Check out the Second Carnival of Feminist Parenting. This neat blog carnival includes a few posts that were submitted for the event, including my recent piece called "On Gendered Interests in Children," as well as a bunch of unsubmitted links related to feminism and parenting. Lots of interesting stuff!
If that isn't enough blog-based goodness about feminist parenting for you, you can also look back at the first edition of the carnival.
If you write about related things, please check out this page, which is a general description of the carnival and a link to the submission form. They didn't have a huge number of submissions this time around, so please think about putting some of your own work forward for the next one!
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Two Examples of the Historical Erasure of Struggle
A primary focus of my reading and writing has for years been histories of struggle in the Canadian context. It is, therefore, hardly news to me that struggles against oppression and exploitation, and their crucial role in creating space of greater freedom and social justice in the present (and future), are persistently erased from the mainstream collective memory -- "the social organization of forgetting," a friend calls it. I rather like that phrase. I still manage to run across examples of this that make me shake my head, however. This post is to share two such examples that I have encountered over the last few weeks in writing a chapter based on stories from a few different interview participants who have been involved in indigenous struggles in urban areas. The fact that these are struggles waged by people who experience both racism and colonization is, I think, very much related to the this historical erasure.
Example One -- Grassroots Response to the White Paper
The first is a big one. It's possible, in fact, that I just haven't found the right sources, the ones that talk about it, and if so I would really like to be corrected. Though I suspect that if such sources exist, at least one of the things that I have found would reference them. In any case, I will proceed based on what I know.
In the late '60s, there was an upsurge in the cenutries-long process of indigenous anti-colonial resistance. It began, from what I understand, in the part of Turtle Island colonized by the United States and fairly soon spread to the part colonized by Canada. In part to preempt this, in 1969 the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau introduced a public policy document called the White Paper. This document, in the name of an individualistic liberal understanding of "equality," proposed to end any legal recognition of indigeneity -- reserve communities turned into ordinary municipalities, reserved land broken up into individually owned plots, denial or extinguishment of settler state recognition of Aboriginal and treaty rights, a complete folding into mainstream service provision, and a few other things. In response, there was vocal and extremely united opposition from across the many and diverse indigenous peoples colonized by Canada, which by 1971 had forced the Liberals to withdraw the proposals. Notwithstanding that it is commonly understood that the same basic assimilationist goals motivate the settler state's orientation to the peoples it is colonizing to this day, forcing it to retreat and regroup and creating space for indigenous survival and further resurgence were great victories.
Given the importance of this moment not only in the histories of indigenous peoples in northern Turtle Island but in the history of the Canadian state, I find it flabbergasting that there is no broad history of grassroots indigenous struggle, including in response to the White Paper, in those years. Most general sources that I have found on indigenous people in Canada that talk about those years have similar elements: they describe the White Paper and why the vast majority of indigenous people considered it cultural genocide; they talk about the important roles played in giving voice to that opposition by indigenous leaders and political organizations at the provincial and national levels; and they say virtually nothing about grassroots organizing in reserve communities and cities. Change is shown as being about interactions between leaders and the state, with strongly worded policy briefs playing a major role, and with no hint that leaders only exist because they are in dynamic relation with peoples that they may in some sense lead but that they do not control and that are themselves active agents in history. Ordinary people, and struggle as something ordinary people do, gets written out. I should add that I have encountered three important but narrow exceptions -- a biography of an important national leader in that era, a history of the period by a white feminist woman that includes a chapter that talks about a very partial slice of grassroots indigenous struggle, and a book by a radical Metis man that has a similar chapter on a different slice. But nothing even approaching an exhaustive, general examination.
I should add that I'm sure many indigenous communities have preserved the memories of those days in stories, as communities in longterm struggle tend to do, and really that's the most important thing. I also know there can be good reasons not to make such stories accessible to the oppressor. Nonetheless, I have a feeling that a lot of the reason for the absence of such histories has more to do with the ways in which mainstream institutions that produce historical narratives are funded, peopled, and organized. And I still cannot dismiss my sense that the cause of transformative social change is better served by trumpeting the stories of past struggles as far and wide as we can.
Example Two -- Mainstream Reporting of Indigenous Victory Over Children's Aid
The other example is much smaller. I spent a few days recently looking at old microfilmed newspapers in a Toronto library. Mostly it was the Winnipeg Free Press. I was trying to find material related to indigenous struggle with the Winnipeg Children's Aid Society in the late '70s and early '80s. Across Canada starting in the '60s and continuing in many places today, child welfare agencies have taken up the colonial role left by the receding residential school system -- that of stealing children from their families and raising them in ways that often weakens or even destroys their ties to their nations, their cultures, and sometimes even their very selves. In the early '80s, sparked by the tragic death of an 18 month-old in CAS care, a group of indigenous people -- mostly women -- waged a brilliant struggle against the CAS. They didn't get everything they wanted, but they were able to force significant changes in how child welfare worked, including the complete dismantling of the organization that had terrorized their families for decades and a new system that, while still deeply flawed, included more space for the urban indigenous community to protect its own children. As is always the case, this depended on cleverly working with other factors at play. CAS upper management was notoriously hostile to and lashed out at the merest hint of criticism, and as the indigenous community turned up the heat, relations between upper management and workers, between upper management and the board of directors, and between upper management and the provincial government seriously deteriorated. Add in a couple of sympathetic journalists (carefully cultivated), a family court justice doing a review of the system whose conscience did not allow him to downplay in his reports the damage done to indigenous people over the years, a related but separate process over the same years whereby Manitoba indigenous nations based on reserved land were taking direct control of child welfare in their territories, and an NDP provincial government that was hardly a close friend of indigenous people but whose electoral needs left some space for prodding in just directions.
Judging as best I can with white eyes and form this end of history, I would describe the coverage in the Free Press as somewhat inconsistent but good at some key moments. What is interesting, though, was its coverage some time after those key moments. As I said, one of the outcomes of all of this was that the Winnipeg CAS, after being ordered into a sort of trusteeship for a period of time by the province, was dismantled and replaced by half a dozen new organizations. For the occasion of the last meeting of the CAS trusteeship board and its final cessation of operations a month or two later, the Free Press had a total of two news articles and an editorial, each of which presented a summary of the events that had lead to this. Native people were mentioned exactly once, in one of the news articles, in a vague and short clause that said something about "criticism" from them, packed into a sentence about other things. The editorial and the other news article didn't mention indigenous people or grassroots struggle at all.
Certainly struggle by indigenous people in Winnipeg wasn't the only thing going on, and without other factors being as they were the outcome would probably have been different. But grassroots struggle by indigenous people was absolutely necessary to create that outcome. Yet it was (despite earlier coverage that wasn't bad) completely erased from that crucial first draft of history that is the daily newspaper as it was authoritatively setting the issue to rest.
Example One -- Grassroots Response to the White Paper
The first is a big one. It's possible, in fact, that I just haven't found the right sources, the ones that talk about it, and if so I would really like to be corrected. Though I suspect that if such sources exist, at least one of the things that I have found would reference them. In any case, I will proceed based on what I know.
In the late '60s, there was an upsurge in the cenutries-long process of indigenous anti-colonial resistance. It began, from what I understand, in the part of Turtle Island colonized by the United States and fairly soon spread to the part colonized by Canada. In part to preempt this, in 1969 the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau introduced a public policy document called the White Paper. This document, in the name of an individualistic liberal understanding of "equality," proposed to end any legal recognition of indigeneity -- reserve communities turned into ordinary municipalities, reserved land broken up into individually owned plots, denial or extinguishment of settler state recognition of Aboriginal and treaty rights, a complete folding into mainstream service provision, and a few other things. In response, there was vocal and extremely united opposition from across the many and diverse indigenous peoples colonized by Canada, which by 1971 had forced the Liberals to withdraw the proposals. Notwithstanding that it is commonly understood that the same basic assimilationist goals motivate the settler state's orientation to the peoples it is colonizing to this day, forcing it to retreat and regroup and creating space for indigenous survival and further resurgence were great victories.
Given the importance of this moment not only in the histories of indigenous peoples in northern Turtle Island but in the history of the Canadian state, I find it flabbergasting that there is no broad history of grassroots indigenous struggle, including in response to the White Paper, in those years. Most general sources that I have found on indigenous people in Canada that talk about those years have similar elements: they describe the White Paper and why the vast majority of indigenous people considered it cultural genocide; they talk about the important roles played in giving voice to that opposition by indigenous leaders and political organizations at the provincial and national levels; and they say virtually nothing about grassroots organizing in reserve communities and cities. Change is shown as being about interactions between leaders and the state, with strongly worded policy briefs playing a major role, and with no hint that leaders only exist because they are in dynamic relation with peoples that they may in some sense lead but that they do not control and that are themselves active agents in history. Ordinary people, and struggle as something ordinary people do, gets written out. I should add that I have encountered three important but narrow exceptions -- a biography of an important national leader in that era, a history of the period by a white feminist woman that includes a chapter that talks about a very partial slice of grassroots indigenous struggle, and a book by a radical Metis man that has a similar chapter on a different slice. But nothing even approaching an exhaustive, general examination.
I should add that I'm sure many indigenous communities have preserved the memories of those days in stories, as communities in longterm struggle tend to do, and really that's the most important thing. I also know there can be good reasons not to make such stories accessible to the oppressor. Nonetheless, I have a feeling that a lot of the reason for the absence of such histories has more to do with the ways in which mainstream institutions that produce historical narratives are funded, peopled, and organized. And I still cannot dismiss my sense that the cause of transformative social change is better served by trumpeting the stories of past struggles as far and wide as we can.
