Raw Materials: Natural Resources, Technological Discourse and the Making of the Canadian Nation

• In Event: 151 - Regular Session. Nations/Nationalism

Abstract

This article analyzes the genealogy and reactivation of Canada’s most enduring origin myth, the “National Dream,” which tells the story of a modern nation joined literally and symbolically by technology. Through the construction of the transcontinental rail system in the late nineteenth century, broadcasting networks in the twentieth, and the exploitation of raw materials in the twenty-first, not only are Canada’s political and technical visionaries believed to have forged a powerful independent state, but its inhabitants can imagine themselves as part of a unified nation with a distinct postcolonial national identity. Drawing on recent scholarship evidencing the material and visual embodiment of national consciousness, I first explore the material conditions that made possible the articulation of a distinct Canadian identity and then argue that the exploitation of the tar sands in Canada is currently positioned by corporate, government and labor interests as a moral referendum on Canadian independence and a determining feature of contemporary Canadian national identity. This framing of the controversial exploitation of that raw matter sits well with a neoconservative leadership seeking to reinvest the mythic National Dream with meaning in order to legitimate itself and mobilize civic support to its program. The ultimate aim of the article is to reveal the persistent use of a discourse focused on raw materials and technology to create, sustain and reinforce Canadian consciousness, even as the specific materials and technology (e.g., from railways to pipelines) and the bases of national attachment (e.g., from domestic to international audiences) change over time.

Author

• Melissa Miriam Aronczyk, State University of New Jersey-Rutgers