bodice Rippers.” This situation has changed somewhat, something that people I spoke with at Harlequin attributed to Harlequin’s successful sixtieth-anniversary publicity efforts (e.g., Quill and Quire had an article on Harlequin, as did The Walrus, May 2009). While the nationwide radio program Canada Reads has yet to feature a romance novel (the closest perhaps being Gil Adamson’s The Outlander, not to be confused with Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander), in 2011 C B C ’s online book club visited the Toronto Romance Writers chapter of R W A and featured a “romance novel challenge” (see “C B C Book Club” and Balser, “The Great C B C Book Club Romance Novel Challenge”). 27 Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 186.

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28 For instance, one author told me that she felt that the Globe and Mail always blamed Harlequin’s profitability on “favourable exchange rates,” instead of “giving Harlequin credit for knowing what they’re doing.” 29 See Kit Dobson in this volume for a discussion of the erasure of Canada-US distinctions in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, which itself crosses the borders between literary fiction and science fiction. Atwood, as Dobson mentions, is often mistaken outside of Canada for an American author. 30 In June 2009, a romance author, who came to visit the writing group that had emerged from a local college course on writing romances and who publishes with Harlequin, told us that she gets paid (lower) foreign royalty rates for books sold in Canada. Whether or not this is the case for most authors, the fact that this circulates is part of writers’ understandings of the field’s divisions. 31 See Bourdieu (The Rules of Art, 200) for a brief discussion of the role of state structures in developing national traditions. 32 Quoted in Strange and Loo, “From Hewers of Wood to Producers of Pulp,” 12. 33 Smith, “Soup Cans and Love Slaves,” 262. 34 Ibid., 268. 35 Ibid., 271. 36 Milz, “Canadian Cultural Policy Making at a Time of Neoliberal Globalization,” 87. 37 See also Boggs for a discussion of government policy, nationalism, and the book trade in Canada. This article also includes a brief discussion of Harlequin’s reactions to Canadian cultural policy, in particular Baie Comeau (Boggs, “An Overview of Canada’s Contemporary Book Trade in Light of (Nearly) Four Decades of Policy Interventions,” 28). 38 Ibid., 88. 39 Smith, “Soup Cans and Love Slaves,” 271. Easton and Hewson argue in this volume that former prime minister Stephen Harper shifted cultural funding in Canada from Massey Commission–style public policy and ­funding toward private philanthropy. 40 This statement was made by an agent at a panel on romance publishing held at, and sponsored by, the City Public Library. 41 See Mackey, The House of Difference, 50–70. Importantly, as Mackey argues, this discourse of multiculturalism often sets aside the facts of racism and settler-colonialism within Canada. In the radio interview described above, while she lauds Harlequin for publishing her multiracial

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book, Perrin also describes her experiences of the conservatism of the romance publishing industry. For instance, she describes an unsuccessful effort ten years earlier to pitch an interracial romance to Harlequin, which had replied with concerns over the book’s possible market. 42 For instance, a small number of Harlequins written by British authors in the 1950s and 1960s are set in Canada, such as the previously mentioned Hospital Corridors (1958) by Mary Burchell and The Wolf Man (1982 [1963]) by Sandra Clark. Currently a number of Canadian authors also set romances in Canada: for instance, Kate Bridges’s historical romances, discussed in this chapter, are set in the Canadian West and Michelle Rowen’s paranormal romance series, Immortality Bites (2006), is set in Toronto. A book initially set in Canada, however, does not always remain so; for instance, at one of the talks at the public library I overheard an author telling a friend that her literary agent had asked her to change the setting of her unpublished manuscript from a Canadian city to an American one. She thought the question over and then reset the manuscript in an American city she had recently visited. 43 Similarly, Karen E.H. Skinazi has discussed how Leslie McFarlane, who spent almost twenty years as one of the writers of the all-American Hardy Boys mysteries (writing as Franklin W. Dixon), shifted his settings to Canada when writing hockey stories in the 1930s. McFarlane’s first hockey story in the American magazine Sport Story had “subtle” Canadian content, but Skinazi argues that the following stories were more clearly set in Canada, as McFarlane may have realized that “Canadianness was more acceptable in hockey writing” (“The Mystery of a Canadian Father of Hockey Stories,” 111–12). 44 Rifkind, “When Mounties Were Modern Kitsch,” 125. 45 Dawson, “That Nice Red Coat Goes to My Head Like Champagne,” 123. 46 Ibid., 123–5. 47 Ibid., 125–7. 48 Brégent-Heald, “The Redcoat and the Ranger,” 43. 49 Compare, for instance, with the television program Due South’s portrayal of the Canadian Mountie as particularly polite, gentlemanly, and reluctant to use excessive force, in contrast to his American colleagues. 50 Bridges, The Proposition, 519–20. 51 Ibid., 520. This absence avoids the difficulties of representation presented by the usual role of Indigenous characters in Mountie novels (as either villains or subordinate helpers to the white protagonist) and in historical romances (as the captors in captivity narratives), but it also replicates the erasure of First Nations peoples as actors in the creation of Canadian history.

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b ib liog ra p h y Balser, Erin. “The Great CBC Book Club Romance Novel Challenge.” C B C blog post. 6 January 2011. . B NC Research. The Canadian Book Market: 2009. Toronto: BookNet Canada, 2010. Boggs, Jeff. “An Overview of Canada’s Contemporary Book Trade in Light of (Nearly) Four Decades of Policy Interventions.” Publishing Research Quarterly 26 (2010): 24–45. Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Field of Cultural Production; or, The Economic World Reversed.” Poetics 12 (1983): 311–56. – The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Brégent-Heald, Dominique. “The Redcoat and the Ranger: Screening Bilateral Friendship in Cecil B. DeMille’s North West Mounted Police (1940).” American Review of Canadian Studies 38, no. 1 (2008): 43–61. Bridges, Kate. The Engagement. 2004. Kate Bridges’ Mounties Bundle. Don Mills: Harlequin, 2008. EPU B file. – The Long Journey Home. 2003. Kate Bridges’ Mounties Bundle. Don Mills: Harlequin, 2008. EPU B file. – The Proposition. 2004. Kate Bridges’ Mounties Bundle. Don Mills: Harlequin, 2008. EPU B file. – The Surgeon. 2003. Kate Bridges’ Mounties Bundle. Don Mills: Harlequin, 2008. E PU B file. “C B C Book Club: Toronto Romance Writers Workshop.” C B C , podcast audio, 13 January 2011. . Dawson, Michael. “‘That Nice Red Coat Goes to My Head Like Champagne’: Gender, Anti-modernism and the Mountie Image, 1880–1960.” Journal of Canadian Studies 32, no. 3 (1997): 119–39. Dubrule, Marie-Andrée. Le cas Harlequin: La mise à l’épreuve du sujet femme; une analyse des procédés narratifs et littéraires. Les cahiers de recherche du GR E MF (Groupe de recherche multidisciplinaire féministe). Quebec: Université Laval, 1986. Grescoe, Paul. The Merchants of Venus: Inside Harlequin and the Empire of Romance. Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 1996. Hannerz, Ulf. “Being There … and There … and There! Reflections on MultiSite Ethnography.” Ethnography 4, no. 2 (2003): 201–16. Ho, Karen. “Situating Global Capitalisms: A View from Wall Street.” In The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader, 2nd ed., edited by

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Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, 137–64. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. Holmes, Diana. Romance and Readership in Twentieth-Century France: Love Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Jacobs, Holly. “Books around the World.” Romance Writers Report 29, no. 5 (May 2009): 8–12. Mackey, Eva. The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Marcus, George E. Ethnography through Thick & Thin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Martin, Emily. Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS . Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Milz, Sabine. “Canadian Cultural Policy-Making at a Time of Neoliberal Globalization.” ESC : English Studies in Canada 33, nos. 1–2 (2007): 85–107. “The Next Chapter Uncovers Canadian Bodice Rippers.” The Next Chapter. C B C Radio, 14 February 2009. Norfleet, Celeste O. “Writers on Writing: Featuring Celeste O. Norfleet.” By Eileen Putman. Romance Writers Report 28, no. 6 (June 2008): 42–5. Nurse, Andrew. “Gendering the Artistic Field.” Journal of Canadian Art History 34, no. 2 (2013): 24–47. Q: The Podcast. CBC. 21 December 2007. Podcast. Rifkind, Candida. “When Mounties Were Modern Kitsch: The Serial Seductions of Renfrew of the Mounted.” ESC : English Studies in Canada 37, nos. 3–4 (2011): 123–46. Rofel, Lisa. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalisms, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham, N C: Duke University Press, 2007. Romance Writers of America. “About RW A.” Accessed 2 September 2011.

– “Statistics.” Accessed 8 August 2011. Ross, Andrew. Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times. New York: N YU Press, 2009. Sennett, Richard. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. Skinazi, Karen E.H. “The Mystery of a Canadian Father of Hockey Stories: Leslie McFarlane’s Break Away from the Hardy Boys.” In Canada’s Game: Hockey and Identity, edited by Andrew C. Holman, 166–210. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.

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Smith, Michelle Denise. “Soup Cans and Love Slaves: National Politics and Cultural Authority in the Editing and Authorship of Canadian Pulp Magazines.” Book History 9 (2006): 261–89. Strange, Carolyn, and Tina Loo. “From Hewers of Wood to Producers of Pulp: True Crime in Canadian Pulp Magazines of the 1940s.” Journal of Canadian Studies 37, no. 2 (2002): 11–32. Tsing, Anna. “The Global Situation.” In The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, 66–98. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. Wirten, Eva Hemmungs. Global Infatuation: Explorations in Transnational Publishing and Texts, the Case of Harlequin Enterprises and Sweden. Uppsala: Section for Sociology of Literature at the Department of Literature, Uppsala University, 1998.

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pa r t t h r e e

Cross-Border Reading

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8 Cross-Border Film Adaptation and Life of Pi Gillian Roberts The cross-border film adaptation of Yann Martel’s Man Booker Prize– winning novel Life of Pi (2001) illustrates a number of economic and cultural issues involved in crossing the 49th parallel, as this Canadian text was translated into an ostensibly Hollywood production. A complicated and curious phenomenon, cross-border film adaptation is shaped by the close and complex relationship between Canada and Hollywood. This relationship is configured by such phenomena as runaway productions shot in Canada and the number of Canadians working in front of and behind the camera, passing as Americans and operating within the Hollywood system. Cross-border film adaptation encompasses a diverse range of texts and cross-border movements. Sometimes, such adaptations fall into a framework that might be entirely anticipated from a Canadian nationalist position: for example, Rachel, Rachel (1968), directed by Paul Newman, adapted from Margaret Laurence’s novel A Jest of God (1966), is perhaps emblematic of Canada’s economy more generally. Both Charles Acland and Michael Stamm address Canada’s history as a “staples” economy in their chapters in this volume, with Stamm’s study particularly demonstrating the cross-border flow of actual material – paper made from the wood of Canadian trees – inherent in the Chicago Tribune’s production and its sometimes-controversial Canadian consumption. In the case of cross-border film adaptation, and especially the example of Rachel, Rachel, one might argue that Canadian resources or “raw material” have been extracted, as it were, for the American film industry, complete with the narrative’s setting transplanted from Canada to the United States, in an example of “culture as the new staple destined for export markets.”1

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Years later, with the 1996 release of The English Patient adaptation, Maclean’s critic Brian D. Johnson asked, “Why can’t Canada make its own hit movies?” though he attempted to soothe the anxieties of Canadian film audiences by arguing we could, indeed, take some “modest pride” in the success of the film – more modest, perhaps, than that taken by Canadian readers when Michael Ondaatje’s novel won the Booker Prize (the first for a Canadian) in 1992.2 Despite the somewhat awkward inclusion of Canadianness in Minghella’s film, however (such as the French actor Juliette Binoche playing Hana, thereby prompting Minghella to make the character’s hometown Montreal, rather than Toronto, as it is in the novel – but with Binoche speaking with a French, rather than a Québécois, accent), the film is an interesting case study in the attempt to determine the nationality of a film. Can it be considered a Hollywood production? Much was made in the press and at awards ceremonies of its international cast and crew, with journalists in British newspapers debating whether, in fact, it might be considered a British film, given the nationality of its director as well as several actors, just to name some of the more prominent elements. As Greg Elmer and Mike Gasher note, Hollywood, a name that has long stood for both a place and an industry, no longer works as such a simple signifier. Hollywood still denotes a place in Southern California, a community within the city of Los Angeles, even the site of the annual Academy Awards pageant, but it has become an increasingly inappropriate label for a film and television industry that comprises a global network of locations, technical services, acting pools, even remote affiliate studio facilities.3 However “Hollywoodized” the film adaptation may have appeared in the case of The English Patient, the actual national identity of the film is uncertain at best. Meanwhile, in the same year that The English Patient did so well at the Academy Awards, cross-border adaptation also moved in the other direction, with the Canadian adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night (David Wellington, 1996), a major success at Canada’s Genie Awards, where winners involved with the film took pleasure in addressing the seemingly unexpected adaptation movement north. The following year, Atom Egoyan’s adaptation of Russell Banks’s The Sweet Hereafter performed a similar cross-border movement (with similar success at the Genies, as well as two Oscar nominations), even relocating the setting, rather than just the location, of filming to Canada, and thereby

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reversing the cross-border movement of Rachel, Rachel. Deepa Mehta’s film Earth (1998) can also be considered a cross-border adaptation. Adapting Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Cracking India (originally titled Ice Candy Man in the United Kingdom), Earth, like its source text, is a product of the Indian diaspora but focused on events in India, namely the lead-up to and fallout of Partition in 1947. Sidhwa’s Indo-American and Mehta’s Indo-Canadian identities present a cross-border relationship between their respective texts that incorporates the 49th parallel into larger diasporic cultural flows. Ang Lee, director of the film version of Life of Pi (2012), is no stranger to cross-border adaptation. His 2005 film Brokeback Mountain, adapted from Annie Proulx’s short story of the same title, was largely filmed in Alberta, an example of what Elmer and Gasher refer to as “Canadian landscapes [acting] as American ‘body doubles’”;4 in particular, the iconic “Brokeback Mountain” itself is played by what Albertans recognize as Moose Mountain. This film presents another means by which Canada might be said to provide the “raw material” for US film production, perhaps especially potent in this case because the mountain itself is so iconic, both in the story – where the men never actually return – and in the film, in which they do return to it periodically, the metonymy of the mountain standing in for Ennis and Jack’s relationship becoming further emphasized as a result. The story of a love affair between two Wyoming cowboys, the film was released the year that the country in which it was shot legalized same-sex marriage, presenting a clash of sorts between production, representation, and circulation. And Lee himself, as a Taiwanese-born director who has lived for several decades in the United States, complicates the assignation of his films to the category of American cinema, given that some of his films have been funded by and shot in Taiwan. There are, in fact, multiple borders to consider when examining Life of Pi as a cross-border film adaptation. A product of 20th Century Fox, the film might be considered American, given its financial backing. But the film was shot in India (the location of much of the novel’s – and some of the film’s – action toward the beginning of the narrative), Taiwan, New Zealand, and, in accordance with the novel’s external frame, in Canada. This chapter argues that adaptation theory has yet to account adequately for shifts in national context as part of the film adaptation process. Much of adaptation theory has focused on the critique of “fidelity criticism,” in other words, the tendency to produce value judgments on films adapted from literary works, with faithfulness to the original operating as the most important criterion. As Brian McFarlane declares,

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“No critical line is in greater need of re-examination – and devaluation.”5 Part of the effort to contest the pervasiveness of fidelity criticism (found particularly, although not exclusively, among literary scholars) has been to construct different categories of film adaptation along a spectrum defined by the apparent intentions of the filmmaker in relation to the original. These categories (which tend to appear in threes) include Dudley Andrew’s “borrowing, intersection, and fidelity of transformation” and Geoffrey Wagner’s “transposition,” “commentary,” and “analogy.”6 Other attempts to defuse the power of fidelity in adaptation discourse incorporate such views as “it is usually at the very point of infidelity that the most creative acts of adaptation … take place” and the countering of fidelity with intertextuality.7 As useful as such approaches may be for many aspects of film adaptation, none of these frameworks can adequately account for questions of location in production and post-production, particularly on the scale of Life of Pi. Further, this process is additionally complicated across the Canada-US border, not only because of the often fraught questions in Canada surrounding national culture in genre and national cinema in particular, especially in relation to the United States, but also because of Canada’s implication in so-called “Hollywood” filmmaking, both in terms of location shooting and, as Acland’s chapter so powerfully reminds us, in post-production. The use of Life of Pi’s adaptation as a case study requires attention to multiply embordered national production contexts in the midst of global cultural flows, given the scale of both the film’s production and the circulation of the source novel – that Canadian “raw material” that preceded it. In terms of adaptation theory, a “borrowing” or an “analogy” adaptation might position “the source merely as raw material, as simply the occasion for an original work.”8 While the film of Life of Pi is closer in narrative terms to Martel’s novel than either “borrowing” or “analogy” indicates, we must attend to the implications of considering the source text as raw material, particularly in the context of an adaptation that crosses an international border, especially one that has historically been positioned as a border between staples and manufacturing and that has been subject to free-trade agreements since 1989. As Linda Hutcheon argues, “An adaptation, like the work it adapts, is always framed in a context – a time and a place, a society and a culture; it does not exist in a vacuum.”9 In particular, she observes, “major shifts in a story’s context – that is, for example, in a national setting or time period – can change radically how the transposed story is interpreted, ideologically and literally.”10 While adaptations that demonstrate such

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radical shifts in national setting from literary to cinematic text make changes in context particularly apparent, especially when the changes incorporate whole continents – for example, in the adaptation of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew into a twentieth-century American high-school setting in Ten Things I Hate About You (Gil Junger, 1999), or the American Raymond Carver’s short story “So Much Water So Close To Home” being adapted into the Australian film Jindabyne (Ray Lawrence, 2006) – we need to find ways of discussing the role of production contexts as part of the analysis of film adaptation. Further, in the case of film adaptations that cross the Canada-US border, whether in terms of setting, production, or post-production, we need to grapple with how “familiar estrangement,” to use Acland’s term, inflects responses to and claims made of cross-border adaptation processes and products. This chapter argues that we must address issues of cultural power within inter / national adaptation. It focuses on Life of Pi in relation to the adaptation of national representation, the reconfiguration of cross-border film adaptation through production and post-production practices, and their onscreen and off-screen implications. A novel that mostly takes place in a lifeboat on the Pacific Ocean, Martel’s Life of Pi, one British reviewer claimed, “could almost be set nowhere.”11 And yet, as I have argued elsewhere, the novel is explicitly framed in terms of nation and, in particular, in terms of cultural work being tied to the duty of the citizen.12 Both the novel and the film are structured through a framing device: an unnamed Canadian writer encounters a man in India who implores him to track down Pi Patel in order to hear a story that will “make [him] believe in God.”13 The novel constitutes the writer’s version of Pi’s narrative, whereas the film stages the meeting between Pi and the writer, who hears the story for the first time and will go on to write his novel, ostensibly the one that Martel’s readers have already read. The novel begins with semi-fictional acknowledgments that not only describe how the unnamed writer in the novel comes to meet Pi and write his story, but that also construct the novel as the work of a Canadian citizen: thanking “that great institution, the Canada Council for the Arts,” as Canadian writers who have received their support do, Martel fuses with the unnamed writer as he declares, “If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams” (x, xi). Unsurprisingly, the film does not replicate this part of the acknowledgments; the film does not present the audience with the premise of Canadianness, not just as an identity but as an actively produced and

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supported national culture (again, not surprisingly, given the complications of the film’s national affiliations). When Martel was nominated for the Man Booker Prize alongside fellow Canadians Rohinton Mistry and Carol Shields, much was made of their Canadianness in the British press, and much was done (explicitly and implicitly) to detract from it, with one Guardian article describing the trio of writers as “half of the shortlist … made up of Canadians, or at least writers who have Canadian passports.”14 Canadian journalists were keen and quick to contradict this view of Canadian writers, defending the Canadian identities of the three writers.15 In terms of Life of Pi, the British contestation of Martel’s Canadianness (given his birth in Spain while his parents were graduate students, followed by his peripatetic upbringing during his father’s career as a diplomat) prompted an anxiety within Canada about Martel’s celebrated novel, which – even if its protagonist is en route to Winnipeg when the ship transporting him, his family, and their zoo animals sinks – is largely set outside Canada. In the wake of the Guardian article, Martel assured interviewers, “Of course I am Canadian,” and that his novel, too, is “very Canadian.”16 Such assertions bear out Zalfa Feghali’s discussion in this volume of Martel’s explicit self-positioning as a Canadian writer, especially in his one-sided correspondence with former prime minister Stephen Harper, and his fusing of citizenship and artistic production. While I take the materialist view that any text produced by a Canadian constitutes a Canadian text, regardless of its setting, I also argue that the text of Life of Pi does provide a range of responses to Canada, both explicit and implicit. Martel’s Life of Pi is largely celebratory in its representation of Canada, the location of the happy ending of Pi’s traumatic story. Pi expresses an affection for Canada in his characterization of the nation as “a great country much too cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos” (204). On the one hand, his final experience of migration seems to be one of compassionate hospitality. Following his arrival in Mexico after 227 days in the lifeboat, Pi declares himself to be overwhelmed by the generosity of those who rescued me. Poor people gave me clothes and food. Doctors and nurses cared for me as if I were a premature baby. Mexican and Canadian officials opened all doors for me so that from the beach in Mexico to the home of my foster mother to the classrooms of the University of Toronto, there was only one long, easy corridor I had to walk down. To all these people I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks. (317–18)

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On the other hand, Pi tempers this “long easy corridor” of migration elsewhere in his narrative, as in his recounting of his experience in an Indian restaurant in Canada, where, having used his fingers to eat, he is the target of a waiter’s criticism: “‘Fresh off the boat, are you?’ I blanched. My fingers … became dirty under his gaze. They froze like criminals caught in the act. I didn’t dare lick them. I wiped them guiltily on my napkin. He had no idea how deeply those words wounded me. They were like nails being driven into my flesh” (7–8). Pi misses out on the Governor General’s Academic Medal at the University of Toronto thanks to “a beef-eating pink boy with a neck like a tree trunk and a temperament of unbearable good cheer” (5–6), suggesting a potentially racist preference for the recipient. Further, in his commentary on why people submit themselves to the experience of migration, Pi frames this experience as traumatic: “Why climb this Mount Everest of formalities that makes you feel like a beggar? Why enter this jungle of foreignness where everything is new, strange and difficult? The answer is the same the world over: people move in the hope of a better life” (86). Pi may have found his better life in Canada, but he nevertheless describes this ostensibly happy ending here in terms of debasement and difficulty, suggesting the “long easy corridor” of which Pi speaks at the end of his narrative may be somewhat revisionist. In more implicit terms, Pi’s multiple religious faiths (adhering simultaneously to Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam) and the implications of the second story of the lifeboat he tells to the Japanese officials intersect with questions of multiculturalism. The radical simultaneity of Pi’s religious faith presents an inventive possibility for multiculturalism, whereas the second story of the lifeboat, involving gruesomely violent acts between the French cook, the Taiwanese sailor, and Pi and his mother represents a horrifyingly failed multiculturalism. Although the possibilities and limitations of multiculturalism are certainly not exclusively Canadian concerns, of course, the Canadian nation-state has explicitly figured itself in multicultural terms since 1971; thus, even in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Pi’s narrative resonates with key questions of Canadian culture. Martel’s Life of Pi, therefore, addresses the Canadian nation both explicitly and implicitly. The explicit references occur largely discursively, rather than dramatically, likely making them easier to omit in the process of film adaptation, as they are not particularly related to plot or attached to key dialogue. Nevertheless, the novel’s framing through Canadianness impacts upon how we might read Life of Pi; therefore, the extent to which Canada is present and the nature of this presence in the film adaptation require scrutiny.

