(De)Constructing Canada: The use of museum spaces in disrupting settler narratives of Canadian identity

Author:

Katherine E.J. Hales

Cited Authors:
  • Ahmed, Sara - Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality
  • Ahmed, Sara - The Phenomenology of Whiteness
  • Alcock, F. J. - A century in the history of the Geological Survey of Canada
  • Anderson, Benedict - Imagined Communities: reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism
  • Aronczyk, Melissa and Brady, Miranda J. - Branding History at the Canadian Museum of Civilization
  • Aronsson, Peter - Explaining national museums: Exploring comparative approaches to the study of national museums
  • Ash, Melanie C.T. - But where are you REALLY From?: Reflections on Immigration, Multiculturalism, and Canadian Identity
  • Bannerji, Himani - The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender
  • Berger, Carl - Honour and the Search for Influence: A History of the Royal Society of Canada
  • Berland, Jody - North of Empire: essays on the cultural technology of space
  • Blumer, Nadine - Expanding Museum Spaces: Networks of Difficult Knowledge at and beyond the Canadian Museum for Human Rights
  • Bucker, Phillip - Canada and the End of Empire
  • Burman, Jenny - Introduction
  • Burman, Jenny - Multicultural feeling, feminist rage, Indigenous refusal
  • Burman, Jenny - Panel #4 Response: Nation, Politics Belonging; ‘Out of Nowhere: Nation, Politics and Belonging’
  • Byrd, Jodi - The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism
  • Campbell, Mark V. - ’Connect the T.Dots’ – Remix Multiculturalism: After Caribbean-Canadian, Social Possibilities for Living Difference
  • Campbell, Mark V. - Paradigmatic Poetics of Reading: The Case of Afrodiasporic Cultures in Canada
  • Carter, Jenny; Orange, Jennifer - Contentious terrain: defining a human rights museology
  • Clarke, George Eliot - What Was Canada
  • Clifford, James - Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century
  • Coombes, Annie - Museums and the Formation of National and Cultural Identities
  • Cosgrave, James E.; Cormack, Patricia - Disenchanted Wonder: Collecting Canadian Identity through the CBC “Seven Wonders of Canada” Project
  • Coulthard, Glen - Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition
  • Coulthard, Glen - Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada
  • Crane, Susan - Museums and Memory
  • Davis, Patricia - Place, Narrative and Social Space
  • Dawn, Leslie - National visions, national blindess: Canadian art and identities in the 1920s
  • Day, Richard J. F. - Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity
  • Dean, David - Museums as Sites for Historical Understanding, Peace, and Social Justice: Views from Canada
  • Dewing, Michael - Canadian Multiculturalism (Library of Parliament, 2009)
  • Dion, Susan - Aboriginal People and Stories of Canadian History: Investigating Barriers to Transforming Relationships
  • Erll, Astrid - Memory in Culture
  • Failler, Angela - Hope Without Consolation: Prospects for Critical Learning at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights
  • Failler, Angela, Ives, Peter, and Milne, Heather - Introduction: Caring for Difficult Knowledge – Prospects for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights
  • Fanon, Frantz - Black Skin, White Masks
  • Fatona, Andrea - Arts Funding, the State and Canadian Nation-Making: Producing Governable Subjects
  • Fatona, Andrea - Connecting Across the Gaps: Experiencing the Black Diaspora
  • Fatona, Andrea - In the Presence of Absence: Invisibility, Black Canadian History, and Melinda Mollineaux’s Pinhole Photography
  • Flood, Sandra - Canadian Craft and Museum Practice
  • Foster, Cecil - Blackness and Modernity: The Colour of Humanity and the Quest for Freedom
  • Foster, Cecil - Keeping it Real: Blacks and Multiculturalism – the Search for Recognition and Authenticity in Canada
  • Granzow, Kara and Dean, Amber - Revanchism in the Canadian West: Gentrification and Resettlement in a Prairie City
  • Guntarik, Olivia - Indigenous Frames of Reference: Translating the Past into a Politics of the Future
  • Hankivsky, Olena and Dhamoon, Rita Kaur - Which Genocide Matters the Most? An Intersectionality Analysis of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights
  • Haque, Eve - Multiculturalism within a bilingual framework: language, race, and belonging in Canada
  • Haque, Eve - The Bilingual Limits of Canadian Multiculturalism: The Politics of Langauge and Race
  • Burman, Jenny - Introduction.
  • Simpson, Audra - Mohawk Interruptus
  • Airline, Amelia - Sample Reference Work
Abstract:

This thesis explores the use of museum spaces in disrupting settler notions of Canadian identity. By identifying the ways in which multiculturalism is written into historical narratives of Canada, these chapters address how the inclusion of a multicultural presence helps curate a Canadian national identity. Drawing on discourses of multiculturalism, race theory, nation-building and some aspects of visual culture, this thesis identifies the ways in which museologies allow for these narratives to be constructed and reconstructed through specific examples within museums. Through the identification of various tropes in the construction of a Canadian national identity – relationship to land and territory, immigration, the nation’s colonial past/present – these chapters focus on Indigeneity, whiteness, and anti-Blackness in Canada as a means of addressing the emergence of these tropes, and how these themes are represented within museum spaces.

Acknowledgements:

Firstly, thank you to my supervisor, Dr. Jenny Burman, for all of her support and guidance throughout my degree and throughout this project.

Thank you to Media@McGill and the Department of Art History and Communication Studies for helping to fund this project.

To Becky Lentz, Marc Raboy, Will Straw, Kristina Huneault, Yuriko Furuhata, Will Roberts and Yves Winters: thank you for everything I learned in their classes, both on and off the syllabus, and for allowing me to explore these ideas in their seminars.

To my family: my parents, Christopher, grandparents and M. Daphne Harper, without whom this wouldn’t have been possible. Additionally, thank you to Barbara, Bernard, Annie, Sahil, Marina, Keegan, Alyssa, Joseph, Maddy, Kelly, Mitchell, Leslie and everyone at CaPS and the McGill Writing Centre for all of their continued support and encouragement throughout this project. Finally, thank you to all of my friends and colleagues who supported me, encouraged me, and discussed (and challenged) these ideas with me.