The Long Arc of a Nation: Memory Politics in Canada and the United States

Abstract

In Canada and the United States, there are ongoing debates about how the nation’s history should be remembered, including what should be included or excluded from educational curricula and which historical figures are worthy or unworthy of being honored with statues or memorials. Many of these memory politics disputes have focused on the legacies of racism and colonialism in the two countries, a trend which coheres with the proliferation of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity as topics in the public discourse. In this dissertation, I examine the dynamics of memory politics through a comparative analysis of the two countries, specifically focusing on four metropolitan areas: Boston, Minneapolis, Toronto, and Vancouver. I began with a content analysis of 165 newspaper articles published in major outlets that addressed topics related to the history of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity. I use the content analysis to identify salient themes of memory politics disputes in each context, including which aspects of national history are most frequently contested, the cultural repertoires employed during these disputes, and which ethnoracial groups are most frequently invoked during these discussions. To ensure the interviews spoke to the issues and concerns that were most likely to be relevant to the interviewees in each context, I also used this analysis to develop vignettes and refine the questions included on the interview guide. I organize my findings into three empirical chapters. The first empirical chapter examines how recent events have prompted many Canadians and Americans to reconsider taken-for-granted narratives about national exceptionalism that are linked to the belief that the nation has achieved racial equality. The second empirical chapter focuses on the perceived stakes of memory politics disputes. Drawing on the concept of recognition, I find that interviewees are seeking recognition through historical representations. I identify four dimensions of the struggle for recognition in memory politics disputes: visibility, significance, adversity, and contributions. In the third empirical chapter, I describe how white interviewees in Canada and the United States perceive their personal status and the collective status of white people as a group in the context of memory politics disputes. Consistent with prior research on the racial attitudes of white people, I find that some interviewees downplay or dismiss the impact of historical racism on present-day inequalities and oppose any additional programs for redressing racial inequality. However, some white interviewees emphasized that racism and colonialism are directly connected to present-day inequalities and emphasized the need for more racial justice initiatives, a perspective that would undermine their privileged status in society. I find that those in the latter group do not feel a sense of racialized group status threat and employ the concept of linked fates to explore why this might be.