Example Two -- Mainstream Reporting of Indigenous Victory Over Children's Aid
The other example is much smaller. I spent a few days recently looking at old microfilmed newspapers in a Toronto library. Mostly it was the Winnipeg Free Press. I was trying to find material related to indigenous struggle with the Winnipeg Children's Aid Society in the late '70s and early '80s. Across Canada starting in the '60s and continuing in many places today, child welfare agencies have taken up the colonial role left by the receding residential school system -- that of stealing children from their families and raising them in ways that often weakens or even destroys their ties to their nations, their cultures, and sometimes even their very selves. In the early '80s, sparked by the tragic death of an 18 month-old in CAS care, a group of indigenous people -- mostly women -- waged a brilliant struggle against the CAS. They didn't get everything they wanted, but they were able to force significant changes in how child welfare worked, including the complete dismantling of the organization that had terrorized their families for decades and a new system that, while still deeply flawed, included more space for the urban indigenous community to protect its own children. As is always the case, this depended on cleverly working with other factors at play. CAS upper management was notoriously hostile to and lashed out at the merest hint of criticism, and as the indigenous community turned up the heat, relations between upper management and workers, between upper management and the board of directors, and between upper management and the provincial government seriously deteriorated. Add in a couple of sympathetic journalists (carefully cultivated), a family court justice doing a review of the system whose conscience did not allow him to downplay in his reports the damage done to indigenous people over the years, a related but separate process over the same years whereby Manitoba indigenous nations based on reserved land were taking direct control of child welfare in their territories, and an NDP provincial government that was hardly a close friend of indigenous people but whose electoral needs left some space for prodding in just directions.
Judging as best I can with white eyes and form this end of history, I would describe the coverage in the Free Press as somewhat inconsistent but good at some key moments. What is interesting, though, was its coverage some time after those key moments. As I said, one of the outcomes of all of this was that the Winnipeg CAS, after being ordered into a sort of trusteeship for a period of time by the province, was dismantled and replaced by half a dozen new organizations. For the occasion of the last meeting of the CAS trusteeship board and its final cessation of operations a month or two later, the Free Press had a total of two news articles and an editorial, each of which presented a summary of the events that had lead to this. Native people were mentioned exactly once, in one of the news articles, in a vague and short clause that said something about "criticism" from them, packed into a sentence about other things. The editorial and the other news article didn't mention indigenous people or grassroots struggle at all.
Certainly struggle by indigenous people in Winnipeg wasn't the only thing going on, and without other factors being as they were the outcome would probably have been different. But grassroots struggle by indigenous people was absolutely necessary to create that outcome. Yet it was (despite earlier coverage that wasn't bad) completely erased from that crucial first draft of history that is the daily newspaper as it was authoritatively setting the issue to rest.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Review: Reasoning Otherwise
[Ian McKay. Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People's Enlightenment in Canada, 1890-1920. Toronto: Between The Lines, 2008.]
I struggle on a daily basis with the fact that any act of writing is inherently arrogant -- except for journal-bound confessions destined for no eyes but the author's, the act of writing, whatever its specific substance, contains within it the presumption that someone, somewhere will benefit from reading what is produced. This is true of the most humble and cautious blog post, and the more sweeping and grand the vision for a given writing project, the more presumption it embodies. Yet it is only through authorial risk and impertinence, through the bearer of a pen and a notepad tweaking the nose of that which is big and imposing, that we can come -- maybe, just maybe -- to understand the world in new ways.
Reasoning Otherwise is part of something that aims to be both sweeping and grand: a massive, multi-volume history of Canada's socialist left that seeks to stitch together new understandings and new visions of the historical landscape and turn the assumptions of previous efforts on their ears. This is the first substantive volume, a sequel to an earlier overview and theoretical preamble and antecedent to, as far as I understand it, at least two or three other big books we can look forward to in the coming years. This one deals with the left in the years before the rise of the Communist Party, territory that is not unexamined but that has received less attention in the Canadian context than in most places.
A to-me endearing feature of McKay's method, which he calls "reconnaissance," is that it explicitly refuses the pretense of being some sort of final, authoritative synthesis, but embraces its own incompleteness and semi-conjectural status, and is explicit about "accepting that, on issues big and small, the latest word is not going to be the last word" [2]. Yes, it does feel a touch disingenuous, because whatever caveats McKay expresses this will likely function as a definitive text on the left of that era for at least a generation, but I still have a lot of respect for the acknowledgment that any one effort to tell stories of the past will inevitably be partial.
Reconnaissance involves examining not a single figure or single institution but all of the messiness of the socialist left in a given era -- what McKay calls a "formation," which can encompass multiple, loosely related organizations, individuals, tendencies, parties, unions, publications, thinkers, and activists. It examines what is common through this potentially chaotic mix, as well as the contradictions it contains. It explicitly disavows "ancestor worship" by latter day leftists, as well as uncontextual and polemical put-downs. It tries to understand the discourse and actions of the left of a given era in the context of that era, and examine projects and choices on the basis of what was useful and what was not, in the name of supporting leftist self-reflection in the present day.
There is lots to like about this approach. I like the commitment to nuance and complexity. I like the interest in recreating not just a sequence of events but the feel of the period and of moments within it. I like the somewhat meandering feel the text has in parts. Like I said, I respect the acknowledgment of incompleteness. At the same time, it is perhaps even more important than with more conventional, less ambitious histories to read it with its incompleteness actively in mind. For instance, a key theme throughout the book is the influence of the master-narrative of evolution on all branches of the left in this era, filtered not only through a particular reading of Marx but through an even more powerful influence from a philosopher named Herbert Spencer, of whom I had not previously heard. This observation is an important insight into the "first formation" -- McKay's name for the pre-CPC socialist left in Canada -- and into early 20th century Canadian society more broadly. However, does it really deserve as much weight as this volume gives it? There is no way for me to judge without either tackling primary sources myself or having the opportunity to read other books that take up the same material in different ways, which of course have not yet been written.
In pre-1920 Canada, explicitly socialist organizations were small and few. They were mostly without deep roots in the trade union movement, in contrast with their European counterparts, though there were individuals (like Toronto's James Simpson) and moments (like some of the massive uprisings in Canada's coal fields) that were exceptions. Some called themselves "parties" and some ran candidates in elections, even winning seats from time to time, but they were not the sort of organization we might expect to be attached to that label based on later experiences with social democratic and communist mass-based parties. Their focus was largely educational; they wanted to "make" socialists. A couple of the key parties, especially the Socialist Party of Canada and the Socialist Party of North America, have been (ahistorically) labelled "impossibilist" by other writers -- they adhered quite stringently to "single plank" platforms which insisted that anything less than the full implementation of socialism was a compromise and a betrayal, and they routinely disparaged any struggles with any other goal. McKay reads this as a response to the power of liberal hegemony and its proven ability to reabsorb workers' struggles and workers' candidates into the liberal fold, and argues that, for all that many of the associated pronouncements come across as nothing less than utterly obnoxious to modern ears, this approach helped create space for the formation of a left that had a centre independent of the inexorable gravity of liberalism. At the same time, other groups mixed practical struggles and transformative end goals in ways that resist easy placement in twenty-first century categories. Though famous U.S. socialist leader Eugene Debs did disparage once such mixture by a group in British Columbia as "mixed pickles."
It was unclear to me, based on the initial overview book for this projected series, how the volumes of actual history were going to tackle race and gender. I had some concern that race in particular would receive less attention than it should. Happily, this is decidedly not the case in Reasoning Otherwise. However, though they are treated seriously and thoroughly, I still have some concerns about the book's approach to each.
I agree with the book's commitment to getting past polemic and point-scoring approaches to left history, and its commitment to presenting nuance and understanding it in the context of the era in which it occurred. A lot of the new-to-me information that was presented in service of building anti-polemical nuance was useful stuff. For example, it counters assertions I've seen made elsewhere that the male-dominated left was largely disinterested in or even actively opposed to women's suffrage. In fact, though the Socialist Party of Canada was not supportive (in much the same way that it was often cuttingly dismissive of, say, bread-and-butter labour struggles), the overwhelming commonsense among leftists, both women and men, was pro-suffrage. As well, though I have heard many times about the Komagata Maru, a ship carrying South Asian would-be immigrants that were the focus of popular hatred and government opposition that prevented them from landing in Vancouver in 1914, I had never heard about the (admittedly atypical and short-lasting) alliance between the folks on the ship and the Socialist Party of Canada. Nonetheless, there were recurring moments when its discussion of race and gender felt actively defensive. That would be a hard accusation to make stick, I'm sure, because there are also plenty of places where the book is very explicit about the ways in which the early 20th century left acted in oppressive ways. But even so, to my eye there were at least some moments where the text came across as more oriented towards defending the distant past from the polemics of the not-so-distant past than towards a nuanced and tough accounting for oppression and resistance around race and gender in the era in question. I don't think that had to be the case.
My discomfort with the chapter on racism included some of that concern but I also found the framework used for discussing race and racism unsatisfying in a more general way. I think to really nail down that dissatisfaction I would need to spend more time rereading and pondering than I am willing to, unfortunately. It has something to do with wanting to see more and different ways of relating everyday racism to histories of colonization; more and different ways of relating to critical race scholarship on historical shifts in the form of racism over time; more clarity on how race and racism limited the imagination and the political projects of white socialists; more exploration of racialization as a historical process, with greater clarity around that era's conflation of race and ethnicity in light of the broader historical trajectories of different; even a single mention of the left's relationship to African Nova Scotia; and probably other stuff. Not that there wasn't lots of useful stuff in there, but even more than the other areas tackled by this text, it felt like there was more to say.
There are other bits and pieces that deserve a brief mention. I was a bit surprised that more attention wasn't paid to the Knights of Labor, who largely preceded the period covered by this book and who weren't explicitly socialist, but whom I had thought were a pretty clear ancestor for worker radicalism in the settler society in Canada. The section on religion and the left was excellent. I liked the discussion of the Winnipeg General Strike, particularly the attention to the show trials that followed it, though I thought a bit more focus on the events of the strike would've been useful for readers who weren't already familiar with it.
