Looking Beyond Borderlines by Rodney Lee;

Author:Rodney, Lee;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Delimiting the North: Nordicity and North America

But where did this preoccupation with the North come from, or why did the Group of Seven find such an enthusiastic reception from Canadian elites? The imagined division between north and south in Canada is more powerful than the 49th parallel as a defining territorial boundary and arguably has had more of an impact on national identity during the 19th and 20th centuries. Culture has long played a central role in establishing Canadian sovereignty over the North. As a political imperative handed down from the British Empire, Canada inherited the legacy of polar expeditions, those of Sir William Parry (1819–1820) and Sir John Franklin (1845), Arctic explorers who became Canadian heroes for a modern generation of schoolchildren as “Argonauts of the North” representative of the epic struggle of man against nature.22 Rob Shields refers to the centrality of Northern imagery in Canadian culture in terms of its “nordicity,” qualities derived from late 19th century historical texts extolling the virtues of a Northern temperament. The “true North strong and free,” the refrain of the Canadian national anthem is distilled from a British imperialist agenda, an ideal of Victorian discipline underwritten by forms of racism that were cast in terms of Northern superiority, ideals that paradoxically evolved into a project of “civilizing the Inuit” by the middle of the 20th century. Couched in a narrative of geographical determinism based on the austerity of cold climates, the idea that the North was the site for the advance of empire had become so well established in the Canadian imagination that it could be found echoed in government documents as late as the 1950s. A government publication, This is the Arctic, cited as a “curious fact” that “civilization has been expanding northward ever since the dawn of history.”23 Thus, according to Shields, the Canadian Arctic was imbricated within the great narratives of historical progress by the middle of the 20th century.

As a topic of perennial interest, the North has made successive returns for different political and economic purposes in Canada. It is a liminal zone, a site of “pilgrimage,”24 according to Shields, serving as mythic heartland and an opposing pole to the 49th parallel. In contrast, the 49th parallel has become a condensed geographic metaphor that signals the dividing line (cultural and political) between Canada and the United States even though nearly half of the international borderline does not follow its path. The idea of Canada as North has become particularly strong within trade contexts where Canada plays up its nordicity to the US, much in the same way that Mexico performs Latin flair for American audiences. The dominance of the US within NAFTA and subsequent trade and security discussions has oriented the cultural picture more firmly, determining what is “north” and “south” from the unchallenged assumption that the US is at the “center.” While it lies geographically in between Mexico and Canada, a more fine-grained perspective of how North and South function as conceptual poles in multiple contexts

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