Canadian book culture has served, in both domestic and international contexts, to underpin a moralizing rhetoric of enlightened liberal tolerance for difference. Between 1945 and the end of the 1970s the book – as object, as symbol, as idea – was used within the context of the development paradigm to express solidarity with newly decolonized nations, to argue for the importance of Canadian leadership in the new international order, and to secure settler liberal rule at home.
The confluence of books and a national brand was shaped during the postwar decades by a liberal internationalism that privileged the book, and the associated skill of literacy, as a tool of development. Jody Mason analyzes how governmental and non-governmental actors deployed books as instruments of development in various parts of the Third World, how African decolonization movements shaped the nationalisms of Canadian writers who travelled to Africa as part of the burgeoning ngo movement, how late twentieth-century developmentalist ideologies shaped book-centric initiatives aimed at Indigenous communities in Canada, and how Indigenous activists and writers responded to, reframed, and sometimes rejected outright the premises of book development.
This rich interdisciplinary study brings the work of Canadian historians into conversation with book history, literary studies, and settler-colonial studies to encourage a critical assessment of the values that supported developmentalist thinking, and the goals of development itself, at home and abroad. Jody Mason is professor of English, Carleton University, and the author of Home Feelings: Liberal Citizenship and the Canadian Reading Camp Movement. Books for Development analyzes how governmental and non-governmental actors deployed books as instruments of development between 1945 and 1970 as a way to express solidarity with newly decolonized nations, to argue for the importance of Canadian leadership internationally, and to secure settler-liberal rule at home.
Series editors: Kristine Alexander, Ian McKay, and Sean Mills
Supported by the Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University, this series is committed to books that rethink Canadian history from transnational and global perspectives. It enlarges approaches to the study of Canada in the world by exploring how Canadian history has long been a dynamic product of global currents and forces. The series will also reinvigorate understanding of Canada's role as an international actor and how Canadians have contributed to intellectual, political, cultural, social, and material exchanges around the world.
Volumes included in the series explore the ideas, movements, people, and institutions that have transcended political boundaries and territories to shape Canadian society and the state. These include both state and non-state actors, and phenomena such as international migration, diaspora politics, religious movements, evolving conceptions of human rights and civil society, popular culture, technology, epidemics, wars, and global finance and trade.
The series charts a new direction by exploring networks of transmission and exchange from a standpoint that is not solely national or international, expanding the history of Canada's engagement with the world.
http://wilson.humanities.mcmaster.ca How the book came to function as a key representative of Canadian settler exceptionalism.