My reservations notwithstanding, this is a very important book. And an enjoyable one. McKay could probably have accomplished his goals in fewer pages, but it was all interesting and the writing was clear, showed glints of humour, and shifted effectively among the many different scales and foci of attention. Those of us with an interest in the history of oppression and resistance in North America should read it with some healthy skepticism around its grander claims and in balance with other sorts of histories, but we definitely should read it.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
I struggle on a daily basis with the fact that any act of writing is inherently arrogant -- except for journal-bound confessions destined for no eyes but the author's, the act of writing, whatever its specific substance, contains within it the presumption that someone, somewhere will benefit from reading what is produced. This is true of the most humble and cautious blog post, and the more sweeping and grand the vision for a given writing project, the more presumption it embodies. Yet it is only through authorial risk and impertinence, through the bearer of a pen and a notepad tweaking the nose of that which is big and imposing, that we can come -- maybe, just maybe -- to understand the world in new ways.
Reasoning Otherwise is part of something that aims to be both sweeping and grand: a massive, multi-volume history of Canada's socialist left that seeks to stitch together new understandings and new visions of the historical landscape and turn the assumptions of previous efforts on their ears. This is the first substantive volume, a sequel to an earlier overview and theoretical preamble and antecedent to, as far as I understand it, at least two or three other big books we can look forward to in the coming years. This one deals with the left in the years before the rise of the Communist Party, territory that is not unexamined but that has received less attention in the Canadian context than in most places.
A to-me endearing feature of McKay's method, which he calls "reconnaissance," is that it explicitly refuses the pretense of being some sort of final, authoritative synthesis, but embraces its own incompleteness and semi-conjectural status, and is explicit about "accepting that, on issues big and small, the latest word is not going to be the last word" [2]. Yes, it does feel a touch disingenuous, because whatever caveats McKay expresses this will likely function as a definitive text on the left of that era for at least a generation, but I still have a lot of respect for the acknowledgment that any one effort to tell stories of the past will inevitably be partial.
Reconnaissance involves examining not a single figure or single institution but all of the messiness of the socialist left in a given era -- what McKay calls a "formation," which can encompass multiple, loosely related organizations, individuals, tendencies, parties, unions, publications, thinkers, and activists. It examines what is common through this potentially chaotic mix, as well as the contradictions it contains. It explicitly disavows "ancestor worship" by latter day leftists, as well as uncontextual and polemical put-downs. It tries to understand the discourse and actions of the left of a given era in the context of that era, and examine projects and choices on the basis of what was useful and what was not, in the name of supporting leftist self-reflection in the present day.
There is lots to like about this approach. I like the commitment to nuance and complexity. I like the interest in recreating not just a sequence of events but the feel of the period and of moments within it. I like the somewhat meandering feel the text has in parts. Like I said, I respect the acknowledgment of incompleteness. At the same time, it is perhaps even more important than with more conventional, less ambitious histories to read it with its incompleteness actively in mind. For instance, a key theme throughout the book is the influence of the master-narrative of evolution on all branches of the left in this era, filtered not only through a particular reading of Marx but through an even more powerful influence from a philosopher named Herbert Spencer, of whom I had not previously heard. This observation is an important insight into the "first formation" -- McKay's name for the pre-CPC socialist left in Canada -- and into early 20th century Canadian society more broadly. However, does it really deserve as much weight as this volume gives it? There is no way for me to judge without either tackling primary sources myself or having the opportunity to read other books that take up the same material in different ways, which of course have not yet been written.
In pre-1920 Canada, explicitly socialist organizations were small and few. They were mostly without deep roots in the trade union movement, in contrast with their European counterparts, though there were individuals (like Toronto's James Simpson) and moments (like some of the massive uprisings in Canada's coal fields) that were exceptions. Some called themselves "parties" and some ran candidates in elections, even winning seats from time to time, but they were not the sort of organization we might expect to be attached to that label based on later experiences with social democratic and communist mass-based parties. Their focus was largely educational; they wanted to "make" socialists. A couple of the key parties, especially the Socialist Party of Canada and the Socialist Party of North America, have been (ahistorically) labelled "impossibilist" by other writers -- they adhered quite stringently to "single plank" platforms which insisted that anything less than the full implementation of socialism was a compromise and a betrayal, and they routinely disparaged any struggles with any other goal. McKay reads this as a response to the power of liberal hegemony and its proven ability to reabsorb workers' struggles and workers' candidates into the liberal fold, and argues that, for all that many of the associated pronouncements come across as nothing less than utterly obnoxious to modern ears, this approach helped create space for the formation of a left that had a centre independent of the inexorable gravity of liberalism. At the same time, other groups mixed practical struggles and transformative end goals in ways that resist easy placement in twenty-first century categories. Though famous U.S. socialist leader Eugene Debs did disparage once such mixture by a group in British Columbia as "mixed pickles."
It was unclear to me, based on the initial overview book for this projected series, how the volumes of actual history were going to tackle race and gender. I had some concern that race in particular would receive less attention than it should. Happily, this is decidedly not the case in Reasoning Otherwise. However, though they are treated seriously and thoroughly, I still have some concerns about the book's approach to each.
I agree with the book's commitment to getting past polemic and point-scoring approaches to left history, and its commitment to presenting nuance and understanding it in the context of the era in which it occurred. A lot of the new-to-me information that was presented in service of building anti-polemical nuance was useful stuff. For example, it counters assertions I've seen made elsewhere that the male-dominated left was largely disinterested in or even actively opposed to women's suffrage. In fact, though the Socialist Party of Canada was not supportive (in much the same way that it was often cuttingly dismissive of, say, bread-and-butter labour struggles), the overwhelming commonsense among leftists, both women and men, was pro-suffrage. As well, though I have heard many times about the Komagata Maru, a ship carrying South Asian would-be immigrants that were the focus of popular hatred and government opposition that prevented them from landing in Vancouver in 1914, I had never heard about the (admittedly atypical and short-lasting) alliance between the folks on the ship and the Socialist Party of Canada. Nonetheless, there were recurring moments when its discussion of race and gender felt actively defensive. That would be a hard accusation to make stick, I'm sure, because there are also plenty of places where the book is very explicit about the ways in which the early 20th century left acted in oppressive ways. But even so, to my eye there were at least some moments where the text came across as more oriented towards defending the distant past from the polemics of the not-so-distant past than towards a nuanced and tough accounting for oppression and resistance around race and gender in the era in question. I don't think that had to be the case.
My discomfort with the chapter on racism included some of that concern but I also found the framework used for discussing race and racism unsatisfying in a more general way. I think to really nail down that dissatisfaction I would need to spend more time rereading and pondering than I am willing to, unfortunately. It has something to do with wanting to see more and different ways of relating everyday racism to histories of colonization; more and different ways of relating to critical race scholarship on historical shifts in the form of racism over time; more clarity on how race and racism limited the imagination and the political projects of white socialists; more exploration of racialization as a historical process, with greater clarity around that era's conflation of race and ethnicity in light of the broader historical trajectories of different; even a single mention of the left's relationship to African Nova Scotia; and probably other stuff. Not that there wasn't lots of useful stuff in there, but even more than the other areas tackled by this text, it felt like there was more to say.
There are other bits and pieces that deserve a brief mention. I was a bit surprised that more attention wasn't paid to the Knights of Labor, who largely preceded the period covered by this book and who weren't explicitly socialist, but whom I had thought were a pretty clear ancestor for worker radicalism in the settler society in Canada. The section on religion and the left was excellent. I liked the discussion of the Winnipeg General Strike, particularly the attention to the show trials that followed it, though I thought a bit more focus on the events of the strike would've been useful for readers who weren't already familiar with it.
My reservations notwithstanding, this is a very important book. And an enjoyable one. McKay could probably have accomplished his goals in fewer pages, but it was all interesting and the writing was clear, showed glints of humour, and shifted effectively among the many different scales and foci of attention. Those of us with an interest in the history of oppression and resistance in North America should read it with some healthy skepticism around its grander claims and in balance with other sorts of histories, but we definitely should read it.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Video: "The Colour of the Race Problem is White"
Here is a useful video of what appears to be an introductory seminar for university students on the basics of racial inequality and struggles against it called "The Colour of the Race Problem is White," given by author and activist Robert Jensen. It is pretty U.S.-centric in its detail and context, but the form of the argument transposes without much difficulty onto Canada.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
On Gendered Interests in Children
Anyone who has kids has at some point found themselves trapped in a conversation in which the other person pronounces, often with great insistence, that "Boys like..." or "Girls play with...".
I want to make a few observations about such statements and the phenomena that underly them. This includes an example from the life of L, my kid who will be six years old in a couple of months, that illustrates one way that such preferences get produced, as well as a few thoughts about how to relate to such phenomena.
The first observation is that in a lot of cases the supposed consistency of gendered patterns of preferences and interests among kids has as much to do with what adults do and don't see, do and don't admit as evidence, as with any tendencies that kids actually exhibit. I have found that L and his cousins are a good source of counter-examples to unsettle some of these narratives. L, who moves through the world as a boy, has two cousins of similar ages, Y and E, who move through the world as girls. E, for instance, is much more aggressive and assertive than L. And Y is just as interested in playing with vehicles as L. Yet despite these and other ways in which they do not conform to what some people might expect, I think it would be very easy for someone to take the three of them as proof of girls being inherently one way and boys inherently another, just by being (probably unconsciously) selective about which characteristics they compared. I think this happens a lot. I think much of the time when parents or grandparents or teachers conclude that gender stereotypes about children are supported by the behaviour of children they know, they are doing a lot of active work in how they see and interpret that behaviour to be able to understand it as supporting their conclusions, and often that work involves not seeing or somehow dismissing or actively reinterpreting certain behaviours.