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Like The English Patient, the Life of Pi film adaptation delivers a switch in a protagonist’s location from Toronto to Montreal. In the film, the unnamed writer, having encountered Pi’s “mamaji,” Francis Adirubasamy, in Pondicherry, cites Francis’s ostensibly tidy connection between Pi’s origins and his ultimate destination: “So, a Canadian who’s come to French India in search of a story. Well, my friend, I know an Indian in French Canada with the most incredible story to tell. It must be fate that the two of you should meet.” The inversions of a Canadian in India, an Indian in Canada, connected through legacies of French imperialism, appear in the film as both neat and destined. At the same time, the film denies Pi the status of Canadian here, contradicting the novel’s presentation of Pi’s self-identification, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as “IndoCanadian” (183) already. The film’s change from Toronto to Montreal also dilutes Martel’s interest in radical simultaneity. In the novel, Pi’s foster mother is Québécoise, a Toronto resident with a “French-speaking mind” (54), echoing many of Martel’s other characters in other texts who experience displacement and apparent disjunctions between their identities and their locations. The film implicitly “returns” Pi’s foster mother (even if she never appears or is mentioned in the film) to a location where French Canadianness constitutes a majority identity. At the same time, the film includes references to French in the parts of the narrative set in India that do not appear in the Québécois Martel’s novel. As a child and teenager, Pi is periodically shot reading a book in French (e.g., L’Ile mysterieuse, the French original of Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, suggestive for his later encounter with the carnivorous island in the Pacific, and Camus’s L’Etranger). We also witness Pi announcing his new name to his class in French. Pi indicates French as a pedagogical priority when, following the lesson about animals’ capacity for violence, in which Richard Parker kills a tethered goat through the bars of an enclosure, Pi narrates that he has become dissatisfied with life, and that school is “nothing but facts, fractions, and French.” Pi’s parents also speak to the cook aboard the Tsimtsum in French. The visible and audible references to the French language not only emphasize the history of French imperialism in India, then, but they also suggest that, in Montreal, Pi has found a logical home, regardless of his original destination of Winnipeg.17 Further, the embedding of French into the film’s narrative, even during its Indian and Pacific ocean settings, implicitly acknowledges its Québécois location of production and post-production. In national, rather than provincial, cross-border terms, Canada is, at least, present in the film, which retains Canada as the destination for the

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Patels’ migration and includes the present-day scenes between Pi and the unnamed writer in Montreal. Regarding the question of this film’s national identity, the United States (to which the film ostensibly “belongs”) is completely absent from the screen. If the novel was considered by some to have been “set nowhere,” perhaps the fact that the film was largely shot in a water tank on blue screen accentuates the adaptation’s “infrastructural elsewhere” (in Acland’s terms), the water tank standing in for the Pacific Ocean of the narrative prior to the addition of visual effects. This water tank “elsewhere” inhabits its own geography, however: as Lee highlighted in his acceptance speech for the Best Director Oscar, most of the film was shot in Taiwan. Regardless of what we do or do not recognize as viewers at the surface level of the text, therefore, the materiality of production introduces more international borders than simply the 49th parallel, and emphasizes the Taiwanese-American director’s multiple positionings and cultural ties. If consideration of Life of Pi as a cross-border film adaptation expands the geography of borders beyond North America, it also interpolates additional borders through the shift in setting from Toronto to Montreal and through the economics of film production and post-production. Life of Pi is a cross-border adaptation in relation to the provincial border between Ontario and Quebec, the province from which Martel’s family hails, but where he himself (now resident in Saskatoon) has lived for only a small proportion of his life. In this sense, the film of Life of Pi might also be said to return Martel (along with Pi’s foster mother) to his “native” province; this “return” has been prefigured in much press coverage about Martel’s winning the Man Booker Prize for Life of Pi that was devoted to explaining why Martel writes in English rather than French, as a means of maintaining his connection to Québécois culture.18 But materially speaking, the tax credits offered by the Quebec government feature prominently in this reconfiguration of Life of Pi in its cinematic version. Could Life of Pi, then, be considered a Canadian, or indeed, a Québécois film? Newspaper features demonstrate a range of ways in which Life of Pi has been incorporated into, or positioned against, Canadian and Québécois cinema. One journalist includes Life of Pi in a list of “Canuckfuelled Hollywood films,” justifying the film’s inclusion through its “Canadian connections [that] are deep behind the scenes,” as well as Martel’s novel as source text, Mychael Danna’s film score, the Montreal setting, and the initial destination of Pi’s family (i.e., Winnipeg).19 This list implicitly attempts to recuperate the Canadianness of Hollywood films, perhaps positing a sort of Canada South industry, and features The

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English Patient as well as Austin Powers, Juno, and Ghostbusters, among others. The Canadian “fuelling” of such films mimics the language of the staples economy and resource extraction, particularly given the prominence of the tar sands in twenty-first-century configurations of the national economy. And yet, the reasons given behind Life of Pi’s inclusion on the list, “deep behind the scenes,” exclude some of the “local labour” that is “deep in the image” of the film, as Acland observes, through the effacing of the V F X work done in both Montreal and Vancouver. Conversely, Brendan Kelly in the Montreal Gazette upholds Life of Pi as a film that Québécois cinema is not currently producing but should be: “these sorts of films [are what] Quebec directors need to make”; namely, “accessible auteur films.”20 Greater claims to Life of Pi, perhaps, are made in industrial contexts, not through the kind of “culture of craft” that Acland proposes might be developed to acknowledge adequately and appropriately the below-theline labour that increasingly constitutes so much of the filmmaking process, but simply through a posited passive-but-friendly accommodation. Emerge Film Solutions, for instance, uses Life of Pi among other films (such as Catch Me if You Can, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and The Aviator) to bring film production to Quebec. While the website specifies the tax incentives offered by the Quebec government, Quebec is also, tellingly, credited by the company with “host[ing]” ostensibly Hollywood productions.21 On the one hand, Quebec, in this framework, provides the opportunity for the films to be made (or partly made) in a cross-border hospitality that fits with official constructions of Canada-US cross-border relations. On the other hand, read differently, Hollywood appears to be parasitical, feeding off the host (Quebec, in this instance) for its own gain. This notion of the parasitical intersects with conservative critiques of film adaptation of literary texts in which “[a]daptations are seen as parasitical on literature; they burrow into the body of the source text and steal its vitality.”22 Theorists of adaptation tend to resist this analogy, unsurprisingly. Hutcheon, for instance, asserts, “An adaptation is not vampiric: it does not draw the life-blood from its source and leave it dying or dead, nor is it paler than the adapted work. It may, on the contrary, keep that prior work alive, giving it an afterlife it would never have had otherwise.”23 With only eleven years between Life of Pi’s publication and the release of Lee’s film, the adaptation can hardly be said to have rescued Martel’s enormously successful novel from obscurity; however, Life of Pi’s remarkable afterlife owes much to its Man Booker success, the adaptation, and the celebration of the adaptation through the Academy Awards.

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This simultaneous reading of cross-border production and film adaptation as parasitical would certainly fit into a Canadian nationalist view of the cross-border dynamics at work here. And yet, as Life of Pi’s production has demonstrated, cross-border economics in film production are complicated. Martel’s novel, describing the storm that sinks the Tsimtsum, asserts: “Nature can put on a thrilling show. The stage is vast, the lighting is dramatic, the extras are innumerable, and the budget for special effects is absolutely unlimited. What I had before me was a spectacle of wind and water, an earthquake of the senses, that even Hollywood couldn’t orchestrate” (113). Translated from the page to cinema, of course, this scene – and countless others in the effects-laden adaptation – is indeed subject to budgetary concerns, and implicated in the deterritorializing of what “Hollywood” actually signifies. As Acland discusses, Rhythm & Hues, one of the visual effects studios that worked on the film of Life of Pi, accepted the Oscar for best visual effects – alongside the Montreal unit of Moving Picture Company – just eleven days after the company declared bankruptcy. The documentary Life after Pi (Scott Leberecht, 2014) makes clear that the visual effects industry has been colossally undermined through such elements as the fixed-bidding scheme. Further, tax incentives offered outside the United States (as in Quebec, for instance) have some cross-border implications for labour and the ability of the employees of visual effects companies to find permanent work in one place. When Martel won the Man Booker Prize for Life of Pi in 2002, he declared Canada “the greatest hotel on earth,”24 seemingly a celebration of the country as a cosmopolitan meeting place for the world’s cultures, chiming with promotional versions of Canada’s official multicultural policy; responses to Martel, however, bemoaned the hotel metaphor, expressing anxieties about the nation-as-hotel’s ability to command commitment from its citizens.25 In Life after Pi, one Rhythm & Hues employee adopts the identity of a “Pixel Gypsy,” whose employer is “chasing which government’s gonna give the greatest handout back to the studios. I’ve taken to just living in hotels the past few years.” In the Life after Pi narrative, Canada’s place in the VFX economy condemns Rhythm & Hues’s American employees to transitory lives as “nomads,” where a permanent home is beyond reach, exemplified by the children of VFX workers holding signs bearing such slogans as, “Mommy, why do we have to move to Vancouver?” The V FX industry as it currently operates across nation-state borders is subject to far more uncertainty than the branch-plant economics of the music industry as discussed by Richard Sutherland in this volume. Yet, as Acland emphasizes, the counter-narrative presented by Life after Pi is

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partial in its discussion of labour, mainly through its effacement of Rhythm & Hues’s Canadian employees, leaving the documentary to suggest that the company – and indeed, the V F X industry as a whole – has responsibilities only to its American workers, wedging the 49th parallel between different nation-states’ members of the VF X workforce. Thus, aspects of the film’s afterlife, including the V F X protests at the Oscar ceremony, the truncation of Rhythm & Hues employee Bill Westenhofer’s acceptance speech once he began to address the company’s bankruptcy on air, and Life after Pi, position the players in a parasitic or vampiric relationship differently, with, as Acland points out, subsidy-offering countries such as Canada appearing as “vulture nations.” But other narratives bound up in Life of Pi reorient once more what might be identified as parasitical: to what extent, for instance, might we consider Martel’s novel to be using India as “raw material”? Apart from the Pondicherry setting in the first section of the narrative, in fact, both novel and film address the positioning of India within the economy of cultural production. The unnamed narrator of Martel’s novel – referred by critics as the “author-narrator” or the “Martel-like narrator”26 – begins the Author’s Note by describing a failed attempt to write a novel with a Portuguese setting in 1939: “I flew to Bombay. This is not so illogical if you realize three things: that a stint in India will beat the restlessness out of any living creature; that a little money can go a long way there; and that a novel set in Portugal in 1939 may have very little to do with Portugal in 1939” (v). The narrator leaves open the possibility that this (ultimately discarded) novel, ostensibly Portuguese in its subject, might have more to do with India or, at least, that the setting is somehow irrelevant. What is relevant for the purposes of cultural production, however, is the fact “that a little money can go a long way” in India. In the film adaptation, the unnamed writer (played by Rafe Spall) articulates some of this information in conversation with the adult Pi (Irrfan Khan) in Montreal, disclosing that he met Pi’s honorary uncle, Francis, while trying to write his novel in India. When Pi assumes that the writer’s novel was about India, the writer corrects him with the statement, “It’s cheaper living in India.” Spall speaks this line somewhat sheepishly, as though the writer is embarrassed for having taken financial advantage of India without attempting to represent it in his novel (but presumably he will redress this failing when he writes Pi’s story). Sitting in Montreal as he utters this statement, the writer draws attention to the materiality of cultural production, explicitly in relation to his own (fictional) work, and implicitly in relation to the film itself, which, given the positioning of Canada in

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general and Quebec in particular in American protests surrounding the V FX industry, perhaps unwittingly features as a kind of meta-apology. In cross-border provincial terms as well, the shift in the adult Pi’s home from Toronto to Montreal may also be implicitly addressed and excused in this line of dialogue that acknowledges cultural production as cheaper in some locations than others. Canadian cities are no strangers to acting the parts of other (especially American) cities; the correlation between the filming location and setting in the film, therefore, constitutes somewhat of a rarity for a non-Canadian film. Martel would eventually publish a novel partly set in Portugal in 1939, The High Mountains of Portugal (2016). Following the success of Life of Pi, however, a controversy erupted involving another novel, written in Portuguese, on which Martel’s story draws, possibly furnishing another example of parasitic cross-border cultural relations. The plagiarism scandal surrounding Life of Pi even more explicitly raises this possibility of Canadian culture operating as a parasite in a hemispheric context, through the accusation that Martel plagiarized Brazilian novelist Moacyr Scliar’s novel Max and the Cats (1981), a very different kind of inter-American cultural exploitation from the dynamic across the 49th parallel that Canadian nationalists would recognize.27 Scliar’s short novel, first published in Portuguese in 1981, tells the story of Max, a Berliner whose father is a furrier with a shop named The Bengal Tiger, featuring a stuffed tiger on the wall. Following a sexual liaison with Frida, a shop employee, Max has to flee Germany in order to escape the Nazis, to whom Frida’s husband has denounced Max. Embarking on a ship from Hamburg bound for Brazil, Max soon finds himself a castaway in a dinghy, the ship having been sabotaged, with a jaguar for company. Max arrives unscathed in Porto Alegre twenty pages later, and the rest of the novel’s action takes place in Brazil, focusing on Max’s suspicions about a neighbour’s Nazi affiliations. The plagiarism controversy – which died down relatively quickly – was contextualized in the Canadian media through economic tensions, “political rows[,] and diplomatic wrangles” between Canada and Brazil, stemming from disputes over corned beef, aircraft companies, and a high-profile kidnapping of a Brazilian businessman by a group that included two Canadians.28 Ultimately, the dispute surrounding Life of Pi did not escalate into a lawsuit. Martel’s novel actually includes a reference to Scliar in the Author’s Note – and it did so even prior to the plagiarism controversy – where Martel and / or the unnamed narrator declares that he owes the novel’s “spark of life” to the Brazilian writer, as though the novel of Life

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of Pi is itself a kind of adaptation. The intertextual relationship between Life of Pi and Max and the Cats is clear, therefore, and even signalled within Martel’s text itself (whereas, in contrast, intertextual gestures to Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym are not highlighted as such).29 Tellingly, post–plagiarism controversy, a new edition of Max and the Cats was published, which emblazons the phrase “the spark of life” on the back cover, recruiting Martel and his success for the purposes of marketing the earlier Brazilian text, presumably on the expectation that Martel’s acknowledgment – now read as an endorsement – would extend the afterlife of Max and the Cats and generate further profits, a reversal of the parasitic relationship between the two novels. Thus, both Life of Pi’s own afterlife, in the form of the film adaptation, and the novel’s most visible antecedent demonstrate a plethora of cross-border cultural flows. Martel’s novel and its adaptation illustrate a contemporary cultural production economy at work that requires us to consider multiple boundaries, in multiple ways, as we attempt to trace the power relations of nation and culture back and forth across borders. Life of Pi is a critical case study, not only for cross-border film adaptation, but also for the current industrial model of filmmaking in particular. In cross-border terms, as Acland notes, “every so-called ‘runaway’ production, seeking havens of financial advantage for media work, is also a ‘return-from-away’ of employment prospects for the talent in most countries that have lived under the cultural and economic shadow of the US for the better part of the last century.” Coupling these “runaway”/“return-from-away” movements with film adaptation is particularly important both to Life of Pi as a case study and to cross-border adaptation more generally, given the cultural power accorded Canada through the international recognition (through the Man Booker Prize) and market value (through the concomitant sales) of Martel’s novel, the text’s symbolic and economic capitals fusing into a national capital for Canadian culture. After all, as indicated by the journalism surrounding Martel’s Man Booker win, a good deal of Canadian media energy was spent defending, claiming, promoting, and correcting Martel’s Canadianness in the face of both international disregard for his identity and the worrying (for some) implications of Martel’s characterization of Canada as a hotel. Given the expanded scale of cinematic production, consumption, and circulation, the stakes of Canada’s claim to Ang Lee’s film might be proportionally higher. Yet the proliferation of sites of film production and post-production, and Canada’s position within this economy, complicates

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our sense of the players in this cross-border exchange of what appears, superficially, to be highbrow literary production for big-budget, VFX-laden Hollywood product. Such a dichotomy across the 49th parallel would seem to confirm the fears of the Massey Commission more than half a century ago, as addressed by the chapters of Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson and of Jessica Taylor in this volume. But for Montreal-based employees of the British-owned Moving Picture Company, responsible for the Tsimtsum’s sinking sequence of Life of Pi, and for the crew members who worked on the live action scenes, both shot and set in Montreal in the film’s external frame, we need to think through more carefully the implications of their “service provider” work on the adaptation of a novel by the Québécois Yann Martel. For the future of film adaptation studies, we need to consider how a “culture of craft” might alter the terms of how we think about the transition from text to screen, including the contexts of production and post-production that lie between these two sites.

N otes 1 Dowler, “Early Innis and the Post-Massey Era in Canadian Culture,” 350. 2 Johnson, “The Canadian Patient,” 42. 3 Elmer and Gasher, “Introduction,” 1. 4 Ibid., 9. 5 McFarlane, Novel to Film, 8. 6 Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, 98; Wagner, The Novel and the Cinema, 222, 223, 226. 7 Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 20; see McFarlane, Novel to Film, 10, and Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 8. 8 Klein, “Introduction,” 10. 9 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 142. 10 Ibid., 28. 11 Payne, “The Weird Bunch,” 12. 12 Roberts, Prizing Literature, 195. 13 Martel, Life of Pi, viii. All further references for this text will appear in parentheses. 14 Gibbons, “Booker Fatwa on Pompous Fiction,” 13. 15 See “Canadians Write the Book on Excellence” and Wallace, “Critics Carp at ‘Canadianness’ of Booker Nominees.” 16 Quoted in Higgins, “Montreal Author Wins Booker Prize,” A3. 17 This is not to efface the significance of Winnipeg’s francophone communities, but rather to suggest that the film prepares Pi – as well as the audience

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– for his ultimate destination, a city that, despite its sizeable anglophone community, is readily identified with the French language both within and outside Canada. 18 See Bégin, Guy, and Lessard. 19 “Canuck-Fuelled Hollywood Films to Get You in the Canada Day Spirit.” 20 Kelly, “Is There a Silver Lining to the Quebec Film Crisis?” 21 Emerge Film Solutions, “Canada – Quebec.” 22 Stam, “Introduction,” 7. 23 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 176. 24 Quoted in Higgins, “Montreal Author Wins Booker Prize,” A3. 25 See “Canada’s Winning Words,” and Henighan, “Literature Survives through Its Variety,” 138. 26 Cole, “Believing in Tigers,” 23; Stratton, “Hollow at the Core,” 5. 27 Martel claimed in an essay written for the Powell’s Books website that he had read a review of Scliar’s novel by John Updike in The New York Times. Intrigued by the description of a novel that Updike seemed to have found “forgettable,” Martel “didn’t really want to read the book. Why put up with the gall? Why put up with a brilliant premise ruined by a lesser writer. Worse, what if Updike had been wrong? What if not only the premise but also its rendition were perfect?” (“How I Wrote Life of Pi”). It later transpired that Updike never reviewed Max and the Cats, and that The New York Times never printed a review of the novel at all. Later, in a Q&A session with readers on The Guardian’s website, Martel stated, “Clearly I got some of my facts wrong” (“May Richard Be Always at Your Side”) and maintained it was still the case that he had not yet read Max and the Cats itself. 28 Vincent, “New Chapter in Nation’s Rage Toward Canada,” A1. 29 Both the name “Richard Parker” and the scenes of cannibalism in Life of Pi have antecedents in Poe’s narrative. See Ketterer for a further exploration of the links between these texts.

b ib liog r ap h y Andrew, Dudley. Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Bégin, Jean-François. “Yann Martel remporte le Booker Prize.” La Presse, 23 October 2002. Virtual News Library. “Canada’s Winning Words: Be Thankful So Many World-Class Writers Have Chosen to Live Here.” Ottawa Citizen, 24 November 2003. Nexis. “Canadians Write the Book on Excellence.” Ottawa Citizen, 24 October 2002. Nexis.

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“Canuck-Fuelled Hollywood Films to Get You in the Canada Day Spirit.” Postmedia Breaking News, 29 June 2013. Nexis. Cole, Stewart. “Believing in Tigers: Anthropomorphism and Incredulity in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.” Studies in Canadian Literature 29, no. 2 (2004): 22–36. Dowler, Kevin. “Early Innis and the Post-Massey Era in Canadian Culture.” In Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions, edited by Charles R. Acland and William J. Buxton, 339–54. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. Elmer, Greg, and Mike Gasher. “Introduction: Catching Up to Runaway Productions.” In Contracting Out Hollywood: Runaway Productions and Foreign Location Shooting, edited by Greg Elmer and Mike Gasher, 1–18. Lanham, M D: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Emerge Film Solutions. “Canada – Quebec.” 17 June 2014. . Gibbons, Fiachra. “Booker Fatwa on Pompous Fiction.” Guardian, 25 September. Nexis. Guy, Chantal. “Les hauts et les bas de l’année littéraire 2002.” La Presse, 29 December 2002. Virtual News Library. Henighan, Stephen. “Literature Survives through Its Variety.” Interview with Kit Dobson. In Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace, edited by Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli, 130–49. Waterloo, ON : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012. Higgins, Michael. “Montreal Author Wins Booker Prize.” National Post, 23 October 2002. Nexis. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Johnson, Brian D. “The Canadian Patient (Why Can’t Canada Make Its Own Hit Movies).” Maclean’s, 24 March 1997: 42–6. Kelly, Brendan. “Is There a Silver Lining to the Quebec Film Crisis?” Montreal Gazette, 25 November 2012. . Ketterer, David. “Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and Poe’s Pym (and ‘Berenice’).” Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation 42 (2009): 80–6. Klein, Michael. “Introduction: Film and Literature.” In The English Novel and the Movies, edited by Michael Klein and Gillian Parker, 1–13. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981. Lessard, Valérie. “L’histoire de Yann.” Le Droit, 23 August 2003. Virtual News Library. Life after Pi. Directed by Scott Leberecht. Hollywood Ending Movie, 2014. .

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Life of Pi. Directed by Ang Lee, 2012. London: Twentieth-Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2013. DVD. McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. Martel, Yann. “How I Wrote Life of Pi.” Powells.com, 2002. . – Life of Pi. 2001. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2002. – “May Richard Parker Be Always at Your Side.” Guardian, 26 November 2002. . Payne, Tom. “The Weird Bunch: This Year’s Booker Prize Shortlist Is Full of Strange Books by Non-English Writers.” Daily Telegraph, 28 September 2002. Nexis. Roberts, Gillian. Prizing Literature: The Celebration and Circulation of National Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge, 2006. Scliar, Moacyr. Max and the Cats. Trans. Eloah F. Giacomelli. New York: Plume, 1990. Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” In Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation, edited by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, 1–52. Malden, MA : Blackwell, 2005. Stratton, Florence. “‘Hollow at the Core’: Deconstructing Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.” Studies in Canadian Literature 29, no. 2 (2004): 5–21. Vincent, Isabel. “New Chapter in Nation’s Rage Toward Canada: Beef, Bombardier, Books.” National Post, 7 November 2002. Nexis. Wagner, Geoffrey. The Novel and the Cinema. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975. Wallace, Bruce. “Critics Carp at ‘Canadianness’ of Booker Nominees.” Montreal Gazette, 19 October 2002. Nexis.

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9 Acadian Identities, Arcadian Dreams: Revisioning Evangeline North of the Border Jennifer Andrews

In “Atlantic Realities, Acadian Identities, Arcadian Dreams,” Maurice Basque calls for the development of a new agenda for Atlantic Canada, one that will “convince Acadians that their hard-fought linguistic and cultural rights and identities will be recognized and not just folklorized.”1 As part of the larger project proposed in the 2011 collection titled Shaping an Agenda for Atlantic Canada, scholars like Basque quite rightly insist on probing the ways in which Atlantic Canada – and for Basque, specifically Acadians – has been objectified or packaged to present a particular vision of its past, present, and future, both at home and abroad. Consider, for instance, the long-standing international popularity of the musical version of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, which has become an institution on Prince Edward Island, sharing the story of a red-headed, freckle-faced orphan, who finds a home with an elderly brother and sister seeking a boy to labour on their farm. The result is a poignant (and deeply gendered) narrative that has popularized the bucolic aspects of P E I through the young heroine, Anne, who persuades her adoptive family to keep her, partly by learning to perform femininity in ways that make her acceptable to the community.2 Since its debut in 1964, this family-friendly theatrical event has attracted more than two million ticket-holders from all over the globe. Anne’s success is evidence of the powerful role that tourism plays in the construction of provincial, regional, and national cultural, as well as gendered, identities. Notably, the tourist industry – like so many others – is fundamentally shaped by the physical proximity to the United States, which provides by far the largest single source of visitors to Canada (beyond Canadians travelling within the country).3

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Performed for fifty-one consecutive seasons at the Confederation Centre in the middle of Charlottetown, the capital city of the province, Anne of Green Gables has provided an important economic engine for the island. Tourism is especially critical in Atlantic Canada, including P E I, where reliance on farming, fishing, and natural resources has become increasingly unreliable. Certainly, Anne of Green Gables is one of many examples of the creation of a vibrant tourist culture across the Atlantic region, a phenomenon that Ian McKay in The Quest of the Folk describes as a deeply essentializing and gendered version of rural people and their ways of life. As McKay points out, the quest for the folk perpetuates the notion that rural Atlantic Canadians are “simpler, kinder, slower, and … more innocent … than those who” categorize them.4 Of course, there are inherent dangers in selling such a vision. In Anne of Tim Hortons, Herb Wyile argues that, by presenting Atlantic Canada as a “therapeutic sanctuary … and a quaint pastoral retreat,” the tourism industry “celebrates a way of life whose waning has intensified the need for it to generate compensatory revenue”5 through the perpetuation of a romantic stereotype of underdevelopment that is fundamentally false. For Basque, the Acadian Deportation of 1755 and its legacy are particularly vulnerable to exploitation in the quest for tourist dollars. The “Folk paradigm” also cultivates and perpetuates a “subordinating vision of women and the prerogatives of male power” that are used to uphold “a harmonious social order rooted in traditional, patriarchal relations” in which women are tied to the hearth and home,6 though Anne does not readily adhere to that model; instead, she must be trained to be more ladylike. Given that Atlantic Canada has already been frequently constructed as a dependent feminized figure economically and socially,7 much like the youthful Canadian nation was by its colonial mother Mrs Britannia (witness “A Pertinent Question” by J.W. Bengough, who depicted this complex relationship in a particularly revealing fashion),8 it is no surprise that Basque fears that the Acadians will face a similar kind of exploitation through the perpetuation of dominant stereotypes, in one of which the population becomes a (female) commodity to be sold for profit. As Ian McKay and Robin Bates persuasively document in their examination of the Evangeline phenomenon that was used extensively to market Nova Scotia, the use of a static and deeply romanticized visual representation of Evangeline as “beautiful,” and thus the embodiment of “moral excellence,” was compelling for tourists who “arrived in fervent quest of women who looked like Evangeline,”9 hoping by coming to Acadia that they could find real-life versions of this inspirational female figure. McKay

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and Bates also note that there are important parallels in this respect between Evangeline and Anne of Green Gables, both of whom have been used by “regional tourism / history … to produce representations of young women as accessible blends of purity and beauty,”10 an oversimplification of complex and dynamic female characters that has proved highly successful in drawing travellers to the region. Inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem, and created by a first-generation Dutch-Canadian Alberta resident, Ted Dykstra, the musical version of Evangeline (which premiered in June 2013 at the Confederation Centre in Charlottetown and was reprised in the fall of 2015) evokes and potentially subverts gendered folk stereotypes by bringing the tragic and politically fraught Acadian love story to the EnglishCanadian stage. The decision to do so comes with complex political, social, economic, and cultural implications, as Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson argue in their chapter on the appropriation of Superman in the service of a specific version of neo-conservative nationalism. Evangeline is no different. For many Acadians, retelling the story of the Deportation, particularly Longfellow’s version, reinforces romantic clichés that bear little resemblance to the violent realities of life during, and after, the expulsion. And the repetition of such narratives, when done for profit, as in the case of a musical, may be seen as needlessly exploiting a historical tragedy. Indeed, as Ronald Rudin explains in Remembering and Forgetting in Acadie, French-speaking Acadians in New Brunswick, including Basque, expressed considerable suspicion of Maine-based English-speakers from the Saint Croix Valley claiming Acadian roots in the period leading up to the four hundredth anniversary of the founding of Acadie in 2004. They did so precisely because these non-French speakers (situated just south of the Canada-US border) were seen as attempting to profit from the commercial value of the anniversary of the arrival of the French, without possessing any substantial linguistic or historical knowledge of Acadie. As Basque wryly observed at a Federation of Nova Scotia Heritage meeting in 2003, “Let’s be honest. If it was not for the millions of dollars, less attention would be directed to 2004,”11 a comment that was overtly directed at the efforts of English-speakers to make the birth of Acadie about their roots. Likewise, for some theatregoers, Evangeline may appear to repeat this pattern of using a historical event to generate revenue based on tourists from within Canada and south of the border who seek out and embrace sanitized versions of this border-crossing past. Yet Dykstra uses the unique location and historical significance of the Confederation Centre, coupled with the commercialized musical-theatre

