Jody Mason is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University. She has published two books, Writing Unemployment: Worklessness, Mobility, Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Canadian Literatures (U of Toronto P, 2013) and Home Feelings: Liberal Citizenship and the Canadian Reading Camp Movement (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019), as well as numerous articles on topics related to literature and print culture in Canada. She is currently working on a critical history of the cultural industries-creative economy shift in late twentieth-century Canada.
Article
“Canadian Postwar Book Diplomacy and Settler Contradiction”
Abstract
A standard narrative in the literary history of English Canada is that literary culture was able to “develop” in the wake of the 1951 Massey Report, finally “arriving” in the years between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s. This essay offers another view of this period, analyzing not the smooth developmental momentum but rather the contradiction and disavowal that attended one of the federal government’s first direct forms of support for the book, which came in the form of postwar book diplomacy efforts. Using Anna Johnston and Allan Lawson’s theorization of settler colonialism, the essay analyzes how these book diplomacy undertakings exemplify the “double inscription of authority and authenticity” of settler contradiction. As the Imperium shifted across the Atlantic in the decade that followed the close of the Second World War, the settler nation struggled to locate itself anew in relation to its doubled, desired, and disavowed origins.
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