Canadian Content: Culture and the Quest for Nationhood

by Ryan Edwardson

Overview

A nation is given shape in large part through the cultural activities of its builders. Historically, nationalists have turned to the arts and media to articulate and institute a sense of unique national identity. This was certainly true of Canada in the twentieth century. Canadian Content explores ways in which nationhood was defined and pursued through cultural means in Canada throughout the last century.

As a framework for the study, Ryan Edwardson distinguishes between three phases of Canadianization: support for the arts and cultured mass media during the colony-to-nation transition; the 'new nationalist' empowerment of multi-brow culture and the call for state intervention in the mid-1960s and 1970s; and the 'cultural industrialism' initiated by the federal government under Pierre Trudeau in 1968. Examining each phase in its turn, Canadian Content looks at Canada as an ongoing postcolonial process of not one but a series of radically different nationhoods, each with its own valued but tentative set of cultural criteria for orchestrating and implementing a Canadian national experience.

Considering the relationship between culture and national identity, this study offers an idea of what it means to be Canadian, and suggests just how adaptable, problematic, and ongoing the pursuit of nationhood can be.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802095190
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	05/24/2008
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ryan Edwardson is a Canadian music fan with a PhD in History from Queen's University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements     vii
Introduction: A Guide to Canadianization     3
Colony to Nation: Morality, Modernity, and the Nationalist Use of Culture     27
Culturing Canada: The Massey Commission and the Broadcasting, Film, and Arts Triumvirate     51
From Institution to Industry: Mass Media and State Intervention, 1958-1966     78
Canadian Content Woes: Cultural Imbalance and Undercurrents in the 1960s     113
Creating the Peaceable Kingdom: A New Nationalist Canadian Identity     135
Guaranteed Culture: Nationalism and the Question of Intervention     160
Saving Canada: Pierre Trudeau and the Mobilization of Culture     185
Littlest Hobos and Kings of Kensington: Canadian Cultural Melange in the 1970s     220
From Citizens to Consumers: Cultural Industrialism and the Commodification of Canadian Content     241
Canadianization in a Time of Globalization     260
Conclusion: Building Canada - Culture and the Quest for Nationhood     280
Notes     285
Bibliography     325
Index     345

Editorial Reviews

‘Edwardson has written a substantial and impressive book on the evolution of Canada’s official policies to support national culture… It provides a valuable discussion of the issues involved in protecting cultural expression on the national stage as we drown in globalization.’—Ged Martin: The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, vol 100:412:2011

From the Publisher