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form, to portray vividly the dynamic interactions between the Acadian, Anglophone, Francophone, and Indigenous populations in British North America and what would soon become the United States and to assert the rich contemporary existence of Acadian populations in Canadian locales beyond Quebec and New Brunswick, where the majority of Acadians live.12 Founded in 1964 and “funded by the federal government and seven of the provinces,” the Confederation Centre was intended, according to its founding director, Mavor Moore, to be “a festival of allCanadian work to honour the Fathers of Confederation.”13 The Centre’s programming aimed to replicate the scandal-ridden merriment of the politicians who had gathered in Charlottetown in 1864 to prepare for what would become the birth of Canada three year later by offering a “Festival of Music and Laughter.”14 How, then, did Evangeline, a predominantly tragic story of forced exile, find a home at a theatre so overtly linked to the creation of celebratory Canadian narratives of nation? One answer may lie with the commercial success of Anne of Green Gables. Notably, Anne bears more than a passing resemblance to Evangeline who, because of her circumstances, must learn to be both pragmatic and virtuous in order to survive. By probing this musical adaptation of an alreadymythical representation of the Acadian deportation, including the program notes, lyrics, music, sets, casting, and theatrical performances, and exploring its transformation from poem to theatrical event, Evangeline can be read as adding another dimension to analyses of American depictions of Canada in the historical past and present by offering an Anglo-Canadian response, though limited, to Basque’s call for a new Atlantic Canadian agenda that potentially recognizes Acadians (particularly Acadian women) as more than simply profitable symbols of a static and saleable past. In doing so, Dykstra contributes to the hemispheric circulation of narratives. He creates a musical that borrows from an American source to portray the deportation and its aftermath in a manner that is ultimately compelling to audiences across Canada, especially those who may not be familiar with the expulsion (as evidenced by its recent incredibly successful run at Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre from 31 October to 22 November 2015). Yet Evangeline also has the commercial potential to succeed if exported yet again across the Canada-US border.15 The story of Evangeline was first published as an epic poem by American writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1847. It is a narrative about tragic romantic love and thwarted opportunities, but also the resourcefulness and fearlessness of womanhood. For Longfellow, who “pretty much invented poetry as a public idiom in the United States and abroad,”

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Evangeline was an opportunity to create a virtuous female heroine and a tale of unwavering loyalty that served the national cultural agenda of nineteenth-century America.16 The story of an unnamed Acadian woman’s efforts over a lifetime to reunite with her betrothed, whom she was set to marry on the day of the deportation, was shared at first with his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, with whom he recognized its literary potential. 17 Longfellow, having initially encouraged Hawthorne to produce a prose narrative of the story, subsequently asked him to wait until he had attempted “to write a poem on the theme.”18 The resulting poem was a huge commercial and critical success with “at least 270 editions and some 130 translations” appearing in the first hundred years after its initial publication by Ticknor in Boston.19 Longfellow sold more than twentyeight thousand copies of Evangeline in the United States between 1847 and 1869, making him “the first American writer to make a living from poetry,”20 and demonstrating the importance of this story to a new nation seeking to distinguish itself from its Old World roots. Despite the detailed description of Acadia in Evangeline, Longfellow never visited the site of the deportation or the province of Nova Scotia. Longfellow was more interested in what the Acadian population, and particularly Evangeline, could symbolize for American readers, who were trying to construct an equally distinctive national identity and history. Acadians exemplified the challenge of, and failure to overcome, powerful competing claims by the French and English on its land and culture. Seen as naive, they were perceived as doomed to disappear, unlike America, and thus provided valuable lessons on what not to do, while still offering access to a depth of tradition that rooted the Acadian community and its culture. Americans aspired to such tradition as they sought symbols and icons to define their new country and its significance, both at home and abroad. The poem relied heavily on French philosopher Abbé Raynal’s romanticized vision of the Acadians as a “pastoral people,”21 deeply generous, fundamentally innocent, and unfortunately caught in an inescapable web of colonial conflict over who would dominate the region. By focusing primarily on Raynal’s representation of the Acadian people and putting it in an epic poetic form, Longfellow enabled his American audience, if only temporarily, “to escape to a better, more European, more settled world, the ‘[H]ome of the [H]appy,’ yet one tinged with that delicious nostalgia that came from knowing the transience of that happiness.”22 Rendering Acadia as a “forest primeval” filled with “simple … farmers”23 who appear to have an Edenic life allowed Longfellow to avoid having to examine the complex and often-conflicted relationships

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between the English and the French colonial empires, between Acadian and Indigenous communities, and among the Acadians themselves. The poem was especially appealing for nineteenth-century Americans eager to establish a distinctive cultural and literary tradition, while invoking some of the most desirable Old World European customs, and, most importantly, justifying and solidifying a deep distrust of the British Empire. In Longfellow’s text, the Acadian deportation is the impediment to the long and happy marriage of the youthful and beautiful Evangeline to Gabriel. While the fathers of the couple have signed the legal documents to complete the marriage the night before, the daytime celebration of the union is interrupted by the events of the Deportation, which begin when the Acadian men are ordered to gather inside the local church without women or children present and told they must surrender their property and prepare to be “transported to other lands” (40). Hence, Evangeline’s Catholic faith and unwillingness to sacrifice her virginity to any other man become symbolic of her saintly conduct and devotion to Gabriel in the decades that follow their separation. Longfellow’s verse stresses the glory of the suffering woman in a uniquely American fashion, attributing her transformation into a courageous and determined female to her search for a “manifest destiny,” a journey that becomes a panorama of US history and geography from “agrarian colony to urban republic” and covering the Western, Southern, and Eastern states over the course of the poem.24 Her commitment to searching for her lost love ensures that the poem feels elegiac in tone, moving from “a static and idyllic Arcadia towards a constantly evolving, morally ambivalent, industrialized and urbanized society,” epitomized by her eventual tragic reunion with Gabriel.25 At the poem’s conclusion, Evangeline, a Sister of Mercy working in Philadelphia, who tends to those suffering from “pestilence,” discovers Gabriel, who is now an old man on his deathbed in an almshouse (97). Gabriel quickly dies in Evangeline’s arms, having shared a single kiss, and relieves Evangeline of her “restless, unsatisfied longing” as she bows to God and thanks him for this moment of reconciliation (100). Evangeline ends on a poignant note, with the lovers “sleeping / Under the humble walls of the little Catholic churchyard, / In the heart of the city, they lie, unknown and unnoticed,” but recognized as remarkable for having “completed their journey” (101). For Longfellow, Evangeline and Gabriel figure as constant reminders of a legacy of faithfulness and loyalty against all odds, which, while deeply moving to readers, is readily displaced by the reality of the bustling American city with its New World dynamism. The now-reunited couple may be laid to rest in the midst of Philadelphia, but

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they represent a past that is no longer viable, nor suited to the vigorous growth of the United States. Paradoxically, as Acadian scholar Robert Viau notes in his study of Evangeline, the journey of these two lovers portrays key themes in American literature that resonate with readers around the globe, creating an exotic account of the grandeur of North America’s wide-open spaces and enormous potential: “Pour le lecteur étranger, Evangeline est l’expression d’un nouvel exotisme revigorant, celui des grands espaces nord-américains” [For the foreign reader, Evangeline is the expression of a newly reinvigorated exoticism, that of the open spaces of North America].26 Longfellow employs Evangeline’s foreignness strategically to celebrate the couple’s virtuousness and piety, while the poet ensures that Acadians – particularly Acadian women – who cling to their past are doomed, because they lack heirs to carry on their name and legacy. Most importantly, Evangeline and Gabriel do not procreate, enabling their story to remain one that secures the minority status of Acadians in America as they integrate and intermarry – or, in the case of these lovers, die childless. Notably, those who arrive (like the deportees on Gabriel’s ship) in Louisiana take advantage of the climate and the opportunity to build a homestead without fear of being driven away; they are rewarded with prosperity and security. For instance, Gabriel’s father, Basil the blacksmith, tells Evangeline when she arrives, having just missed Gabriel after many years of searching for him, that Louisiana has given him “a home, that is better perchance than / the old one!” because of its milder weather, richer farmlands, and the knowledge that “No King George of England shall drive you away from your / homesteads, / Burning your dwelling and barns, and stealing your farms and / your cattle” (79). Basil also has taken a Louisiana Spaniard as his new bride, furthering his integration into the local community. With this gesture, Longfellow foregrounds the benefits of becoming American despite the circumstances of deportation, an approach that Viau explains affirms the notion that “[L]es Acadiens de la Louisiane sont devenus des Américains” [The Acadians of Louisiana have become Americans].27 While Evangeline and Gabriel are reunited in a divine version of Acadie through their deaths, the poem offers a much brighter future for men like Basil, who embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of American self-reliance and assimilation and may ultimately, with their new wives and through subsequent generations, produce a line of US-born descendants. In Longfellow’s Evangeline, America becomes a beneficent nation and a champion of freedom from oppression, offering the promise of a future

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for those who integrate, despite the historical reality that pre-Independence American troops played a substantial role in the Acadian deportation and benefited directly from the removal, as demonstrated by the migration of the New England Planters, who relocated (at the invitation of the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia) to the former Acadian lands shortly after the expulsion. And because Longfellow relied heavily on the writings of others to shape his poem, he was able to construct a vision of the Acadian homeland of Grand-Pré that functioned as a “veritable Paradise Lost (indeed Paradise Regained for the tourist, if not for the Acadians) whose ‘tragedy’ only lent an edifying melancholic tinge to its ‘superlative [physical] beauty.’”28 The result is that Evangeline functioned for nineteenth-century American readers as a text upon which to project safely their “generalized emotions” and to share “broadly consensual sentiments” by reading a story that is relegated, at least chronologically, to an idealized, yet ultimately tragic, past.29 Longfellow’s poem might depict the elements of “upheaval and destruction” experienced by nineteenth-century American readers just prior to the Civil War and on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, but the narrative did not impinge directly on the present.30 The result was a poem that could provide catharsis for its American readers without burdening them with the complex emotions evoked by an immediate historical situation. Despite being written by a “New England Unitarian,” Evangeline also offered a desirable and useful narrative for two specific groups north of the Canada-US border: French-Canadians and Acadians.31 Translated into French by Pamphile Le May for publication in 1865, a mere two years prior to Confederation, the poem became an overt critique of the brutality of British imperialism, depicting Evangeline as its “unhappy victim” and toning down Basil’s enthusiasm for Louisiana.32 Le May’s translation made this story palatable to French-Canadian nationalists seeking an accessible narrative of the strength of the Catholic faith. But it was most enthusiastically embraced by Acadians themselves, who found in Evangeline a female figure of faith, loyalty, and hope, who epitomized the unity of a diasporic population seeking to articulate their collective existence and survival – without offending the nations in which they had rebuilt their communities on both sides of the border. Moreover, Evangeline offered redemption from the pervasive racial slurs levelled against the Acadian people for their historic intermarriage with the Mi’kmaq. Longfellow’s poem granted the Acadians “a flawless European pedigree” by “imagining” them as “Normans,” both distant from the less-desirable Mediterranean-based races and equal to the British; their “only crime had

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been that they were too Old World.”33 The ingenuity of this kind of appropriation, as McKay and Bates so persuasively illustrate, meant that Evangeline’s flexibility ensured its sustainability by enabling “different readings to suit the different purposes of different people – sometimes even conflicting things to one and the same person.”34 So what made Evangeline ripe for presentation in the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown, P E I , in June 2013? The mandate of the Confederation Centre on P E I remains unique within Canada: “to produce full-scale musicals in repertory” that satisfy the massive influx of tourists every summer, a challenge that is heightened by the need to avoid, in the words of Globe and Mail drama critic Herbert Whittaker, “experimenting with anything sordid, rude, or otherwise unsuited to the family trade.”35 As Mel Atkey describes in Broadway North: The Dream of a Canadian Musical Theatre, “musical theatre remains by far the most popular form of theatre,” and the Confederation Centre is unique in that it has – at least historically – possessed the financial resources to undertake the production of elaborate and expensive musical-theatre shows on a grand scale, partly because of the sustained success of Anne of Green Gables.36 However, the Confederation Centre has been criticized by Toronto theatre critic Richard Ouzounian in recent years for “seemingly racing towards an artistic dead end,” as it has shifted from the production of new Canadian-made shows with international touring potential (twenty-five between 1965 and 1985) to a venue for imported American musicals, many of which failed to draw tourists,37 precisely because the shows were already familiar and available to audiences in other wellestablished venues, such as Broadway. For Ouzounian, the addition of “established American musicals” and the replacement of “book musicals” with “jukebox revues” meant that the qualities that made the Confederation Centre unique were put aside to boost ticket sales, a strategy that failed miserably by straying from the venue’s core mission and audience expectations that they would see uniquely Canadian productions.38 The former artistic director of the Centre, Annie Allen, characterizes the past several decades somewhat differently, arguing that, with the decline in public arts funding from the 1990s to the present, the Centre’s programming has had less financial latitude to experiment with risky ventures, and thus has continued to showcase its most profitable show: Anne. Evangeline offered the opportunity to revitalize the Centre’s traditional mandate, as the “first original Canadian musical the festival has produced since 1999” in the hopes of bolstering lower ticket sales.39 This financial focus was reflected in the staging of Evangeline, which Allen

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made contingent upon the strict adherence to a limited budget, at least according to “Broadway musical standards.”40 Allen insisted on the crosscasting of the two shows (Evangeline and Anne), so most actors have roles in both productions over a single season, coupled with the production of a simplified set to ensure that the stage can be readily shared with Anne. But the choice of Evangeline also demonstrated a deep awareness of the need to attract Canadian and American audiences with a storyline that definitively engages with the history of both nations. In the case of Evangeline, the Confederation Centre placed its faith in the hands of well-known English-Canadian actor, writer, director, and composer Ted Dykstra, whose experience working at theatres across the country and enormous commercial success as the co-creator and co-star of 2 Pianos 4 Hands, made him an ideal person to bring Evangeline to fruition. Dykstra’s reputation made the musical a much more bankable commodity for a theatre needing a guaranteed hit with touring potential. Dykstra had worked on Evangeline for a decade before seeking the support of Toronto-based Mirvish Productions in 2009; Mirvish financed 2 Pianos 4 Hands, and thus was a natural partner for this new musical. Born to Dutch immigrants who came to Canada “without even knowing the language” in an effort to escape the Nazi occupation, Dykstra’s family soon settled in Edmonton, where he grew up.41 After finishing his training at the National Theatre School, Dykstra developed a career acting across Canada, and then through co-starring in 2 Pianos 4 Hands, which toured the globe for six years. Dykstra has also appeared in film and television and has become an acclaimed director over the past fifteen years, having received multiple awards for acting, musical direction, production, and writing for theatre. Yet Dykstra’s efforts to stage Evangeline in Toronto were ultimately rejected because the play was perceived as needing “more sex, more violence, and more ‘kitchen-sink realism,’”42 referencing the theatrical and film movement made popular in Britain from 1956 to the late 1970s, in which depictions of working-class life in domestic settings proved immensely popular with a broad array of theatregoers, and thus could increase the potential audience size. Mirvish invested half a million dollars and paired Dykstra with a Broadway writer to make the story “edgier,” but the collaboration ultimately failed.43 Dykstra was eventually persuaded to move the project to the Confederation Centre by the man who became Evangeline’s musical supervisor, Robert Foster, and actor Adam Brazier, who originated the role of Gabriel and has since become the artistic director of the Centre.

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Taking on the production of Evangeline involved considerable financial risk on the part of the Confederation Centre, which had recently emerged from a half-million-dollar deficit. But clearly something struck the Confederation Centre executives who gathered more than $400,000 in federal grants and private donations to underwrite its development and world premiere at a cost of $1.5 million in 2013. And the initial gamble appeared to have been a success, with Ouzounian stating in a 2013 review of Evangeline in the Toronto Star that “someone should take this great story, greater score, and greatest stars, then find a way to show them off in Toronto.”44 Ouzounian’s assessment may be perceived as dismissive of the musical’s success in Atlantic Canada and its deep connections to the region, but as a national theatre critic aware of the challenge of financing shows, Ouzounian demonstrates faith in Evangeline’s commercial success in larger markets, an opportunity that could provide much-needed income to the Centre. In an effort to promote the show’s potential further afield, the Centre has subsequently invested an additional $100,000 to record an Evangeline album, using the 2013 cast members and a seventeen-piece orchestra to produce a CD that is intended to “generate interest in the show from other producers and companies” and make “this very important Canadian story available to people who maybe weren’t able to” come to Charlottetown.45 The attention this recording has produced in Toronto, in particular, is promising, because the Centre owns the rights to Evangeline until 2020; the Centre also has the option to “translate it into French and mount or tour it.”46 As Brazier explains, the recording is part of a plan to find “partners in order to bring Evangeline to the next level … to have a life not only nationally and internationally” but locally as well, so as to expand the repertoire of reliable shows and to secure the Centre’s future.47 The recent announcement from the National Arts Centre in Ottawa of a $3-million-per-year-investment program in “ambitious performing-arts works from anywhere in Canada, whether or not those shows appear on N A C stages,” suggests that there remains a desire to produce Canadianmade exportable products, such as Evangeline.48 Central to this N A C funding opportunity is the discovery and funding of “projects that aim to close their … production run by loading their sets into a shipping container, not a dumpster.”49 As NA C president and chief executive Peter Herrndorf explains, an excellent example of “the kind of work” NAC has in mind is The Drowsy Chaperone, a Canadian-authored musical that parodies American musical comedy of the 1920s, and went from being a Toronto Fringe Festival play to a David Mirvish–funded musical to a

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Broadway hit that has subsequently toured the West End, North America, Japan, Australia, and Brazil; the musical won five Tony Awards in 2006 and a C D was released, recorded by the original Broadway cast. Given Evangeline’s potential when translated into French, the Confederation Centre’s interest in seeing the show tour, its success in Edmonton, and its narrative relevance to audiences south of the Canada-US border, it may be just the kind of show N A C is seeking to achieve what Herrndorf describes as the Centre’s ultimate goal: to build “a canon of great Canadian work”50 and to spread knowledge of an important but little-known piece of colonial Canadian history. Interest in Evangeline from the Confederation Centre makes sense, given that community education and knowledge of the Acadian deportation on Prince Edward Island and in the Maritime region generally is much higher than in the rest of Canada. Visitors to the island can easily travel to relevant historical sites and get a taste of contemporary Acadian life by taking a scenic drive around the North Cape Coastal region, also known as La Région Évangéline, and visiting places such as the Acadian Museum of PEI and the Village Musical Acadien. But PEI is also in proximity to the provinces that have seen the largest proportional influx of diasporic Acadians return over the past two and half centuries: New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The Acadians came from France from 1604 onward, initially settling in the coastal areas of Nova Scotia, on the shores of northern New Brunswick, and in select communities in P E I . The expulsion began in 1755, with more than “six thousand Acadians” being forcibly removed from Nova Scotia between August and December of that year.51 The Acadians were deported after refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the British Crown, which would have turned them against the French and broken a community commitment to neutrality. This event marked the beginning of a lengthy forced exodus, with the deportation continuing “until 1763.”52 The deportees were sent to locations all along the eastern seaboard of the United States, dividing families permanently. While British authorities started to allow small numbers of Acadians to return to Nova Scotia, the dispersal of the Acadian population was profound. Today, there are thriving Acadian communities in not only western P E I but also north New Brunswick, parts of Cape Breton, and the southern tip of Nova Scotia, as well as Maine, Quebec, and Louisiana. Not surprisingly, then, the cast of Evangeline is populated by several Acadians who come from local communities, most prominently acclaimed fiddler Albert Arseneault.

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While the production did not break box-office records (long held by Anne), Evangeline garnered a very respectable profit during its single summer run, selling 28,587 tickets; Evangeline was performed in the largest of four theatres at Confederation Centre, the Homburg, which seats 1,104 attendees. It beat the reduced run of Anne, which was cut from close to 100 shows to 42 performances and generated sales of “just under 22,000” tickets.53 During this first run, ticket sales were predominantly purchased by Islanders (totalling 12,410) and Canadian visitors from the surrounding provinces – New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador – who purchased 10,203 tickets. Visitors from the US to PEI constituted only 6 per cent of ticket sales for the 2013 run of Evangeline, likely the result of a high Canadian dollar, hovering at an average of ninety-seven cents throughout 2013.54 The impact of the exchange rates is significant when examining the Centre’s efforts to fulfill its long-range plan for Evangeline to tour nationally and even beyond Canada’s borders; the high Canadian dollar certainly diminished American attendees during Evangeline’s first run, and thus it made good sense to remount the show as the Canadian dollar fell and to consider taking it on the road. Most critically, the 2014 season at the Confederation Centre was a failure, with the $400,000 surplus generated by Evangeline being “wiped out” by the decision to restage Canada Rocks! nine years after a very profitable two-season run (2005–2006) at the Centre. Unexpectedly, Canada Rocks! drew average crowds of approximately three hundred attendees per show in a theatre with more than a thousand seats, leaving the Confederation Centre struggling to balance its books and searching for ways to recoup its losses.55 In 2015, Evangeline was revived for the fall season of programming at the Confederation Centre in partnership with Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre, a venue located in Dykstra’s hometown. The Citadel was co-founded by “the late Joseph ‘Broadway Joe’ Schoctor,” who began his theatre career as a producer in New York City, and saw his regional theatre as an ideal venue for “pre-Broadway tryouts.”56 While such claims, Atkey suggests, may have been exaggerated, it is where Dykstra began his very successful career, both north and south of the Canada-US border. This second version of Evangeline – with new leading actors and a new director, Citadel’s Bob Baker – ran from 14 September to 10 October at the Centre in an effort to boost ticket sales before being transplanted to Edmonton. Unfortunately, the shorter run of this more refined production of Evangeline in Charlottetown was less successful financially, because, as

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the communications manager for Confederation Centre, Fraser McCallum, explained in a telephone conversation, his sense was that those who saw the show in 2013 did not feel the need to see it a second time, despite the fact that the production was a more polished undertaking. The “shoulder season” of September and October offers still-mild weather, a host of activities for visitors, and reduced rates and packages for those coming to P E I , and the Confederation Centre regularly schedules a robust fall lineup to capture tourism dollars,57 so it would seem to be a perfect time to revive Evangeline. Total sales for this 2015 fall run were 10,490 tickets, with 5,290, or roughly 50 per cent, purchased by those living on P E I (a  slight increase in percentage). Surrounding provinces constituted 27.85 per cent of ticket sales, or 2,922 tickets. Yet US ticket sales rose by 3 per cent, constituting over 9 per cent of total ticket sales (954 tickets), which is not surprising given that the Canadian dollar fell to an average of 78.29 cents in 2015. This percentage growth in American interest was coupled with the success of Evangeline’s three-week run in Edmonton, where it garnered renewed attention, locally and nationally, for Dykstra’s “populist appeal” as the creator of a story of resilience that echoes the challenges of the current “humanitarian crisis in the Middle East and Europe.”58 Ticket sales for Evangeline at the Citadel were outstanding, totalling “13,700 attendees out of a total seating capacity of 16,250,” resulting in “an 84% occupancy rate” with single-ticket sales constituting a far greater portion of attendance statistics than anticipated by the theatre’s management.59 The Schoctor Theatre at the Citadel is much smaller than the Homburg, with only 681 seats, but the show clearly captured the attention of both audiences familiar with the Citadel and those who are not part of Citadel’s season-ticket holders, with many performances selling out. The director of marketing and communications at the Citadel, Ken Davis, notes that single-ticket sales surpassed expectations dramatically, reaching “130%” of the anticipated target for so-called “casual ticket[s].”60 The commercial success of this partnership indicates the portability of this romantic tragedy, its appeal to audience members beyond regular theatre subscribers, at least in Edmonton, and alters the vertical trajectory of cross-border relations between Canada and the US by creating an economically viable model for the horizontal movement of public culture across Canada. Of course, Confederation Centre’s C E O , Jessie Inman, would like to see Evangeline – much like Anne of Green Gables, which has toured globally – “reach Broadway,” because it tells a universal story, that of “the importance of place” and identity,61 a goal that paradoxically reaffirms

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the long-standing notion that Canadian productions must attain commercial and critical success in New York to be deemed worthwhile. Such a colonial mentality in the case of musical theatre is, as Atkey notes, a result of the fact that “in many people’s minds, the musical still has the Stars and Stripes pasted firmly on it.” Yet, historically, musical theatre “began in France, Austria, and Britain,” and “[t]he form itself is not the exclusive property of any nationality.”62 However, even a Broadway producer must consider context when creating musical theatre that can be toured beyond New York, and Evangeline is a wonderfully portable production precisely because it champions the work of a seminal American poet and celebrates the possibilities that the United States offers to exiled Acadians, replicating and seemingly affirming Canada’s southern neighbour as the champion of freedom for those who are forcibly removed from their British North American home. In the author’s notes in the program, Dykstra explains what initially motivated him to undertake this project in P E I , overtly linking his own immigrant heritage to his efforts at recovering this essential piece of colonial Canadian history and asserting a sense of national pride and unity through its performance at the Confederation Centre (and then later at the Citadel Theatre located in his hometown of Edmonton): I was forty years old when I first heard of the poem Evangeline by American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It was a revelation for so many reasons … the story was beautiful, a love that would not die beating at its centre. Another was the story of Acadie and its people. I was astounded to learn of this piece of Canadian history and also a little angry that I never learned it in school … I researched for six months, traveling everywhere Acadian I could – from the Maritimes to Louisiana. And then I wrote and composed, from my heart – for many years! … As I walked into rehearsal the other day I thought, “What a great country we live in. Here I am, a first-­ generation Dutch Canadian from Northern Alberta, telling a 250-year-old tale of French people from the Maritimes, written by an English American 150 years ago, and performed by an incredible, multilingual and diverse cast from all over Canada, in the cradle of Confederation.” That’s my Canada.63 Dykstra’s notes reveal the layered cross-border origins of the narrative, which provides the basis of the musical, but also relies on a construction of Canadian multiculturalism that both imitates aspects of the American

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Dream and yet locates its success in what appears to be a more benign site of origin – the birthplace of Confederation – an act which had important implications for Acadian nationality and self-definition (despite the expectations one might have that, with Confederation, Acadian identity would be subsumed forever). Dykstra’s commitment to educating theatregoers who, like him, were not taught about the deportation in Canadian schools is complicated by the fact that, as with Anne of Green Gables, Evangeline is a fictional creation that nurtures and sustains, despite her personal tragedies, the “idyllic, pastoral society” that has been successfully marketed as the essence of Atlantic Canada from even before Confederation.64 McKay and Bates note in their study of the “Evangeline Phenomenon” that the appeal of the folk can be traced back to arrival of “well-heeled visitors” to Nova Scotia in the 1850s in search of “true Acadians,” inspired by Longfellow’s poem.65 By the 1880s, “corporate interests and entrepreneurs” had begun to secure “The Land of Evangeline … as one more front on New England’s therapeutic frontier,” providing an escape from the stress of urban living.66 Dykstra’s Evangeline may offer the opportunity to rebuke those responsible for the Acadian deportation and provide a teachable moment, but it also relies fundamentally on a commitment to romantic nationalism and the triumph of femininity, with the character of Evangeline embodying the self-sacrificing and virtuous heroine who refuses to give up on love. Her fate may be tragic, yet for those sitting in the audience, the musical attests to the survival of the Acadian people in a manner that is intended to ensure that theatregoers – on both sides of the border – find catharsis, redemption, and paradoxically the enforcement of entrenched gender binaries as they watch this epic narrative unfold. Evangeline wanders America in search of her beloved rather than settling down with another man, finds Gabriel on his deathbed, and, as a result, misses the opportunity to bear children and raise a family; her independence comes at the cost of securing future generations of Acadians. Evangeline is, as Jane Taber notes in the Globe and Mail, “one of the most ambitious musicals ever conceived in Canada, with … a cast of more than 30, 200 costumes, and a 14-piece orchestra,” qualities that have led Taber, among others, to compare it to Les Misérables for its “historical breadth” in depicting working-class France during a revolutionary period, and its immense and lasting popularity with theatregoers around the globe.67 Such observations give some insight into why Confederation Centre has committed so many resources to the show. The Evangeline stage set is boldly “cinematic,” relying heavily on enormous projected

