I was nervous about this one

Last week I had to review my own doctoral supervisor's work. Obviously that made me nervous. I'm still not happy with my writing here, but the prof who graded it (a different prof) liked it. 

Review: Kelm, Mary-Ellen. A Wilder West: Rodeo on Western Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011.

Mary-Ellen Kelm’s A Wilder West is at once a social and a cultural history, of sport, of native-newcomer relations, and of Western Canadian settlement. Using Richard White’s “middle ground” as a call to action, and Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the “contact zone” as an analytical tool, Kelm engages with a range of issues, such as performativity, agency, representation, authenticity, hybridity, and hegemony, as they emerged in relationships implicated in rodeo. Her work covers the late nineteenth century through to present rodeos, and is focused examining small-town and reserve rodeos in Alberta and the British Columbia interior during the early to mid twentieth century. Her main concern is problematizing the narrative of settler hegemony in rodeo, and the binary of “cowboys versus Indians” that popular culture commonly ascribes to it. Ultimately, Kelm’s conclusion is unorthodox among historians who employ the contact zone, arguing that the history of Western Canadian rodeo was more gendered than it was racialized.

A key goal of Kelm’s introduction is situating the rodeo as a contact zone, on the basis that rodeos were sites of struggle between relational systems of meaning, showing both division and commonality (9). Colonial power, in such spaces, was present but not absolute, and was perpetuated and mitigated through material and discursive structures. Kelm’s text is based around a thematic rather than a chronological organization, although there is some chronological progression through the monograph as Kelm follows the professionalization of rodeo through the mid twentieth century. Rather than linking themes to particular dates, Kelm accomplishes a thematic analysis through examining particular locations and the individuals associated with them, considering a range of such places in each chapter.

Kelm’s first chapter outlines the impact of communities on local rodeos, and of rodeos on communities, considering how rodeo entailed a performance of values and history. She also outlines the challenges for Aboriginal peoples in participation in rodeos, noting that while Aboriginal participation was critical for the financial success of a rodeo, agents with the Department of Indian Affairs hindered this, particularly in Alberta, by limiting Aboriginal mobility outside of reserves. Kelm’s key argument in this chapter is that, despite being a performance of histories, identities, and values, rodeo was not the “ritual of conquest” that other historians have portrayed (25). Instead, it was an awkward joining of history and modernity to portray communities in positive combinations of progress and nostalgia (44-48). This portrayal worked for Aboriginal as well as settler communities, representing Aboriginal pasts within the present, to demonstrate the compatibility of Aboriginal culture with modernity (56). Ultimately, Kelm shows the multi-faceted role of rodeos in Alberta and British Columbia communities, and the various meanings that these events engendered.

Subsequently, Kelm considers, in her second chapter, how communities and individuals constructed their identities using rodeo. Rodeo thus served as a contact zone for building identities and the relationships that constituted these identities. Kelm emphasizes that these identities were highly gendered. A key part of this analysis thus involves the role of “rough masculinity” in rodeo culture, and how this expression of masculinity was complicated by, and overlapped with, ideas of rodeo men as engaging in a fraternity of sportsmanship. Kelm argues that, for some Aboriginal men, “cowboy” served as a position of status, indicating how gendered identities in this context were also racialized and circumscribed by class and place. Finally, Kelm turns to her aim of uncovering affective relationships within rodeo. This is largely accomplished by analyzing a series of photographs by Chow Dong Hoy, which Kelm sees as a destabilization of ethnographic images, as Hoy portrayed his subjects as they wished to be represented, and thus made visible the hybridity that formed within the contact zone. This last element of the chapter is effective in demonstrating hybridity, but less so in demonstrating affect; the expressions of the various individuals in Hoy’s portraits indicate how they wished to be depicted, rather than necessarily how they felt.

