Canadian Cultural Studies

Not Folking Around: Towards a Political-Aesthetic Economy of Folk Art

By Henry Adam Svec

Erin Morton, For Folk’s Sake: Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016. 405 pp.

Aislie Walsh’s recent biopic Maudie (2017) charts the rough life of Maud Lewis, the self-taught artist whose idyllic, brightly coloured paintings of daily existence in rural Nova Scotia garnered both national and international acclaim, which has only grown since her death in 1970.
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What Lives On?

By Leisa Desmoulins

Amber Dean. Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance. University of Toronto Press, 2015. 188 pp.

What remembrances survive after death? For whom? In her 2015 book, Remembering Vancouver’s Disappeared Women: Settler colonialism and the difficulty of inheritance Amber Dean asks what lives on after the violent deaths and disappearances of a group of women.
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Inconveniently Yours

By Karl Jirgens

Thomas King. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 287 pp.

Thomas King’s book was released shortly before the final Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings held in Edmonton (March, 2014) and more recently, in Ottawa (June, 2015), at which survivors of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools recounted abuse, suffering and hardship (1).
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Canadian Ghosts and the Narratives of Nation Building

By Shaun Stevenson

Margot Francis. Creative Subversions: Whiteness, Indigeneity, and the National Imaginary. University of British Columbia Press, 2011. 252 pp.

Soon after relocating to Vancouver, British Columbia, I made an obligatory tourist excursion to Capilano Suspension Bridge Park on the North Shore. While struck by the beauty and lushness of a West coast rainforest, the enormity of the trees, and the vastness of the cliffs traversed via narrow, swinging bridges, I found my attention drawn to other things residing in the these dense, damp woods.
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Glorious and Brave: An American’s Take on Canadian Art

By Mary Elizabeth Luka

Denise Markonish, Ed. Oh Canada: Contemporary Art from North North America. The MIT Press, 2012. 400 pp.

From the first images and words of the Oh, Canada catalogue, it is evident that Denise Markonish is a curator in love with the thousands of artistic works, the 800 artists, and the dozens of critics, commentators and curators she has discovered, considered, and pulled together in a relatively idiosyncratic manner from a country abutting her own.
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The Future of Anti-racist Feminism In Canada

By Ashley Dryburgh

Sherene Razack, Malinda Smith, and Sunera Thobani, eds. States of Race: Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century. Between the Lines, 2010. 248 pp.

Despite its forwarding-leaning title, States of Race: Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century is as much about the past as it is about the future. The collection opens by looking backward, with an eight page preface detailing the history of critical race feminism in Canada over the past decade.
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“Intellectual Craftwork”: Reading Barbara Godard

By Erin Wunker

Barbara Godard. Canadian Literature at the Crossroads of Language and Culture. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli. NeWest Press, 2008.

I met Barbara Godard once. She was the plenary speaker at the McGill English Graduate Students’ Conference when I was in the first year of my Master’s. I remember being awed first by the vertigo-inducing complexity of her plenary paper, and then, later, when I was able to talk with her at the evening reception.
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