That said, gendered tendencies to particular interests and preferences do exist in children. And they exist because they are created. The question is, how? There are lots of answers to that having to with all of the many ways in which norms are socially created and enforced on (and resisted by) every one of us. A million everyday situations and workings of power make it so -- details like what kids clothes are even available to buy, and the social punishment implied by a tsk on seeing a picture of a preschool boy holding a pink bag, and Disney princesses only becoming some little girl's passion after a year of immersion in the peer pressure cooker that is school, and countless others. But I just want to highlite one example. This is an example I had thought of before but never written about, and it came up in conversation a couple of weeks ago so I thought I would organize a post around it.
The Example
We lived in Los Angeles from the time L was 9 months until he was almost 2 years, and I was the stay-at-home in this period. At that age, a broken piece of plastic found on the playground can be a whole new world of fun and learning, but let me extract just two of the new interests that appeared fairly consistently in L later in our stay in LA: he liked trains and he liked flowers. Four years later, he remains obsessed with locomotives, while flowers -- well, he isn't beyond admiring them when they are drawn to his attention, or even spontaneously, but they don't occupy much space in his universe. Some of this may be about place, as West LA is flower-rich and train-poor (though play buddies and TV meant it was not wholly train-deficient) and Sudbury is flower-poor and train-rich. Some of it is about the ways in which capitalist social relations can co-create desires and the products to meet them, which are shaped by the fact there is just more for a kid to do with a model train than with a model flower. Though there are lots of ways to productize flowers that are about aesthetics.
Much more important were the ways that these nascent interests were taken up, mirrored back to him, and reinforced or discounted by the adults around him. For a kid that young, it is mostly parents who do the work of putting demonstrated preferences into narratives. We certainly did some deliberate work to avoid imposing gendered interests upon him. We made space for him to like flowers and affirmed that, just as we made space for him to like trains and affirmed that. Yet I would bet that even at the stage of composing narratives of L's life for far-off grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, there were subtle gendered elements in how we talked about those interests -- definitely not consciously denying one and elevating the other, but differences in framing and emphasis that we were not conscious of. Practices by said distant relatives of asking questions and of giving gifts soon made trains a signature L thing, while mention of flowers in descriptions of his antics was taken up as a transient cuteness and attributed little significance by hearers.
I'm not saying it is a perfect paired example, but I would argue that both subtle factors of framing by myself and sometimes less subtle choices around things like gift giving by extended family members would have been significantly different if L was a girl, even if the initial expressions of interest in trains and flowers were the same.
What Can/Should We Do?
I am an adult who exists in a relation of care with a child. Actually, I exist in relations of care with several children at least once in a while -- my nieces, friends' kids, etc. -- but it is only a live-in sort of deal with L. As such, how am I to understand and intervene in the processes of gendered socialization that produce such interests and preferences? (Since L is being socialized into masculinity, that is where my examples will focus.)
A preliminary point that I think always needs to be made in these discussions is that parents have a lot less power to shape their children than most people, including most parents, believe. I haven't worked it all out, and perhaps I'll make another post of it, but I think this has to do with the dominance of liberal frameworks organizing how parents understand their role, with the related emphasis on human beings as abstract, isolated agents. I think being a happy and effective parent means working to understand one's parenting in the context of a much different model of the social world, which recognizes that we do shape a particular part of our child's environment -- though one that progressively and inevitably shrinks with every passing year -- but that we do so in a larger and much more complicated context.
The real place to start, though, is to understand that gendered characteristics produced by socialization in the context of patriarchal social relations can usefully be divided into those that are a problem in and of themselves and those that are not. I should be clear that both matter in as much as they indicate the existence of the patriarchal social relations that produce them, and that cause so much pain and violence in so many lives. But only some of them -- things like those which give many boys the sense that they have a right to talk over girls, or that cut boys off from their emotions in important ways -- cause anguish. If a gendered characteristic causes anguish to the person who has it or causes that person to cause anguish to others, I would say that it matters for itself. However, there are other things which are produced in whole or in part by socialization under patriarchy, but in and of themselves they don't really matter very much. In this case I'm thinking about, say, liking flowers versus liking trains, or having blue as your favourite colour versus pink. The key, though, is that they don't matter in terms of their content, though if there are experiences of anguish that result in a kid arriving at a given position, that matters -- he reluctantly gives up a favourite lunch box because of teasing from classmates, say. As well, while it doesn't matter if any given boy prefers pink or blue, it does matter how he will react if another boy in his class proudly proclaims his like for pink.
If something is causing anguish or causing the causing of anguish, then the need to act has a different character, a greater urgency, but this post is about relating to those products of gendered socialization that don't particularly matter for themselves. I think there are three ways that we should relate to that category of instances: affirm what is, create openness and space, and cultivate critical consciousness.
Affirming what is means supporting (non-anguish causing) interests and preferences, regardless of how they relate to dominant gender norms. If he likes trains, that's fine. If he likes flowers, that's fine too. It is less about how you feel about the content of the preference than it is about affirming your relationship to the child in question, and affirming their right to form and express interests, to form and express self. Of course, it is important to keep in mind that practicing this sort of affirmation with respect to an interest or preference which already receives a great deal of social affirmation is a pretty different endeavour than when it runs counter to dominant expectations.
Creating openness and space is about consciously acting against the social pressures, not because we care particularly about the outcomes in these specific areas but because we recognize that patriarchal (and other oppressive) social relations are of a piece and we want to embody for our kids our desire for a world of justice and liberation in terms of gender and on every other axis. It is about showing them we know there are these pressures, and don't think there should be. It is about deliberately introducing counter-normative possibilities into your child's environment and life. It is about working through the ways in which your gut reactions -- moments of bodily tension, unthinking words, silent biases -- still act as enforcers of oppressive norms, on you and those around you. It is about exploring your own counter-normative interests, going down those alleys that somehow mysteriously got shut off in your own childhood, your own teenage years, your own adulthood. It is about, for children of all genders, affirming the value of the strong, transgressive feminine, which is so broadly despised in the dominant culture, as well as the vulnerable masculine.
Cultivating critical consciousness is a recognition that parenting is not about creating some embodied mimic of an abstract list that exists in our head, but rather about supporting active agents who are figuring out how to exist within-and-against oppressive social relations, just as we are constantly figuring out the same thing. This is not just relevant to the subject of this post, of course, but to all the thorny questions of raising kids in a messed up world. Talk about stuff. Talk about your own struggle, your own wounds. Talk about the media you watch and the situations you face to make all of this stuff visible. Talk about the pressures to like this, to dislike that, to be this, to avoid that. Talk in grounded ways about how patriarchal (and other oppressive) social relations limit and hurt almost everyone, but how they hurt some people a lot more than others and give unearned rewards to some. Through your own journey to develop critical consciousness and to act to create a better world, in everyday ways and in organized collective ways, model what it is to journey.
Relating this to the example at the centre of this post, it means that I should continue to be perfectly okay with L's train obsession. It is not one we need to do much work to affirm, given that it is perfectly consistent with dominant expectations of boys. Probably we could have done more to create space for less easily acceptable interests at the stage where his interest in trains was developing. And of course there is always more that can be done in the current moment to create openness and possibility and to cultivate critical consciousness.
I want to make a few observations about such statements and the phenomena that underly them. This includes an example from the life of L, my kid who will be six years old in a couple of months, that illustrates one way that such preferences get produced, as well as a few thoughts about how to relate to such phenomena.
The first observation is that in a lot of cases the supposed consistency of gendered patterns of preferences and interests among kids has as much to do with what adults do and don't see, do and don't admit as evidence, as with any tendencies that kids actually exhibit. I have found that L and his cousins are a good source of counter-examples to unsettle some of these narratives. L, who moves through the world as a boy, has two cousins of similar ages, Y and E, who move through the world as girls. E, for instance, is much more aggressive and assertive than L. And Y is just as interested in playing with vehicles as L. Yet despite these and other ways in which they do not conform to what some people might expect, I think it would be very easy for someone to take the three of them as proof of girls being inherently one way and boys inherently another, just by being (probably unconsciously) selective about which characteristics they compared. I think this happens a lot. I think much of the time when parents or grandparents or teachers conclude that gender stereotypes about children are supported by the behaviour of children they know, they are doing a lot of active work in how they see and interpret that behaviour to be able to understand it as supporting their conclusions, and often that work involves not seeing or somehow dismissing or actively reinterpreting certain behaviours.
That said, gendered tendencies to particular interests and preferences do exist in children. And they exist because they are created. The question is, how? There are lots of answers to that having to with all of the many ways in which norms are socially created and enforced on (and resisted by) every one of us. A million everyday situations and workings of power make it so -- details like what kids clothes are even available to buy, and the social punishment implied by a tsk on seeing a picture of a preschool boy holding a pink bag, and Disney princesses only becoming some little girl's passion after a year of immersion in the peer pressure cooker that is school, and countless others. But I just want to highlite one example. This is an example I had thought of before but never written about, and it came up in conversation a couple of weeks ago so I thought I would organize a post around it.
The Example
We lived in Los Angeles from the time L was 9 months until he was almost 2 years, and I was the stay-at-home in this period. At that age, a broken piece of plastic found on the playground can be a whole new world of fun and learning, but let me extract just two of the new interests that appeared fairly consistently in L later in our stay in LA: he liked trains and he liked flowers. Four years later, he remains obsessed with locomotives, while flowers -- well, he isn't beyond admiring them when they are drawn to his attention, or even spontaneously, but they don't occupy much space in his universe. Some of this may be about place, as West LA is flower-rich and train-poor (though play buddies and TV meant it was not wholly train-deficient) and Sudbury is flower-poor and train-rich. Some of it is about the ways in which capitalist social relations can co-create desires and the products to meet them, which are shaped by the fact there is just more for a kid to do with a model train than with a model flower. Though there are lots of ways to productize flowers that are about aesthetics.