Kelm’s third chapter is the first of three that examines the professionalization involved in rodeo’s transition into a sport, and the impact of this transition on racialized and gendered participation. The thrust of this chapter is an examination of the professional organizations that regulated rodeo and cowboys, generating a public image of cowboys as respectable athletes rather than fun-seeking amateurs. Kelm cautions that these organizations were not as “revolutionary” as they might seem to observers, as they still excluded women; Aboriginal participation, though technically permitted, was constrained by social, economic, and political structures (129-130). Kelm carries this analysis through her fourth chapter, a continued consideration of professionalization. Through the increasing bureaucratization and standardization entailed by professionalization, the rough masculinity that Kelm accounts earlier transitioned such that sporting respectability became a more dominant representation of cowboys. This was part of the Cold War masculinity that was prominent in the mid-twentieth century, emphasizing family-oriented responsibility. Rodeo families thus moved in a “liminal contact zone” with a distinct subculture that included intergenerational Aboriginal and settler families (135). Although this liminal contact zone gave somewhat more space for femininity, women had to carefully deploy concepts of femininity and family to be accepted within pro rodeo circuits (151-153).

The theme of professionalization continues in Kelm’s fifth chapter, which examines rodeos that were not part of the professional rodeo circuit, and how professionalization affected them. Rodeo served as an escape from modernity. As such, Aboriginal culture became associated with the past, and thus commodified for the tourist market. Some communities expressed concern that the move towards professionalization was excluding local rodeo participants, including Aboriginal peoples, who had a complex and declining position in the modernizing Western Canadian economy. Aboriginal women’s participation as rodeo or stampede “queens” indicated the contested representation of authenticity that rodeo organizers attempted to promote. These women, who occasionally spoke of First Nations struggles rather than merely serving as ambassadors, indicated how rodeo was a space, though restricted, that gave voice to social forces. According to Kelm, community rodeo participation, rather than being neutral, was segmented and contested.

Kelm’s final chapter is also her most compelling. This chapter emphasizes how reserve rodeos served as an expression of identity, history, and values, as contact zones grounded in a discourse of discrimination (208). The emphasis here is on affect and intimacy, through the creation of an “intimate public” and an “affective community” that sustained hope for Aboriginal cultures by deploying a hybridized “Indian cowboy” identity (206, 216). This identity disrupted the myths and binaries that characterized rodeo in popular culture, with the wider implication of indigenizing rodeo. Kelm argues that, by destabilizing the binary that separated “cowboys” from “Indians,” Aboriginal peoples were able to subvert other categories, blurring tradition with modernity, and culture with nature. This analysis grants reserve communities significant agency from their position of marginality in popular culture, and demonstrates a flexibility that is not present in usual metanarratives of conquest (217).

Beyond summarizing her argument and the empirical content of her work, Kelm’s conclusion considers the implications of her analysis, highlighting how a multiplicity of meanings, often conflicting, can come from a subaltern cultural analysis, and suggesting that historians go beyond discourses of difference to analyze individual identities. She acknowledges that some of her findings may be perceived as problematic, and therefore takes care to emphasize that, despite ultimately arguing that small towns were less racially troubled than is usually assumed, this is a disruption of the stereotypes upon which racism is based, rather than a denial of racism. Whereas some scholars emphasize racial difference in work grounded by postcolonial theory, Kelm uses such approaches to show that racialization, while important, can also render marginalized participants invisible. By emphasizing social memory, Kelm troubles many of the meanings that historians ascribe to contact zones.

There are some gaps in Kelm’s study. As an analysis of rodeo in Western Canada, it seems amiss that events such as the Calgary Stampede do not figure in this work. While this is primarily a study of small-town rodeo, it is puzzling that Kelm did not take up the opportunity to consider the potential of a contact zone between rural and urban environments in larger urban rodeos. Similarly, Kelm’s work is a transborder history, intentionally focused on Canadian rodeos. A comparative chapter would be welcome, given the involvement of American riders on the Canadian rodeo scene; to what degree did rodeos function as contact zones across the border, and what identities were constituted in American rodeos?

Some novel elements of Kelm’s work in A Wilder West include her simultaneously regional and microhistorical focus and her discussion of affect. The latter seems experimental in this work; Kelm does not apply this affective analysis through her monograph, instead considering emotional connections and intimacies only at specific points. Her engagement with the affective turn is thus effective, but exploratory rather than exemplary. It is in her combined micro-level and regional work, building connections between communities and wider rodeo culture, that Kelm’s analysis is particularly strong. This, alongside nuggets of analysis of affect, enables her to foreground the hybridity of identities of rodeo participants, and to disrupt the binaries that are produced by racialization within rodeo.

Just got this back: Review of McKay's Quest of the Folk

My field supervisor liked it! Even the clam chowder metaphor :)

Review: McKay, Ian. The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2009.