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images of British soldiers’ letters home, traditional Acadian landscapes with dyke systems, along with national flags and maps that track the epic journey of Evangeline and Gabriel as they move from the Acadian shores down along the east coast of the United States and out into middle America before reuniting in Philadelphia.68 Risers to the left side of the stage mimic hills and ship bows, and also become canoes, as Evangeline and Gabriel travel vast lands, occasionally almost literally crossing paths in the middle of the proscenium stage. The right front apron of the stage functions as a podium for English soldiers to deliver their monologues, thus further dividing the space of this cultural, linguistic, and national conflict spatially to emphasize visually their marginality – deliberately reversing more traditional perspectives of British dominance and giving centre stage to the actions of the deported Acadians. Dykstra’s musical spans forty years of Acadian history, modelling itself on Longfellow’s poem, but also deviating from it in several respects. Perhaps motivated by the feedback he received from Mirvish Productions, Dykstra’s version of Evangeline initially included a graphic rape scene, in which the young Evangeline, separated from Gabriel in the chaos of the deportation, leaps off a boat to escape the brutality of English Captain Hampson, who has seized her shoes, stockings, and sweater to prevent her escape. Hampson is seeking revenge for Gabriel’s humiliation of him when the Acadian men are initially rounded up at the local church to receive deportation orders; Gabriel has kicked Hampson in the face and accidentally reveals that his bride is Evangeline. While this scene did appear in the previews, it was later toned down for regular audiences, in order to avoid the strong criticism that emerged on the opening night that Evangeline was not, as one angry patron put it, a “suitable show for my grandchildren.”69 Paradoxically, elements that might be presumed to attract theatregoers to a Mirvish Production counter the long-standing demand to provide wholesome entertainment, epitomized by Anne of Green Gables, to the multigenerational tourist trade that swells the population of Prince Edward Island every summer – and the need to retain repeat visitors. While such constraints arguably dampen the depiction of violence and violation – both collective and individual – that were part of the Acadian deportation, Dykstra uses the concept of a “love story” to add an interesting twist to the portrayal of Hampson and of the British generally. The same Francophone actor, Réjean Cournoyer, who plays Hampson also takes on the role of the English governor Lawrence, who delivers a heartfelt monologue about the painful decisions he has had to make in carrying

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out the deportation orders, a dehumanizing process that he recognizes as fundamentally unfair. The letters are addressed to his wife and children, incorporating an emotional angle that complicates the audience’s presumed desire to condemn roundly the behaviour of either Lawrence or Hampson. This doubling of roles is further complicated when Cournoyer later reappears as Hampson, charged with deciding whether Gabriel, who has committed mutiny onboard a deportation ship to South Carolina, should be executed. Cournoyer, in the role of Hampson, chooses to let Gabriel live, but leaves him uncertain of Evangeline’s loyalty, a judgment that secures the eventual reunion of the couple much later in life. Dykstra incorporates a variety of Acadian elements to the production, through the casting and music, most notably with the character of René LeBlanc, played by Arseneault. Born and raised in the Acadian region of PEI, Arseneault is an extremely talented fiddler (formerly of the Acadian bands Chuck & Albert and Barachois, among others). In Evangeline, LeBlanc is the notary public who arranges the marriage papers of the young lovers, and Arseneault’s appearances in the play are filled with lively fiddling solos and dance numbers that blend Acadian traditions with those of other populations they encountered. Historically, there was considerable interaction – and some intermarriage – between African Americans, Acadians, Louisiana Spaniards, and White Creoles, and this is conveyed through Gabriel’s father’s marriage to a Louisiana Spaniard, whom Evangeline meets when she reaches that region, and more explicitly depicted in the presence of Clairborne, a freed black slave, who joins LeBlanc during a key musical number in the production.70 LeBlanc leads a song titled “Atchafalya / Freedom” that juxtaposes the traditional Choctaw tribal words for “long” (“falaya”) and “river” (“hachcha”) with an English declaration of “freedom,” overtly articulating in linguistic terms the positive aspects of the cultural, racial, and ethnic intermingling that took place for those Acadians who were deported to Louisiana.71 In contrast to their position in British North America, the Acadians were warmly welcomed to Louisiana, offered grants of high-quality land, and were able to construct a “sanctuary they called New Acadia,” from which these immigrants launched a letter-writing campaign to bring more exiles to this new locale.72 As a result, “approximately 3,000 exiles made their way to the bayou country from Maryland, Pennsylvania, and France between 1766 and 1785.”73 The song itself parallels LeBlanc’s advocacy for the benefits of moving to the southern seaboard of the United States, where the dispossessed Acadians are the recipients of bulls, cattle, and farmland, in parallel with the African-American slaves’ acquisition of freedom.

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The ambitious nature of Evangeline, and Dykstra’s efforts to make it both portable and relevant to audiences south of the border, is made explicit in the scenes that focus on Acadian integration in Louisiana. In particular, Dykstra exploits the large-scale musical number “Atchafalya /Freedom” to create an intense emotional moment that draws together multiple marginalized groups in a triumphant and celebratory experience that is characteristic of Broadway “megamusical[s]” such as Les Misérables.74 “Atchafalya / Freedom” opens with a short fiddle solo, followed by brief, interspersed solos by LeBlanc and by Clairborne, played by Marcus Nance, an acclaimed African-American actor who has performed on Broadway and spent three seasons at Canada’s renowned Stratford Festival; his magnetic presence and powerful voice, along with the song’s structure, is designed to get audiences clapping and swaying in their seats. While the song’s call and response structure is dominated initially by René’s description of what tangible resources Louisiana has provided the exiles, Clairborne joins the song when the chorus asks, “Louisiane gave me a bull, 8 cows, / a farm and land, they let me be / What else did you get?” to which the African American replies, “I got my / I got my / I got my / Freedom.”75 This song takes on a gospel flavour with Clairborne’s declaration, creating a song that builds to a crescendo by interjecting a lengthy fiddle solo by LeBlanc, followed by a final chorus that affirms the survival of all through lyrics that seamlessly blend the English, French, and Indigenous languages: “Viens tous, down to the Coeur / d’Ouisiane / Au Bajou that we call Atchafalaya / Bienvenue we welcome every / man et tous les femmes [sic].” [Come everyone down to the Heart / of Louisiana / At the Bajou that we call Long River / Welcome we welcome every / man and all the women.]76 The vigorous rhythmic clapping, foot-stomping, and general boisterousness of this song in performance viscerally conveys the celebratory sentiment of this moment in the play, as Evangeline arrives, hoping that she will find Gabriel, and sees that the deported Acadians she has longed to see are thriving in their new home south of the border. Strategically, the song works to gloss over the parallels that might be seen between enslaved African Americans and the exiled Acadians as persecuted marginal groups, whose exploitation, though varied in its severity, expose both the United States and British North America as countries with troubled colonial pasts. Rather, the populations work together in an apparently seamless and upbeat manner; America becomes a land of opportunity for all. With this musical number, Dykstra is careful not to condemn either country’s legacy, ensuring that the production can be readily exported south of the Canada-US border.

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While Dykstra’s approach appears conservative at times, he does not confine the blending of racial and ethnic groups to the Acadians in Louisiana, but rather portrays the complex reality of interracial attraction to ensure Evangeline’s loyalty to her beloved Gabriel and tangibly demonstrate her virtuousness, while also acknowledging the historic relationship that existed between Acadians and Indigenous peoples, even in British North America (which Longfellow chooses to depict in nonreproductive terms). First, Dykstra alters the character of Baptiste LeBlanc, the notary’s son, who in Longfellow’s poem functions as an obvious suitor for Evangeline, given Gabriel’s absence over the years. In the musical, Baptiste emerges as a friend and companion to Evangeline when he discovers her struggling to survive winter alone. Later, in 1767 Ohio, Evangeline tends to an arrow wound Baptiste suffers while fighting local Indigenous peoples, sparking a moment of mutual attraction. But Dykstra halts this by introducing the character of Cornflower, a Shawnee woman, played by the Cree / Métis actor and storyteller Nicole Joy-Fraser, whose role differs substantially from that of the unnamed Shawnee woman in Longfellow’s poem who cautions Evangeline that she is chasing a phantom and then sends her to a nearby Jesuit settlement, where the Native woman thinks Gabriel may have gone. In the musical, Cornflower speaks French and has lost her husband to British soldiers. Despite her deeply clichéd name and costuming, reminiscent of Disney’s Pocahontas and Tiger Lily, Cornflower is sympathetic to the Acadian cause and falls in love with Baptiste. The couple has a baby, and while Evangeline initially stays with them, and rejoices in the birth of this new mixed-raced child, she soon realizes that she must move on and continue her search for Gabriel. Gabriel is also reconfigured by Dykstra as a champion of the Minutemen, who were early leaders of the American Revolution; he arrives in New Hampshire and uses the story of the Acadian deportation to rouse local groups to fight against the British. In the musical, Gabriel enters into a gunfight with some British soldiers as part of the Minutemen group and encounters his old nemesis, Hampson, only to let Hampson go, confident that he will be killed. Paradoxically, Hampson comes back to shoot Gabriel, who is saved by the intervention of another Indigenous female character, Acorn, who appears to be of Mi’kmaq descent and acts as a form of divine intervention. The relentless romanticization of female Indigenous characters is both troubling and complex in the context of this musical. In both cases, the women function as independent and skilled survivors whose presence is a constant reminder of the existence of Native peoples throughout the areas where the British, Acadians, and Americans

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established communities, a prior population that, unlike Evangeline, will produce offspring and ensure their futurity. The conclusion of the musical is perhaps most revealing, with its operatic staging of the reunion between the betrothed couple – a scene that invokes and ironically reverses Bizet’s Carmen by having Gabriel die in Evangeline’s arms, a borrowing of opera conventions that are an integral part of the history of musical theatre in both Canada and the US.77 The visual significance of this scene is heightened by the reunion of two parts of a handmade wooden Holy Cross, which Gabriel’s father fashioned into necklaces for the youthful bride and groom to wear as symbols of their eternal love from their wedding day onward. While Dykstra clearly stresses the tragically spiritual dimensions of this meeting, staging it at the Confederation Centre gives the final line additional resonance when read in relation to the rebirth of Acadian nationalism and the need to understand Acadians as a distinct and vibrant population. Dykstra cannot, by presenting the story of Evangeline as he does, help but participate in the gendered folkification of this population, but he does so strategically to create a production that has both national and cross-border portability. Concurrently, the legacy of Anne and its ability to embody Canadian identity globally are inseparable with the Confederation Centre’s history, both past and present, and Dykstra embraces the significance of this connection through his choice of venues for both the world premiere of Evangeline and its reprise. Moreover, as Maurice Basque makes clear, the historical gathering for the planning of Confederation, despite being rejected by “the majority of Acadians,” occurred in the same year (1864) as the founding of Collège Saint-Joseph, the first French-language degree-granting college in Atlantic Canada, and was followed by the creation of the first Acadien newspaper, le Moniteur Acadien, in 1867, the year that Confederation was approved by the British Parliament.78 Moreover, le Moniteur Acadien actually serialized Le May’s translation of Evangeline shortly after its inception. The creation of Collège Saint-Joseph is often described as the beginning of the Acadian Renaissance, and, coupled with the birth of the first Acadian newspaper, was pivotal for many Acadians who understood that, in Basque’s words, “the new federal government meant possibilities for them, not only regarding social mobility but also in terms of protecting their French language.”79 The result was a series of events that recognized Acadians as constituting a distinct nation, one that Basque argues was acknowledged explicitly by the newly formed Canadian government with the appointment of the first Acadian senator in 1885.

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The musical of Evangeline may ultimately remain a co-optation of sorts, staged in English and conveying an American version of an Arcadian dream that perhaps never existed, but by returning it to the birthplace of Confederation and highlighting the contemporary cultural richness of the Acadian people (beyond their strongest hub of New Brunswick), and the intricate interracial links that have always existed between and among Acadians and other peoples, Dykstra at least forces too-often-complacent patrons, Maritimers and those from further afield, to question the historic barrenness of Evangeline and Gabriel, and to acknowledge the present existence of Acadian peoples and their distinctive culture right in their own backyards.

n otes My thanks to Fraser McCallum, the communications manager for the Confederation Centre of the Arts for his generosity in providing access to information about and photographs from the 2014 production of Evangeline, and to Ken Davis, the director of marketing and communications at the Citadel Theatre, for his speedy response to my request for ticket sales numbers. I am particularly grateful to Chantal Richard, for her considered and helpful feedback on a draft of this chapter, to Erin Morton, who directed me to a wonderful quotation from Ernest Forbes’s book, and to my S SHRC-funded research assistant, Rich Cole, who attended a performance of Evangeline in Edmonton to gather materials about that version of the production.  1 Basque, “Atlantic Realities, Acadian Identities, Arcadian Dreams,” 62.  2 See McQuillan and Pfeiffer for a thoughtful exploration of the powerful role gender plays in Anne of Green Gables, both in shaping Marilla and Matthew’s desire to acquire a boy to assist with farm work and Marilla’s efforts to train Anne to become “a good girl” (“Why Anne Makes Us Dizzy,” 5).  3 In Broadway North, Atkey explains that the Confederation Centre is known for, and depends heavily on, the creation of “wholesome family entertainment” to attract tourists, which means that there are “limitations” on the kind of shows that can be developed (142). For statistical studies of American visitors to Canada, see the Destination Canada (which was the Canadian Tourism Commission) website: http://en.destinationcanada.com/ markets/where-we-market-canada/us and the PEI Department of Economic Development and Tourism website, which also assesses the origin of visitors to the Island: https://www.princeedwardisland.ca/en/search/site?f%5B

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0%5D=type%3Apublication&f%5B1%5D=field_department%3A639& f%5B2%5D=field_publication_type%3A2330. The Tourism Industry Association of Canada produces detailed reports assessing exit surveys done on tourists to PEI every two to three years; reports from 2012 and 2014 are posted: http://www.tiapei.pe.ca/tiapei.cfm?id=537. In addition, they post yearly visitor counts, both estimated and actual: http://www.­ tiapei.pe.ca/tiapei.cfm?id=536.  4 McKay, The Quest of the Folk, 275.  5 Wyile, Anne of Tim Hortons, 22.  6 Ibid., 127.  7 See Forbes, who quotes a Maclean’s article in which “the Maritime provinces [are described as] … like a housewife who having married for money which failed to materialize ‘neglected her housework, went down to the seashore … watched the ships go by and pouted’” (Challenging the Regional Stereotype, 59). Fuller (Writing the Everyday, 33–7) and Wyile (Anne of Tim Hortons, 127–34) also examine the pervasiveness of gender stereotypes in relation to region, particularly through the subversion by women writers of the Folk paradigm.  8 See Bengough (A Caricature History of Canadian Politics, 26–7), for one of many depictions of Canada’s feminization, and Cumming (Sketches from a Young Country, 193–9), for an analysis of the representation of women in cartoons drawn by Bengough and his contemporaries. It is worth noting here that Bengough did not always depict Canada as a feminized figure; on occasion, he rendered Canada in the form of a young boy or adolescent male. See Spencer for examples of Bengough’s use of these figures. In a cartoon published on the front cover of Grip (8 December 1888), Bengough drew Canada as a male child being informed by the bearded American “President-elect Harrison … that he intends to adopt the youngest and pay off all of his bills” (115), sending a clear message of the threat of annexation. Likewise, the “Fishery Tangle,” published in September 1887 in Grip, positions a youthful male wearing a “Canada” cap and advocating a “Canada-US commercial union” to settle a longstanding conflict between Uncle Sam (America) and John Bull (Britain) (212–13).  9 McKay and Bates, In the Province of History, 85. 10 Ibid., 84. 11 Rudin, Remembering and Forgetting in Acadie, 117. 12 See the 2006 “Ethnic Origins” counts for Canadian provinces and territories as recorded by Statistics Canada, which include a figure of 25,400 Acadians in New Brunswick out of a total population of 719,650, and

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32,950 Acadians in Quebec out of a total population of 7,435,905. The high proportion of Acadians in New Brunswick has helped to secure the community’s recognition of its unique significance. Proportions of Acadians in other Atlantic provinces are far lower; see the statistics in the 2006 count for further details. 13 Atkey, Broadway North, 107. 14 Ibid. 15 There are a number of theatrical and choral productions of the story of Evangeline by Americans, dating back to an 1860 adaptation staged at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York; an initially failed 1874 “operabouffe” version titled Evangeline, which was notable because both lovers were “played by women” (Traubner, Operetta, 339), which, once revised, became very successful; and, most recently, a short chamber opera of Evangeline’s story by Gwyneth Walker, which first premiered at Southeastern Louisiana University in 2014 and then was reprised for its Canadian premiere at the Covenanter Church in Kentville, Nova Scotia, in August 2015. Most have been performed only in the United States. See Traubner, Operetta, and McQuaid et al., Evangeline, for more details. 16 Irmscher, Longfellow Redux, 3. 17 McKay and Bates, In the Province of History, 71. 18 Griffiths, “Longfellow’s Evangeline,” 28. 19 Ibid. 20 Charvat, “Longfellow’s Income from his Writings,” 10. 21 Griffiths, “Longfellow’s Evangeline,” 32. 22 McKay and Bates, In the Province of History, 73. 23 Longfellow, Evangeline, 9, 14. All further references for this text will appear in parentheses. 24 Viau, Les visages d’Évangéline, 54 (my translation); Doyle, North of America, 46. 25 Ibid. 26 Viau, Les visages d’Évangéline, 55 (my translation). 27 Ibid., 57 (my translation). 28 McKay and Bates, In the Province of History, 103. 29 Irmscher, Longfellow Redux, 60; McKay and Bates, In the Province of History, 72. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 89. 32 Irmscher, Longfellow Redux, 247. See Bourque and Merkle, “De Evangeline à l’américaine,” for a fascinating and detailed analysis of the relationship between Longfellow’s poem and Le May’s translation.

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33 McKay and Bates, In the Province of History, 95. 34 Ibid., 96. 35 Atkey, Broadway North, 142; Atkey quoting Whittaker, 146. 36 Ibid., 149. 37 Ouzounian, “Evangeline: New Musical.” 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Mann, “‘Evangeline’ a Bold Stroke for Time-Worn Charlottetown Festival.” 41 Ouzounian, “Ted Dykstra.” 42 Quoted in Taber, “How Ted Dykstra’s Evangeline Finally Made It to the Stage.” 43 Ibid. 44 Ouzounian, “Evangeline: A Triumph.” 45 Wright, “Confed Centre Spending $100K to Record Evangeline.” See Atkey (Broadway North, 247–9), who notes that commercial recordings of Canadian musicals are a relatively recent phenomenon and one of the few ways to ensure that the production has a life beyond its performance run. 46 Wright, “New Artistic Director Wants PEI to Return to Anne, Evangeline.” 47 Ibid. 48 Everett-Green, “N AC to Spend $3-million a Year on New Projects,” A10. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 McKay and Bates, In the Province of History, 32. 52 Griffiths, “Petitions of Acadian Exiles,” 216. 53 Wright, “New Artistic Director Wants PEI to Return to Anne, Evangeline.” 54 See http://www.canadianforex.ca/forex-tools/historical-rate-tools/yearlyaverage-rates for annual average rates of the Canadian dollar’s value in comparison with the US dollar. 55 See “Confederation Centre Gains from Evangeline All Gone” for a brief summary of Confederation Centre’s 2015 financial results. 56 Atkey, Broadway North, 25. 57 Fraser, “Extending PEI ’s Shoulder Season Will Be a ‘Priority’ of New 5-Year Tourism Strategy.” 58 Nestruck, “Stories of Epic Resilience,” R6. 59 Ken Davis, private email to the author, 17 November 2016. 60 Ibid. 61 Taber, “How Ted Dykstra’s Evangeline Finally Made It to the Stage.” 62 Atkey, Broadway North, 2. 63 Dykstra, “Author’s Notes,” 11.

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64 Wyile, Anne of Tim Hortons, 1. 65 McKay and Bates, In the Province of History, 103, 96. 66 Ibid., 103. 67 Taber, “How Ted Dykstra’s Evangeline Finally Made It to the Stage.” 68 Mann, “‘Evangeline’ a Bold Stroke for Time-Worn Charlottetown Festival.” 69 The quotation comes from a patron I heard on opening night who approached then-artistic director Anne Allen to share this sentiment with her; this kind of audience feedback did ultimately lead to changes in the presentation of the scene in subsequent productions. 70 See Brasseaux’s assessment of Acadian intermarriage for a more detailed statistical study of this interracial mixing in Acadia and Louisiana. 71 Read, Louisiana Place Names of Indian Origins, 15. 72 Brasseaux, “Acadian to Cajun,” 2. 73 Ibid. 74 Sternfeld, The Megamusical, 1. 75 Dykstra, Evangeline (CD liner notes), 12. 76 Ibid. 77 Atkey, Broadway North, 30–1. 78 Basque, “Atlantic Realities, Acadian Identities, Arcadian Dreams,” 68. 79 Ibid.

b ib liog r ap h y Atkey, Mel. Broadway North: The Dream of a Canadian Musical Theatre. Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 2006. Basque, Maurice. “Atlantic Realities, Acadian Identities, Arcadian Dreams.” In Shaping an Agenda for Atlantic Canada, edited by John G. Reid and Donald J. Savoie, 58–77. Halifax: Fernwood, 2011. Bengough, J.W. A Caricature History of Canadian Politics. 1886. Toronto: Peter Martin, 1974. Bourque, Denis, and Denise Merkle. “De Evangeline à l’américaine à Évangéline à l’acadienne: une transformation idéologique?” In Traduire depuis les marges / Translating from the Margins, 121–45. Québec: Nota bene, 2008. Brasseaux, Carl A. “Acadian to Cajun: History of a Society Built on the Extended Family.” Paper presented at Genetics of Acadian People conference, 9 August 1999, 1–5. . Charvat, William. “Longfellow’s Income from his Writings, 1840–1852.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 38 (1944): 9–21.

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“Confederation Centre Gains from Evangeline All Gone.” C B C News, 9 October 2014. . Cumming, Carmen. Sketches from a Young Country: The Images of Grip Magazine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Doyle, James. North of America: Images of Canada in the Literature of the United States, 1775–1900. Toronto: ECW, 1983. Dykstra, Ted. “Author’s Notes.” Evangeline. Program notes. Charlottetown: Confederation Centre of the Arts, 2013, 11. – Evangeline. Liner notes. Musical directed by Reza Jacobs. Confederation Centre of the Arts, 2014. CD. Everett-Green, Robert. “N AC to Spend $3-Million a Year on New Projects.” Globe and Mail, 1 December 2016: A10. Forbes, E.R. Challenging the Regional Stereotype: Essays on the 20th Century Maritimes. Fredericton, N B: Acadiensis, 1989. Fraser, Sara. “Extending P.E.I.’s Shoulder Season Will Be a ‘Priority’ of New 5-Year Tourism Strategy.” CBC News, 26 September 2016. . Fuller, Danielle. Writing the Everyday: Women’s Textual Communities in Atlantic Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. Griffiths, Naomi E. “Longfellow’s Evangeline: The Birth and Acceptance of a Legend.” Acadiensis 11, no. 2 (1982): 28–41. – “Petitions of Acadian Exiles, 1755–1785: A Neglected Source.” Histoire Sociale/Social History 11, no. 21 (1978): 215–23. Haliburton, Thomas Chandler. A Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia. Book I. Halifax: Joseph Howe, 1829. Irmscher, Christopher. Longfellow Redux. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Longfellow, Henry W. Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie. Fredericton: Goose Lane, 2004. Mann, Mark. “‘Evangeline’ a Bold Stroke for Time-Worn Charlottetown Festival.” BlouinArtInfo (Canadian edition), 11 July 2013. . McKay, Ian. The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.

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McKay, Ian, and Robin Bates. In the Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010. McQuaid, Sean, et al. Evangeline: Enrichment Guide. Charlottetown: Confederation Centre of the Arts, 2015. McQuillan, Julia, and Julie Pfeiffer. “Why Anne Makes Us Dizzy: Reading Anne of Green Gables from a Gender Perspective.” Mosaic 34, no. 2 (2001): 17–32. Nestruck, J. Kelly. “Stories of Epic Resilience, and a Bong Named Trudeau.” Globe and Mail, 7 November 2015. . Ouzounian, Richard. “Evangeline: A Triumph from a Canadian Tragedy – Review.” Toronto Star, 7 July 2013. . – “Evangeline: New Musical Carries Hopes of Charlottetown Festival.” Toronto Star, 5 July 2013. . – “Ted Dykstra: Battling with His Personal Demons.” Toronto Star, 14 July 2011. . “PEI’s Albert Arseneault to Play René the Notary in the New Canadian Musical Evangeline.” Confederation Centre of the Arts Press Release, 29 April 2013. . Read, William A. Louisiana Place Names of Indian Origins: A Collection of Words. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008. Ross, Ryan. “Canada Rocks Numbers Disappoint.” The Guardian, 10 October 2014. . Rudin, Ronald. Remembering and Forgetting in Acadie: A Historian’s Journey through Public Memory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Spencer, David R. Drawing Borders: The American-Canadian Relationship during the Gilded Age. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Sternfeld, Jessica. The Megamusical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Taber, Jane. “How Ted Dykstra’s Evangeline Finally Made It to the Stage.” Globe and Mail, 8 July 2013. . Traubner, Richard. Operetta: A Theatrical History. New York: Routledge, 2003. Viau, Robert. Les Visages d’Évangéline: du poème au mythe. Beauport, QC : Publications M N H, 1998. Wright, Teresa. “Confed Centre Spending $100K to record Evangeline.” The Guardian, 17 January 2014. . – “New Artistic Director Wants PEI to Return to Anne, Evangeline.” The Guardian, 23 July 2014. . Wyile, Herb. Anne of Tim Hortons: Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011.

