Critical Inquiries: A Reader in Studies of Canada

This book takes a bold, critical approach to Canadian studies, framing Canada as an ongoing colonial project. The contributors assess how policy programs, such as multiculturalism and national arts funding and cultural monuments and symbols, such as the Famous Five Monument, the Tunnels of Moose Jaw and Saskatchewan’s Centennial, are all shaped within this colonial matrix. Furthermore, the contributors in this collection argue that the making of Canada as an extension of British-European colonialism has celebrated whiteness and has subjugated racialized others to the dominant group’s economic, cultural and societal norms. “As a critical Canadian studies unmasks, unearths, repositions, rereads, reworks and remakes, it also works to produce new modes of relational logics and conditions in which the intimacies that European colonial expansion produced for us might be refashioned.” — Rinaldo Walcott, from the Foreword