In The Quest of the Folk, Ian McKay offers a neo-Gramscian contribution to the history of Nova Scotia, challenging hegemonic aspects of Nova-Scotian society as the result of a carefully produced and commodified “Folk” culture. Loosely situating his text within subaltern studies, McKay ultimately presents a critique of authenticity and postmodernity, with significant commentary on essentialism, commercialism, and identity.

In his introductory chapter, McKay repositions the Folk as an idea, rather than an inherent people of Nova Scotia, and establishing renowned folklorist Helen Creighton as largely responsible for furthering this idea. The Folk, according to McKay, emerged following a wider movement to counter the Enlightenment’s class divisions, secularism, and science. This emergence paralleled similar trends in the United States and Britain. The creation of the Folk was not power-neutral, but an “aesthetic colonization” (9) on the part of cultural producers. In this chapter McKay also defines Innocence as a “local variant of antimodernism” and as a mythomoteur, “a set of fused and elaborated myths,” that served as a framework of meaning (30). This motif, McKay shows, emerged largely in the mid twentieth century. The controversies surrounding this text, to which McKay responds to in the foreword to this edition, show the salience of the Folk in the early twenty-first century. This essentialist motif ties together the monograph as a study of antimodernism.

McKay’s second and longest chapter is a largely biographical consideration of Helen Creighton, outlining her intellectual influences and career collecting folksongs. McKay reveals her to be a problematic figure, rather than a hero of the Folk. He pays particular attention to Creighton’s social location, as an upper middle-class gentlewoman, and the impact of this identity and circumstances on Creighton’s work. Her research fit comfortably within the acceptable pursuits of a “gentlewoman,” and while Creighton was caught between models of nineteenth- and twentieth-century womanhood, McKay illustrates that she was unquestioning of her own class position and its implications for her research on folk songs, and used her paternalist outlook to shape an essentialist image of the Folk. McKay concludes this chapter by noting that Creighton’s research is inconsistent with that of more recent folklorists; for example, more recent scholars have shown that Creighton over-emphasized the significance on Nova Scotian folklore tradition of an English cannon known as Child Ballads. I would contend, however, that this is an unfair comparison on McKay’s part, seeing as Creighton’s research was a product of her particular circumstances and lacked the hindsight of contemporary scholars.

Following his analysis of Helen Creighton, McKay turns his attention to Mary Black, a critical figure in the handicraft revitalization on Nova Scotia. Once again, this chapter follows a loosely biographical structure in its treatment of Black’s own work, extending this to include a critique of the commercialization of handicrafts through the tourism industry. Like Creighton, Black was a problematic figure, particularly through her commercial outlook and her desire to define handicrafts in ways that symbolically tied them to, but practically distanced them from, the Nova Scotian “Folk.” While Creighton’s commodification of Folk culture was ostensibly her means of preserving and displaying it, Black’s approach focused on the needs of the tourist market rather than the Folk themselves, as McKay illustrates by outlining her calls for coordination in the designs and productions of handicrafts, and her desire for high-standard craftsmanship, even if this meant the crafts being produced by non-Nova Scotian, often European, trained craftspeople. Creighton, with what McKay termed an “entropic sensibility” (179), worked to discover Folk culture; Black, on the other hand, strived to create it in the image of her own ideals of handicrafts. By including an analysis of Black’s career and impact, McKay shows how the Folk was more significant than a nostalgic collection of folksongs—it was physically and economically tangible through the production of handicrafts.

McKay’s fourth chapter is an analysis of the spread of the mythomoteur of Innocence and its salience for the Folk themselves. It is in this chapter that McKay’s analysis loses some of its appeal. Given the limits of social history methodology, McKay notes that a consideration of the experiences and opinions of the population at large would not be possible; thus, he evaluates the prominence of the Folk as an idea by focusing on cultural works, particularly literature. From this, he infers that the Folk mythomoteur was a widespread imagining, and key as a representation of the province. At no point, however, does McKay make use of the voices of the Folk themselves; indeed, throughout this monograph they are a disappointingly silent presence. While this does not entirely discredit McKay’s argument, particularly as he acknowledges that many cultural producers who reflected the Folk were themselves Nova Scotian, it certainly undermines McKay’s claim that his work is subaltern in outlook, and is a serious gap in his work.