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10 Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy: Reading across Borders Kit Dobson In this chapter, I read Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy as a dystopia that responds differently to Canadian and US contexts. In doing so, I consider not only the critical reception of these books, but also what we might gain from the texts by thinking of them in terms of border studies and as books that treat Canada and the United States quite differently. Many of the conditions faced by the characters in the books result from, among other things, the War on Terror and its fallout. This war, of course, has different resonance on either side of the 49th parallel: while the US government declared the War on Terror in response to the events of 11 September 2001, the official Canadian position has been one that is both outside and inside of it, at times willingly participating (as has been the case in Afghanistan) and at times resisting or dissenting (as we have seen in the cases of Iraq and Syria). Atwood’s trilogy occupies a position of ambivalence as a mass-market series of middlebrow literary works destined for both Canadian and US markets (and well beyond). The overweening desire of the governmental systems depicted in those books to control people leads to the destruction not only of many individual characters, but also, if indirectly, of human civilization itself. The books may, in that sense, be read as an indictment of the ongoing state of war. Atwood portrays a world in which “registering a protest” or “any kind of public action” is “shot off at the knees” by the private forces that have replaced the public ones.1 She notes how very easily the totalitarian changes that the novels encode can occur: every element found in those books, she notes, with particular reference to the futuristic science that she depicts, already exists or theoretically could exist, and the logic of the corporate society and its subsequent collapse are portrayed as reasonable

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outcomes of today’s perceived threats. Through an investigation of the novels and the debates that they have garnered, I will argue for the complexity of these books as responses to contemporary challenges in both Canada and the United States. In particular, I will read the MaddAddam trilogy as a post-9/11 dystopia in order to argue that this work marks precisely how the status of the human body has been newly contested and undermined in both Canada and the United States since the millennium. In doing so, I am drawing upon readings of the ways in which, since 9/11, we have witnessed retrenchments of patriarchal and colonial ideals that may have receded for some time after the Second World War, but that are threatening to reassert themselves with dangerous force, operating in a biopolitical mode through neo-liberal governance to undermine ongoing struggles for equity. There is a primary critical trend that reads Atwood’s trilogy in ecocritical terms. This focus is an important one at a time when the western Antarctic ice sheet is collapsing, a collapse that will likely lead to the world’s oceans rising by approximately ten feet over the next century; it is also important when animal species named by Atwood in the novels, such as the Black Rhino (which is one of the characters’ codenames), have been declared extinct since the time of the first novel’s publication in 2003. Indeed, much of the available criticism on the novels reads them ecocritically2 and in terms of utopian / dystopian thinking and ethics.3 Beyond this ecocritical focus, some critics have written about narratological, theological, and apocalyptic aspects of the works.4 This vein also leads critics to consider the novel’s relationship to monster narratives such as Frankenstein.5 Others have focused on questions of gender, noting that Oryx and Crake, the first novel of the trilogy, marks the first time that Atwood’s main protagonist in a novel has been male.6 Ecocritical work that might pick up on, for instance, Rob Nixon’s powerful notion of “slow violence” provides space for my own reading of these novels in terms of the neo-liberal reinscription of the human body. Sharon Sutherland and Sarah Swan read Oryx and Crake specifically in order to draw out an opposition between Canada and the United States, arguing that “9/11 heavily influenced the finished Oryx and Crake” and that the novel “offers a uniquely Canadian perspective on the aftermath of the attacks.”7 Their article details some of the plot elements that I discuss here and reads the character Jimmy as a metaphorically “Canadian observer of post-9/11 US politics.”8 However, Sutherland and Swan’s analysis restricts itself to Oryx and Crake, and I therefore expand upon that line of thinking in the criticism thus far written and that I have been able to collect in my research.

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Although I would like to suggest that the differences between Canadian and US contexts are crucial ones to grapple with, it is important to note that the novels themselves do not overtly maintain any difference between the two. That is, while the novels make reference to things like “the American Way” (MaddAddam, 183), they do not specifically talk about the United States and Canada. This erasure sets the trilogy apart from Atwood’s earlier novel The Handmaid’s Tale, in which women flee the theocratic post-US state of Gilead to Canada via the Underground Femaleroad. Muting these differences in the MaddAddam trilogy may enable the novels’ cross-border market appeal, and Atwood is frequently mistaken internationally for an American author.9 Fredric Jameson, in his generally favourable review of The Year of the Flood, puts it as follows: “there is a category into which [Atwood] squarely fits and without which she cannot fully be understood, a category of which at least 300 million English-speakers generally need to be reminded: she is a Canadian, and no little of her imaginative power comes from her privileged position above the border of the lower 48.”10 We might, then, read the MaddAddam trilogy as a complex Canadian response to the United States, similar to the way Jennifer Andrews proposes, in her chapter in this book, to read Evangeline as a complicated US interpretation of a part of Canadian history. However, the distinction between Canada and the United States seems to have vanished in the future that Atwood envisions: at one point, the character Zeb watches the news of his seemingly American father’s fall from grace from Whitehorse, in Canada’s Yukon Territory, but the narrator describes the news as being “all over the country” (184), as though there is no distinction between the geographies. The immediate distinctions between Canada and the United States are thus slight in these novels. Cities are described (Whitehorse, Calgary, Montreal, San Francisco, New New York, and others, all appear), but nation-states are in the process of falling apart, while corporations take over many of their functions. Nevertheless, Sutherland and Swan argue that Oryx and Crake “offers a uniquely Canadian perspective” in that the novel’s protagonist, Jimmy, functions as “an intimate outsider,” just as Canada did to the United States in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.11 The process of understanding this trilogy across the Canada-US border, in other words, requires reading beyond the explicit dystopic set-up that Atwood creates. This question of the nation-state and dystopia immediately links to the debates around genre that have surrounded these works, that is, to questions about dystopic writing and its relationship to science fiction and

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speculative fiction (S F ). Atwood has gone so far as to articulate her rationale for her generic choices very specifically, publishing the book In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011) in response to her critics. That book is an amalgam of new and previously published work, a book that is designed, it seems, to demonstrate her long-standing credibility as an SF writer. She dedicates the book to Ursula K. LeGuin, whose Guardian review of Oryx and Crake occasioned debate over Atwood’s use of genre. Atwood situates her writing in the context of George Orwell, H. Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and others. There are two particular themes of In Other Worlds that I would like to bring to this context. First, Atwood recognizes the ways in which dystopic writing is linked to utopic thinking, from Thomas More onward, but she seeks to disrupt it by bringing the two terms together in what she terms “ustopian” writing. She articulates the idea as follows: “Ustopia is a word I made up by combining utopia and dystopia – the imagined perfect society and its opposite – because, in my view, each contains a latent version of the other.”12 This framework is one that she suggests might be useful for understanding the MaddAddam trilogy. Atwood wonders: “why is it that when we grab for heaven … we so often produce hell? … Maybe it’s the lumpiness of human beings” (84). The latency of the dystopia within the utopia, then, is also seemingly contained in the post-lapsarian state of humanity in the West. Second, and more immediately important to this context, she suggests repeatedly in In Other Worlds that her own “ustopic” works respond to contemporary international circumstances. The novels that she has written in this mode are, she notes, “our own planet in a future” (5). It is the present that provides her with the circumstances of this future. “Of recent years,” she states, “American society has moved much closer to the conditions necessary for a takeover of its own power structures by an anti-democratic and repressive government … [N]ow we see a United States weakened by two draining wars and a financial meltdown, and America appears to be losing faith in the basic premises of liberal democracy. After 9/11, the Patriot Act passed with barely a cough” (90). That is, Atwood recognizes that the dystopian elements of her writing – or what she might call the “ustopian” elements – are ever more present in today’s American society. Atwood’s concern for the US fallout from 9/11 begins to demonstrate how this event has, indeed, had very different repercussions on either side of the Canada-US border. While a growing body of study examines literature in the United States post-9/11, there is relatively little parallel criticism as yet in Canada. A literature search will turn up the edited collection

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Literature after 9/11 (edited by Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn), Kristiaan Versluys’s Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel, and Richard Gray’s After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11, among other books, articles, and more. There is a large and growing scholarship around 9/11 and literature in the United States, in other words, yet relatively little in Canada as yet (books like Kent Roach’s September 11: Consequences for Canada are more concerned with questions of law and society). On the one hand, this gap is difficult to account for, in that Canada has been an active participant in the so-called War on Terror, and the events of 9/11 have been deeply impressed upon the Canadian imaginary. Perhaps, however, some classically Canadian ambivalence is on display in the relative lack of critical cultural commentary on 9/11.13 Canada’s opting out of the invasion of Iraq, for instance, signalled a disjuncture with the US politics of the immediate post-9/11 period. Michael Truscello has questioned why it is that 9/11 might be situated “as a date of exceptional importance,” and wonders whether such a focus on this date as one of exception “merely contribute[s] to, for example, neoconservative attempts to enshrine 9/11 as a propagandistic tool.”14 His analysis of the response to 9/11 suggests that the last fifteen-plus years are those of increased neo-conservative retrenchment, “draconian laws, militarization of police forces, and repressive new forms of technological surveillance.”15 It is thus hardly a change to be celebrated, as Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson also note in this volume with reference to Superman’s being reclaimed in Canada along neo-conservative lines. Indeed, if, as Slavoj Žižek argued shortly thereafter, 9/11 signalled the end of the US “holiday from history,”16 then this process of getting back to work has been a dire one indeed. From the Canadian side of the border, we might argue that this country was routinely complicit in the re-engineering of the post-9/11 state throughout the years of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, but we have been reluctant to name it as such. There is thus, it seems, a critical challenge that we must confront: on the one hand, 9/11 changed many things in the United States, and these shifts have also affected Canada deeply. We should therefore note these shifts. On the other hand, marking 9/11 as a moment of extreme exceptionalism may be part of perpetuating a rhetoric that has enabled deep-seated forms of cultural and literal violence to reassert themselves. It seems wise, then, to proceed with caution when reading MaddAddam across borders; it is a trilogy that addresses the different situations of Canada and the United States, but reading for both (or rather, a plurality of) politics entails reading Atwood’s dystopia

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with a both / and lens that recognizes the impact of 9/11, while also examining the myriad forces that might bring such a future to pass. The novels project a none-too-distant future in which the world collapses, due to, first, environmental degradation, and second, a biologically engineered supervirus created by Glenn, who goes by the codename Crake. The three books plot themselves different trajectories, moving between linked characters and settings. In short, they project a dystopian (or ustopian, if we accept Atwood’s framework) future in which the state has effectively crumbled in the wake of both environmental collapse and the takeover of corporations. The trilogy’s similarities to The Handmaid’s Tale have led many to see Atwood’s concerns as long-standing ones. People in the West are divided between the corporate compounds and the “pleeblands,” spaces portrayed as being inhabited by seedy quasi-legal or else illicit activity (similar to the divide between the inside and outside of the state of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale). In a brief recap of the story at the beginning of MaddAddam, Atwood describes the pre-epidemic divide as follows: it was a world “divided into the Compounds – fortified corporations containing the technocratic elite that controlled society through their collective security arm, the CorpSeCorps – and the pleeblands outside Compound walls, where the rest of society lived, shopped, and scammed, in their slums, their suburbs, their malls” (xiii–xiv). The world outside of the West operates largely at the behest of the Western, corporate powers as well. This existing state of affairs collapses as a result of Crake’s virus, leaving some humans to attempt to eke out a future. Among them are the genetically engineered post-humans whom Crake developed in order to replace humankind, colloquially known as the Crakers.17 These beings are similar to humans in many ways, yet incorporate several different genetic traits that make them adaptable to the post-apocalyptic world. The first novel, Oryx and Crake (2003), follows the character Jimmy through recollections of his lost past and details his present-time interactions with the Crakers. The Year of the Flood (2009) follows up by detailing the religious society known as the God’s Gardeners, who are an ecologically focused sect that lives in anticipation of what they call the “waterless flood” that will wipe out humankind, a prophecy that they see as being fulfilled by Crake’s superbug. The third book, MaddAddam (2013), brings the characters together in the aftermath of society’s collapse, as they strive to begin anew, evading threats from hybrid animal species and from dehumanized people – other survivors – who would destroy them.

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While the breadth of this trilogy is already affording many critics different entry points, such as the ecocritical focus that many have already taken, I would like to hone in on the security state that these novels develop prior to the illness that wipes out most of the human species. I do so because it is perhaps one of the clearest narrative threads that might allow us to consider the interplay of borders in these books and to bring the post-9/11 context to light. This element of the narrative is written in the past tense and told from the perspective of multiple characters. In Oryx and Crake, we learn through Jimmy’s memories about how the security state came be to established. As a young boy, he witnesses a mass bonfire of infected animals, reminiscent of the “mad cow” scares in the United Kingdom early in the millennium.18 This bonfire, the adults around him suspect, is the result of a deliberate act of terrorism, designed to “drive up the prices” of rival growers’ animals.19 The result of this malady is to bring all elements of the life lived by Jimmy and his parents within their OrganInc corporate-compound “in-house” (19). That is, supply chains become corporatized, and nothing is brought in from “outside” any longer; the security that had been thought to be “tight as a drum” prior to the act of bio-espionage expands, and the world beyond recedes (18). Borders thus become ever more defined between individual corporate spaces, while those who are left on the outside are effectively left to rot. As the narrative puts it, “Outside the OrganInc walls and gates and searchlights, things were unpredictable. Inside, they were the way it used to be when Jimmy’s father was a kid, before things got so serious” (27). The world is divided into the haves and the have-nots, but the borders outside of Jimmy’s compound are even more treacherous than that: “it wasn’t just one side you had to watch out for,” readers are told. Instead, there are “[o]ther companies, other countries, various factions and plotters” (27). The state of warfare, in other words, has become perpetual, and the rhetoric of safety – “[d]idn’t she want to be safe, didn’t she want her son to be safe?” Jimmy’s dissident mother is asked (53) – is used to trample all other considerations. Young Jimmy and Crake spend their time in some of the shadier corners of the Internet, watching extreme pornography and live executions. It is a virtual space in which the ideological war is being waged on many fronts, and it is impossible to tell whether any of the threats from elsewhere are real. Crake suggests that all of the online images of places that “purported to be in fundamentalist countries in the Middle East … were probably taking place on a back lot somewhere in California” (82). This is the world in which the CorpSeCorps, a shadowy private security firm, increasingly takes over the services of

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the state, commissioning, for instance, the genetically spliced “wolvogs” (205) and taking over where public safety no longer prevails. The creep of the privatization of everything remains on display. For instance, we are told that “[t]he Corpsmen were really anal about airspace … they suspected everyone of wanting to nuke stuff from above” (244–5). The borders multiply and shift under corporate rule right up until society’s collapse, leaving Jimmy to contemplate humankind’s demise. In The Year of the Flood, more details emerge about the state of (in) security under which the trilogy’s denizens live prior to the collapse. The novel traces the lives of the characters Toby and Ren, two women who have been involved in the God’s Gardeners and who survive Crake’s epidemic. We learn early in the novel that “the CorpSeCorps had outlawed firearms in the interests of public safety, reserving the newly invented sprayguns for themselves, and suddenly people were officially weaponless,”20 a legislative change that would have very different resonance in Canada and the United States. In other words, this private security firm manages to take action so as to control all legitimated forms of violence as it replaces state functions. The provenance of the Corps becomes clearer, too: readers are told that “[t]hey’d started as a private security firm for the Corporations, but then they’d taken over when the local police forces collapsed for lack of funding, and people liked that at first because the Corporations paid, but now CorpSeCorps were sending their tentacles everywhere” (25). Or, in another parallel statement, readers learn that “officially they were a private Corporation Security Corps employed by the brand-name Corporations, and those Corporations still wanted to be perceived as honest and trustworthy” (266). The God’s Gardeners find themselves at constant risk from this quasi-official regime of enforcement, but also from the general population, which distrusts them because of their ecological commitments. The Gardeners’ leader, Adam One, notes, however, that because they “own nothing” of value to the system, they “don’t qualify as terrorists” (48). In other words, political status depends upon private property; by virtue of having none – or none of perceived value – they are more or less left to themselves. Yet the risk remains: their death rites, for instance, involve illegally burying bodies in parks, something that Adam One says does not square with a society that “believes that even death itself should be regimented and, above all, paid for” (184). As long as they remain peaceful, however, they are tolerated. Although “the CorpSeCorps were said to be bent on eliminating” the “green-guerrilla scene … activists” (267), they want to be perceived as a force of good, stability, and order, and therefore leave the Gardeners temporarily to their

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own devices. This is a precarious state of being, however. On the one hand, crossing the corporate world if you are on the inside of the compounds is liable to lead to what the character Zeb, who becomes Toby’s lover, calls “Corpicide”: “If you’re Corp and you do something they don’t like, you’re dead. It’s like you shot yourself” (244). On the other hand, if you are on the outside of the fenced compounds of the corporations, you simply disappear or are attacked, as the Gardeners are late in The Year of the Flood, because, Adam One suggests, the Gardeners “threatened their profit margins” (275). The third novel, MaddAddam, takes place largely after the epidemic has wiped out most of the human species, although ongoing elements of backstory, and Zeb and Adam One’s in particular, continue the process of describing the security state. Zeb and Adam One, half-brothers, live parallel lives that display the increasingly fugitive nature of existing outside of cultural and corporate norms. Zeb’s story connects to the dismantling of what remains of Western liberal democracies, as he notes the crumbling of the legal system (65) and is employed at one point by a company specializing in “the hacking of electronic voting machines” (175). Adam’s and Zeb’s father, the founder of the sleazy Church of PetrOleum, is also linked to the crumbling of the state, the rise of the CorpSeCorps, and the ongoing environmental destruction. The church preaches a creed that blends “the American Way and God’s Holy Oil,” vilifying environmentalists as “demon-possessed Satanic minions of darkness” (183). This is a vilification that has at times taken on similar, if less overt forms, in both Canada and the United States in recent years, especially concerning bitumen extraction projects from northern Alberta. The attack on the public or common good and the critical need for dissent is eliminated – “the Corps had the power to bulldoze and squash anything they liked,” we read (329) – and the possibilities for being validated as a legitimate, fully human being become narrower and narrower up until the species’ demise. Some specific details in the novels make reference to the atmosphere of the United States and the ongoing War on Terror. One of Jimmy’s childhood computer games, for instance, is called “Kwiktime Osama” (Oryx, 40), a seeming reference to Osama bin Laden, and one of the general sentiments expressed in that book – “Remember when you could fly anywhere in the world, without fear?” (63; italics in original) – seems to evoke the pre-9/11 situation with a nod to the false nostalgia and complacency that allowed turn-of-the-millennium North Americans to forget previous airline disasters. In The Year of the Flood, the character Amanda, Ren’s childhood friend, discusses “the Wall” that the

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CorpSeCorps builds “to keep the Tex refugees out, because just the fence wasn’t enough” (85), a seeming parallel to the Mexico-US border fence and wall constructed since 9/11, though moved to a locale that reflects Atwood’s description of the complete desertification of the south-central United States in the near future. That novel also makes reference to what is called “internal rendition” (98, 190), an evocation of the process of “extraordinary rendition” of the George W. Bush years, years that are similarly evoked through the reference to hacking voting machines, a widespread concern during the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections in the United States. What do we gain from reading these novels in the context of the proliferating, privatizing security state? I would like to suggest that this framework points to the threat of neo-liberal governance, a threat that can be witnessed in both Canada and the United States, though with different overtones in each country. Neo-liberal governance can be variously defined, but is nicely summed up in David Harvey’s suggestion that it consists of the hollowing out of all governmental practices, besides bolstering the markets and maintaining a monopoly on legitimated forms of violence, so as to keep those markets flowing.21 In the United States, we might think of the shocking levels of military spending that have persisted now for decades or the militarization of police forces; in Canada, we might think of the shift from the rhetoric of “peace keeping” to the more overtly militaristic stance of the Harper years. In both circumstances, displays of force may come at the cost of the social programs and the other forms of governmentality that Harvey discusses. The extreme outcome of such governance, as envisioned by Atwood, points toward how such a narrowly neo-liberal future endangers humans themselves. Neoliberalism is, in essence, a renewed form of liberalism that relies upon extreme forms of self-reliance and the voiding of community functions. Crake’s project of wiping out the human species and replacing it with his own genetic splice seems merely to be a logical outcome of the progressive dehumanization of other human bodies that is seen in the trilogy. The disposability of the body is remarkably ever-present across the novels: dissidents, the poor, women, children, the racialized, and those who know too much all appear to be at constant risk of torture, murder, and death. It is the normalized body – that of the privileged white male – that appears to be at relatively little risk, as long as it remains politically and economically obedient.22 The treatment of violent, but otherwise normative, criminals in the trilogy shows their dehumanization as well. Such criminals are sent to play “painball,” apparently a lethal variation on paintball, whose

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survivors – three of whom become the antagonists in the trilogy – are said by Ren to be “not really human” (Year, 362) as a result of their experiences. Crake’s motives for the mass genocide of all of these nolonger-quite-human bodies, however, remain opaque (see MaddAddam, 140–1). His ever-shifting collection of quirky fridge magnets suggests, late in Oryx and Crake, that humans are limited, yet also that “[t]o stay human is to break a limitation” (301). What that limitation might be remains unknown. The limitations that are the result of being human, however, remain a constant concern in the trilogy, and are a constant concern of many of the top corporations as well: their work involves attempting to perfect the human species. Toby, who works for a time at the AnooYoo Corporation, which promises rejuvenation and beautification, observes the clients who come and go, noting that “[n]obody likes it … being a body, a thing. Nobody wants to be limited in that way” (264). By the time we read the third book, Toby is able to observe that, to the newly engineered Crakers, the “regular” humans “must seem subhuman” (36), and she later turns the observation around, wondering whether “the Crakers may be more human” than the other characters have yet been able to recognize (217). In In Other Worlds, Atwood suggests that science fiction and speculative fiction “can explore the nature and limits of what it means to be human in very explicit ways, by pushing the human envelope as far as it will go in the direction of the not-quite-human” (62). She wonders, similarly, “How far can humans go in the alteration department before those altered cease to be human? Which of our features are at the core of our being?” (91). Her trilogy ends by dramatizing these queries by forcing her main characters to determine the fates of their antagonists, the “painballers” who try to kill them. The painballers are, indeed, people with no apparent redeeming qualities. Violent criminals before the collapse of society, they survived multiple rounds of the painball game to which they were sentenced and that others watch as a form of gladiator sport; they survived by becoming ever more violent and dehumanized. Murder, sexual violence, and cannibalism are among their everyday behaviours, and are witnessed again and again. Toby argues to Zeb, though, that theirs “were human lives, whatever they’d done” (298). Once the two surviving painballers are captured, the group of survivors faces the decision of what to do with them. At this point, the neo-liberal curtailment of the state and, in turn, of the human comes into play: the debate centres largely on the extent to which the men are human or not. The character Rebecca terms them “soul-dead neurotrash,” White Sedge describes them as “[f]ellow

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human beings,” and Crozier opines that they are “[s]cumsucking fuckbuckets” (367). Black Rhino intervenes by saying, “Who cares what we call them … [s]o long as it’s not people” (367); Toby, reflecting upon the situation, notes that it is “[h]ard to choose a label,” because the painballers’ experiences have rendered them “not quite human” (368). White Sedge argues that “their viciousness is a result of what was done to them earlier in their lives, by others” (368), making a case for nurture over nature, but, in the end, the group decides, with only one dissenter, to kill the painballers. Whether or not they are human, the group lacks the capacity to attempt either to rehabilitate or adequately imprison their antagonists, and so they kill them instead. Atwood suggests, in a reflection on George Orwell, that one outcome of 9/11 is “open markets, closed minds” (In Other Worlds, 148). That is, we risk creating a world in which corporations rule supreme, while the capacity for mobile, critical forms of thought diminishes. The governmental nightmare that she described so well in The Handmaid’s Tale is now, post-9/11, the nightmarish future of the MaddAddam trilogy, one run by companies for their own narrow ends. When reading in the context of 9/11, I am immediately put in mind of Judith Butler’s trenchant observations about who can and cannot be considered fully human in the context of the War on Terror: she notes that we must observe the ways in which bodies are rendered more or less human as a justification for either mourning their loss or speeding their destruction. While the trilogy comes to rest upon what is effectively a humanistic conundrum, Butler’s reasoning leads me to suggest, rather, that it is the concept of the human that is inadequate, that the concept of the human itself is used to label and control us, and is, perhaps, that which we must define and resist. In Atwood’s dystopic trilogy, then, we might begin to witness the ways in which the human ceases to be an adequate category for understanding the social and the political since 9/11. In turn, the particular distinction between Canada and the United States in these novels might be witnessed in the active role that Crake takes in engineering the future alongside Jimmy’s comparative passivity. If we accept the argument from Sutherland and Swan that Jimmy acts as a quasi-Canadian stand-in, his passivity can be read as that of a Canada that maintains an ambivalent attitude toward US actions, paralyzed and uncomprehending. At the end of MaddAddam, a wounded Jimmy does not participate in the vote on the painballers’ fate. It is already surprising that the blithely unaware Jimmy has made it to this point, but his brief survival of the collapse of society suggests a certain form of possibility, even though he, too, will perish. In the

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meantime, his fellow survivors have become enmeshed within the forms of governance over life and death that constrained them prior to the collapse when they judge the humanity of the painballers – an act of judgment that will bring its own eventual destruction, Atwood suggests. Borders return, and in particular the border of what constitutes the human. Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy may read differently on both sides of the Canada-US border and beyond, as elements like gun control and corporate governance continue to remain different within each state’s political boundaries, yet the problem of the human brings these readings together. The policing of the human body, Atwood suggests, is liable to render us all abject in the long run. ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

My first thanks are due to Michael Thorn, whose work as my research assistant was invaluable to the completion of this article. I would like to acknowledge the Internal Research Grant Funds program at Mount Royal University. Thanks to audiences that supplied me with feedback on earlier versions of the arguments that led to this piece at the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English conference at Brock University and the Culture and the Canada-US Border Conference at the University of Nottingham.

n otes 1 Atwood, MaddAddam, 242. All further references for this text will appear in parentheses. 2 See especially Bergthaller, “Housebreaking the Human Animal”; Bouson, “Using Up”; Canavan, “Hope, but Not for Us”; Dawson, “Biohazard”; Glover, “Human / Nature”; and Rozelle, “Liminal Ecologies.” Shoshannah Ganz terms Atwood’s first two novels “the inception of a nascent mutation of the Gothic” that she terms “Canadian ecoGothic” (“Margaret Atwood’s Monsters in the Canadian ecoGothic,” 87). 3 In this respect, please see Bouson, “Game Over”; DiMarco, “Paradice Lost”; Dunning, “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake”; Evans, “‘Not Unmarked’”; Ingersoll, “Survival”; and Pordzik, “The Posthuman Future of Man.” 4 Especially the focus taken in essays by Barzilai, “‘Tell My Story’”; Cooke, “Technics and the Human”; DiMarco, “Going Wendigo”; Hall, “The Last Laugh”; Hiser, “Pedagogy of the Apocalypse”; and Watkins, “Future Shock.”

