These three monographs gave me so much to work with that it was hard to stay within a manageable length (my Canada comps field supervisor reads these in the morning, after he arrives at his office but before I get there - so I try to keep them short! I could potentially avoid this length restriction by sending them to him earlier, but then they'd be shorter because I'd have less time to work on them. An odd cycle). Tomorrow when we discuss them in person I'll get to properly sink my teeth in.
Reading Response: Little, Loo,
Curtis
Making law.
Building the educational state. Reforming institutions. The titles of monographs
by Tina Loo, Bruce Curtis, and J.I. Little, respectively, show various actions
in state formation in British Columbia, Canada West, and Canada East, all
temporally clustered in the mid-nineteenth century. Through their analyses of
law, education, and institutions more broadly, one can see the tensions in
historiography of the 1990s concerning pre-Confederation state formation. Despite
existing on a spectrum of engagement with theory, these works are united by
their local emphases, problematizing of the relationship between communities
and the state.
Tina Loo
presents a study of legal discourses, their formation, and their implementation,
in British Columbia, primarily prior to Confederation. Her goal is ostensibly
to show how conflict and negotiation were involved in shaping the economic
system, with law as an underpinning of a liberal economic order.[1]
Ultimately, her conclusions read more as a discussion of liberalism itself,
reached through a number of case studies of legal controversies that reached
courts in British Columbia. Her approach is decidedly post-structuralist, and
she offers a definite example in favour of conducting such an analysis, which
was relatively novel among historians when her work was published. As such,
Loo’s work is theoretically strong; by providing clear definitions of
liberalism and discourse analysis, she avoids the pitfalls faced by later
historians—Greg Gillespie comes to mind—who take their theoretical
underpinnings for granted. Her bridging between empirical and theoretical
approaches to writing Canadian history through discourse analysis shows the
legal order in British Columbia as constructed rather than natural, but that
this construction, and liberalism itself, is limited rather than totalizing.[2]
Bruce Curtis
offers, as Philip Corrigan’s prefatory remarks indicates, a “genealogy of the embodied educational state” in Canada
West.[3]
To Curtis, the organization of education was a struggle regarding the form of a
colonial state, subsuming class- and gender-specific understandings of state
schooling, the emergence, stabilization, and normalization of mass schooling,
and the management of resistance to public schooling in a series of interlinked
studies.[4]
In contrast to Little, Curtis takes a Foucauldian approach that sees education
very much as a means of social control that is sufficiently hegemonic as to
appear natural. This hegemony emerged through ideology, but more importantly,
habituation, pedagogy, and discourses of education as pleasurable for students.[5]
J.I. Little
outlines institutional reform during a transformatory period following the
defeat of the Rebellions in Lower Canada. He rejects hypotheses of
institutional reform based on social-control theory; according to Little, this
elite implementation of institutions to serve a capitalist system was
applicable for an urban area, but not for a rural, pre-industrial society. In
contrast to Curtis’s work, Little argues that the social-control thesis and
related approaches incorrectly suggest that state institutions were central and
elite.[6]
It is in his treatment of education that Little’s work most clearly contrasts
with Curtis’s; Little contends that in the Eastern Townships, education had
local support prior to the Rebellions. Similarly, he indicates that taxation
was not an imposition from the elite, but was implemented with popular consent.
Little’s main goal is to locate public figures and institutions Eastern
Townships within a ‘state-community spectrum,’ with both ‘state’ and
‘community’ as fluid entities.[7]
Little thus argues that state formation occurred at the community level, rather
than as an interchange between the centre and periphery.[8]
While Loo is very explicit in her terminology and precise in the theoretical
links she draws, Little does not provide definitions quite so readily; in his
third chapter, for example, “community regulation” goes undefined, leading the
reader to infer how such issues as the charivari, temperance, and smuggling are
linked within this category. More troublingly, as Curtis charges in his review,
Little is ambiguous as to the form taken by the state in his study, arguably
portraying it, in Curtis’s words, as a “monolithic entity” or a “straw
opponent.”[9]
Little’s work is
thematically broader than either Curtis’s or Loo’s, covering both education and
law in his monograph. This breadth allows him to draw substantial conclusions,
emphasizing a limited state role and significant localism on many fronts. In
tackling so many facets of institutional reform, analyzed through case studies
rather than wider trends, he sacrifices the theoretical depth concerning
particular facets of the state; this depth is a major strength of Curtis’s and
Loo’s monographs. Whereas Curtis and Loo highlight the applicability of their
work to regions wider than their geographical areas of study, Little highlights
the local specificity of his work. To Curtis, the application of the
educational state extends through international state-building projects, arguing
that the educational condition and project were “central constituents of
political rule in the bourgeois order.”[10]
Loo, while arguing that British Columbia is unique within Canada and therefore
best understood “within the particular discursive space provided by liberalism”
rather than other frameworks, situates her work as an example of the larger
significance of the link between law and liberalism, to make larger and more
theoretical claims about the nature of rights, justice, and legal discourse.[11]
Little, more cautiously, makes no such contentions; he does not claim that his
findings extend beyond the Eastern Townships, emphasizing their unique position
in a struggle against isolation.[12]
For historians of areas other than the Eastern Townships, the strength of his
work is not in his untangling of the specificities of that region, but in his
examination of institutional reform from a non-governmental perspective,
extending an analysis beyond the government and its legislation.
Little, Curtis,
and Loo differ profoundly on their use of theory. While Little rejects
Foucauldian approaches such as the social-control thesis, Curtis’s work is
theoretical, bordering on conspiratorial, in his claims that the educational
state was embodied within schoolchildren. Loo decidedly takes a middle ground,
with an extensive but critical application of post-structuralism and
liberalism. While Loo is not as explicit as the other authors in engagement
with social-control theory, she is closer to Curtis than to Little in this
respect, situating the state as an instrument of capitalism through law
premised on liberal discourse, with the class oppression that this would
presumably entail. The state, to Loo, is still an overarching force, with power
over the people, though not to the extent that Curtis postulates.
A critical
omission of all three texts is the relative lack or weakness of analyses of
gender, and race. While these are political rather than social histories, the
absence of strong analyses of these elements of privilege and marginalization
hinder all three considerations of the state, by positioning the local
community as, by default, white and male. The fairly limited treatment of
Aboriginal peoples in Loo’s work, and apparent absence of such an analysis in
Curtis’s, is particularly striking given their geographic situation and
theoretical underpinnings, respectively. For Little, this is a less critical
concern, but nonetheless an issue he could afford to engage with more.
No comments:
Post a Comment