One particularly satisfying component of McKay’s work can be found in a short section of his fourth chapter that presents an analysis of gender and sexuality as part of the mythomoteur.  McKay highlights the connections between Innocence as an essentialist framework and the traditional family values and gender roles that proponents of the Folk assumed to be inherent in Nova Scotia as a “therapeutic space” away from the challenges of modernity (251). In doing so, he positions the Folk as a gendered category—though not as individual men and women. This illustrates the complex role of gender in antimodernism, which celebrated pre-modern gender roles of domestic femininity and thriving masculinity. These traditional roles stood in stark contrast to the realities of gender relations in Nova Scotia, which experienced changing reproductive patterns consistent with those of other parts of North America. Thus, McKay highlights the gendered nature of Innocence as an ideological formation through which “a politics of cultural selection” cherry-picked, from an otherwise modernizing society, those aspects of gender and sexuality that were anti-modern (251).

In a concluding chapter, McKay outlines his neo-Gramscian theoretical underpinnings and meditates on the utility of the Folk as a concept in post-modernity. McKay carefully distinguishes this from postmodernism, basing his ideas on the work of literary critic Frederic Jameson. McKay notes that postmodernity, while intensifying demand for images of Folk, is more accepting of the fragmentation and lack of authenticity that follows from these images. This assertion, in my opinion, bears the wider significance of McKay’s work, although this is somewhat mitigated by his taking for granted his characterization of contemporary society as situated in postmodernity. Along with his introductory chapter, the final portion of this chapter serves as a theoretical bookend to the three interior chapters, clarifying the theory that McKay applies, to varying degrees, throughout his work. In order to diminish the strength of the mythomoteur, McKay proposes a neo-Gramscian framework. In short, this approach reconciles and thus combines the strengths of Marxian political economy and Foucauldian genealogy, thus enabling an analysis of the Folk that considers power structures, rather than assuming unity. McKay roots his use of such an approach as grounded in the work of Stuart Hall, who criticizes the linguistic turn in historiography without outright dismissing it. While McKay’s preceding chapters illustrate the theory that he lays out in his conclusion, this meticulously integrated theoretical framework ultimately appears to be what he wishes he had accomplished in The Quest of the Folk, or perhaps the goal for future work. This is particularly clear in his attempt to situate his work within subaltern studies.

McKay’s characterization of his work as “subaltern” is peculiar, and problematic. This characterization is rooted in his theoretical links to Gramsci, whose thought is foundational for, but expanded by, contemporary scholars in subaltern studies. The Quest of the Folk is, however, inconsistent with many of the major tenets of this particular subfield. The present incarnation of subaltern studies is postcolonial in its paradigm, whereas McKay’s work is focused on Folk who, though economically marginalized, are largely part of a colonial white settler society—a state formation that McKay does not deconstruct. Additionally, subaltern studies emphasize “history from below.” While the major players in McKay’s work are not elite, Mary Black and Helen Creighton are certainly women of significant privilege, as are the cultural producers who form the focus of McKay’s chapter on the influence of the Folk. Through the act of cultural production, it is arguable that these cultural producers, if they were Folk to begin with, leave the Folk behind and portray them from the perspective of outsiders. This is neither history from above, nor history from below—instead, it is history from in-between. This could be a valuable positioning for an historical analysis, but it is not the paradigm that McKay lays claim to.

By leaving the voices of the Folk out of his analysis, McKay falls victim to his own criticism of Folk portrayals of Nova Scotians. In his prologue, McKay charges that the framework of the Folk entails “the reduction of people once alive to the status of inert essences as a way of voiding the emancipatory potential of historical knowledge,” calling on subaltern studies to reassert specificity and complexity (xx). While he certainly challenges the essentialist portrayals of the Folk that permeate Nova Scotian culture, his work does not use historical knowledge as a truly emancipatory force; instead, he perhaps inadvertently perpetuates the marginalization of Folk voices.

On a childhood trip to Nova Scotia, I had the privilege of encountering a sizeable bowl of clam chowder in a small cabin on a northern part of Cape Breton Island. This chowder was ostensibly world famous; indeed, it was initially exquisite. As I made my way through the bowl, spoonful after spoonful, it began to feel heavy, and the weight detracted from the overall experience of the meal. To make matters worse, I did not find the amount of clams I had been hoping for. Ian McKay’s Quest of the Folk had the same effect on my reading appetite: ultimately, his verbosity detracted from the appeal of his argument and his theoretical strengths, and the relative silence of the Folk themselves made this otherwise compelling work rather disappointing. This disappointment is only somewhat mitigated by his acknowledgement that voices of the Folk are hard to come by—it is akin to a waiter apologizing that the restaurant is out of clams, but serving chowder anyway.