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5 In addition to some of the texts already mentioned, see, for instance, the second chapter of Sharon Rose Wilson’s Myths and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (35ff.); her chapter “Frankenstein’s Gaze”; and Staels, “Oryx and Crake.” 6 Bannerjee, Howells, and Tolan all, separately, note this point. For Tolan, Oryx and Crake pushes Atwood’s writing into post-feminist territory (Margaret Atwood, 273ff.), while Nathalie Foy argues that Atwood’s depiction of Jimmy’s mother, at least, “appears less post-feminist than ­pre-feminist” (“The Representation of the Absent Mother in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,” 408). For Reingard M. Nischik, instead, Oryx marks “a falling-off of explicit concern with gender” (Engendering Genre, 3). Larissa Lai has written about the character Oryx and gender, linking gender to Jimmy and Crake’s Orientalist gaze – and Oryx’s gaze back. 7 Sutherland and Swan, “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,” 219. 8 Ibid., 229. 9 This point may be a vexing one for scholars who are well aware of Atwood’s investments in questions of Canadian literature. It is tempting to begin to read the criticism and reviews of the MaddAddam trilogy in national terms, as the responses appear to vary: Canadian readers may be likely to read the novels for concepts such as Ganz’s “Canadian ecoGothic,” while such contexts may be of less interest to critics in other locations. 10 Fredric Jameson, “Then You Are Them.” 11 Sutherland and Swan, “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,” 219, 233. 12 Atwood, In Other Worlds, 66. All further references for this text will appear in parentheses. 13 For it is only that, a relative and not absolute lack, and it shows up, if sometimes indirectly, in literary texts like Marcus Youssef, Guillermo Verdecchia, and Camyar Chai’s Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil, Dionne Brand’s Inventory, Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down, and Jane Urquhart’s Sanctuary Line, among others. 14 Truscello, “Ten Years After 9/11,” 9. 15 Ibid., 10. 16 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 56. 17 On the concept of the post-human, see especially Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman. The Crakers would not fit all understandings of the posthuman, let alone post-humanism, it is important to note. Michèle Lacombe describes the Crakers as being “[n]ot robots so much as floor models” for a future post-humanity (“Resistance in Futility,” 426). 18 Coral Ann Howells uses this echo of events in the UK in order provide a timeline for Jimmy’s childhood, linking Atwood’s description to events in 2001 (Margaret Atwood, 173).

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19 Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 18. All further references for this text will appear in parentheses. 20 Atwood, The Year of the Flood, 24. All further references for this text will appear in parentheses. 21 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2. 22 On this note, Sally Chivers analyzes the potency of normalcy and notes “the elimination of physical difference from Oryx and Crake” (“Margaret Atwood and the Critical Limits of Embodiment,” 388). Diana Brydon suggests that, in Oryx and Crake, “there are people and there are disposable people, and these categories leak” (“Atwood’s Global Ethic,” 451).

b ib liog r ap h y Atwood, Margaret. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. Toronto: Signal, 2011. – MaddAddam. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2013. – Oryx and Crake. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2003. – The Year of the Flood. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2009. Bannerjee, Suparna. “Towards ‘Feminist Mothering’: Oppositional Maternal Practice in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 14, no. 1 (2013): 236–47. Barzilai, Shuli. “‘Tell My Story’: Remembrance and Revenge in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” Critique 50, no. 1 (2008): 87–110. Bergthaller, Hannes. “Housebreaking the Human Animal: Humanism and the Problem of Sustainability in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood.” English Studies 91, no. 7 (2010): 728–43. Bouson, J. Brooks. “‘It’s Game Over Forever’: Atwood’s Satiric Vision of a Bioengineered Posthuman Future in Oryx and Crake.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39, no. 3 (2004): 139–56. – “‘We’re Using Up the Earth. It’s Almost Gone’: A Return to the PostApocalyptic Future in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 46, no. 1 (2011): 9–26. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Brand, Dionne. Inventory. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006. Brydon, Diana. “Atwood’s Global Ethic: the Open Eye, the Blinded Eye.” In Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye, edited by John Moss and Tobi Kozakewich, 447–58. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. Canavan, Gerry. “Hope, but Not for Us: Ecological Science Fiction and the End of the World in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.” LIT : Literature, Interpretation, Theory 23, no. 2 (2012): 138–59.

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Chivers, Sally. “Margaret Atwood and the Critical Limits of Embodiment.” In Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye, edited by John Moss and Tobi Kozakewich, 385–96. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006. Cooke, Grayson. “Technics and the Human at Zero-Hour: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Studies in Canadian Literature 31, no. 2 (2006): 105–25. Dawson, Ashley. “Biohazard: The Catastrophic Temporality of Green Capitalism.” Social Text 31, no. 1 (2013): 63–81. DiMarco, Danette. “Going Wendigo: The Emergence of the Iconic Monster in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Antonia Bird’s Ravenous.” College Literature 3, no. 4 (2011): 134–55. – “Paradice Lost, Paradise Regained: Homo faber and the Makings of a New Beginning in Oryx and Crake.” Papers on Language & Literature 41, no. 2 (2005): 170–95. Dunning, Stephen. “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake: The Terror of the Therapeutic.” Canadian Literature 186 (2005): 86–101. Evans, Shari. “‘Not Unmarked’: From Themed Space to a Feminist Ethics of Engagement in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Femspec 10, no. 2 (2010): 35–58. Foy, Nathalie. “The Representation of the Absent Mother in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” In Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye, edited by John Moss and Tobi Kozakewich, 407–19. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006. Ganz, Shoshannah. “Margaret Atwood’s Monsters in the Canadian ecoGothic.” In Ecogothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, 87–102. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013. Glover, Jayne. “Human / Nature: Ecological Philosophy in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” English Studies in Africa 52, no. 2 (2009): 50–62. Gray, Richard. After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11. Malden, MA , and Oxford: Wiley, 2011. Hall, Susan. “The Last Laugh: A Critique of the Object Economy in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 4, no. 3 (2009): 179–96. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Helwig, Maggie. Girls Fall Down. Toronto: Coach House, 2008. Hiser, Krista Karyn. “Pedagogy of the Apocalypse.” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship & Pedagogy 21, no. 2 (2010): 154–62. Howells, Coral Ann. Margaret Atwood. 2nd ed. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2005. Ingersoll, Earl. “Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Novel Oryx and Crake.” Extrapolation 45, no. 2 (2004): 162–75.

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Jameson, Fredric. “Then You Are Them.” Review of The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood. London Review of Books, 10 September 2009. . Keniston, Ann, and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, eds. Literature after 9/11. New York: Routledge, 2008. Lacombe, Michèle. “Resistance in Futility: The Cyborg Identities of Oryx and Crake.” In Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye, edited by John Moss and Tobi Kozakewich, 421–32. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006. Lai, Larissa. Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014. Nischik, Reingard M. Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2009. Pordzik, Ralph. “The Posthuman Future of Man: Anthropocentrism and the Other of Technology in Anglo-American Science Fiction.” Utopian Studies 23, no. 1 (2012): 142–61. Roach, Kent. September 11: Consequences for Canada. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003. Rozelle, Lee. “Liminal Ecologies in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Canadian Literature 206 (2010): 61–72. Spiegel, Michael. “Character in a Post-National World: Neomedievalism in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Mosaic 43, no. 3 (2010): 119–34. Staels, Hilde. “Oryx and Crake: Atwood’s Ironic Inversion of Frankenstein.” In Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye, edited by John Moss and Tobi Kozakewich, 433–46. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006. Sutherland, Sharon, and Sarah Swan. “Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake: Canadian Post-9/11 Worries.” In From Solidarity to Schisms: 9/11 and after in Fiction and Film from Outside the U.S., edited by Cara Cilano, 219–36. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. Tolan, Fiona. Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Truscello, Michael. “Ten Years after 9/11: An Introduction.” Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 1 (2011): 9–24. Urquhart, Jane. Sanctuary Line. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2010. Versluys, Kristiaan. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Watkins, Susan. “Future Shock: Rewriting the Apocalypse in Contemporary Women’s Fiction.” LIT : Literature, Interpretation, Theory 23, no. 2 (2012): 119–37. Wilson, Sharon R. “Frankenstein’s Gaze and Atwood’s Sexual Politics in Oryx and Crake.” In Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye, edited by John Moss and Tobi Kozakewich, 397–406. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006.

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Wilson, Sharon Rose. Myths and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women’s Fiction: From Atwood to Morrison. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Youssef, Marcus, Guillermo Verdecchia, and Camyar Chai. Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso, 2002.

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11 “We Have to Get Along with Others”: Cosmopolitanism and Cross-Border Literary History Zalfa Feghali “There is no other justification for the study of world literature … but this: to be a thorn in the side, a permanent intellectual challenge to national literatures – especially the local literature.”  Franco Moretti “Some of us used to be you; some of us want to be you; some of you used to be us.”  Margaret Atwood

Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s comments above offer a direct description of the relationship between Canada and the United States, encapsulating the fraught character of the border that separates the two nations and shedding light on the complexity of identifying as either “us” or “you” in this context.1 Marxist literary critic Franco Moretti’s ideas on world literature, in contrast, take a broader view, theorizing how national borders need not shape or dictate the identities of national literatures. In his framework, the study of world literature productively undermines understandings of national literatures and offers a different focus for literary study that eschews literary nationalisms in favour of what he calls the “worlding” of texts.2 Both Atwood and Moretti’s comments resonate with the key concerns of this chapter, which examines Canadian author Yann Martel’s 101 Letters to a Prime Minister (2012) in relation to Canadian and US

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literature, and its modelling of cross-border reading, at the same time as Martel’s book exists as a work of Canadian literature that features both Canadian and non-Canadian texts. Where 101 Letters to a Prime Minister has often been read as simply the workings of a public intellectual, intended as an indictment of now-former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, or as merely “a book about books,” I read it instead as an example of how we might craft a cross-border literary history that has at its core the concerns of cosmopolitan citizenship, and also as an engagement with the politics of form in its unsettling of the epistolary genre, in the same vein as Jacques Derrida’s “satire of epistolary literature” in The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1987).3 In this chapter, I read Martel’s work as an example of one way in which a cross-border literary history can be achieved. I show that such an approach also has the effect of reversing the dominant cultural flow and polarity of the Canada-US border, offering a cross-border economy of reading, framed on the one hand by the lack of response to Martel from Stephen Harper and on the other by Barack Obama’s unsolicited letter to Martel showing his appreciation of Life of Pi (2001). This readerly engagement with a range of US and Canadian literary texts, as well as texts whose authors hail from all over the world, also allows a means of understanding “Otherness” in the twenty-first century that recasts the readers of 101 Letters to a Prime Minister, and the books themselves, as cosmopolitan, “worlded” citizens. By reading 101 Letters to a Prime Minister as an epistolary text that unsettles the cultural and literary flow of the 49th parallel, this chapter offers North American literary and border studies an imaginative, transformative, and cross-border method of doing literary history that has at its heart the principles of cosmopolitan citizenship, a citizenship that both is contingent on conceptions of nationality and simultaneously challenges, and even undermines, nationalisms. Martel’s 101 Letters to a Prime Minister marked the end of a three-year project in which the Canadian writer, perhaps most famous for his Life of Pi, began writing a series of letters to then-prime minister Stephen Harper, enclosing a novel, a collection of short stories, a children’s book, a play, or a collection of poetry with every dispatch. Martel never received a personal response from Harper, who in 2004 famously (but perhaps apocryphally) noted that his favourite book was the Guinness Book of World Records. Martel has since described the experience as like being in “the loneliest book club in the world.”4 Martel’s book recommendations in these letters range across a broad spectrum of time and geographical area, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland,

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France, and Russia, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Shakespearean earlymodern drama to Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1991) and beyond. But most telling is that, of the 101 dispatches, twenty-nine contain works by authors who can be identified as Canadian, twenty-two include works by authors who can be broadly considered as from the United States, and the remaining fifty are drawn from national contexts beyond North America. As he is a Canadian author, Martel’s 101 Letters is rendered a “Canadian” text, undermining the national provenances of the books, and I argue specifically that the fifty-one North American dispatches, just over half of the total, work to erase the Canada-US border from the “inside,” forcing those texts that would “ordinarily” be considered as hailing from the United States to “pass” as Canadian, yet ultimately eroding even the Canadianness of these texts in favour of a cosmopolitan reading that inquires how twenty-first-century readers encounter and understand the “Other.” By situating twenty-two of these novels in a context that does not highlight their US “character,” I argue that these texts are empowered and placed in a position to be read hemispherically, beyond national boundaries and overturning US cultural hegemony, which, since its acknowledgment in the 1951 Massey Report, and especially after the events of 11 September 2001, has been described as having the ability to “penetrate every wall, home, life, and mind.”5 The paradox of US texts being empowered, while also undermining and overcoming US cultural hegemony, lies at the heart of the cross-border model of reading that I  advance: here, as in Kit Dobson’s chapter on Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, the border is refigured as a tool for reading texts that cross it, and the US texts in question are able to “achieve universal resonance” (101 Letters, 19) through such a framework by virtue of their provenance being made secondary. I use the texts that make up Martel’s “book about books” as what Gillian Roberts in this volume terms “raw material,” reforming them in my argument as Canadian cultural texts that, as Roberts contends, are inextricable from Canadian national identity. But to “pass” is not simply to be accepted as a member of one particular group or category on the basis of perceived resemblance or sameness: in the case of literary texts, passing unravels narratives of close-knit national literary identities and serves as a step towards, as Nancy Kang puts it, “negotiat[ing] a specifically cross-border North American literary history” through which cosmopolitan citizenship can be explored.6 This reversal of the status quo, in which Canadian cultural products are often “mistaken” as “American,” proposes an alternative relationship

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between these neighbours that lie on either side of the 49th parallel. What emerges from such a reframed relationship is a practice or economy of reading that reorients Canada’s role in the Canada-US relationship, while embedding twenty-first-century cross-border concerns and cosmopolitan citizenship within its very framing process: an attempt to formulate a cross-border literary canon at a time of both heightened crisis at, and skepticism of, borders, and bearing in mind what philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s definition of cosmopolitan citizenship would describe as the ethical considerations that must take place if we are to behave ethically to those designated as “strangers.” This is exemplified in Martel’s discussion of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). He describes to (Stephen) Harper the greatness of language that allows readers of English to “read untranslated books from every continent” and “feel both at home and abroad” (68), stressing how such reading clearly works to destabilize the (perceived) monolith that is the Canada-US border, and, of course, closes the gaps between North America and other continents, too. His comments about the novel come at the letter’s close: “It’s a modern classic, a great story, one that will make you love lawyers, but it’s for the usage that I chose it. Rural Alabama English of the 1950s as spoken by children is something else. And yet it is English, so you will understand it without a problem” (68). The capacity of To Kill a Mockingbird to make the reader “feel both at home and abroad” allows an erasure of the boundary that separates “home” from “abroad” in Canada, and recalls Margaret Atwood’s destabilization of “you” and “us” in North America in the second epigraph of this chapter. As Scout Finch, the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird, realizes at the end of the novel, “Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things inbetween … Neighbors give in return.”7 In this context, Scout’s description of neighbours can be understood as referring to neighbours as citizens, equal in the eyes of the state, but also, of course, as neighbouring nations. Understanding Martel and Harper as neighbours brings new resonance to Scout’s comments; if she sees neighbours as giving “in return,” then Harper’s silence in the face of Martel’s many “little things inbetween” casts Harper in an even less favourable light. Key to such a cross-border reading practice is Martel’s view that literature offers a route through which to encounter the (generic) figure of “the Other,” an echo of political scientist Reg Whitaker’s comment that “[f]or Canada, the United States remains our significant Other.”8 For Martel, in the letter accompanying Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), it is the role of language that may help Harper

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and other potential readers understand the Other: in reading this novel, Martel tells Harper, “You will have heard voices that you might otherwise never have heard” (137), reminiscent of C B C Radio 2’s 2009 contest inviting listeners to select “the top 49 songs from north of the 49th parallel that would best define our country to incoming US President Barack Obama.”9 More significantly, for Martel, “for the duration of the story [the reader] will have entered the being of an African-American woman” (137). Martel’s claim that reading inspires empathy and, potentially, a recognition of the real legacies of entrenched racism in North America resonates with the words of the protagonist of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Starks, who tells her friend Phoeby that “mah tongue is in mah friend’s mouf” – reminding readers that engaging with a text allows them access to the voices of “others,” or, to recall Scout Finch’s preferred description, the voices of neighbours.10 However, understanding neighbours as simply “others” assumes a dichotomy that feminist theorist Sara Ahmed usefully works to dismantle when she describes the processes by which the self or the community must “differentiate from each other or the other … through differentiating between others.”11 Recognizing the importance of a multi-layered understanding of Otherness is crucial to conceptions of cosmopolitan citizenship, and this is reflected in the letter that accompanies Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007). Because Native North Americans occupy a complex composite of Otherness, Martel writes: “It would be nice to think that one day Junior will stop being tormented by these perceived existential opposites … It’s good, after all, to be something only part-time” (397). Such an acknowledgment of the importance of hybrid identifications in the twenty-first century is relevant to all cross-border concerns, and can also be seen in Martel’s reading of Latinx Junot Díaz’s Drown (1996): for him, the short stories “cover what it means to have a hyphen in one’s identity, the potential for it to be a gulf, a dream, a strain, a loss” (128). Martel’s apt description of the collection is reflected in Drown’s epigraph, taken from Cuban-American poet Gustavo Pérez Firmat, which offers an effective meditation on how linguistic belonging can be just as important as national belonging, and equally on how admission to such belonging is refused. This offers a route back to a consideration of how encountering different voices, sometimes speaking in different languages, is also the work of the imagination, which can, as Northrop Frye notes in The Educated Imagination (1964, and dispatch 20), “produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in” (140).

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The aspiration to achieve “the society we want to live in” is, of course, an impetus of cosmopolitan citizenship, with the “we” here taken not only to mean Canadian society, but also readers and citizens across the globe. This kind of citizenship finds one of its most-often-cited articulations in Jacques Derrida’s On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, in which Derrida identifies a contradictory impulse embedded within the logic of cosmopolitanism: the relationship between hospitality and hostility, which, in the Canadian context, as Roberts asserts in Prizing Literature, “offers an enabling framework for discussing the configuration of national identity and belonging.”12 Yet national identity and belonging under erasure may seem to exist in a paradoxical relationship with the ideal of cosmopolitan citizenship: in The Politics of Friendship, Derrida affirms the aporetic nature of friendship with extended discussions of an apostrophe that Michel de Montaigne attributes to Aristotle: “O my friends, there is no friend.”13 The purpose of exposing the contradiction, for Derrida, is not to make cosmopolitan citizenship impossible, but rather to enable its emergence through a more thorough understanding of the ethics of friendship, as Scout Finch does in Martel’s discussion of dispatch 13. Semiotician and political theorist Walter D. Mignolo’s view of cosmopolitan citizenship is equally invested in envisioning communities comprised of different individual voices, as he tackles the issue of global or universal citizenship. While Mignolo concludes that the political emergence of such a framework is unlikely, a conceptual and individual engagement with cosmopolitan citizenship – or what I argue Martel’s compendium of letters is suggestive of – is premised on the shared universal “human drive to build communities grounded on memories and experiences,” or, as Frye would have it, “the society we want to live in.”14 Speaking through and with voices of “Others,” who might be part of the aspirational community promised by cosmopolitan citizenship, holds practical and personal civic significance in Martel’s project. In 101 Letters, Martel traces his project back to March 2007, when he was invited to Ottawa to take part in the celebrations commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Canada Council for the Arts, as he was a recipient of a Council Grant in 1991 and again in 1997. He recalls how he felt while contemplating the House of Commons, where the celebrations were taking place, and, as he puts it: “I got to thinking about stillness” (7). At these celebrations, the minister for Canadian heritage at the time, Bev Oda, delivered a short speech. Martel remembers, “We artists stood up, not for ourselves but for the Canada Council and what it represents. The Minister did not speak for long. In fact, she barely started, we thought,

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when she finished and sat down. There was a flutter of applause and then MPs turned to other matters. We were still standing. That was it? Fifty years of building Canada’s dazzling and varied culture, done with in less than five minutes?” (7). Through all this, Martel noticed that “[t]he Prime Minister did not speak during our brief tribute. He didn’t look up,” leading Martel to wonder, “Who is this man? What makes him tick? There must be occasions,” Martel ponders, “when [Harper’s] thinking goes from the instrumental – how do I do this, how do I get that? – to the fundamental – why this, why that” (8). As a result of this incident, Martel decides to “make suggestions that would inspire stillness in Stephen Harper” (8), and the project begins. As a self-proclaimed “citizen of the arts,” Martel believes he has the right to know what a current prime minister thinks of reading, and “a right to know what books shaped him” (9). To justify his project, Martel argues that “literature – as opposed to factual non-fiction – is an essential element to a deeply thinking, fully-feeling mind in our complex twentyfirst century world” (1). The books he recommends to Harper can be understood as a canon of literature that ostensibly functions to help nurture a cosmopolitan outlook, what Martel calls “a deeply thinking, fully-feeling mind,” capable of appreciating “the greatness of literature, and its paradox, that in reading about fictional others we end up reading about ourselves. Sometimes this unwitting self-examination provokes smiles of recognition, while other times … it provokes shudders of worry and denial. Either way, we are the wiser, we are existentially thicker” (18). These last comments, in the letter accompanying the very first book he sends to Harper, The Death of Ivan Ilych (1882), encapsulate the cosmopolitan citizenship that can be achieved through reading and encountering that which can “[leap] from the bounds of the local to achieve universal resonance” (19), and instigate change in a reader. This readerly change, I argue, is one that lies at the heart of cosmopolitan citizenship and its reimagined cross-border literary history; the “universal resonance” of books and the concept of world or cosmopolitan citizenship can be linked in their shared “efforts to create universal frameworks of communication,” with readers cast as active agents in this cross-border economy of reading, both across the Canada-US border and on a global scale – especially, in Martel’s case, because of his popularity as a writer.15 Martel writes these letters not just from a position of indignation – “That was it? Fifty years of building Canada’s dazzling and varied culture, done with in less than five minutes?” – but also, and perhaps more relevantly, as a Canadian citizen concerned that Harper, as an elected leader, had never declared his “imaginative assets,” those facets of his mind that

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with the power of elected office can become his dreams but Martel’s “nightmares” (14). For Martel, effective leadership must be informed by art “in all its incarnations, from the frivolous to the essential” (16), and he saw no evidence that Harper is “informed by literary culture or, indeed, by culture in general” (12), except in Harper’s elimination of arts funding and initiatives over the course of his leadership, his otherwise selective engagement with Canadian cultural events, as, in this volume, Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson show, and as a symptom of what Dobson in his chapter rightly describes as “the threat of neo-liberal governance.”16 Accordingly, Martel sees his campaign as one that is personal and political as well as public, motivated by the civic concerns all Canadian citizens are entitled to articulate in light of what Martel might recognize as “the unfinished moral business of the sovereign state,” as Andrew Linklater puts it.17 A contributing factor to the public facet of this project is that, as I have noted, Martel never received a personal response to any of his dispatches to Harper, and although he did receive seven letters between May 2007 and September 2010 from various executive correspondence officers and one assistant to the prime minister, there was “not a peep from [his] intended co-reader” (6). Each of Martel’s letters began with a standard inscription or address: “To Stephen Harper, / Prime Minister of Canada, / From a Canadian writer, / With best wishes, / Yann Martel” (17). At times, and particularly later in the project, Martel or the other Canadian writers whose help he enlisted inserted a further line of introduction in this inscription, such as that which accompanied Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading (1997): “To Stephen Harper, / Prime Minister of Canada, / A history of reading, a history of being, / From a Canadian writer (and reader), / With best wishes, / Yann Martel” (416). Such a standard address serves to remind us that Martel’s project, while certainly intended to offer Harper a digestible and literal “state of the arts,” or as he calls it, “A Prime Minister’s Reading List” (167), is also a conscious engagement with the epistolary form, a form that, according to David Gerber, “can function as a means for defining and modifying human relations.”18 As Alyssa MacLean shows elsewhere in this volume, “the act of writing back” can be “a profound political statement,” and Martel’s engagement with the politics of form allows us to examine the many connections between political responsibility and its relationship to the arts, as well as offering a framework for a cross-border reading practice predicated on cosmopolitan citizenship. As cultural theorists Margaretta Jolly and Liz Stanley remind us, “it is only very infrequently that an entire epistolarium can be published,” but in this case, the epistolarium in question has appeared more than once.19

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While 101 Letters to a Prime Minister is a compendium of all the letters associated with Martel’s project, offering readers access to, as the subtitle suggests, “The Complete Letters to Stephen Harper,” he also published What Is Stephen Harper Reading? (2009) as a midpoint project, while his campaign was still ongoing. As well as plotting the complete arc of the project, 101 Letters to a Prime Minister shifts the focus from the present continuous (What Is Stephen Harper Reading?) to the factual and atemporal, and, more broadly, situates the project within the epistolary form. In 101 Letters to a Prime Minister, Martel offers his readers – those on either side of the 49th parallel, and beyond – the chance to read his letters and recommendations to Harper and to intrude on and participate in what is traditionally seen as a closed, dyadic relationship. To extend this conception of the dyad, textual theorist Gerald MacLean notes that the dyadic, intimate relationship suggestive of the epistolary form cannot always be described as dialogic.20 The lack of (personal) response from Harper undermines traditional understandings of this dyad, which assumes that there are “always (at least) two sides to any correspondence, two subjectivities telling and reading two different stories, two voices testifying differently in an ‘event of utterance’ through which self and other define and redefine each other.”21 Rather, the readers of 101 Letters take Harper’s place in a move that opens up the project, consistent with Gerald MacLean’s view that considerations of the traditional epistolary dyad downplay the importance of the often public nature of epistolary relationships.22 If Martel’s project is framed by Harper’s lack of personal response, an outcome that he did not necessarily expect, it is because the lack of response unsettled a dyadic relationship in which, as Mikhail Bakhtin puts it, “every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word it anticipates.”23 If “the word in language is half someone else’s,” the fact of Harper’s silence and his lack of personal acknowledgment of Martel’s letters have had the unintentional effect of expanding the epistolary relationship so that the word can be someone else’s, in this case, the public’s.24 Without a response, Martel’s subsequent letters were forced to operate as reflective responses to themselves and as attempts to anticipate and pre-empt potential imagined – but always deferred – responses, since “primacy belongs to the response as the activating principle: it creates the ground for understanding, it prepares the ground for an active and engaged understanding.”25 Read in this way, Martel’s letters can be understood as being both “from” and “to” him(self), as well as being of international public interest

