White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada

by Daniel Coleman

In White Civility Daniel Coleman breaks the long silence in Canadian literary and cultural studies around Canadian whiteness and examines its roots as a literary project of early colonials and nation-builders. He argues that a specific form of whiteness emerged in Canada that was heavily influenced by Britishness. Examining four allegorical figures that recur in a wide range of Canadian writings between 1820 and 1950 - the Loyalist fratricide, the enterprising Scottish orphan, the muscular Christian, and the maturing colonial son - Coleman outlines a genealogy of Canadian whiteness that remains powerfully influential in Canadian thinking to this day. Blending traditional literary analysis with the approaches of cultural studies and critical race theory, White Civility examines canonical literary texts, popular journalism, and mass market bestsellers to trace widespread ideas about Canadian citizenship during the optimistic nation-building years as well as during the years of disillusionment that followed the First World War and the Great Depression. Tracing the consistent project of white civility in Canadian letters, Coleman calls for resistance to this project by transforming whiteness into wry civility, unearthing rather than disavowing the history of racism in Canadian literary culture.

Genres: Grad School

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Daniel Coleman teaches in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. His research covers Canadian Literature, cultural production of categories of privilege, literatures of immigration and diaspora, and the politics of reading. His publications include White Civility (2006) and In Bed with the Word (2009) as well as co-edited scholarly volumes.

Reviews

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sly civility (thanks, Bhabha), wry civility, white civility: I wouldn't call it a crisis, but it's more than an unfolding, more of a stone in the waters. Throw a stone (call it civil society). Watch the waters part (the violence of civilization, natch, Benjy). See it sink (hear the stones of populism yet?). Coleman does really, really interesting work exploiting the manifold ambiguities that permeate imperial literature and colonial cultures in Canada: as far as it goes, it goes up into the founding stories that justify the violent biopolitics which continue to influence how white Canadians view their history, their present, and their future. In this vision, Canadian-"others" are inscribed with various levels of nostalgia, romanticism, cynicism, and violence.

These are things we know, in part due to work such as Coleman's, and it is valuable. Yet I hear in Coleman less of what I really want: why end by championing the speculative novel of a white colonist? Why articulate sly civility as a survival under oppression? These are insufficient. If the charges and histories here are correct, then they call to be replaced; to be accompanied or to accompany the central tenets of an indigenous literary criticism and indigenous networks of social powers. No more dangerous games with civility. Time for hospitality, dignity, and respect.