Hopefully getting empirically and theoretically stronger with Harris and Perry

Last week, I apologized to my comps field supervisor for not being as strong at the theoretical side of things as he and I would like. He responded that I seem to be struggling with the empirical side of history as well. Ouch! Hopefully I've rectified it this week! Two very interesting books, of which I've focused more on Harris's historical geography as it is a bit further than Perry's work from the sort of study that I'm accustomed to.

Cole Harris, The Resettlement of British Columbia

Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire

Adele Perry and Cole Harris, in their work on the history of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British Columbia, destabilize the narratives of “settlement” that they argue is problematic to Canadian history. Perry accomplishes this through an intersectional, poststructural analysis that emphasizes colonialism as a “popular social experience” that pervaded nineteenth-century British Columbia.[1] Harris portrays the European presence in British Columbia as one of resettlement, highlighting the important link between pre-existing First Nations communities and the land. Both authors focus on linkages in this colonial experience: Perry describes gender and race as “mutually constitutive,” while Harris argues for a similar entangled relationship between colonialism and land, in which colonialism was a product of geography, yet also shaped it.

Perry’s work follows from a wide body of postcolonial work, such as that of Catherine Hall and Ann Laura Stoler, which emphasizes gender as a major category of analysis for colonialism. She argues that race must be treated in a similar manner, suggesting and modeling an interrogation of whiteness just as previous historians have done with masculinity, and interweaving these problematized categories. It is likely through this development that Perry’s work has become prominent in postcolonial histories of British Columbia and Western Canada more broadly. She is careful to note, however, that her own work is not explicitly ‘post’ colonialist; she is hesitant to use such a label, but draws from postcolonial theory to inform her analysis of imperialism and race. Perry gradually unfolds the discourses that constructed Aboriginal peoples and white settlers, showing these discourses to be “fictive and changing” constructions.[2]

Both Perry and Harris purport to use discourse in their analyses. Perry clearly does this; Harris, arguably, does not. Perry’s monograph is replete with analyses of songs and poetry describing the experiences and perceptions of a variety of settlers. These verses show evolving and often contradictory images of Aboriginal peoples and settlers, predicated upon gendered representations, furthering Perry’s argument that colonialism was about contact between two peoples as men and women, rather than in the absence of gender relations. For example, by portraying Aboriginal women as opposite to white women, colonists could define womanhood to be the exclusive purview of white women; on this basis, Perry claims that “woman” as a category had clear “racial contours.”[3] Perry notes that in a poststructuralist approach, all sources are discursive in character. Her consideration of discourse is strongest in her analysis representations through poetry and lyrics; while she analyzes laws and policies as well, she does not attempt the same depth of textual analysis with these sources as she does with those of a more literary slant. Much of her analysis of legal texts focuses on inclusion and exclusion of various bodies from the law.

Cole Harris has a decidedly unorthodox definition of discourse. Whereas poststructuralists would generally define discourse as pertaining to language, seeing words as key to the construction of meaning, Harris defines it without relation to language (“the interrelated ideas, assumptions, and practices associated with a particular configuration of social power”[4]). This allows him to write a chapter that is ostensibly focused on discourse, with minimal analysis of language itself. This chapter analyzes power relationships in the fur trade with reference to performances of surveillance and discipline. From a theatrical perspective, however, it is akin to a play with a set and stage directions, but no script.

Another theme running through both Perry’s and Harris’s work is that of discipline, regulation, and reform. In several of Harris’s essays, the resettlement of British Columbia is portrayed as one of discipline, surveillance, and ordering of native peoples and land. He frames forts in the fur trade, for instance, in relation to their potential as sites of discipline and surveillance for the fur trade, emphasizing their status as ordered space.[5] There is a definite drawback to this strand of analysis, however: through this emphasis on colonialism implementing order and discipline, Harris implies, likely inadvertently, that Native society and land use was disorderly. This is also a potential pitfall in Perry’s work. While she considers Aboriginal agency to a greater extent than Harris, there is a clear division in her conceptualization of power, whereby Aboriginal attempts to manipulate society are framed as resistance, and European settler attempts to manipulate society are framed as discipline. In Perry’s analysis, non-Aboriginal targets of reform projects could cross or straddle this line between implementing discipline and effecting resistance, while Aboriginal peoples were, by default, objects of imperialism.