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to what Alyssa MacLean terms “anticipated readers,” “situated as they are on the boundaries of the personal and impersonal.”26 In this framework, letters “originate from a ‘writing I’ (usually singular) and are sent to a ‘reading I’ (usually but not invariably singular); but they are also very much a public form with strong structural conventions – address, salutation, ‘business’ farewell, signature – which help shape (and in some cases determine) content as well as form and are also often written and read in circumstances that are social rather than individual.”27 Indeed, as literary critics Amanda Gilroy and W.M. Verhoeven note of the epistolary form more generally, “each letter, however private and personal it may seem, is a letter marked by and sent to the world.”28 This is particularly apt in Martel’s case, as his campaign grew to operate very much in the public sphere, including a website (now defunct) and, as the project drew more public scrutiny, a range of news articles and interviews. Of course, this is not the first time a head of state has received a highprofile, public letter from a writer or intellectual, and in the twenty-first century, the genre of the “open letter” has become a fixture on social media. Most famously, Émile Zola wrote to Félix Faure, then president of France, over the Dreyfus Affair in 1898. Entitled “J’accuse …!” Zola’s letter offered a scathing critique of how the Dreyfus Affair was handled, and accused the French government of anti-Semitism. As a result of his open letter, published on the front page of Aurore, Zola was found guilty of libel and went into exile in England. Just as well known (but not to a head of state) is Martin Luther King Jr’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he recognizes the “interrelatedness of all communities and states,” an observation that resonates with the concerns of this chapter, as it theorizes the connections between letters, reading, Otherness, and cosmopolitan citizenship across the Canada-US border.29 Alyssa MacLean’s discussion in this volume of the genre of the open letter and its relationship to the cause of abolition also bears noting here; according to MacLean, personal letters written by formerly enslaved people to their former owners “became a mode of dissent” that operated in the public sphere when they were published in abolitionist newspapers and marked as “open” to the consumption of anyone who chose to read them. Martel’s compendium of open letters, while initially a personal project, therefore becomes what Charlotte Alter, in her tongue-in-cheek “An Open Letter to Open Letter Writers,” describes as “a public announcement posing as a private gesture,” available for the consumption of readers around the world.30 Martel’s project can also be read as building on (but also diverging from) the writing of open letters as a Canadian nation-building tradition

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that some historians suggest reaches back to the origins of the Canadian national anthem in 1880;31 in 1915, lawyer and army officer Talbot Mercer Papineau, whose correspondence with Henri Bourassa saw him hailed in 1916 as “The Soul of Canada,”32 stated in an open letter that the First World War was responsible for the emergence of a Canadian nationality.33 To this day, mandate letters are sent to Canadian ministers,34 and, more recently, former governor general David Johnston’s The Idea of Canada: Letters to a Nation (2016) has used letter-writing to reflect on Canadian national identity. But where these letters have sought to record the building of a nation, other recent open letters originating in Canada have different aims,35 and I read Martel’s open-letter project to Harper more fruitfully, not as a blind valorization of Canada as a nation, but as an example of a cross-border, cosmopolitan reading practice that acknowledges and problematizes understandings of national cultural production. Despite the role of open letters in Canadian political and cultural history, Martel never receives a response from the prime minister he accuses of lacking an engagement with the arts. However, Martel does receive a letter from another country’s leader, though in this case, it is unsolicited. This letter is recorded in dispatch 76 on 1 March 2010, when Martel sends Harper One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), and relates the story of the day he received a now-famous note from Barack Obama: “The President of the United States wrote to me – to me! … But here, what does he gain? I’m not a US citizen” (318). Martel uses Obama’s letter, which thanks Martel and simply notes of Life of Pi, “It is a lovely book – an elegant proof of God, and the power of storytelling,” to offer Harper a reproachful jab as he sends him Solzhenitsyn’s famous novel about a day in the life of a gulag prisoner: “Not all heads of government are as good” (318). While in the context of the novel in question, Martel likely means Stalin, he could just as easily mean Harper himself. Obama’s unsolicited note can be productively read as a surrogate response from a head of government. This is despite Obama suffering from what Mark Simpson describes as “a gap in knowledge” of Canadian cultural production: in a 2008 interview with the then-Democratic presidential nominee, it emerged that Obama’s iPod playlist featured no content originating from above the 49th parallel.36 However, Obama’s letter signals his deep civic engagement with literary culture, and he has stated that “when I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I

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think I’ve learned from novels.”37 Given Obama’s “universal appeal” in Canada, Harper’s silence is further cause for public ridicule of the former prime minister.38 Obama’s note and Martel’s own affirmation that he is “not a US citizen” foreground the importance of reading 101 Letters to a Prime Minister as one that necessarily crosses the border that separates these two leaders. As a project about world literature, Martel’s is an example of a book that both reinforces frameworks of national literatures – specifically, Canadian literature – while simultaneously undermining national boundaries, thus unsettling the concept of literary nationhood altogether and unbinding literary and readerly citizenship and provenance from border lines, reversing the polarity of the Canada-US border, and advancing a readerly cosmopolitan citizenship. Bearing in mind that Martel’s campaign can be traced back to 2007, when he stood in the House of Commons, and that he stakes a claim in this project as “a citizen of the arts,” this cross-border reading practice, predicated as it is on literature as a tool for understanding the Other, aims to be transformative. In the letter accompanying J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Martel clearly explains to Harper his views on the value of novels in the context of this campaign, and these views usefully capture the potential of cosmopolitan citizenship: [T]he value of a novel is not that you will read it and smack your forehead and scribble down a new bill you intend to propose to the House. No. The originality of fiction addresses the individuality of its reader. How that reader then acts with others – in other words, becomes political – will involve a dilution of that originality, a regard for the conventions and sensibilities of others. And that’s all right. We have to get along with others. (282) In Martel’s view, then, art and literature are the means through which to live “beyond the narrow confines of one’s own experience” (281), and several of his dispatches include novels, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), and Valerie Martin’s Property (2003), that can be read as cautionary tales of what can transpire when the desires of the individual are made to overshadow the needs of others, or when “the citizen whose precious individuality is not nourished is … led astray by the claims of demagogues and tyrants” (282). For example, in the letter accompanying Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus (1991), Martel shows how crucial literature of the Holocaust should be in our understanding of a twenty-first-century world: “This comic book

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is real literature,” he writes (63). Martel’s warning is clear: “Some stories need to be told in many different ways so they will exist in new ways for new generations. The story of the murder of nearly six million of Europe’s Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis and their criminal accomplices is just the sort of story that needs renewing” (63). Martel sends Maus to Harper on 17 September 2007, when the author is in Poland working on his third novel, Beatrice and Virgil (2010). Martel’s attempt at his own Holocaust novel, Beatrice and Virgil follows a writer, Henry, who, after failing to publish a novel on the Holocaust, has moved from Canada to “one of those great cities in the world that is a world unto itself, a storied metropolis where all kinds of people find themselves and lose themselves.”39 In excluding any specificity about the city Henry moves to, Martel casts Canada as a standard and other world cities as simply non-Canadian: “Perhaps it was New York. Perhaps it was Paris. Perhaps it was Berlin” in which Henry is now “a resident alien, a rightless ghost” (21). Reading the novel’s setting in this way ensures that the reader is aware that the novel’s plot does not take place in Canada, but elsewhere, in what can best be described as an anycity, despite its author and protagonist identifying as Canadian. As Gillian Roberts puts it, “in Beatrice and Virgil, there is simply Canada and not-Canada, thereby emphasizing not only Henry’s nationality but also Martel’s.”40 In crafting the novel in this way, Martel is able to insinuate a Canadian hegemony, where only Canada is named and the identity of other locations are contingent on their non-Canadian character. But as in 101 Letters, this insinuated Canadian hegemony is problematized still, as non-Canadian cities are made to operate in opposition to Canadian counterparts, while also being claimed by them. Here, “passing” as Canadian begins to erode Canadianness and to sharpen a view of cosmopolitan literary citizenship that operates across borders. Letters play an active role in Beatrice and Virgil, too. Henry receives letters from readers continuously, and it is in fact one of these letters that moves the plot of the novel forward: “Letters came from Great Britain, Canada, the United States, and all other corners of the former British empire, but also from across Europe and Asia, their writers of all ages and stations, the English varying from the confidently refined to the sublimely butchered” (26). Henry responds to every letter he receives, because to him, “[t]o remain silent in the face of kindness and enthusiasm would have been rude. Worse: it would have been thankless” (29). Martel’s emphatic inclusion of the importance of responding to letters from readers should be read in context: he is in the final stages of writing Beatrice and

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Virgil at the same time that he begins sending letters to Harper. Given the catalytic function of letters in the novel, the connections between the novel and his letter-writing project are more than suggestive. Earlier in the novel, as Henry wanders despondently in Hyde Park after a disastrous meeting with his London publishers, Martel invokes Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). As he slowly comes to terms with the fact that his Holocaust novel will not be published, he realizes that “[h]e had entered the park like Mr. Hyde of Stevenson’s tale, deformed by anger, wilfulness, and resentment, but he was leaving it more like the good Dr. Jekyll” (19). Invoking Stevenson’s tale of split personalities at this juncture is important for two reasons: first, because as Beatrice and Virgil progresses, the dédoublement of Henry as protagonist and his antagonist, also named Henry, and also writing Holocaust fiction, becomes clear. Second, The Strange Tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde is included in Martel’s fifty-sixth dispatch to Stephen Harper, in which he notes that the story’s effectiveness is rooted in its ability to impel readers to “have this battle told from the inside, in the very voice of the tortured double combatant” (237). Following a cross-border model for reading that “mirrors each reader’s personality” allows readers access to struggles between “good” and “evil” without pandering to an “us” or “them” dichotomy. In addition, downplaying the national provenance or character of the text evokes a more cosmopolitan interpretation of both The Strange Tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Martel’s novel (237). Beatrice and Virgil’s preoccupation with crafting a novel and creative way to represent the Holocaust may seem very specific, but in fact is a useful example of how reading across borders in the spirit of a cosmopolitan citizenship allows readers to “get along with others” in the twentyfirst century. Henry describes his rationale for writing his Holocaust novel: [T]he peculiar gravity of the event pulled the reader back to the original and literal historical facts … And so Henry came to wonder: why this suspicion of the imagination, why the resistance to artful metaphor? A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real. Was there not a danger to representing the Holocaust in a way always beholden to factuality? Surely, amidst the texts that related what happened, those vital and necessary diaries, memoirs, and histories, there was a spot for the imagination’s commentary? Other events in history, including horrifying ones, had been treated by artists, and for the greatest good … In each case the artist had taken a vast, sprawling tragedy, had found its heart, and had represented it in

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a non-literal and compact way. The unwieldy encumbrance of history was reduced and packed into a suitcase. Art as suitcase – light, portable, essential. (10–11) Henry’s (and Martel’s) appeal to the urgency of creative fiction in the face of tragedy is, as Dobson notes in this volume, a relative rarity in Canadian post-9/11 literature and criticism, but nonetheless easily finds an echo in similar appeals to the urgency of art in response to crisis from the other side of the 49th parallel. As Don DeLillo famously writes, three months after the attacks on 11 September 2001, which had an immediate impact on political borders and national senses of belonging: The event itself has no purchase on the mercies of analogy or simile. We have to take the shock and horror as it is. But living language is not diminished. The writer wants to understand what this day has done to us … But language is inseparable from the world that provokes it. The writer begins in the towers, trying to imagine the moment, desperately. Before politics, before history and religion, there is the primal terror. People falling from towers hand in hand. This is part of the counternarrative, hands and spirits joining, human beauty in the crush of meshed steel. In its desertion of every basis for comparison, the event asserts its singularity. There is something empty in the sky. The writer tries to give memory, tenderness, and meaning to all that howling space.41 Both passages offer an entreaty to readers to recognize the power and importance of art as a communal repository for memory. Reading and writing literature that records (traumatic) history through fiction is vital in the twenty-first century, whether the subject matter is the Holocaust or 9/11. Art, and the exchange of art, as Martel notes in the letter accompanying Lewis Hyde’s The Gift (1983), “creates a community” (231), as evidenced by the enjoyment, consumption, and exchange of art and literature in Martel’s book club with Harper and by the unexpected letter from Obama. In this framework, Martel, Harper, and Obama encounter texts and people whom they would consider as “Other” to themselves. Such a community is predicated on “the gift-giving spirit” (233) and on the hospitality of Martel’s book club, as well as the cross-border economy of reading world literature. The “transformative gift” Hyde theorizes becomes evident here, as his book club extends not just to Harper, but also to the readers of 101 Letters to a Prime Minister. Such hospitality

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and its assumption of reciprocity lies at the core of theories of cosmopolitan citizenship. Martel’s recognition that his letter-writing campaign has a reach beyond “the extensive paper trail that a prime minister creates” (233) offers a route back to discussions of the erasure of the Canada-US border. In the Canadian context, the celebration of national arts, culture, and literature that takes place through, for example, the Canada Council grants that Martel commemorated in March 2007 and that gave impetus to his campaign, offers what Roberts has described as “a form of hospitality.”42 Through Martel’s epistolary project and book club, “the cultural frame in which the works are consumed and read”43 exists beyond national boundaries, and is offered, in the gift-giving spirit of readerly hospitality, to Margaret Atwood’s “us” and “them,” to Scout Finch’s “neighbours,” to Janie Starks’s “friends,” and through Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s anxieties over the English language, functioning as “a way to ‘open up’ literary history” beyond national boundaries, and across the Canada-US border.44 Even while this chapter complicates understandings of national literatures and advocates a cosmopolitan, “worlded” citizenship of both books and their readers, as Moretti might suggest, it recognizes the complex processes of reading at and across borders. Cosmopolitan citizenship is not, of course, a comprehensive solution for disengaged world leaders and lacklustre reading practices, or for their seeming inability to behave ethically to strangers, to evoke Appiah’s theorization of the concept. But it does offer a route to reading literature that pushes readers to seek out the “Other,” whether in a book, across a border, or in a letter. In a period of increased scrutiny of citizenship and nationality, a literary history that works across political borders offers literary and border scholars, as well as other readers, a framework for reading that can evade national(ist) claims over literary works. Sometimes insincere and often exploitative, such claims serve the vested interests of neo-liberal conceptions of citizenship that curtail rather than expand the scope of reading and literary inquiry. Martel’s book club is merely one example of the ways in which authors and readers can explore new, cosmopolitan literary citizenships.

n otes 1 Atwood, “Letter to America.” 2 Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 68. 3 Martel, 101 Letters to a Prime Minister, 1 (all further references to this text will appear in parentheses); Derrida, The Postcard, 521.

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4 Bell, “Fact Check”; Bell, “101 Letters.” 5 DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future.” 6 Kang, “As If I Had Entered a Paradise,” 444. 7 Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 278. 8 Quoted in Billingham, “Detained at Customs,” 261. 9 Simpson, “Obama’s Playlist,” 131. 10 Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 17. 11 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, 44. 12 Roberts, Prizing Literature, 6. 13 Montaigne, “De l’amitié,” 226. 14 Mignolo, “Citizenship, Knowledge, and the Limits of Humanity,” 316. 15 Linklater, “Cosmopolitan Citizenship,” 37. 16 It is of course important to note here that Stephen Harper is the author of A Great Game: The Forgotten Leafs and the Rise of Professional Hockey (2013), which was generally well received upon publication. However, one review of the book by Massey Lecturer Adam Gopnik suggests that “[t]he way that you show yourself to be authentically Canadian is by engaging with hockey.” Harper’s focus on an “authentically Canadian” pastime can be read as symptomatic of the narrow national focus that cosmopolitan citizenship seeks to interrogate (quoted in Klein, “Hockey History, as Documented by Prime Minister”). 17 Linklater, “Cosmopolitan Citizenship,” 36. 18 Gerber, “Epistolary Ethics,” 5. 19 Jolly and Stanley, “Letters as / not a Genre,” 95. 20 MacLean, “Re-siting the Subject,” 2. 21 Gilroy and Verhoeven, “Introduction,” 95. 22 Ibid., 191. 23 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 280. 24 Ibid., 293. 25 Ibid., 282. 26 Jolly and Stanley, “Letters as / not a Genre,” 95. 27 Ibid. 28 Gilroy and Verhoeven, “Introduction,” 1. 29 King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” 30 Alter, “An Open Letter to Open Letter Writers.” 31 “O Canada.” 32 “The Soul of Canada.” 33 The actual Bourassa-Papineau correspondence is freely available online: . 34 See Trudeau, “Mandate Letters.”

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35 For example, the controversial open letter to the University of British Columbia protested the institution’s conduct in relation to Steven Galloway’s suspension from U BC’s Creative Writing Program “pending the investigation of serious allegations” (ub c ac c ounta b le, “An Open Letter to U BC”). The letter was initially signed by ninety-two prominent figures in the Canadian literary community, many of whom then withdrew their names as signatories after they received criticism for condoning rape culture and the silencing of victims. In fact, Martel was a signatory to the original Open Letter to U BC, but later apologized for not “consider[ing] all the implications of the wording of the letter,” before removing his name entirely from the list of signatories (UB C -NOW, “Statement by Yann Martel”). Coincidentally, Martel’s inclusion of Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo (2008) in 101 Letters (dispatch 21) intends to remind Harper of the role of literature; in response to such creative writing, Martel suggests, “Your mind’s eye sees, your moral sense is outraged: your full humanity is being exercised” (101 Letters, 97). “Open Letter to UB C ” is an example of an open letter prompting a range of responses of just this sort, responses that push readers beyond “just [taking] it in dumbly, wondering how people could to that to each other” (97). That the “Open Letter to UB C ” elicited responses, such as, for example, Julie Rak’s “Open Counter-Letter about the Steven Galloway Case at U BC ,” and ultimately, Martel’s own withdrawal of his name as signatory, is evidence that the genre of the open letter is capable of generating change, despite Martel’s own 101 letters never having received a direct response from Harper. 36 Simpson, Obama’s Playlist,” 133. 37 Obama and Robinson, “A Conversation – II.” 38 Simpson, “Obama’s Playlist,” 132. 39 Martel, Beatrice and Virgil, 20. All further references to this text will appear in parentheses. 40 Roberts, Prizing Literature, 210. 41 DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future.” 42 Roberts, Prizing Literature, 51. 43 Ibid. 44 Moretti, “Slaughterhouse,” 227.

b ib liog ra p h y Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge, 2000. Alter, Charlotte. “An Open Letter to Open Letter Writers.” Time, 2 December 2015. .

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Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. London: Penguin, 2006. Atwood, Margaret. “Letter to America.” The Nation, 14 April 2003. . Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bell, Sonya. “101 Letters to a Prime Minister: Yann Martel Opens Up His Book Club.” iPolitics, 28 November 2012. . – “Fact Check: Stephen Harper and the Guinness Book of World Records.” iPolitics, 28 November 2012. . Billingham, Susan. “Detained at Customs: Jane Rule, Censorship, and the Politics of Crossing the Canada-US Border.” In Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border, edited by Gillian Roberts and David Stirrup, 261– 78. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013. DeLillo, Don. “In the Ruins of the Future.” The Guardian, 22 December 2001. . Derrida, Jacques. The PostCard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Díaz, Junot. Drown. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1964. Gerber, David. “Epistolary Ethics: Personal Correspondence and the Culture of Emigration in the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of American Ethnic History 19, no. 4 (2000): 3–23. Gilroy, Amanda, and W.M. Verhoeven. “Introduction.” In Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture, edited by Amanda Gilroy and W.M. Verhoeven, 1–25. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. London: Virago Press, 1986. Jolly, Margaretta, and Liz Stanley. “Letters as/not a Genre.” Life Writing 2, no. 2 (2005): 91–118. Kang, Nancy. “‘As If I Had Entered a Paradise’: Fugitive Slave Narratives and Cross-Border Literary History.” African American Review 39, no. 3 (2005): 431–57. King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” 16 April 1963. .

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Klein, Jeff Z. “Hockey History, as Documented by Prime Minister.” New York Times, 4 November 2013. . Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: Warner Books, 1960. Linklater, Andrew. “Cosmopolitan Citizenship.” In Cosmopolitan Citizenship, edited by Kimberly Hutchings and Roland Dannreuther, 35–59. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999. MacLean, Gerald. “Re-siting the Subject.” In Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture, edited by Amanda Gilroy and W.M. Verhoeven, 176–97. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Martel, Yann. Beatrice and Virgil. Toronto: Alfred Knopf Canada, 2010. – 101 Letters to a Prime Minister: The Complete Letters to Stephen Harper. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2012. Mignolo, Walter D. “Citizenship, Knowledge, and the Limits of Humanity.” American Literary History 18, no. 2 (2006): 312–31. Montaigne, Michel de. “De l’amitié.” Essais. Book 1, chap. 28. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959. Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” The New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68. – “The Slaughterhouse of Literature.” Modern Language Quarterly 51, no. 1 (2000): 207–27. “O Canada.” . Obama, Barack, and Marilynne Robinson. “President Obama and Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation – II.” The New York Review of Books, 19 November 2015. . Rak, Julie. “Open Counter-Letter about the Steven Galloway Case at UB C ,” 18 November 2016. . Roberts, Gillian. Prizing Literature: The Celebration and Circulation of National Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Simpson, Mark. “Obama’s Playlist: Materializing Transnational Desire at the C B C .” In Material Cultures in Canada, edited by Thomas Allen and Jennifer Blair, 131–53. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015. “The Soul of Canada.” The Times, 22 August 1916. Trudeau, Justin. “Mandate Letters.” . UB C - NO W. “Statement by Yann Martel.” 23 November 2016. . UB C A C C O U N TABLE. “An Open Letter to UB C : Steven Galloway’s Right to Due Process.” 14 November 2016. .

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Contributors

C H A R L E S R . A C L A N D is professor of communication studies at Concordia University. He is the author of: Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal Influence (Duke University Press, 2012); Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (Duke University Press, 2003); and Youth, Murder, Spectacle: The Cultural Politics of “Youth in Crisis” (Westview, 1995). He edited Residual Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and co-edited The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities (R E F R A M E , 2016); Useful Cinema (Duke University Press, 2011); and Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999). JEN N IFER A ND R E WS is professor in the Department of English at the University of New Brunswick. She has authored or co-authored two books and numerous articles on the subject of border crossings. Her current SSHR C -funded project is titled Americans Write Canada. BRITTNEY ANNE BOS is a recent graduate of the Department of History of Queen’s University, Kingston. Her PhD focused on the creation of monuments in Ontario from 1850 to 2001 and the connections these commemorations have to colonialism and the formation of nationalist racial identities. Broadly, her work highlights the construction of the Canadian nation through its commemorations, using both a gendered and a racial lens. She has previously published on the Underground Railroad monument and other commemorations that contribute to the colonial memory of Canada.  K I T D O B S O N is currently associate professor in the Department of English, Languages, and Cultures at Mount Royal University. His most

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recent book is Malled: Deciphering Shopping in Canada (Wolsak & Wynn, 2017). In 2016 he was the Eakin Visiting Fellow in Canadian Studies at McGill University. His previous books are Transnationalism, Activism, Art (co-edited with Áine McGlynn; University of Toronto Press, 2013); Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace (with Smaro Kamboureli; Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013); Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu (editor; Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013); and Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009). LEE EASTON is associate professor of English at Mount Royal University. He has co-authored essays with Kelly Hewson published in A R I E L , Reception, Canadian Review of American Studies, and Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), and is co-author with Richard Harrison of Secret Identity Reader: Essays on Sex, Death and the Superhero (Wolsak and Wynn, 2010). Z A LFA FEGH A L I is a lecturer in American literature at the University of Leicester’s Centre for American Studies and School of Arts. She is the author of Crossing Borders and Queering Citizenship: Civic Reading Practice and Contemporary American and Canadian Writing (Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2018). K E L L Y H E W S O N is professor emerita of English at Mount Royal University. She has co-authored essays with Lee Easton published in ARIEL , Reception, Canadian Review of American Studies, and Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013). A LY SSA M acL E A N is assistant professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University. Her scholarly writing and research interests focus on nineteenth-century American literature, hemispheric studies, and the Canada-US border. She is currently completing a book entitled America’s Canada: Hemispheric Literary Relations and the Construction of US Citizenship, 1830–1865.  G ILLIA N ROB E R T S is associate professor in North American cultural studies at the University of Nottingham. She is author of Prizing Literature: The Celebration and Circulation of National Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2011), Discrepant Parallels: Cultural Implications of the

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Canada-US Border (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), and co-editor, with David Stirrup, of Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013). She was co-investigator of the Leverhulme Trust–funded Culture and the Canada-US Border international research network. M I C H A E L S T A M M is associate professor in the Department of History at Michigan State University. He is the author of Dead Tree Media: Manufacturing the Newspaper in Twentieth-Century North America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) and Sound Business: Newspapers, Radio, and the Politics of New Media (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). R I C H A R D S U T H E R L A N D is associate professor in the Department of Economics, Justice, and Policy Studies at Mount Royal University. His research focuses on the Canadian music industry, with a particular focus on the role of government policy in the sector. Prior to academic life he worked in the Canadian music industry in a number of roles, including journalist, label manager, and policy researcher. JESSIC A T A Y L O R is currently a research associate in studies of women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Toronto. Her research examines the work of women writers in both new and old media, from ethnographic research on flexible labour and romance writers to discourse analysis of mommy bloggers.