Much more important were the ways that these nascent interests were taken up, mirrored back to him, and reinforced or discounted by the adults around him. For a kid that young, it is mostly parents who do the work of putting demonstrated preferences into narratives. We certainly did some deliberate work to avoid imposing gendered interests upon him. We made space for him to like flowers and affirmed that, just as we made space for him to like trains and affirmed that. Yet I would bet that even at the stage of composing narratives of L's life for far-off grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, there were subtle gendered elements in how we talked about those interests -- definitely not consciously denying one and elevating the other, but differences in framing and emphasis that we were not conscious of. Practices by said distant relatives of asking questions and of giving gifts soon made trains a signature L thing, while mention of flowers in descriptions of his antics was taken up as a transient cuteness and attributed little significance by hearers.
I'm not saying it is a perfect paired example, but I would argue that both subtle factors of framing by myself and sometimes less subtle choices around things like gift giving by extended family members would have been significantly different if L was a girl, even if the initial expressions of interest in trains and flowers were the same.
What Can/Should We Do?
I am an adult who exists in a relation of care with a child. Actually, I exist in relations of care with several children at least once in a while -- my nieces, friends' kids, etc. -- but it is only a live-in sort of deal with L. As such, how am I to understand and intervene in the processes of gendered socialization that produce such interests and preferences? (Since L is being socialized into masculinity, that is where my examples will focus.)
A preliminary point that I think always needs to be made in these discussions is that parents have a lot less power to shape their children than most people, including most parents, believe. I haven't worked it all out, and perhaps I'll make another post of it, but I think this has to do with the dominance of liberal frameworks organizing how parents understand their role, with the related emphasis on human beings as abstract, isolated agents. I think being a happy and effective parent means working to understand one's parenting in the context of a much different model of the social world, which recognizes that we do shape a particular part of our child's environment -- though one that progressively and inevitably shrinks with every passing year -- but that we do so in a larger and much more complicated context.
The real place to start, though, is to understand that gendered characteristics produced by socialization in the context of patriarchal social relations can usefully be divided into those that are a problem in and of themselves and those that are not. I should be clear that both matter in as much as they indicate the existence of the patriarchal social relations that produce them, and that cause so much pain and violence in so many lives. But only some of them -- things like those which give many boys the sense that they have a right to talk over girls, or that cut boys off from their emotions in important ways -- cause anguish. If a gendered characteristic causes anguish to the person who has it or causes that person to cause anguish to others, I would say that it matters for itself. However, there are other things which are produced in whole or in part by socialization under patriarchy, but in and of themselves they don't really matter very much. In this case I'm thinking about, say, liking flowers versus liking trains, or having blue as your favourite colour versus pink. The key, though, is that they don't matter in terms of their content, though if there are experiences of anguish that result in a kid arriving at a given position, that matters -- he reluctantly gives up a favourite lunch box because of teasing from classmates, say. As well, while it doesn't matter if any given boy prefers pink or blue, it does matter how he will react if another boy in his class proudly proclaims his like for pink.
If something is causing anguish or causing the causing of anguish, then the need to act has a different character, a greater urgency, but this post is about relating to those products of gendered socialization that don't particularly matter for themselves. I think there are three ways that we should relate to that category of instances: affirm what is, create openness and space, and cultivate critical consciousness.
Affirming what is means supporting (non-anguish causing) interests and preferences, regardless of how they relate to dominant gender norms. If he likes trains, that's fine. If he likes flowers, that's fine too. It is less about how you feel about the content of the preference than it is about affirming your relationship to the child in question, and affirming their right to form and express interests, to form and express self. Of course, it is important to keep in mind that practicing this sort of affirmation with respect to an interest or preference which already receives a great deal of social affirmation is a pretty different endeavour than when it runs counter to dominant expectations.
Creating openness and space is about consciously acting against the social pressures, not because we care particularly about the outcomes in these specific areas but because we recognize that patriarchal (and other oppressive) social relations are of a piece and we want to embody for our kids our desire for a world of justice and liberation in terms of gender and on every other axis. It is about showing them we know there are these pressures, and don't think there should be. It is about deliberately introducing counter-normative possibilities into your child's environment and life. It is about working through the ways in which your gut reactions -- moments of bodily tension, unthinking words, silent biases -- still act as enforcers of oppressive norms, on you and those around you. It is about exploring your own counter-normative interests, going down those alleys that somehow mysteriously got shut off in your own childhood, your own teenage years, your own adulthood. It is about, for children of all genders, affirming the value of the strong, transgressive feminine, which is so broadly despised in the dominant culture, as well as the vulnerable masculine.
Cultivating critical consciousness is a recognition that parenting is not about creating some embodied mimic of an abstract list that exists in our head, but rather about supporting active agents who are figuring out how to exist within-and-against oppressive social relations, just as we are constantly figuring out the same thing. This is not just relevant to the subject of this post, of course, but to all the thorny questions of raising kids in a messed up world. Talk about stuff. Talk about your own struggle, your own wounds. Talk about the media you watch and the situations you face to make all of this stuff visible. Talk about the pressures to like this, to dislike that, to be this, to avoid that. Talk in grounded ways about how patriarchal (and other oppressive) social relations limit and hurt almost everyone, but how they hurt some people a lot more than others and give unearned rewards to some. Through your own journey to develop critical consciousness and to act to create a better world, in everyday ways and in organized collective ways, model what it is to journey.
Relating this to the example at the centre of this post, it means that I should continue to be perfectly okay with L's train obsession. It is not one we need to do much work to affirm, given that it is perfectly consistent with dominant expectations of boys. Probably we could have done more to create space for less easily acceptable interests at the stage where his interest in trains was developing. And of course there is always more that can be done in the current moment to create openness and possibility and to cultivate critical consciousness.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Radical Sci-Fi/Fantasy Convention
Sorry about the scant posting lately...I've been plugging away at a fairly substantial post about kids and parents and gender in moments that try not to steal energy from book-writin' (which has been a bit of a hard grind these last few weeks) but that post isn't quite ready yet. In the meantime, a friend passed along a really cool looking link: Think Galactic is a radical left sci-fi/fantasy discussion group in Chicago and in a couple of weeks they are putting on what looks like an amazing convention. Panel titles include Gender & Sexuality in FanFiction, Race & Ethnicity in YA, Anarchism & the Superhero, Cultural Appropriation, Species Defined Gender Roles, RaceFail '09, Recognizing Privilege in Theism and Atheism, and lots of other really neat stuff. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be able to make it, at least this year, but if you think you might, go ahead and register!
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Police Target Hamilton Book Fair
This is ridiculous: The Hamilton police department is warning that the 2nd annual Hamilton Anarchist Book Fair is a potential source of hate crime. Criminalizing dissent is always bad, but there is something particularly cheeky about the police -- the armed fist employed by defenders of the status quo against land claims, struggles for racial and gender justice, actions by working people, and so much else -- accusing these social justice activists of conspiring to promote hatred.
Here is a media release from Common Cause, the group of platformist anarchists who are organizing the event:
Here is a media release from Common Cause, the group of platformist anarchists who are organizing the event:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Anarchists call Police report comparing activism to hate crime "chilling"
May 24, 2009
HAMILTON- Local members of the provincial anarchist organization Common Cause fear Hamilton police are seeking to criminalize local organizers after a Hamilton police report identified the 2nd annual Hamilton Anarchist Book Fair as a potential source of hate crime.
While presenting the Year-End Hate Crime report (available online) to the Hamilton Police Board on May 19, acting sergeant Michael Goch stated police would be “actively monitoring” the book fair scheduled to take place on June 6.
Alex Diceanu, Ontario Treasurer of Common Cause responded, "As the organizers of the annual book fair, and as local anarchists and activists, Common Cause is deeply disturbed by these statements.
"This is a manipulation of hate crime laws to criminalize activism. At this time of economic and environmental crisis, alongside increasing political disengagement, activism and educational events such as the book fair should be encouraged, not chilled with surveillance."
The report also identifies the 2010 G8 summit (Huntsville, ON), the 2010 Olympics, “local native land reclamation issues”, “the anarchist movement” and “anti-government and anti-establishment reaction of economic crisis and job losses” as trends and events that “may have significant impacts and repercussions on the Hamilton community in terms of hate/bias related incidents.”
For the first time the report also includes incidents of graffiti aimed at police even though this contradicts the report's own definition of a hate crime.
Diceanu commented, "We are concerned that public resources meant to investigate hate crimes are being focused upon people trying to improve this community."
The Hamilton Anarchist Book Fair is not a threat to the community.
It is open to the public and family-friendly, featuring free child care and a kid's workshop.
Over 300 people attended last year's book fair. Activists will gather again this year to exchange literature and other forms of information.
Workshops at the book fair attempt to address issues faced by marginalized groups named in hate crimes legislation, including indigenous peoples, racialized groups, people facing disability barriers and others. Other workshops address the the economic crisis, environmental justice and workplace organizing.
"Common Cause's Basic Policy states clearly that, and I quote, 'we actively oppose all manifestations of oppression such as racism, sexism, [religious] sectarianism and homophobia and we struggle against them.'