Harris’s chapter on the 1881 nominal census, written with Robert Galois, illustrates how he engages with both power and discourse, while also highlighting the regional specificity of British Columbian history. Harris and Galois analyze the 1881 census as a means to show the recalibration of space and society, considering it as “an instrument of the growing regulatory power of the modern nation-state, and a reflection of the white Canadian society that devised and administered it,” again emphasizing both the mutually constitutive role of colonialism and the nation-state in relation to land and the centrality of regulation and discipline in Harris’s own analysis. Harris’s consideration of census categories borders on discursive analysis, scrutinizing representations of Native peoples as “Indians” rather than simply “people.”[6] This analysis is more in relation to the space allocated to various categorizations within the census, rather than language itself, however. More consistently with the rest of Harris’s collection, Harris and Galois indicate that the 1881 census overall shows British Columbia as a unique and regionally diverse society, and one to be considered on its own terms rather than subsumed into a wider history of colonialism.[7]

A particularly fascinating insight in Harris’s work is his consideration of ‘space-time compression’ as a factor that makes British Columbia a unique site in European colonialism. Harris’s sixth essay, “The Struggle with Distance,” shows the importance of communication and transportation infrastructures to British Columbia as a colonial project. The implementation of such infrastructures was, according to Harris, part of the integration of British Columbia into a modernizing world, and therefore neither politically nor culturally neutral.[8] Unlike in other areas of a modernizing world, these changes occurred very quickly, as Harris outlines in his discussion of the Fraser Canyon as a compressed story of emerging modernity, with a unique periodization of colonialism and resistance compared to other areas.[9]

There are a handful of peculiarities in Harris’s collection of essays. These include his references in a couple of chapters to “Coyote” as representative of Aboriginal peoples. This quite problematically situates Aboriginal peoples within a spiritual realm, referring to religion without truly analyzing it or considering its impact on Aboriginal worldviews. As a rhetorical device, such references are jarring, and border on inappropriate given Harris’s position as a white scholar with an admitted lack of Aboriginal perspective. Harris’s work is occasionally quite self-conscious in tone, with many autobiographical notes and caveats in his introduction to position him as a settler with a clear link to particular places in British Columbia. In one essay, this self-consciousness is troubling: in fairly extensive prefatory remarks to his seventh essay, “Industry and the Good Life around Idaho Peak,” Harris notes that this particular essay is an older work than the rest of the collection, and criticizes his own previous assumptions and assertions that Aboriginal peoples had not been present in the land around Idaho Peak as symptomatic of the hegemony of colonial narratives.[10] It is therefore puzzling that Harris opted to include this particular essay without significant edits. It has certain value in expanding Harold Innis’s staples thesis, through Harris’s demonstration of the importance of economies that lay on the margins of staples trades.[11] However, this section is theoretically a step behind the rest of the collection, and less integrated into the trajectory of Harris’s overall argument.

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[1] Perry, 7.

[2] Perry, 5.

[3] Perry, 56.

[4] Harris, 281.

[5] Harris, 48.

[6] Harris, 157.

[7] Harris, 160.

[8] Harris, 162.

[9] Harris, 105.

[10] Harris, 194.

[11] Harris, 216.

This only skims the surface

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.

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[1] Loo, 4.

[2] Loo, 162.

[3] Corrigan, cited in Curtis, 9.

[4] Curtis, 12.

[5] Curtis, 378.

[6] Little, 5.

[7] Little, 7.

[8] Little, 12.

[9] Curtis, review, 214, 213.

[10] Curtis, 380.

[11] Loo, 157, 161.

[12] Little, 240.

Forgot to post this one: Craig, and more Greer

I had a very busy week, and as you can see, I didn't finish one of the two books before having to hand in a reading response! I was hesitant to post this one at first, for that reason. And then I forgot to post it. But here it is now...or, ok, after a bit of a reflective preamble.

