scholarly journals The Message of the Carillon: Bells as Instruments of Colonialism in Twentieth-Century Canada

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-25
Author(s):  
Patrick Nickleson

Bells and carillon have long symbolized the harmonious community in Euro-American political discourse. In this article, I denaturalize this rhetorical position by taking into account the context of bells and carillon in interwar Canada. I do so by reading William Lyon Mackenzie King’s address at the inauguration of the Parliament Hill carillon within the broader context of Canada’s colonial “Old World” nostalgia for the carillon. I then turn to testimony from survivors of the residential school system to argue that the link between bells, harmony, and community had to be forcefully imposed by settlers to banish any potential discord.

2021 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 420-444
Author(s):  
Greg Bak

ABSTRACT Helen Samuels sought to document institutions in society by adding to official archives counterweights of private records and archivist-created records such as oral histories. In this way, she recognized and sought to mitigate biases that arise from institution-centric application of archival functionalism. Samuels's thinking emerged from a late-twentieth-century consensus on the social license for archival appraisal, which formed around the work of West German archivist Hans Booms, who wrote, “If there is indeed anything or anyone qualified to lend legitimacy to archival appraisal, it is society itself.” Today, archivists require renewed social license in light of acknowledgment that North American governments and institutions sought to open lands for settlement and for exploitation of natural resources by removing or eliminating Indigenous peoples. Can a society be said to “lend legitimacy” to archival appraisal when it has grossly violated human, civil, and Indigenous rights? Starting from the question of how to create an adequate archives of Canada's Indigenous residential school system, the author locates Samuels's work amid other late-twentieth-century work on appraisal and asks how far her thinking can take us in pursuit of archival decolonization.


2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 747-772 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Bridget Murray

AbstractDrawing upon Walter Benjamin's “principle of montage,” this article excavates the political salience of what is referred to herein as the residential school system's “pan-territorial ideal.” The pan-territorial ideal materialized in 1930 with the opening of the Shubenacadie Residential School in the Maritimes, the system's final frontier. It was envisioned, forged and secured, in part, with the overt understanding that so called Indian education could be used as a vector of violence to control Indigenous peoples and their lands. This history clashes with dominant narratives that interpret residential school system violence as the product of mismanagement and neglect. From the early days of Confederation to its almost full legal autonomy from Britain in the early twentieth century and beyond, the Dominion's pursuit of the pan-territorial vision involved the selective harnessing of the residential school system as a field of state-sanctioned force to quell Indigenous resistance. In this, residential school violence cannot be reduced to a deviation from the norm. In crucial respects, it was an inherent feature of the system and Canadian modern statehood itself.


2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-12
Author(s):  
Barbara Greenberg

The Canadian public has heard many apologies from various governments and church institutions over the last 20 years. In June 2008 Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized to First Nations for the federal government’s role in the residential school system. First Nations have also received apologies from the United Church of Canada (UCC) for its participation in these schools. Much of the work being done on the process of apology assesses the apology in order to judge if it is convincing and worthwhile.My work asks the question: are apologies effective in their attempt to make amends for past injustices, or are they examples of what Klein calls “manic reparation”?


Author(s):  
Lital Levy

A Palestinian-Israeli poet declares a new state whose language, “Homelandic,” is a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. A Jewish-Israeli author imagines a “language plague” that infects young Hebrew speakers with old world accents, and sends the narrator in search of his Arabic heritage. This book brings together such startling visions to offer the first in-depth study of the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in the literature and culture of Israel/Palestine. More than that, the book presents a captivating portrait of the literary imagination's power to transgress political boundaries and transform ideas about language and belonging. Blending history and literature, the book traces the interwoven life of Arabic and Hebrew in Israel/Palestine from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, exposing the two languages' intimate entanglements in contemporary works of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by both Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. In a context where intense political and social pressures work to identify Jews with Hebrew and Palestinians with Arabic, the book finds writers who have boldly crossed over this divide to create literature in the language of their “other,” as well as writers who bring the two languages into dialogue to rewrite them from within. Exploring such acts of poetic trespass, the book introduces new readings of canonical and lesser-known authors, including Emile Habiby, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Anton Shammas, Saul Tchernichowsky, Samir Naqqash, Ronit Matalon, Salman Masalha, A. B. Yehoshua, and Almog Behar. By revealing uncommon visions of what it means to write in Arabic and Hebrew, the book will change the way we understand literature and culture in the shadow of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.


2019 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 235-246
Author(s):  
Alexey L. Beglov

The article examines the contribution of the representatives of the Samarin family to the development of the Parish issue in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The issue of expanding the rights of the laity in the sphere of parish self-government was one of the most debated problems of Church life in that period. The public discussion was initiated by D.F. Samarin (1827-1901). He formulated the “social concept” of the parish and parish reform, based on Slavophile views on society and the Church. In the beginning of the twentieth century his eldest son F.D. Samarin who was a member of the Special Council on the development the Orthodox parish project in 1907, and as such developed the Slavophile concept of the parish. In 1915, A.D. Samarin, who took up the position of the Chief Procurator of the Most Holy Synod, tried to make his contribution to the cause of the parish reforms, but he failed to do so due to his resignation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 294
Author(s):  
Laura Cervi ◽  
Fernando García ◽  
Carles Marín Lladó

During a global pandemic, the great impact of populist discourse on the construction of social reality is undeniable. This study analyzes the fantasmatic dimension of political discourse from Donald Trump’s and Jair Bolsonaro’s Twitter accounts between 1 March and 31 May. To do so, it applies a Clause-Based Semantic Text Analysis (CBSTA) methodology that categorizes speech in Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) triplets. The study findings show that in spite of the Coronavirus pandemic, the main beatific and horrific subjects remain the core populist signifiers: the people and the elite. While Bolsonaro’s narrative was predominantly beatific, centered on the government, Trump’s was mostly horrific, centered on the elite. Trump signified the pandemic as a subject and an enemy to be defeated, whereas Bolsonaro portrayed it as a circumstance. Finally, both leaders defined the people as working people, therefore their concerns about the pandemic were focused on the people’s ability to work.


Author(s):  
Tyson Stewart

This article explores an important facet of the New Wave of Indigenous filmmaking in Canada: residential school system history and imagery, its place in the historical archive, and the way it is being retold and reclaimed in films like Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013), Savage (2009), Sisters & Brothers (2015), Indian Horse (2017), and The Grizzlies (2018). While researching this topic, one unanswered question has left me feeling sometimes frustrated and often troubled: Is there a risk of producing pan-Indigenous readings, or worse, repeating the original propagandistic intentions of the original residential school photographs when they are used in new media?


2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 926-946 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen MacDonald

AbstractFrom the mid-twentieth century, England's coroners were crucial to the supply of organs to transplant, as much of this material was gleaned from the bodies of people who had been involved in accidents. In such situations the law required that a coroner's consent first be obtained lest removing the organs destroy evidence about the cause of the person's death. Surgeons challenged the legal requirement that they seek consent before taking organs, arguing that doing so hampered their quick access to bodies. Some coroners willingly cooperated with surgeons while others refused to do so, coming into conflict with particular transplanters whom they considered untrustworthy. This article examines how the phenomenon of “spare part” surgery challenged long-held conceptions of the coroner's role.


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