Indeed, anarchists have always sought to understand and end all forms of oppression in our struggle to create a world marked by true equality, freedom, peace, and harmony with the natural environment" says Diceanu ATTACHED PHOTO: A Hamiltonian with a disability talks with AJ Withers
a disability-rights activist with DAMN 2025 at the 2008 Hamilton anarchist book fair. Photo Credit: George Sweetman
Monday, May 18, 2009
Sci-fi/Fantasy Fans Against Racism
I am a nerd. Moreover, I am that flavour of nerd that derives great enjoyment from science fiction, fantasy, and horror, in both textual and audiovisual forms -- a taste that has informed my media consumption since my dad first read me various versions of the Arthur myth, some Ursula LeGuin, and J.R.R. Tolkien as bedtime stories starting when I was six or seven.
There is very little I can do to conceal my more general nerdliness from anyone who spends more than a few minutes in conversation with me, but I do tend to be rather sheepish about advertising my specifically fannish tendencies when it comes to speculative fiction. I won't get into the reasons for that sheepishness -- it would distract from the point of the post -- but part of the reason for me posting this today is that I realized that that tendency on my part was on the verge of keeping me silent in a situation in which my political convictions would otherwise be pushing me to say something.
So. Apparently there was a great deal of controversy that began in January '09 when some white sci-fi/fantasy authors and editors and fans said and did some fairly clueless racist things. Some fans of colour and allies pointed those racist things out, and the usual sort of thing happened that tends to happen when white folks get called on racism, in real life or online. This series of events has been called RaceFail 09 (see here and here). I was vaguely aware of RaceFail 09 as it was happening, but only vaguely, because I mostly do not have much to do with organized fan contexts (see above, re. "sheepishness").
More recently, different white sci-fi/fantasy authors have said different clueless racist things -- a good summary is here. It was that post just linked, which I found via a post on Alas, A Blog, that got me reading about all this stuff on Friday afternoon when I really should have been doing other things. This newer situation has variously been called RaceFail 2.0, MammothFail, and other things as well. (Two posts linking to other posts on this issue can be found here and here.)
Now, part of what caught my attention was the content of the original boneheaded move by author Patricia Wrede, who I had never previously heard of. A lot of what I read and write, and a lot of what appears on this blog, has to do with Canadian history from below -- that is, history considered in ways that explicitly foregrounds experiences of and resistance to oppressions. As well, I have developed increasing conviction over the years that you cannot get to the root of anything politically in North America unless you deal with the history and present-day reality of colonization and genocide of the indigenous nations of Turtle Island. So it caught my attention to learn that Wrede is writing an alternative history fantasy of North America in which indigenous people do not exist, and in which the chattel slavery of Africans brought to the Americas does not exist either. As others have noted in various things linked in the links above, you might be able to justify this particular fantastical revision of history if what you were doing was examining the ways in which the shape of the social world in contemporary North America depends in profound ways on histories to which indigenous peoples and enslaved African peoples have been integral. That could actually be fascinating and useful, given the ways in which those of us who are privileged tend to be completely out of touch with the ways in which our privileged realities depend on people who are oppressed to our benefit (white folks on racialized people, men on women, etc., etc.). But the comments from Wrede quoted in the above posts make it clear that it was a decision made primarily because having indigenous people in her story would make things more difficult for her as a writer, and their absence has no particular impact on the history she intends to tell.
This is the main comment from Wrede that gets cited:
This choice is happening in the context of a realworld history in which white people have been trying to make the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island disappear for some time now, and one in which one of the dominant stereotypes that indigenous folks must face in much of the U.S. and some parts of Canada is that they don't exist. And the idea that the two stereotypes she references are the only possible ways to write indigenous people is kind of stunning in its refusal to even acknowledge the possibility of writing indigenous people as, y'know, complicated, nuanced, three-dimensional human beings in complicated, nuanced, three-dimensional societies.
The other major contribution to RaceFail 2.0 comes form fantasy author Lois McMaster Bujold -- I have never read her work either, but I know that some friends like it a lot. Her point, I think made in the course of discussing the stuff from Wrede, was a claim that people of colour have only recently started to read, write, and enjoy speculative fiction, thanks to the internet. Bujold and others claimed, as neo_prodigy summarizes, that the reason "POC speculative fiction fans don't exist is because we're too poor/uneducated, weren't exposed to it by other family members and other absurd bullshit."
Now, my understanding is that there are ways that dominant practices in the production of science fiction, fantasy, and horror have not always made it easy for racialized people to find a place. The publishing industry has its own particular history of racism, as do organized fan contexts. The dominant modes of storytelling in science fiction and fantasy have also tended to be based in standpoints that map readily onto whiteness, onto the colonizer, onto the imperial being, which could also be offputting to some who must navigate those oppressive realities in real life.
Because of these active exclusions, I have understood it to be the case the people of colour have tended to be modestly underrepresented as writers and fans of sf/f/h in English -- definitely not absent, but moderately less present. But because of this controversy, I'm no longer so sure that even that is true. Whether it is true or not, I'm sure these things are: Racism in both social contexts associated with sf/f/h fiction and in sf/f/h writing exists and makes these environments less hospitable to racialized people. Yet racialized people are and have always been present in those contexts, as both writers and readers. I mean, it is just a basic, basic thing that oppression creates its own resistance. That resistance can take lots of forms, it may or may not be visible to the oppressor, and it may or may not be easily recognized as such by those of us who claim we want to be allies. But it is always there. So of course there are fans of colour, and have always been. Of course. No matter how hostile an environment we white people might make fan contexts and publishing contexts and some of the dominant tropes of the genre -- people that are erased, excluded, pushed to the exit by relations of white supremacy and the ways in which they are expressed in how writing gets published and what writing gets published, will always, always, always be refusing to passively accept that treatment. Always. And white folk who want to be allies should be refusing to passively accept it too. As well, the ways that human beings take up stories and images is active -- people are fully capable of embracing elements of a narrative that fill us with wonder, with hope, with passion, that speak to us in some way, and really embrace them, even as we are critical of other elements.
So some things have been happening in response to all of this. One is this amazing, inspiring callout for racialized fans of speculative fiction to make themselves visible by leaving a comment. Another is the day of blog-based action to which this post is a response, called "Fen of Color United" or FOC_U. The callout was for racialized people to post stories or poetry or fanfic or analyses of the issue and to generally show a refusal to be silent and invisible, and for white allies to speak out in solidarity. So that's what I'm doing.
I'll end with this: Read what you already love but be deliberate as you experiment with new voices. Read authors of colour. Read authors that play with critical politics in their work. And as you do all of that, embrace the juxtaposition of extracting joy and wonder with actively critical reading, of producing joy and wonder with actively critical writing.
There is very little I can do to conceal my more general nerdliness from anyone who spends more than a few minutes in conversation with me, but I do tend to be rather sheepish about advertising my specifically fannish tendencies when it comes to speculative fiction. I won't get into the reasons for that sheepishness -- it would distract from the point of the post -- but part of the reason for me posting this today is that I realized that that tendency on my part was on the verge of keeping me silent in a situation in which my political convictions would otherwise be pushing me to say something.
So. Apparently there was a great deal of controversy that began in January '09 when some white sci-fi/fantasy authors and editors and fans said and did some fairly clueless racist things. Some fans of colour and allies pointed those racist things out, and the usual sort of thing happened that tends to happen when white folks get called on racism, in real life or online. This series of events has been called RaceFail 09 (see here and here). I was vaguely aware of RaceFail 09 as it was happening, but only vaguely, because I mostly do not have much to do with organized fan contexts (see above, re. "sheepishness").
More recently, different white sci-fi/fantasy authors have said different clueless racist things -- a good summary is here. It was that post just linked, which I found via a post on Alas, A Blog, that got me reading about all this stuff on Friday afternoon when I really should have been doing other things. This newer situation has variously been called RaceFail 2.0, MammothFail, and other things as well. (Two posts linking to other posts on this issue can be found here and here.)
Now, part of what caught my attention was the content of the original boneheaded move by author Patricia Wrede, who I had never previously heard of. A lot of what I read and write, and a lot of what appears on this blog, has to do with Canadian history from below -- that is, history considered in ways that explicitly foregrounds experiences of and resistance to oppressions. As well, I have developed increasing conviction over the years that you cannot get to the root of anything politically in North America unless you deal with the history and present-day reality of colonization and genocide of the indigenous nations of Turtle Island. So it caught my attention to learn that Wrede is writing an alternative history fantasy of North America in which indigenous people do not exist, and in which the chattel slavery of Africans brought to the Americas does not exist either. As others have noted in various things linked in the links above, you might be able to justify this particular fantastical revision of history if what you were doing was examining the ways in which the shape of the social world in contemporary North America depends in profound ways on histories to which indigenous peoples and enslaved African peoples have been integral. That could actually be fascinating and useful, given the ways in which those of us who are privileged tend to be completely out of touch with the ways in which our privileged realities depend on people who are oppressed to our benefit (white folks on racialized people, men on women, etc., etc.). But the comments from Wrede quoted in the above posts make it clear that it was a decision made primarily because having indigenous people in her story would make things more difficult for her as a writer, and their absence has no particular impact on the history she intends to tell.
This is the main comment from Wrede that gets cited:
The *plan* is for it to be a "settling the frontier" book, only without Indians (because I really hate both the older Indians-as-savages viewpoint that was common in that sort of book, *and* the modern Indians-as-gentle-ecologists viewpoint that seems to be so popular lately, and this seems the best way of eliminating the problem, plus it'll let me play with all sorts of cool megafauna).
This choice is happening in the context of a realworld history in which white people have been trying to make the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island disappear for some time now, and one in which one of the dominant stereotypes that indigenous folks must face in much of the U.S. and some parts of Canada is that they don't exist. And the idea that the two stereotypes she references are the only possible ways to write indigenous people is kind of stunning in its refusal to even acknowledge the possibility of writing indigenous people as, y'know, complicated, nuanced, three-dimensional human beings in complicated, nuanced, three-dimensional societies.