This week is reading week, which, unsurprisingly, I am using for exactly its intended purpose. I have six books to read for next week, of which I've finished not quite two, and I also hope to go back through some of my other readings that I didn't do in as much detail as I'd have liked. I also have a goal of writing up all of this week's books, in three reviews/responses (as they are on three very different topics!). We shall see how I do... 

There was some minor panic last week. Actually, that's a deceptive way of structuring that sentence: I panicked entirely last week about comps. I feel behind on readings, meaning that I had to go into class on Thursday not having completed two of the three books I was to have read. I have a personal policy of fessing up to the prof if I'm not prepared, and I did so. Some of my classmates are somewhat critical of that, since it wouldn't be good for my grade. But I worry that I'd get found out anyways, in such a small class. I'd rather have a 100% chance that the prof knows that I wasn't prepared and perhaps assumes me to be unreliable, than take a 50% chance that I get found out anyways and am thought dishonest, or a 50% chance that I say something ridiculous in my attempts to bullshit through class, and have him think me stupid. It's all a bit of a tradeoff. Ideally this will be the last time I'll be unprepared, as that was a very anxious day for me. Fortunately after panicking a bit for two days after that (and I do not use the word "panic" in a hyperbolic sense!) a friend who wrote her comps a couple of years ago mentioned that she felt similarly panicked for much of her first year of her PhD. At least knowing that my anxiety is, to some extent, normal, meant that I could focus on work again.

In terms of feedback from my professors (and I am putting this here so that I have a narrative of my comps work, rather than to share grades with the world! I do find it somewhat shocking that people actually bother to read my analyses) I've had one of these graded; the Poulter response got an A-. In theory I should think that's good enough, but in practice, well, I'd like to get As more often. It's not about the actual grades (although I am so fond of my GPA from the past couple of years that I am borderline secretive about it) but because I know that my work will probably slide a bit as I get more and more stressed out as comps approaches. If I can reliably get As and A+s on my work at this point, then hopefully I will still pass comps (I'm pretty sure that "pass" in this context is equivalent to a B. They have high standards!). Apparently these should be more like reviews than essays.

Enough reflecting and waffling. Here's the actual response:

Craig: Backwoods Consumers and Homespun Capitalists

Greer: Peasant, Lord, and Merchant

I write this response with one large caveat: I admittedly have not finished Greer’s work, and am basing this off what I learned from the preface. This will therefore be a response largely to Craig’s monograph. I can only hope that the assumptions I make about Greer’s work from his preface do not show themselves to be entirely incorrect once I finish reading his text.

Béatrice Craig’s Backwoods Consumers and Homespun Capitalists: The Rise of a Market Culture in Eastern Canada is a quite thorough examination of economic transitions in the Upper Saint John Valley, also referred to as Madawaska. Based on official statistics and local record keeping—including, for example, business ledgers and account books—Craig outlines how a variety of players participated in a local commercial economy. Among Craig’s main points is refuting the “staple thesis” which many historians use to understand economic development; rather than revolving around a single staple, Craig emphasizes how Madawaskayans maintained a diverse economy involving local, regional, and international markets. She highlights the agency of various participants in the economy, including men and women of various nationalities and social classes.

Among the strengths of Craig’s work is how she problematizes a range of terms, including capitalism, farming, the economic sphere, and markets. She questions binaries that are common in analyses of emerging economies, such as subsistence/commercial, family/economy, and production/consumption, making a clear case for blurred boundaries and elastic terminology.[1] Her rejection of binaries is among her reasons for rejecting a Marxist definition of capitalism, as it would imply a binary of employers/labourers that did not exist in the Madawaska region.[2] She points out that many historians label an economy as capitalist by attributing values to their behaviours, even when their views aren’t specified in historical records.[3] Peculiarly, Craig has no such qualms about assuming agency based on an individual’s actions, without records of their motivations.

An emphasis on agency is a current through Craig’s work. Craig argues that the economy in Madawaska was a “product of human agency…rather than the consequences of abstract forces.”[4] Notably, however, Craig portrays this human agency as, perhaps, unintentional, arguing that through their attitudes and actions, producers and consumers unknowingly shaped an economic transition.[5] Through this emphasis on agency, Craig also shows capitalism as not an inevitable economic destination.[6] Agency, for Craig, is not limited to those with social or financial capital; for example, she considers as well women’s agency through crafting their engagement with textile markets, and as consumers. Rather than merely following a capitalist market, Craig shows how Madawaskayans engaged with various levels of the economy in very specific ways, using the market only when it benefitted them, rather than by default.

