Scientific Essay from the year 2011 in the subject Cultural Studies - Canada, York University, language: English, abstract: Many have argued that there is no such thing as a Canadian culture or identity. This article explores the history of how schools in the past have shaped a national identity and how cultures transmit their vaules and traditions to their young. This article argues that there are twelve commonplaces about Canada that all Canadians, regardless of where they live or how long they have lived here can identify with. The schools across the country have an obligation to debate, argue and explore these twelve commonplaces thereby promoting a shared Canadian culture that is fluid, flexible and evolving. It argues that these twelve are not fixed in stone but are just a starting point for "keeping the conversation going". It promotes a revisioning of our culture throiugh a myulticulturalism prism.

?There can be no political sovereignty without culture sovereignty.' So argued the CBC in 1985 in its evidence to the Caplan/Sauvageau Task Force on Broadcasting Policy. Richard Collins challenges this assumption. He argues in this study of nationalism and Canadian television policy that Canada's political sovereignty depends much less on Canadian content in television than has generally been accepted. His analysis focuses on television drama, at the centre of television policy in the 1980s. Collins questions the conventional image of Canada as a weak national entity undermined by its population's predilection for foreign television. Rather, he argues, Canada is held together, not by a shared repertoire of symbols, a national culture, but by other social forces, notably political institutions. Collins maintains that important advantages actually and potentially flow from Canada's wear national symbolic culture. Rethinking the relationships between television and society in Canada may yield a more successful broadcasting policy, more popular television programming, and a better understanding of the links between culture and the body politic. As the European Community moves closer to political unity, the Canadian case may become more relevant to Europe, which, Collins suggests, already fears the ?Canadianization? of its television. He maintains that a European multilingual society, without a shared culture or common European audio-visual sphere and with viewers watching foreign television, can survive successfully as a political entity ? just as Canada has.

Mapping the contradictions and ambiguities in the cultural politics of Canadian identity, The House of Difference opens up new understandings of the operations of tolerance and Western liberalism in a supposedly post-colonial era. Combining an analysis of the construction of national identity in both past and present-day public culture, with interviews with white Canadians, The House of Difference explores how ideas of racial and cultural difference are articulated in colonial and national projects, and in the subjectivities of people who consider themselves mainstream, or simply Canadian-Canadians.

She considers each of these diverse genres in terms of the way it explains the cultural identity of a nation formed from the settlement of immigrant peoples on the lands of dispossessed indigenous peoples.

The North American entertainment industry is rapidly consolidating, and new modes of technological delivery challenge Canadian content regulations. An understanding of how Canadian culture negotiates its rapport with American genres has never been more timely. West/Border/Road offers an interdisciplinary analysis of contemporary Canadian manifestations of three American genres: the western, the border, and the road. It situates close readings of literary, film, and television narratives from both English Canada and Quebec within a larger context of Canadian generic borrowing and innovation. Katherine Ann Roberts calls upon canonical works in Canadian studies, theories of genre, and a wide range of scholarship from border studies, cultural studies, and film studies to examine how genre is appropriated and sometimes reworked and how these cultural narratives engage with discourses of contemporary Canadian nationhood. The author elucidates Guy Vanderhaeghe’s rewriting of the codes of the historical western to include the trauma of Aboriginal peoples, Aritha van Herk’s playful spoof on American western iconography, the politics and perils of the representation of the Canada-US border in CBC-produced crime television, and how the road genre inspires and constrains the Québécois and Canadian road movie. A reminder of the power and limitations of American genres, West/Border/Road provides a nuanced perspective on Canadian engagement with cultural forms that may be imported but never foreign.

The essays in Canadian Cultural Exchange / Échanges culturels au Canada provide a nuanced view of Canadian transcultural experience. Rather than considering Canada as a bicultural dichotomy of colonizer/colonized, this book examines a field of many cultures and the creative interactions among them. This study discusses, from various perspectives, Canadian cultural space as being in process of continual translation of both the other and oneself. Les articles réunis dans Canadian Cultural Exchange / Échanges culturels au Canada donnent de l’expérience transculturelle canadienne une image nuancée. Plutà ́t que dans les termes d’une dichotomie biculturelle entre colonisateur et colonisé, le Canada y est vu comme champ oÃ1 plusieurs cultures interagissent de manià ̈re créative. Cette étude présente sous de multiples aspects le processus continu de traduction d’autrui et de soi-mÃame auquel l’espace culturel canadien sert de théâtre.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of Canadian cultural policy and research, at a time of transition and redefinition, to establish a dialogue between conventional and emerging foundations. Taking a historical view, the book informs insights on current trends in policy and explores global debates underpinning cultural policy studies within a local context. The book first acknowledges what Canadian cultural policy research conventionally recognizes and refers to in terms of institutions, values, and debates, before moving on to take stock of the transformations that are continuing to reshape Canadian cultural policy in terms of values, orientations, actors, and institutions. With a focus on all levels of government-- federal, provincial, and local -- the book also centers on Indigenous arts policies and practices. This systematic and inclusive volume will appeal to academic researchers, graduate students, managers of arts and culture programs and institutions, and in the areas of cultural policy, public administration, political science, cultural studies, film and media studies, theatre and performance, and museum studies.

Contending that cultural producion gives voice to racism, the authors--anthropologists Carol Tator and Frances Henry and attorney Winston Mattis--here examine how six controversial Canadian cultural events have given rise to a newly empowered radical or critical multiculturalism.

From the American Revolution to NAFTA to the Helms-Burton Act and beyond, this work offers an assessment of relations between the USA and Canada. It seeks to distil a mass of detail concerning cultural, economic and political developments of mutual importance during the past two centuries.

This book attempts to reconcile the concept of free trade with a key non-trade social value - cultural diversity - in an era of economic globalisation. It first shows how we can look at culture in many different ways, and explains why we should care about cultural diversity. The book then examines the challenges that policymakers are faced with in formulating cultural measures in the new media environment, and analyses UNESCO's theories and approaches to cultural diversity. This is followed by a comprehensive examination of the treatment of 'culture' in global and regional trade agreements, including the framework of the GATT/WTO system, the WTO's judicial practice involving cultural products, and the treatment of culture under the EC/EU and NAFTA. This identifies the challenges trade norms encounter in dealing with cultural products. The author seeks to formulate a balanced view of the challenge of protecting and promoting cultural diversity while also recognising the important goal of trade liberalisation. To this end Professor Shi proposes a dual method through which the norms found in WTO agreements and in UNESCO cultural instruments may be brought into alignment: the first highlighting the compatibility of cultural policy measures with trade obligations on a domestic level, the second suggesting potential linkages between the WTO rules and the UNESCO Convention from the perspectives of treaty interpretation.