The other major contribution to RaceFail 2.0 comes form fantasy author Lois McMaster Bujold -- I have never read her work either, but I know that some friends like it a lot. Her point, I think made in the course of discussing the stuff from Wrede, was a claim that people of colour have only recently started to read, write, and enjoy speculative fiction, thanks to the internet. Bujold and others claimed, as neo_prodigy summarizes, that the reason "POC speculative fiction fans don't exist is because we're too poor/uneducated, weren't exposed to it by other family members and other absurd bullshit."
Now, my understanding is that there are ways that dominant practices in the production of science fiction, fantasy, and horror have not always made it easy for racialized people to find a place. The publishing industry has its own particular history of racism, as do organized fan contexts. The dominant modes of storytelling in science fiction and fantasy have also tended to be based in standpoints that map readily onto whiteness, onto the colonizer, onto the imperial being, which could also be offputting to some who must navigate those oppressive realities in real life.
Because of these active exclusions, I have understood it to be the case the people of colour have tended to be modestly underrepresented as writers and fans of sf/f/h in English -- definitely not absent, but moderately less present. But because of this controversy, I'm no longer so sure that even that is true. Whether it is true or not, I'm sure these things are: Racism in both social contexts associated with sf/f/h fiction and in sf/f/h writing exists and makes these environments less hospitable to racialized people. Yet racialized people are and have always been present in those contexts, as both writers and readers. I mean, it is just a basic, basic thing that oppression creates its own resistance. That resistance can take lots of forms, it may or may not be visible to the oppressor, and it may or may not be easily recognized as such by those of us who claim we want to be allies. But it is always there. So of course there are fans of colour, and have always been. Of course. No matter how hostile an environment we white people might make fan contexts and publishing contexts and some of the dominant tropes of the genre -- people that are erased, excluded, pushed to the exit by relations of white supremacy and the ways in which they are expressed in how writing gets published and what writing gets published, will always, always, always be refusing to passively accept that treatment. Always. And white folk who want to be allies should be refusing to passively accept it too. As well, the ways that human beings take up stories and images is active -- people are fully capable of embracing elements of a narrative that fill us with wonder, with hope, with passion, that speak to us in some way, and really embrace them, even as we are critical of other elements.
So some things have been happening in response to all of this. One is this amazing, inspiring callout for racialized fans of speculative fiction to make themselves visible by leaving a comment. Another is the day of blog-based action to which this post is a response, called "Fen of Color United" or FOC_U. The callout was for racialized people to post stories or poetry or fanfic or analyses of the issue and to generally show a refusal to be silent and invisible, and for white allies to speak out in solidarity. So that's what I'm doing.
I'll end with this: Read what you already love but be deliberate as you experiment with new voices. Read authors of colour. Read authors that play with critical politics in their work. And as you do all of that, embrace the juxtaposition of extracting joy and wonder with actively critical reading, of producing joy and wonder with actively critical writing.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Review: "Real" Indians and Others
[Bonita Lawrence. "Real" Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004.]
This book does pretty much exactly the kind of work that I think powerful political nonfiction needs to do. It begins from individual experience, and draws out from experiences the ways in which the real lives of real people, and by extension the oppressions they experience, are socially organized. It does not flinch from hard questions or from following the implications of politicized understandings of the world. It refuses to oversimplify in the name of a political objective, and finds ways to show how diverse experiences of oppression and resistance are tied together.
More specifically, this book is an important study of racial formation in Canada, and of the evolution of colonial relations. It contributes to discussions among indigenous peoples with respect to how they are organizing against their diverse experiences of colonization. By implication, this also issues a challenge that non-indigenous radicals need to take up and work with.
The book takes a series of interviews done by Lawrence in the context of the urban indigenous community in Toronto, a community in which Lawrence herself has actively participated. It situates these experiences in the long history of the settler state regulating who is and who is not properly considered to be "Indian." This stretches from differential practices towards "pure bloods" versus "mixed bloods" by the Hudson Bay Company in the long years before 1867 and arbitrary decisions about who was or was not allowed to participate in treaty processes, through the many incarnations of the Indian Act, and the ongoing, relentlessly colonial orientation of the Canadian state. I actually found it difficult to read in places -- not that the overall idea was particularly new to me, but the relentless detailing of so many twisty, turny evil ways in which colonial management of indigenous lives has wreaked violence upon people made me heartsick at not a few points in the reading. Through all of this, the book looks at the historical and personal trajectories by which indigenous people in Canada have been pried away from their nations over many generations and ended up in cities, and also how they are struggling, individually and collectively, to navigate what history has dealt them.
The use of colonial identity regulation to attack nations by forcibly expelling potential members is a key insight of this book into the processes of colonization that have created Canada. Indigenous nations were forced into small, isolated pockets of land, and then a whole manner of (usually highly gendered) tools were applied to separate people from their nations, with the end goal of destroying those nations and, therefore, the challenge to the Canadian state represented by indigeneity. Generations of applying these tools have produced deep and painful contradictions within and among indigenous people -- differences and contradictions that cannot simply be wished away by labelling them "false consciousness" or some such, but that are very real and that have to be the starting point for establishing political unity in the struggle against colonial relations. These colonially created divisions, as well as settler ideologies around things like "authenticity," have powerfully influenced commonsenses among indigenous people themselves about who is and is not an "Indian."
Lawrence argues that, though the issues are many and difficult, indigenous people in urban areas, and those whose ancestors include both indigenous and non-indigenous people, have important roles to play in struggling against colonial relations and the liberation of indigenous nations as nations. A key element of the political vision that springs from her analysis is a revival of the ancient confederacies that organized the political life of the nations of Turtle Island in the days before contact. This would provide a location for political identification that was not so bound to colonial ways of organizing the world -- that could, without denying the real bases for contradictions among indigenous people, provide a forum for working through them and building meaningful anti-colonial unity. I don't think I have enough knowledge to comment on this as a political strategy, and it wouldn't be my place anyway as a settler, but it certainly sounds compelling as she presents it.
Though it is not its focus, I think this book also issues a challenge to non-indigenous people. I read this, of course, as a white guy who swims within the vague, largely dispersed and disorganized something that could be called the settler-dominated and white-dominated left. There are at least three tendencies within the white settler-dominated left with respect to relating to indigenous struggles. Though it is less universal than it used to be, the first tendency just ignores it. There is a second grouping that pays it some rhetorical heed but with minimal appreciation that there is a necessity not just to voice token acknowledgment but to open up our own politics to be transformed in encounters with indigenous anti-colonial thought and action. And there is a third tendency, and in this one I'm thinking particularly of some segments of the white settler-dominated radical left, that is still usually not terribly good at sophisticated listening and opening up self for transformation, but that takes anti-colonial politics more seriously at least in a general sense. Yet this last grouping often pays attention to certain land-based struggles, particularly those using confrontational tactics, and ignores other aspects of colonization and resistance.
All of these tendencies could benefit from reading this book, but I am particularly interested in seeing it read by folks in the last grouping -- that segment of us that know that taking indigenous struggle seriously is important but that is fumbling around to figure out how to do that. This book doesn't answer that question for us, of course, but by making urban indigenous realities visible in an anti-colonial framework it provides both a push and a resource for correcting one of the traps into which we frequently fall.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
This book does pretty much exactly the kind of work that I think powerful political nonfiction needs to do. It begins from individual experience, and draws out from experiences the ways in which the real lives of real people, and by extension the oppressions they experience, are socially organized. It does not flinch from hard questions or from following the implications of politicized understandings of the world. It refuses to oversimplify in the name of a political objective, and finds ways to show how diverse experiences of oppression and resistance are tied together.
More specifically, this book is an important study of racial formation in Canada, and of the evolution of colonial relations. It contributes to discussions among indigenous peoples with respect to how they are organizing against their diverse experiences of colonization. By implication, this also issues a challenge that non-indigenous radicals need to take up and work with.
The book takes a series of interviews done by Lawrence in the context of the urban indigenous community in Toronto, a community in which Lawrence herself has actively participated. It situates these experiences in the long history of the settler state regulating who is and who is not properly considered to be "Indian." This stretches from differential practices towards "pure bloods" versus "mixed bloods" by the Hudson Bay Company in the long years before 1867 and arbitrary decisions about who was or was not allowed to participate in treaty processes, through the many incarnations of the Indian Act, and the ongoing, relentlessly colonial orientation of the Canadian state. I actually found it difficult to read in places -- not that the overall idea was particularly new to me, but the relentless detailing of so many twisty, turny evil ways in which colonial management of indigenous lives has wreaked violence upon people made me heartsick at not a few points in the reading. Through all of this, the book looks at the historical and personal trajectories by which indigenous people in Canada have been pried away from their nations over many generations and ended up in cities, and also how they are struggling, individually and collectively, to navigate what history has dealt them.
The use of colonial identity regulation to attack nations by forcibly expelling potential members is a key insight of this book into the processes of colonization that have created Canada. Indigenous nations were forced into small, isolated pockets of land, and then a whole manner of (usually highly gendered) tools were applied to separate people from their nations, with the end goal of destroying those nations and, therefore, the challenge to the Canadian state represented by indigeneity. Generations of applying these tools have produced deep and painful contradictions within and among indigenous people -- differences and contradictions that cannot simply be wished away by labelling them "false consciousness" or some such, but that are very real and that have to be the starting point for establishing political unity in the struggle against colonial relations. These colonially created divisions, as well as settler ideologies around things like "authenticity," have powerfully influenced commonsenses among indigenous people themselves about who is and is not an "Indian."
