The White Geography of Lawren Stewart Harris

Whiteness and the Performative Coupling of Wilderness and Multiculturalism in Canada

Bibliographic Data

ID4143065
AuthorsAndrew Baldwin (0000-0001-9960-7344, Department of Geography, Mackintosh-Corry D201, Queen's University Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume41
Issue3
Pages529-544
Publication date2009-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning A Economy and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0308-518X • E-ISSN: 1472-3409
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1068/a40110
OpenAlexW2163277856
LanguageEN
Citations received16
References cited16

Wilderness and multiculturalism are frequently invoked as central features of the official national imagination in Canada, but seldom are these foundational ideas recognized as genealogically proximate. Instead, both are routinely made to occupy discrete cognitive spaces, with the effect being that they are reified as distinct zones of Canadian life, and imagined as having emerged at two very distinct moments in the Canadian national narrative. Against the grain of this conventional interpretation, this paper offers a counterreading of wilderness and multiculturalism in Canadian political culture-one that seeks to disrupt their presupposed autonomy by rendering them simultaneous moments in a particular racialized historical geography. The paper elaborates this proposition by critically examining two popular works by Canadian landscape painter Lawren Stewart Harris. It concludes with some remarks on the political implications of the argument

Aesthetics · Art · Autonomy · Literature · Multiculturalism · Narrative · Performative utterance · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Wilderness · Canadian Identity and History · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Landscape and Cultural Studies · Law

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