Citizens and Nation, or Space and Time and Talk in Canadian History

This is the book I found this weekend in the basement of a little used book store a few blocks from the Department of History at the University of Toronto's downtown campus. The cover picture was a horrendous choice and suggests the publisher cared more about catching people on the title and the idea of Emily Carr as Nationalist Painter, but the book has little if anything to do with Carr.

Instead it looks at different societies within the geographic space of Canada and, particularly, how they communicate in mundane, economic, cultural, and wider discourse. It's a bit simplistic (which might be an understatement) at times, but it is effective in debasing the idea that Canadian history is that of Reformers and Tories.

I'll talk more about it tomorrow, but it's emphasis is on communication and how it changes and is used differently by different culture groups--and ultimately how different forms merge in the hybrid spaces (and sometimes bodies) that have occurred in Canada. Friesen also challenges standard, European, conceptions of time and space.

This latter point might be something to think about as, Friesen argues, ideas of time and space help to define what is communicated and how that occurs in social contexts. He doesn't quite get into questions of power, but it is definitely implied (or read in to the text on my part).

Another way of thinking of the question is through the idea of "movable knowledge,"** which generally refers to turning information into material (or electronic) form and transmitting it through space and time to somewhere and, effectively, sometime else. Technology, as well as cultural ideas regarding space and time, is an important but not necessarily dominant factor.

The question is translating this way of thinking into the language of the target audience and the sense of urgency required of us. I think it's doable, and it will also allow us to frame the topic in a more unconvential and edgy, and I hope intriguing, light.

More tomorrow (and hopefully I'll have a chance to read more--I've only read the first part so far!)


**This is, as far as I know, a term coined by French science studies thinker Bruno Latour, or one of his translators. It came up in one of the most interesting papers from the conference last weekend.