Resilient ideological assumptions, shifting economic priorities, and government policy in the postwar era influenced how northern culture was represented in popular Canadian imagery. In an enlightening exposure of Canada’s cultural landscape, The Iconic North lays bare the relationship between settler nationbuilding and popular images of Aboriginal experience. Joan Sangster redirects current debates about the geopolitical prospects of the North by addressing how women and gender relations have played a key role in the history of northern development. She reveals how Indigenous and non-Indigenous women alike shaped gender, class, and political relationships in the circumpolar north – a region now commanding more of the world’s attention. Reviews This book fills an important gap in the field of Canadian cultural history. — Robyn Schwarz, Western University, British Journal of Canadian Studies, September 2017 Few authors possess the skill to take an everyday image and turn it just slightly, in Twilight Zone fashion, to reveal a startling and intriguing truth. Professor Joan Sangster of Trent University does just that in The Iconic North. To read Sangster’s account is to question every common media depiction of the Arctic. — Holly Doan, Blacklock’s Reporter, June 2016 “Sangster … is not the first to focus on the North and its place in the Canadian identity, but her effort must be celebrated because it is so candid.” Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students and up. — J. S. Krysiek, Gettysburg College, CHOICE, January 2017 What makes Joan Sangster’s The Iconic North stand out is the way she links so many cultural forms – television and film, novels, periodicals, report and travel writing – with the political economy of northern development in post-war Canada. Though Sangster’s reading of these works is skillful, this is not a study in discourse analysis. Rather it is a richly contextualized interpretation that makes clear how cultural constructions of the North served to legitimate, justify, and explain internal colonialism. — Mary-Ellen Kelm, Simon Fraser University, Canadian Journal of History, July 2018 The Iconic North brings fresh insight and evidence of what these images tell us about how post-war Canada saw the North: as its own colonial other. — Renee Hulan, Canadian Historical Review, September 2019 Given the current geopolitical struggles over the future of the North, this is a timely sophisticated intervention in debates in the field of Aboriginal and colonial history in Canada and internationally. — Sarah Carter, author of Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West
The Iconic North is essential reading for anyone interested in the Canadian North. Broad in scope and focusing on an understudied period of our cultural history, the discussion is elegantly written and meticulously researched … Sangster, one of our pre-eminent feminist historians, has given us a must-read book to savour. — Sherrill Grace, OC, author of Canada and the Idea of North
The Iconic North is a fascinating examination of the ideological construction of the Indigenous North in postwar Canada. I highly recommend it to anyone seeking to understand the history – and future – of the circumpolar region. — Nancy Janovicek, author of Feminist History in Canada: New Essays on Women, Gender, Work, and Nation
A thoughtful, innovative, and insightful study of southern perceptions about the Canadian North and its Indigenous peoples in the decades following the Second World War. Exceptionally well-researched, this book is a “must read” for Arctic scholars in both the social sciences and the humanities. — Shelagh D. Grant, author of The Polar Imperative: A History of Arctic Sovereignty in North America
About the Author Joan Sangster is professor of gender and women’s studies at Trent University. |