Lawrence argues that, though the issues are many and difficult, indigenous people in urban areas, and those whose ancestors include both indigenous and non-indigenous people, have important roles to play in struggling against colonial relations and the liberation of indigenous nations as nations. A key element of the political vision that springs from her analysis is a revival of the ancient confederacies that organized the political life of the nations of Turtle Island in the days before contact. This would provide a location for political identification that was not so bound to colonial ways of organizing the world -- that could, without denying the real bases for contradictions among indigenous people, provide a forum for working through them and building meaningful anti-colonial unity. I don't think I have enough knowledge to comment on this as a political strategy, and it wouldn't be my place anyway as a settler, but it certainly sounds compelling as she presents it.
Though it is not its focus, I think this book also issues a challenge to non-indigenous people. I read this, of course, as a white guy who swims within the vague, largely dispersed and disorganized something that could be called the settler-dominated and white-dominated left. There are at least three tendencies within the white settler-dominated left with respect to relating to indigenous struggles. Though it is less universal than it used to be, the first tendency just ignores it. There is a second grouping that pays it some rhetorical heed but with minimal appreciation that there is a necessity not just to voice token acknowledgment but to open up our own politics to be transformed in encounters with indigenous anti-colonial thought and action. And there is a third tendency, and in this one I'm thinking particularly of some segments of the white settler-dominated radical left, that is still usually not terribly good at sophisticated listening and opening up self for transformation, but that takes anti-colonial politics more seriously at least in a general sense. Yet this last grouping often pays attention to certain land-based struggles, particularly those using confrontational tactics, and ignores other aspects of colonization and resistance.
All of these tendencies could benefit from reading this book, but I am particularly interested in seeing it read by folks in the last grouping -- that segment of us that know that taking indigenous struggle seriously is important but that is fumbling around to figure out how to do that. This book doesn't answer that question for us, of course, but by making urban indigenous realities visible in an anti-colonial framework it provides both a push and a resource for correcting one of the traps into which we frequently fall.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Review: The New City
[John Lorinc. The New City: How the Crisis of Canada's Cities is Reshaping our Nation. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2008. (Original edition published 2006.)]
I'm not sure it really makes any sense for "cities" or "the city" to be the focus of affection, but it still manages to be one for me: I like cities.
I grew up in a small town, so for most of the year I had almost no experience of the urban that wasn't completely diluted by its mediation through the automobile. However, we would spend at least a month every summer at my grandparents' house in Glasgow and those early associations with urban living -- vacation, grandparental presence, being spoiled, and all the other good things those imply for a child -- may be the actual root of my current city-liking. Still, it took me years of living in Hamilton, Ontario, as a young adult to go from complete disconnection to serious affection, but that may have been more about how my life was organized as an undergraduate university student than anything else. And if my sentiment was indeed forged in visits to Scotland's grimy, poor, industrial and post-industrial urban heartland, it is an interesting coincidence that most of my adult life has been spent in the grimy, poor, industrial and post-industrial Ontario cities of Hamilton and Sudbury.
Regardless of where it came from, my newly flowering affection for Hamilton was partly responsible for the three years I spent producing and hosting a radio show that could variously have defined itself as being about municipal politics, local social movements, or local urban issues. Whichever angle my co-host and I were emphasizing at a particular moment, we were always assertively pro-city in our orientation. If this book hit the shelves during those three years, I'm sure I would've had an entire show devoted to interviewing John Lorinc, a mainstream journalist with a long history of covering urban issues in big Canadian newspapers. There is something about the enthusiasm Lorinc exhibits for cities, and for the best that the urban can offer, that really speaks to me. This is particularly true in my own current context of feeling regretfully under-citied -- I have a certain affection for Sudbury, but still wish I lived some place bigger.
I also appreciate the form and content of the book. It is extensively researched. The writing is not beautiful or brilliant, but it is clear and smooth. Lorinc packs in a lot of material and weaves together many sources in a seamless way, as good journalistic writing has to do. There is also evidence of concern for injustice and suffering. Certainly the book has moments of glorifying conspicuous urban consumption, but much of its focus is on key social issues such as homelessness, immigration, education, transit, the environment, and so on. In doing so, it generally advocates progressive positions, presents important aspects of problems, and often talks to sources that have clever things to say.
I hope I've managed to foreshadow that there might be a "but" coming along in this review, because it is a pretty big one. For all that this book manages to tweak that part of me that is sweet on cities, and for all that it brings under one cover lots and lots of the raw materials that a radical analysis of cities in northern Turtle Island would also require, The New City also smacks with a saddening thump into the limits of mainstream progressive Canadian politics in its first pages, and keeps on thumping into that wall throughout the book.
It would be pointless, I think, to try and provide a complete accounting of the political problems of this book -- they are all extremely predictable and it would soon become repetitive and shrill. But I suppose I have to at least give an overview, or some examples:
So by all means read this book. It contains loads of useful information. Some of its discussion of specific policy problems, in the context of organizing for immediate reforms, are also quite useful. And definitely savour the moments when Lorinc shows his passion for vibrant cities. But not only take his writing as a detailed lesson in the real strengths and serious limitations of mainstream progressive politics in Canada, but also take some of the problems of this book as indications that maybe we should start to trouble some of the ways in which privileged lefties (such as yours truly) experience our own enjoyment of the urban.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
I'm not sure it really makes any sense for "cities" or "the city" to be the focus of affection, but it still manages to be one for me: I like cities.
I grew up in a small town, so for most of the year I had almost no experience of the urban that wasn't completely diluted by its mediation through the automobile. However, we would spend at least a month every summer at my grandparents' house in Glasgow and those early associations with urban living -- vacation, grandparental presence, being spoiled, and all the other good things those imply for a child -- may be the actual root of my current city-liking. Still, it took me years of living in Hamilton, Ontario, as a young adult to go from complete disconnection to serious affection, but that may have been more about how my life was organized as an undergraduate university student than anything else. And if my sentiment was indeed forged in visits to Scotland's grimy, poor, industrial and post-industrial urban heartland, it is an interesting coincidence that most of my adult life has been spent in the grimy, poor, industrial and post-industrial Ontario cities of Hamilton and Sudbury.
Regardless of where it came from, my newly flowering affection for Hamilton was partly responsible for the three years I spent producing and hosting a radio show that could variously have defined itself as being about municipal politics, local social movements, or local urban issues. Whichever angle my co-host and I were emphasizing at a particular moment, we were always assertively pro-city in our orientation. If this book hit the shelves during those three years, I'm sure I would've had an entire show devoted to interviewing John Lorinc, a mainstream journalist with a long history of covering urban issues in big Canadian newspapers. There is something about the enthusiasm Lorinc exhibits for cities, and for the best that the urban can offer, that really speaks to me. This is particularly true in my own current context of feeling regretfully under-citied -- I have a certain affection for Sudbury, but still wish I lived some place bigger.
I also appreciate the form and content of the book. It is extensively researched. The writing is not beautiful or brilliant, but it is clear and smooth. Lorinc packs in a lot of material and weaves together many sources in a seamless way, as good journalistic writing has to do. There is also evidence of concern for injustice and suffering. Certainly the book has moments of glorifying conspicuous urban consumption, but much of its focus is on key social issues such as homelessness, immigration, education, transit, the environment, and so on. In doing so, it generally advocates progressive positions, presents important aspects of problems, and often talks to sources that have clever things to say.
I hope I've managed to foreshadow that there might be a "but" coming along in this review, because it is a pretty big one. For all that this book manages to tweak that part of me that is sweet on cities, and for all that it brings under one cover lots and lots of the raw materials that a radical analysis of cities in northern Turtle Island would also require, The New City also smacks with a saddening thump into the limits of mainstream progressive Canadian politics in its first pages, and keeps on thumping into that wall throughout the book.
It would be pointless, I think, to try and provide a complete accounting of the political problems of this book -- they are all extremely predictable and it would soon become repetitive and shrill. But I suppose I have to at least give an overview, or some examples:
- Gendered experiences of urban space never receive any attention. This is despite the fact that I know there are Canadian feminist academics and activists who have worked on this question.
- He vastly underestimates the role of racism in shaping Canadian cities historically and Canadian urban experience today. He cheers on state multiculturalism without any awareness of the criticisms it has received from anti-racist academics and activists.
- Despite being very supportive of the struggles of immigrants in some parts of the book, it is very hard to read the way he talks about immigration in other sections as anything other than instances of the tired but powerful immigrant-as-problem discourse.
- He does the usual white progressive two-step around indigenous issues by urging a certain kind of support for Native people while completely completely blanking on what it would actually mean politically to take seriously indigenous claims about the past, the present, and the future.
- He is very selective in what he targets with pro-ordinary-people skepticism. For example, he seems to completely accept that the "debt crisis" that was used to create the public panic that preceded the sharp ramping up in neoliberalism at the federal level in Paul Martin's 1995 budget as being a genuine crisis caused by foolhardy spending. But you don't have too look too hard, or even too far to the left, to find that myth taken apart and to see how it was mostly just made up as part of class warfare from above.
- It uses the tired device of performing the virtues of Canada through selective comparison with the United States.
- It explains its questionable narrative of Canadian cities once being the envy of everyone and now running into some problems basically by looking to decisions made by political parties. While it is nice that it is both nonpartisan and highly critical of the right, analyzing neoliberalism solely at this level means missing a lot -- including missing why the book's call for a more robust social democracy with an urban emphasis is simply not going to be on the menu without significant grassroots mobilization.
- He largely ignores the ways in which so much "revitalization" of urban space in rich countries, even putatively progressive variants, ends up being an attack on poor people and poor communities.
So by all means read this book. It contains loads of useful information. Some of its discussion of specific policy problems, in the context of organizing for immediate reforms, are also quite useful. And definitely savour the moments when Lorinc shows his passion for vibrant cities. But not only take his writing as a detailed lesson in the real strengths and serious limitations of mainstream progressive politics in Canada, but also take some of the problems of this book as indications that maybe we should start to trouble some of the ways in which privileged lefties (such as yours truly) experience our own enjoyment of the urban.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
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