Grace, Sherrill E., 2001 Canada and the Idea of North, Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 342 pages.

I was born and raised in Bissett, Manitoba, located in bush country a few hundred kilometres northeast of Winnipeg. I considered myself a northerner, but when I went to the government-run residential high school in Cranberry Portage, I discovered I came from the southern part of northern Manitoba and my credentials and identity as a northerner were somewhat diminished. As a graduate student, I remember getting off the plane in Whitehorse, in Yellowknife, and discovering that anyone from south of sixty was a southerner. Some years later, when I first travelled to Cambridge Bay, I heard Yellowknife referred to as the south… This is the kind of story Sherrill Grace revels in: the ambiguous but powerful attraction of an identity (de)centred around “Magnetic North” is one of the themes of her Canada and the Idea of North, an ambitious, lavishly produced attempt to reconfigure the whole vexing debate around Canadian identity by centring nordicity and the discourse around nordicity. Grace brings an impressive range of scholarship to the daunting task. She has clearly paid careful attention to debates on Canadian identity through a variety of fields. Though primarily a literary critic, the term “discourse” enables her to read anthropology, performance art, philosophy, history, government documents, as well as literature and literary criticism. One cheers for a book that can confidently cite Rabelais and Joyce as easily as it does Alootook Ipellie or Minnie Aodla Freeman. One also cheers for a study that brings the protocols of humanities discourse into the field of northern studies, which has tended towards social science research even in the approaches of its historians. Sadly, for all its celebrations of Nunavut and Aboriginal arts and letters, the book loses its way in a snowstorm of confusion: “lost in the concept of north” will be how I ultimately think of it. The particular way in which it gets lost is instructive and deserves our attention. Two broad interrelated issues concerned me in this text enough to actually produce real heat in my response: its politics and its use of theoretical terms. In political terms, the book is deeply flawed in that it makes no consistent deployment of Canada’s settler-colony status. Hence, although in some chapters there is a sharp criticism of colonialism (one can hardly find a word to disagree with in the last substantive chapter, “The North Writes Back”), the book wants to celebrate “being north” as a Canadian identity at the same time as acknowledging Canada’s colonizing impact on the lands and peoples in its far and mid north. The latter becomes increasingly muted, to the point that Aboriginal voices are appropriated to serve ends antithetical of the political project of decolonization that frequently inspired them. This is related to the problem of the book’s deployment of theoretical terms. It appears to desire to be “theoretically informed,” up on the latest and hippest language and concepts. But adding the term “hybridity” to one’s list of what one praises in a text, throwing around the term “discourse” as an excuse to read different kinds of texts without embedding them in a politics, involves a deep depoliticization of Bhabha’s and Foucault’s theoretical projects. Although in my mind the problem with Bhabha’s and Foucault’s analyses is precisely that their terms give way to a liberal depoliticization, it remains painful to see this happen in practice. Grace’s book represents an exemplar of how not to read either Foucault or Bhabha, in particular. A few examples will make this clear. “North” here is deliberately constructed as a very broad sphere of discursive play: from cottage country to the High …