Canoe Nation: Nature, Race, and the Making of a Canadian Icon

摘要

Almost forty years ago, in her now classic essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey noted, "It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article." I encountered this as a young graduate student and since then have never been able to take the same pleasure in a Hollywood blockbuster. After reading Bruce Erickson's Canoe Nation, I'm going to find it difficult to take pleasure in paddling a canoe. That is, in part, the intention of this book. Canoe Nation is a cultural analysis of the canoe's function in constructing Canadian identity. How and why has the canoe become a Canadian fetish, and whose histories were, and continue to be erased in the process? "The existence of the naturalized space of the nation," Erickson argues, "was delivered in part by the canoe, and as such the canoe offers proof of the nation to itself and the rest of the world" (p. 29).