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Index

9/11, 152, 272, 274–7, 283, 292; and border policing, 20, 193, 281; and literature, 26–7, 273, 275–6, 278, 280, 304 abolitionism, 42–3, 46, 48–50, 52, 55, 57, 61n22, 61n27, 179, 187, 190–1; and print culture, 22, 41–4, 48, 50–1, 58–9n4, 299 Academy Awards, 10, 146–7, 149, 226, 233–6 Acadians, 25, 243–50, 254, 257–64, 265–6n12, 268n70; deportation, 25, 244–8, 250, 254, 257–61 adaptation, 24, 228, 238; and comic books, 3, 118; and film, 3, 6, 10, 25, 143, 214n2, 225–9, 234–5, 238–9; and romance, 215n14; and theatre, 21, 25, 143, 266n15. See also The English Patient; Evangeline (musical); Life of Pi (film); Rachel, Rachel; Scott Pilgrim vs. the World; The Sweet Hereafter African Americans, 46, 52, 54–5, 58, 62n44, 179, 182–4, 187–8, 260–1; and authorship, 41–6, 52, 58; and romance, 208, 216n21

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African Canadians, 44, 49, 54–5, 57, 61n27, 134n64, 189; and commemoration, 179; and print culture, 22; and romance, 216n21 African colonization, 50, 55–6 Alberta, 245, 257; as fictional setting, 116, 212; as film location, 227; and media production incentives, 160; and tar sands, 280 Anderson, Jourdan, 43, 59n4 animation, 146, 150, 153–4, 159–60, 162 Anne of Green Gables, 243, 245–6, 251–2, 255–6, 258–9, 263, 264n2; and tourism, 21, 243–5, 259 anti-Americanism, 122, 172–3, 177– 8, 180, 183–5, 189 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 293, 305 Arseneault, Albert, 254, 260 Atkey, Mel, 251, 257, 264n3, 267n45 Atlantic Canada, 253–4, 257, 263–4, 266n12; and stereotypes, 243–4, 246, 258, 265n7. See also Acadians; New Brunswick; Nova Scotia Attic Records, 103–4 Atwood, Margaret, 5, 217n29, 285n18, 290, 293, 305; “Death by

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Landscape,” 8–10; The Handmaid’s Tale, 274, 277, 283; In Other Worlds, 275, 282; MaddAddam, 272, 274, 277, 280, 282–3; MaddAddam trilogy, 25, 217n29, 272–84, 285n9, 292; Oryx and Crake, 273–4, 277–8, 280, 282, 285n6, 286n22; Year of the Flood, 274, 277, 279–80, 282 audience: of comic books, 116, 120– 1; of commemoration, 181; of film, 3, 143, 145–6, 157, 226, 229, 233, 239n17; of literature, 16, 24, 200, 202–4, 207–10, 226, 229, 249–50, 292, 294–5, 297, 301, 305; national, 3–5, 9–13, 16–17, 20, 24, 27, 83–4, 116, 143, 159, 204, 208– 10, 213–4, 215n14, 215n15, 226, 246–7, 250, 252, 255, 261; of newspapers, 45, 53–5, 58, 60, 83–4, 86, 157; of television, 10–11, 17, 20, 147, 157; of theatre, 21, 245–6, 251–2, 255, 258–9, 261, 264, 268n69; of visual art, 20 Ballantyne, Sonya, 130–1 Basque, Maurice, 243–4, 246, 263 Bates, Robin, 244–5, 251, 258 Batman, 115, 130 Beatles, 123–4 Beaty, Bart, 118–9, 121, 133n44 Bengough, J.W., 244, 265n8 Berland, Jody, 5, 9, 11, 68, 70, 92 Bibb, Henry, 41–2, 52–7, 59n4, 62n36, 62n45 bilingualism, 131, 178 blockbusters, 116, 146, 149, 160 Booker Prize, 127, 225–6, 230, 233–5, 238 border art, 19–20, 31n88, 31–2n91

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Bourdieu, Pierre, 205, 217n31 branch plant, 94, 96; and film, 159; and music, 21–2, 91, 94, 96–9, 101–2, 104, 107–8, 235; and newsprint, 21, 84 Brazier, Adam, 252–3 Brazil, 237, 254. See also Scliar, Moacyr Brick Mansions, 156–7 Bridges, Kate, 24, 200, 210–14, 218n42 Brison, Jeffrey, 122–4 British Columbia, 10, 121, 186; and tax incentives, 148–9, 154, 159–60; and visual effects industry, 150, 153–4, 165 British Empire, 14, 46, 68, 76, 83–4, 248, 250, 302; and abolition, 54; and Canadian allegiance, 84, 177– 8, 190, 211 broadcasting, 93; Canadian, 5, 10–12, 17, 31n76, 85; Québécois, 101; US, 10 Broadway, 251–2, 254–7, 261 Bush, George W., 26–7 California, 147–8, 150–1, 226, 278. See also Hollywood Canada Council for the Arts, 8, 155, 206, 229, 295, 305 Canada Post, 22, 113, 129 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement. See Free Trade Agreement (FTA ) Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (C B C ), 4, 155, 208, 216n26; radio, 205, 216n26, 217n41, 294; television, 10, 17, 20 Canadian content, 21, 156; and radio, 85, 93, 99–100, 102, 107; and television, 17, 85; and theatre, 21

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CanLit. See literature: Canadian capitalism, 11, 128, 163–4 Capitol Records, 97–8 Captain Canuck, 115, 117, 119, 128 Carnegie Foundation, 122, 133n45 Cera, Michael, 3–4 Chicago Tribune, 14, 21–2, 68–75, 79–86, 225 cinema. See film Cinesite, 153–4, 162 Cinram, 104, 153 Citadel Theatre, 246, 255–7 citizenship, 6, 14–18, 22–7, 129, 175, 229–30, 293, 296, 301, 303, 305; and black North Americans, 22, 42, 46, 48, 51, 54, 57–8; Canadian, 15–18, 22–4, 26, 29n22, 46, 54, 58, 83, 85, 155, 207, 229, 235, 296–7; and Canadian Citizenship Act, 14, 54; and citsumer, 17; cosmopolitan, 291–7, 299, 301–3, 305, 306n16; and Indigenous peoples, 14–15; US, 15, 18, 22, 30n52, 46, 48, 51, 54, 57–8, 60n19, 77, 300–1 Civil War (US), 58, 62n44, 177, 179, 188, 250 class, 12, 123, 164, 202, 252, 258 Clay, Henry, 43, 50–9 Collins, Richard, 152–3 colonialism, 70, 131, 217n41, 244, 247–8, 254, 257, 261, 273; and borders, 15–16, 30n63, 120, 125–6; and space, 9, 68 Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 10, 97 Columbia Records, 96–8 comic books, 9, 21–2, 83, 114–22, 125, 127, 133n26; Golden Age of Comics (Canada), 22–3, 114–15,

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117, 118, 121, 127. See also Maus; Nelvana of the Northern Lights; Superman Compo Company, 97–9 computer-generated imagery (C GI), 144–6, 153, 158–9, 162 Confederation Centre, 21, 25, 244–6, 251–8, 263, 264n3 Cooper, Afua, 43, 189 co-productions, 10, 17, 156 copyright, 7, 93, 104–8 Cornyn, Stan, 98–9, 101 cosmopolitanism, 26, 69, 152, 159, 235, 295–6; and reading, 292, 300, 303. See also citizenship: cosmopolitan Cournoyer, Réjean, 259–60 cultural capital, 200, 205 cultural imperialism, 12, 77, 84, 122 Decca (UK), 97–8 Decca (US), 97 Derrida, Jacques, 291, 295 Detroit 300, 173, 183–5 Detroit River, 24, 51–2, 173, 179, 187–8, 190 diaspora, 128, 188–9, 227, 250, 254 digital economy, 146, 159–61, 163–6 Dingle, Adrian, 117, 120. See also Nelvana of the Northern Lights Disney, 150, 262 distribution: of film, 9, 12; of media, 70, 83; of music, 92–107, 153, 161, 216n16; of literature, 13, 16, 203, 211 Dittmer, Jason, 114–15 Douglass, Frederick, 42–4, 46, 48, 55 Due South, 10–11, 218n49 Dwight, Ed, 180, 184, 191

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Dykstra, Ted, 245–6, 252, 255–8, 260– 4. See also Evangeline (musical) dystopia, 26, 156, 272–4, 276, 283 ecocriticism, 273, 278, 284n2, 285n9 Edison, 96–7 Elizabeth II, 123–4, Elmer, Greg, 226–7 E MI , 98, 103 The English Patient, 16, 226, 232, 234 ethnography, 202, 214 Evangeline (musical), 21, 25, 245–6, 251–64 Evangeline (poem), 21, 25, 245–51, 257–9, 262, 266n32, 274; and American context, 247–50 Evangeline phenomenon, 244–5, 254, 258, 266n15 exchange rate, 154, 217n28, 255 exoticism, 9, 119–20, 249 feminism, 126, 285n6, 294 film, 5–6, 8­–9, 24, 91, 101, 143, 252; Canadian, 152, 156–7, 160, 226, 233; and production, 4, 12, 23, 25, 146–8, 151, 155–9, 167n31, 207, 227–9, 232–5, 238–9; and postproduction, 23, 25, 144, 146–7, 149–51, 153, 156–62, 228–9, 232– 3, 235–9; Québécois, 160, 233–4. See also adaptation; Brick Mansions; The English Patient; Hollywood; Hollywood North; Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D; Juno; Life of Pi (film); Rachel, Rachel; Scott Pilgrim vs. the World; The Sweet Hereafter; Warm Bodies First World War, 76, 79, 125, 300 Framestore, 153–4

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Free Trade Agreement (FTA ), 13, 31n76, 102–3, 228 Frith, Simon, 93, 104 Frye, Northrop, 294–5 Fugitive Slave Act (1850), 52, 55, 56 Fuller, Danielle, 16, 265n7 Gasher, Mike, 226–7 gender, 12, 60n19, 61n20, 117, 126, 134n65, 202, 211, 213, 216n19, 243, 246–7, 249–50, 262, 264n2, 273–4, 285n6; and borders, 27; and Canada-US relations, 20–1, 27, 127, 244, 265n8; femininity, 21, 23, 127–8, 135n69, 243, 258; and folk stereotypes, 244–6, 263, 265n7; and genre, 204; masculinity, 21, 23, 51, 126–9, 135n69, 211, 218n49; patriarchy, 125, 244, 273. See also feminism Genie Awards, 4, 226 genre: and film, 228; and print culture, 22; and publishing, 23–4, 199, 201, 205–7, 213–4; and superheroes, 120–1; and subgenres, 202, 208, 210; and television, 17. See also comic books; dystopia; letters; romance; science fiction; speculative fiction gift, 304–5 globalization, 4, 17, 27, 148, 192–3 Globe and Mail, 206, 217n28, 251, 258 Group of Seven, 8–9 Harlequin, 199, 203–6, 208–10, 216n18, 216n20, 216n26, 217n28, 217n30, 217n37, 217–18n41, 218n42; history of, 21, 24, 203,

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215n7, 215n15; and translation, 215n7, 215n14 Harper, Stephen, 26–7, 117, 123–6, 128, 134n56, 217n39, 276, 281; representation of, 116; and Superman Reclamation Project, 21–3, 114, 128, 190; and Yann Martel, 26–7, 127, 230, 291, 293– 4, 296–8, 300–4, 306n16 Hearst, William Randolph, 71, 77 Heidegger, Martin, 127, 131 hemispheric, 237, 246, 292 highbrow, 8, 12, 23, 28–9n22, 122–3, 207 Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada (HS M BC), 177–82, 185, 189, 192 hockey, 125, 134n56, 218n43, 306n16 Hollywood, 147, 152, 158, 226, 235, 239; and Canada, 3, 9, 23, 147, 153, 209, 225, 228, 233–4; film adaptation, 25, 225–6. See also runaway production Hollywood North, 3, 23, 149, 162, 228. See also runaway production Holocaust, 190, 301–4. See also Martel, Yann: Beatrice and Virgil; Maus hospitality, 230, 234, 260, 295, 304 Hutcheon, Linda, 228, 234 Imageworks, 147, 153 imperialism, 7, 70, 76, 84, 128; American, 68; French, 232. See also British Empire; colonialism; cultural imperialism India, 147, 158, 216n18; and Life of Pi, 227, 229, 232, 236 Indigeneity, 15; representations of, 15–16, 23, 117, 119–20, 125–6,

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130–1, 132n8, 211–12, 218n51, 246, 260–2, 294 Indigenous peoples, 15–16, 125, 130– 1, 134–5n65, 179, 248, 262, 294; Blackfoot, 14–15, 30n63; Cree, 262; Haida, 125; Inuit, 117, 130; Métis, 130, 262; Mi’kmaq, 25, 250; Mohawk, 20 Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), 150, 153 Innis, Harold, 9, 86; and Canadian culture, 8; and Canadian nationalism, 166; and empire, 68, 70, 84; and staples, 7, 67–8, 84, 164 intertextuality, 228, 238 Intrigue FX , 144, 153 Iraq, 272, 276 Joly, Mélanie, 130, 134n58 Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D, 150–1 Juno, 4, 234 Kang, Nancy, 21, 292 Kelly, Brendan, 157, 234 King, Martin Luther, Jr, 45, 299 King, Thomas, 14 language, 11, 202, 239–40n17, 252, 259, 294; and difference, 12, 93, 201, 243, 245, 257, 259; French, 93, 215n10, 232, 243, 245, 261–3; Indigenous languages, 131, 261. See also bilingualism; translation labour, 108, 129; Canadian, 24, 130, 144, 146, 149–58, 160–6, 202, 234, 239; digital, 161–2, 165–6; film and television, 24, 144–66, 234–6, 239; flexible labour, 151,

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163–4, 202, 208; precarity, 23, 146, 149, 151–2, 163–4, 166, 215n13, 235–6; US, 23, 148, 151, 235–6 Latour, Bruno, 13, 30n52 Lee, Ang, 25, 227, 233–4, 238. See also Life of Pi (film) letters, 26, 44, 291, 297–300, 302–5; open letters, 14, 21–2, 26–7, 41–60, 84, 299–300, 307n35 The Liberator, 42–4, 58–9 Liberia, 50, 56 Life after Pi, 149, 235–6. See also Rhythm & Hues Life of Pi (film), 25, 147, 149, 225, 227–30, 232–40. See also Martel, Yann literary criticism, 13, 275–6, 290. See also ecocriticism literary field, 200–1, 204–8, 210, 213–14 literature, 7, 12–13, 23–4, 26, 122, 293, 296–7, 300–1; American, 21, 25–6, 207, 275, 290–2; Canadian literature, 16, 26, 120, 122, 200, 205–8, 285n9, 285n13, 290–2, 297, 301; and canonization, 23, 25, 296; francophone, 125, 201, 215n7; literary fiction, 200, 205–6, 213; world, 290, 301, 304. See also Atwood, Margaret; Evangeline (poem); Harlequin; Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth; Martel, Yann; Scliar, Moacyr; Shields, Carol; Their Eyes Were Watching God; To Kill a Mockingbird Litt, Paul, 121–4 Loguen, Jermain Wesley, 43, 59 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 246–7. See also Evangeline (poem)

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Look FX , 144–5 Louisiana, 147–8, 249–50, 254, 257, 260–2, 268n70 lowbrow, 12, 207 McCormick, Robert, 22, 68–73, 79, 82, 85 McKay, Ian, 244, 251, 258 Man Booker Prize. See Booker Prize Manning, Frank E., 9, 12, 20 Maritimes. See Atlantic Canada Martel, Yann, 25–7, 127, 230, 232–3, 239, 240n27, 293–4, 297, 299, 301–2, 304–5, 307n35; 101 Letters to a Prime Minister, 26–7, 290– 305, 307n35; Beatrice and Virgil, 302–3; Life of Pi (novel), 25, 27, 225, 228–32, 234–39, 240n27, 291 mass culture, 9, 117, 121, 124, 127–8, 204, 210; and the Massey Commission, 8–9, 29n22, 122, 128, 207 Massey Commission, 8, 12, 95, 123– 4, 130, 133n45, 155, 217n39; and American culture, 8–9, 11, 121–2, 127–8, 207, 292; and highbrow culture, 8, 28–9n22, 122, 207, 239 materiality, 6–7, 12–14, 17–20, 233, 236; and citizenship, 14, 18, 23, 25, 30n52; and media, 68–9, 72, 86; and music, 10, 22, 92–5, 104 Maus, 292, 301–2 memory, 304; collective, 172, 177, 190, 192; national, 172; public, 175, 180, 186; social, 187; transnational, 24, 172–3, 180–1, 190–3 Meteor Studios, 150–1 Mexico-US border, 5, 19–20 middlebrow, 12, 123, 134n56, 272

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migration, 19, 128, 171, 186, 190, 192–3, 200, 212–13, 230–1, 233, 252, 257; across the Canada-US border, 7, 52, 55–7, 118, 128, 171, 173, 180, 184–5, 250. See also Acadians: deportation; African ­colonization; refugees Mills & Boon, 203, 214n4, 215n15, 216n18 Mirvish Productions, 252–3, 259 Montreal Gazette, 157, 234 Montreal Star, 76–8, 84 monuments, 172, 177, 183, 186–7, 191–2; Monument to the Victims of Communism–Tribute to Liberty, 124, 134n58; and Underground Railroad commemoration, 20, 24. See also Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada (H S MB C ); Underground Railroad: International Memorial Moore, Andrea, 179, 183, 192 Moretti, Franco, 290, 305 Mounties, 24, 118, 200, 210–13, 218n49, 218n51 Moving Picture Company (M PC), 153–4, 235, 239 multiculturalism: and Canada, 186, 208, 211, 217n41, 231, 235, 257; and the United States, 208 Murdoch, Rupert, 68, 199 music, 6, 10–11, 19, 27, 31n88, 91–5, 97–108, 123, 127, 266n15; American industry, 91–2, 97, 106, 108; Canadian industry, 21–2, 91–4, 97, 99–108, 127; Québécois industry, 93, 97, 100–1, 107; recordings, 10, 18, 22, 70, 91–105, 107–8, 153, 253; rights, 6, 93, 105–8. See also branch plant: and

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music; distribution: of music; record label (independent); record label (multinational); tariffs: on music recordings musicals, 24, 245­6, 257; Broadway, 251–2, 254, 261, 263; Canadian, 251, 253, 263, 267n45. See also Anne of Green Gables; Evangeline (musical) National Arts Centre (NA C ), 124, 253–4 national identity, 52, 247, 291, 303, 305; Canadian, 8, 22, 27, 93, 119, 122–3, 127, 206, 211, 213, 292, 295, 300, 302; and cultural industries, 92, 199–200, 206–8, 210, 213–14, 226, 233. See also Acadians; citizenship nationalism, 43, 172–4, 114, 172–4, 181, 183, 186–93, 290–1, 305; Acadian, 263; Canadian, 4, 6–7, 15, 23, 46, 92, 115, 117, 120, 122, 125–6, 151–2, 166, 172, 175, 178–80, 182, 185–6, 189– 90, 199, 201, 211, 217n37, 225, 235, 237, 245; French-Canadian, 15, 250; Indigenous, 15; romantic, 258; US, 69, 72, 85–6, 115, 184, 186 National Parks Service (NPS). See United States National Parks Service (NPS) Nelvana of the Northern Lights, 14, 23, 114, 117, 119–21, 126–8, 132n19, 132n22, 133n35; and the Second World War, 21, 117, 120–1, 126, 132n19 neo-conservatism, 114, 123–4, 127, 245, 276

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neo-liberalism, 26, 273, 281–2, 297, 305 New Brunswick, 72, 160, 255; and Acadians, 245–6, 254, 264, 265­6n12 newspapers, 21, 44–6, 60n11, 60n17, 61n20, 68, 70–4, 81, 83–4, 86, 157, 173, 203, 263; abolitionist, 22, 42–4, 50, 60n10; and Canadian newsprint, 67–8, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 83, 86, 99. See also Chicago Tribune; The Liberator; Montreal Gazette; Montreal Star; New York Daily News; New York Daily Tribune; Toronto Christian Guardian; Toronto Star; Voice of the Fugitive newsprint, 22, 67–73, 75, 77–80, 83–6, 165 New York Daily News, 79–81 New York Daily Tribune, 42, 44, 59 New Zealand, 147, 158, 227 Nicholson, Hope, 119–20, 133n35 North, 119–20, 126, 128 North American Free Trade Agreement (NA F TA), 13, 103–4, 161 Nova Scotia, 134n64, 160, 255, 266n15; and digital production incentives, 154, 160; and Acadia, 244–5, 247, 250, 254, 258

Other, 187, 291–5, 299, 301, 304–5 Ouzounian, Richard, 251, 253

Obama, Barack, 26–7, 291, 294, 300–1, 304 oil, 23, 27, 86, 120, 280; Alberta tar sands, 27, 234, 280 O’Malley, Bryan Lee, 3, 10 Ondaatje, Michael, 16, 226 Orientalism, 119, 285n6 Orwell, George, 275, 282, 301 Oscars. See Academy Awards

Raboy, Marc, 11–12 race, 6, 12, 179, 204, 217–18n41; and Canada, 12, 49, 61n27, 117, 126–7, 134n64, 179, 182, 202, 262, 268n70; and power, 12, 187, 281; and the United States, 48, 54, 115, 260, 262, 268n70; whiteness, 48–9, 54, 61n27, 115, 117, 126–9, 134n64, 179, 202–4, 208, 218n51,

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Parks Canada, 171–2, 179–82, 184 patriotism. See nationalism Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 294, 305 Perrin, Kayla, 208, 218n41 pipelines, 27, 134n65 Pixar, 150, 153, 165–6 Poe, Edgar Allan, 238, 240n29 popular culture, 8, 12, 28–9n22, 115, 123, 135n69, 148, 158; Canadian, 12; US, 8–9, 12, 17, 155, 166. See also comic books; film; mass ­culture; television post-human, 277, 282, 285n17 print culture, 6, 8, 18, 22, 27, 83, 122; and abolitionism, 41–62. See also comic books; newspapers Quebec, 15, 126, 181, 215, 226, 232; and Acadians, 246, 254; and digital effects industry, 154, 160, 162, 237; as film location, 6, 232–4; and pulp and paper, 21–2, 73, 79–81, 83. See also film: Québécois; Martel, Yann; music, Québécois industry; nationalism, French-Canadian Quill and Quire, 205, 216n26

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281. See also African Americans; African Canadians; Indigeneity; Indigenous peoples; multiculturalism; racism; slavery Rachel, Rachel, 225, 227 racism, 117, 204, 281, 294; in Canada, 46, 58, 61n27, 117, 120, 126, 134n64, 179, 189, 192, 217– 18n41, 231; in the United States, 41, 49, 51, 56–8, 62n45, 115, 180. See also slavery radio, 92, 97; and Canadian content, 85, 99, 102; US, 8, 72, 118, 121–2, 131n1. See also Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC): radio R C A Victor. See Victor Recording Company record label (independent), 100–3. See also Attic Records record label (multinational), 93, 97–103, 105, 107. See also Decca; E MI ; Sony; Universal; Warner Brothers refugees, 256; fictional, 281; from slavery, 46, 50, 52–8, 174, 182. See also slavery region, 12, 17, 61n22, 255; and the music industry, 101–2. See also Atlantic Canada; North; Quebec; West resource extraction, 164–5, 234, 244. See also oil Rhythm & Hues, 147, 149, 235–6. See also Life after Pi Richardson, Lewis, 50–6, 58, 62n35 Richey, Rachel, 119–21, 133n35 Roberts, John, 43–44, 46–9, 58 Rockefeller Foundation, 122, 133n45

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romance, 21, 23–4, 199–210, 213–14, 214n4, 215n7, 215n14, 216n20, 216n26, 217n30, 217n40; and Canadian settings, 200, 209–14, 215n15, 218n42; and race, 216n21, 217–18n41, 218n41, 218n51. See also Bridges, Kate; Harlequin; Mills & Boon Romance Writers of America (R WA ), 200–4, 216n26 Roy, Gabrielle, 125–6 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences. See Massey Commission Royal Canadian Mint, 22, 113 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (R C MP). See Mounties runaway production, 6, 23, 149, 225, 228, 238; and Montreal, 143–4, 149, 156–8, 233, 236–7, 239; and Toronto, 3, 149, 209; and Vancouver, 149, 209 Scliar, Moacyr, 237–8, 240n27 Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, 3–4, 10 science fiction, 17, 121, 217n29, 274, 282 Second World War, 69, 97, 115, 118, 120–1, 190, 211, 273; and Chicago Tribune, 21–2, 81–5. See also War Exchange Conservation Act (WECA) sexuality, 128–9, 204 Shepherd, John, 91–2 Shields, Carol, 11, 230; The Stone Diaries, 11, 18 Shuster, Joe, 113, 116–17, 128, 132n17 slavery, 60n17, 174, 180, 189; in Canada, 59n8, 61n22, 189; and

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fugitives, 41–6, 49–50, 58–9n4, 59n8, 61n27, 61n31, 62n35, 62n36, 62n44, 177–8, 182, 187–8; in the United States, 14, 21–2, 24, 27, 41–58, 59n4, 59n8, 62n36, 62n45, 171–2, 177–9, 182, 186–8, 260–1. See also Fugitive Slave Act (1850) Smythe, Dallas W., 7, 11–12 Song Corp., 103–4 Sony, 103–4, 147 sovereignty: Arctic, 126; cultural, 5, 95, 152; economic, 5; Indigenous, 15, 27; political, 5, 127, 152, 211, 297 special effects. See visual effects speculative fiction, 275, 282 staples, 7, 24, 68, 86, 225, 228, 234; and empire, 68, 84, 164; pulp and paper, 68, 86, 165, 225 Statistics Canada, 161–2 statuary, 23–4, 125, 173–4, 183, 187– 9. See also monuments; Underground Railroad: International Memorial Straw, Will, 10, 92, 95 Stuart, Reginald C., 5, 26 Superman, 21–2, 113–17, 127–31, 131n1, 135n67, 135n69, 190, 214n2, 245, 276; Reclamation Project, 21–3, 113–19, 123–5, 127–30; and whiteness, 126–9 Sutherland, Sharon, 273–4, 283 Swan, Sarah, 273–4, 283 The Sweet Hereafter, 10, 226 tariffs: on newsprint, 73–8, 86; on music recordings, 21–2, 93, 95–6, 99, 102–4, 106–7

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tax credits, 23, 147–8, 153–4, 160, 233–5 television, 10–11, 85, 121–3, 160, 252; Canadian, 152, 155–7; and production, 4, 10, 12, 17, 23, 146, 148–51, 155, 157–9, 167n31; and post-production, 146, 149–51, 157–62. See also broadcasting theatre, 24, 122–3, 128, 252, 266n15. See also Evangeline (musical); musicals Their Eyes Were Watching God, 293– 4, 305 Time Warner. See Warner Brothers Tinic, Serra, 10, 17, 167n11 To Kill a Mockingbird, 293, 295, 305 Toronto Christian Guardian, 43, 47–9, 58–59 Toronto Star, 116, 129, 132n17, 253 tourism, 243–5, 250–1, 255–6, 259, 264–5n3 trade, 67, 71, 73–7, 79, 85, 212; free trade, 102, 108; National Policy, 73, 95–6, 99; reciprocity, 73, 75–8. See also Free Trade Agreement (FTA ); North American Free Trade Agreement (NA FTA ) translation, 204, 215n7, 215n14, 250, 253–4, 266n32 transmedia, 149, 162 transnationalism, 20, 23, 118, 149, 185, 187, 191–3, 201, 211; abolitionism, 22, 42–4, 49–50, 55, 58, 187; and commemoration, 23–4, 172–4, 180, 185, 188, 191–3; and Superman, 114, 128, 190. See also memory: transnational Trudeau, Justin, 26–7, 134n65, 135n67, 135n69

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index

Trump, Donald, 26–7 Underground Railroad, 14, 20, 24, 48, 171–2, 177–85, 187–8, 190–2; International Memorial, 171–6, 180, 182–7, 189–93; Monument Committee (Windsor), 179, 183 United States National Parks Service (US NP S ), 171–2, 180, 182, 184 Universal Music, 103–4 vertical integration, 69, 72, 81, 100–1, 161 Victor Recording Company, 96–7 visual culture, 6, 18, 23, 27 visual effects (VFX), 145–6, 151, 156, 158–60, 162–4, 233, 235–7; in Canada, 144, 146, 148–51, 153–4, 156, 158–60, 162–4, 235–6, 239; fixed bidding, 146–7, 235; in the United States, 144, 147–9, 151, 235. See also animation; Cinesite; computer-generated imagery (CG I );

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325

Framestore; Imageworks; Industrial Light & Magic (ILM); Intrigue FX ; Look FX ; Meteor Studios; Moving Picture Company (MPC ); Pixar; Rhythm & Hues; Warner Brothers: and film Voice of the Fugitive, 41, 52, 55 War Exchange Conservation Act (WEC A ), 118, 121, 206 Warm Bodies, 143–4 Warner Brothers: and film 153, 159; and music, 98–9, 103–4 War on Terror, 272, 276, 280, 283 West, 24, 71, 200, 207, 210–13, 218n42 Whitney, Jackson, 49–50, 59, 61n31 Williams, Raymond, 18, 29n22 Wolverine, 115–16, 132n11, 132n12 Wonder Woman, 131, 132n19 Woo, Benjamin, 118–19 Wyile, Herb, 244, 265n7

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