Although not to the extent of the political histories written by Fyson, McNairn, and Greer, Craig’s work is still limited in gendered analysis; in many cases, women are ghettoized into specific chapters. Her discussion of power relationships is mostly class-based. Native peoples are mentioned, but remain in the background of Craig’s analysis, and she offers little hint of intersectional identities. This is quite likely a result of the sources that Craig had available for her research, in which men were the default gender of producers except in specific industries such as textiles; women became visible as producers in a very circumscribed way, and were therefore the subjects of Craig’s chapters on textiles and consumption, but in the background through the rest of the monograph.

Structurally, Craig’s decision to organize her analysis thematically seems quite sensible. She occasionally, however, refers to “earlier” and “later” periods, without being explicit as to what periods she means. One potential weakness of Craig’s work falls in her emphasis on production, with consumption as the major subject of only one of her nine chapters. While her chapters on production seem, collectively, fairly definitive, her chapter on consumption reads as a preliminary examination, perhaps due to the lack of records. This imbalance creates the impression, likely untrue, that consumption was less important than production to the economy. While Craig carefully outlines women’s roles as both producers and consumers, her discussion of men’s economic roles emphasizes their production. It could potentially be fruitful to divide the monograph into equal sections, discussing production and consumption, or perhaps to avoid this possibly problematic binary by integrating both production and consumption more clearly into each chapter.

Ultimately, Craig convincingly portrays the economy in the Upper Saint John Valley as largely commercial, with people living in a world that was influenced by capitalism despite not necessarily being capitalists. This distinction between commercialism and capitalism may be innovative, but I cannot judge this without knowing more about the surrounding historiography. Her analysis of this divide is particularly apparent in her discussion of “principal men” or entrepreneurs, who sat at a boundary between porous economic layers.[7] These men had varying roles in social hierarchies, either disrupting or reinforcing them through their social mobility and economic linkages.[8] Overall, however, they were quite individualistic, a quality which Craig carefully disentangles from capitalism.[9] While not all major mediators, and occasionally more parasitic than beneficial to the community, these principal men encouraged the community to identify with the outside world, provided access to goods, and offered venues for social exchange by opening public houses and inns.[10]

Greer’s work, like Craig’s, is an in-depth study of a particular local area. He similarly outlines how the commercially isolated area of the Lower Richelieu entered a commercial, but not necessarily capitalist, world.[11] Greer’s definition of capitalism is somewhat wider than Craig’s; he describes it as an economy in which commodities are produced for market exchange, with capital-owning entrepreneurs and property-less wage-earners at its centre. While Greer portrays the parishes in his study as commercially isolated, Craig has a different view of the Madawaska. A main part of her argument is that the region, though geographically remote, was not isolated, and in highlighting economic linkages in the area, Craig refutes the staple thesis and shows export-led models to be inadequate for conceptualizing such an economy.[12] Thus, the different thrusts of their studies may be due to the differences between regions, as well as their starting points with different definitions of capitalism.

Situated in Quebec, Greer’s work is necessarily more political than Craig’s. Greer notes, early on, that his insistence on the feudal aspects of rural society in the Richelieu entails neither accepting the actions of the bourgeoisie, nor assuming that the area maintains a feudal, non-capitalist cultural legacy.[13] Greer and Craig also offer quite different justifications for the communities they opt to study. Craig selected the Upper Saint John Valley due to its arguably unique and strategically important position in local, regional, continental, and transatlantic exchanges. Greer, however, selected his regions for their apparent typicality, as well as based on the availability of sources. As Greer portrays his chosen communities as unexceptional, his work offers more potential to extrapolate his conclusions to other parts of rural Quebec; Craig’s work, however, must to some extent stand on its own as a study of such a particular region.

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[1] Craig, 9-11.

[2] Craig, 18.

[3] Craig, 19.

[4] Craig, 14.

[5] Craig, 230-231.

[6] Craig, 13.

[7] Craig, 225-226.

[8] Craig, 70.

[9] Craig, 71.

[10] Craig, 70.

[11] Greer, xii.

[12] Craig, 227.

[13] Greer, xiv, xiii.