Domestic Politics: Multiculturalism, Wilderness and the Desire for Canada

Abstract

Canada as a universalizing desireIn his essay 'Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity,' Emesto Laclau argues that 'the universal' is a necessarily empty space, abstract and unfillable. In democratic social formations, it 'does not have a concrete content of its own..., but is the always receding horizon resulting from the expansion of an indefinite chain of equivalent demands' ( 1995: 107). The inability of any particularitysay, a monarch'sto perfectly fill and embody the abstract universal opens up a democratic space of hegemonic contestation. In this contest, varied and concrete particularities vie for the ability to represent the universal, to expand beyond their private partiality to become, however temporarily, an apparently natural public whole, a 'concrete universaL' The ability of the part to thus represent the whole becomes an ideological question, as the desires of the aspiring particular expand to fill representational space, to become a coherent totality.

Planting the Nation: Tree Planting Art and the Endurance of Canadian Nationalism

“…Hall is careful to eschew a universal claim and stresses that the systems of representation that produce nations are always contingent on historical and geographical difference. We feel that Sandilands (2000a) provides an important argument on the operation of nature and nationalism in the Canadian context. Building on Laclau and Bhabha, she suggests that…”

Green and White Space Invaders

“…What is kept at bay with this appeal is the sense of the unspoken unheimlich land claims, the sense that this type of development may actually be putting more of a strain on the delicate ecology and limited water supply of the arid Okanagan. 14 Hage's critique of whiteness reverberates through the history of Okanagan real estate promotion and also with contemporary theories of Canadian whiteness, where Anglo subjects speaking as national subjects seek to organize Others in terms of multicultural policy and the wilderness in terms of environmentalism (Baldwin 2009;Sandilands 2000;Willems-Braun 1997).…”

Regimes of Ethical Value? Landscape, Race and Representation in the Canadian Diamond Industry

“…Such myths have been widely critiqued both because they obscure real dominations of northern peoples throughout Canada's history (Bednasek and Godlewska 2009; Usher 2003) and because the casting of tolerance and multiculturalism as a sort of gift granted to aboriginal populations is itself a form of domination (Mackey 2002). The latter is the case to the extent that it creates the very political realm within which multiple cultures are said to be equally expressing themselves (Baldwin 2009a; Sandilands 1999).…”