Browsing by Author "Thompson, John Herd"

Dreams of a "tropical Canada" that included the West Indies occupied the thoughts of many Canadians over a period spanning nearly forty years. From the expansionist fever of the late nineteenth century to the redistribution of German territories immediately following the First World War, Canadians of varying backgrounds campaigned vigorously for Canada-West Indies union. Their efforts generated a transatlantic discourse that raised larger questions about Canada's national trajectory, imperial organization, and the state of Britain's Empire in the twentieth century.

This dissertation explores the key ideas, tensions, and contradictions that shaped the union discourse over time. Race, nation and empire were central to this discourse. Canadian expansionists' efforts to gain free access to tropical territory, consolidate British possessions in the Western hemisphere, and negotiate the terms under which West Indians of color would enter the Canadian federation reflected and perpetuated logics that were simultaneously racial, national, and imperial.

Canada-West Indies union campaigns raise important questions about the processes at work in the ideological and material formation of the Canadian "nation" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Employing a wide range of public and private manuscript material, diaries, travelogues and newspapers, this dissertation argues that Canadians' expansionist aspirations in the West Indies were inextricably connected to a national vision. To the campaign's advocates, acquiring colonial satellites - particularly in tropical regions - was a defining feature of nation-state formation.

My dissertation project on colonialism and immigration in Canadian history explores the complex intersections of discourses of race, nation, and empire. With an emphasis on the role of visual and popular culture, I locate Canada within transnational discussions about citizenship and civilization. Like emerging states in the "Anglophone colonial world", Canadians helped erect and maintain a "global color line", by passing racist immigration laws that discriminated between "white" and "non-white" migrants. Canadian "racial nationalists" used visual culture to justify immigration restriction and create identity and belonging, even as Canadian identity simultaneously trumpeted tolerance and enlightenment. In turn, anti-racists invoked national exceptionalist mythologies to opposed race-based immigration restriction. Looking back at a global era of nation-building, I locate Canada as an emerging nation-state in which Anglo-Canadians faced the challenge of creating a national identity within a racist global empire, and alongside a powerful Republic that was also virulently racist, but from which Canadians desperately wanted to distinguish themselves. Heated debates about race and national belonging also unearthed cleavages between "white" people in Canada, the United States, and within the British Empire, including distinctions of gender, class, and ethnicity, as well as competing and political and ethical sensibilities. Situated at the intersection of transnational and national history, my project explores how this complex case of nation-formation spawned subtle and dynamic racial discourses, an understanding of which will advance our understanding of race and racism in the twentieth century.