National Network for Equitable Library Service

When a recent wave of condominium development overtook Toronto, women emerged as powerful consumers, and reports claimed that home ownership was offering young, single women freedom, financial independence, and personal security. Sex and the Revitalized City examines the truth of these claims by exploring the phenomenon from the perspective of women condo owners and planners and developers.

In 1968, Canadians dared to take a chance on a new kind of politician. Pierre Trudeau became the leader of the Liberal Party in April and two months later won the federal election. His meteoric rise to power was driven by Trudeaumania, an explosive mix of passion and fear fueled by media hype and nationalist ambition. This book traces what happened when the fabled spirit of the sixties met the excitement of the Centennial and Expo 67. Canadians wanted to modernize their nation, differentiate it from the US, and defuse Quebec separatism.

Contemporary slavery has emerged as a source of fascination and a spur to political mobilization. This volume brings together experts to carefully explore how the language of slavery has been invoked to support a series of government interventions, activist projects, legal instruments, and rhetorical and visual performances. However well-intentioned these interventions might be, they remain subject to a host of limitations and complications. Recent efforts to combat slavery are too often sensationalist, self-serving, and superficial and end up failing the test of speaking truth to power.

This analysis of the relationship between gender and nature proposes that masculinity is a technology that shapes both our engagement with the natural world and how we define freedom. As the complexity of our ecosystems becomes more apparent, the line between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, and technology and bodies becomes less distinct. Yet contemporary masculinity studies has generally failed to incorporate this new way of thinking.

Drawing on treaties, international law, the work of other Indigenous scholars, and especially personal experiences, Marie Battiste documents the nature of Eurocentric models of education, and their devastating impacts on Indigenous knowledge. Chronicling the negative consequences of forced assimilation, racism inherent to colonial systems of education, and the failure of current educational policies for Aboriginal populations, Battiste proposes a new model of education, arguing the preservation of Aboriginal knowledge is an Aboriginal right.

Power through Testimony documents how survivors are remembering and reframing our understanding of residential schools in the wake of the 2007 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, which includes the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a forum for survivors, families, and communities to share their memories and stories with the Canadian public. The commission closed and reported in 2015, and this timely volume reveals what happened on the ground.

Until recently, most residents of Puvirnituq, an Inuit settlement in Northern Quebec, made their living off the land. Successful hunting, fishing, trapping and gathering, so vital to people’s survival, were underpinned by the expectation that food should be shared. As the Inuit moved into – both forced and voluntary – they have had to incorporate the workings of a monetized economy into their own notions of how to operate as a society.

Theories of liberal multiculturalism have come to dominate debates about identity and difference politics in contemporary western political theory. Identity/Difference Politics offers a nuanced critique of these debates by switching the focus from culture to power. Issues of power are examined through accounts of meaning-making – those processes through which meanings of difference are produced, organized, and regulated.

This perceptive intellectual history explores the role of manhood in French Canadian culture and nationalism. In the late nineteenth century, Quebec was still an agrarian society and masculinity was rooted in the land and the family and informed by Catholic principles of piety and self-restraint. As the industrial era took hold, a new model of manhood was forged, built on the values of secularism and individualism. Vacante’s analysis reveals how French Canadian intellectuals defined masculinity in response to imperialist English Canadian ideals.

Ask any Canadian what “Métis” means, and they will likely say “mixed race.” Canadians consider Métis mixed in ways that other Indigenous people are not, and the census and courts have premised their recognition of Métis status on this race-based understanding. Andersen argues that Canada got it wrong. From its roots deep in the colonial past, the idea of Métis as mixed has slowly pervaded the Canadian consciousness until it settled in the realm of common sense.