1. Compiling Knowledge, Enacting Space, Binding Time: Innis's Canadian North (1928-1944).
- Author
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Audette-Longo, Patricia H. and Buxton, William J.
- Subjects
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MEDIA studies , *ECONOMIC history , *CANADIAN history , *SPACETIME , *INDIGENOUS peoples - Abstract
While Harold A. Innis's contributions to media theory and economic history are well recognized, his attention to Canada's North has received less notice. This paper brings together and analyzes Innis's most sustained engagement with the North: his sixteen-year project of reviewing more than 150 books about the region for the Canadian Historical Review. By examining Innis's North as a mediated text, the paper traces how his reviews were informed by concerns with enacting space and binding time. The paper discusses how Innis used his reviews to compile information about a largely unknown area, map its natural-resource potential, and commemorate its colourful and sometimes-turbulent past. Innis contributed to a construction of the region as a last frontier whose conquest could unite Canadians in common purpose and identity. Innis's reviews provided a platform for him to criticize the federal government s policies on the region, but his contributions to our understanding of the region largely failed to reflect the complexities of an already occupied, already changing North. Nevertheless, his discussions of political and economic development in the North anticipated current discussions of how Canada's northern tier is undergoing transformation through the exploitation of resources and climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2014