About BC Books Online
BC Books Online was created for anyone interested in BC-published books, and with librarians especially in mind. We'd like to make it easy for library staff to learn about books from BC publishers - both new releases and backlist titles - so you can inform your patrons and keep your collections up to date.
Our site features print books and ebooks - both new releases and backlist titles - all of which are available to order through regular trade channels. Browse our subject categories to find books of interest or create and export lists by category to cross-reference with your library's current collection.
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Description
Resilient ideological assumptions, shifting economic priorities, and government policy in the postwar era influenced how northern culture was represented in popular Canadian imagery. In an enlightening exposure of Canada’s cultural landscape, The Iconic North lays bare the relationship between settler nation building and popular images of Aboriginal experience. Joan Sangster redirects the debates about the geopolitical prospects of the North by addressing how women and gender relations have played a key role in the history of northern development. She reveals how assumptions about both Indigenous and non-Indigenous women shaped gender, class, and political relationships in the circumpolar north – a region now commanding more of the world’s attention.
Contributor Notes
Joan Sangster is a historian who teaches gender and women’s studies at the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies at Trent University. A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she has held visiting fellowships at McGill, Duke, and Princeton universities. She is the author of Transforming Labour: Women and Work in Postwar Canada; Girl Trouble: Female Delinquency in English Canada; Regulating Girls and Women: Sexuality, Family, and the Law, Ontario 1920–60; Earning Respect: The Lives of Working Women in Small-Town Ontario, 1920–1960; and Dreams of Equality: Women on the Canadian Left, 1920–60. A retrospective collection of her essays, Through Feminist Eyes: Essays in Canadian Women’s History, was published in 2012.
Awards
- Winner, CLIO Prize for The North, Canadian Historical Association
Editorial Reviews
The Iconic North brings fresh insight and evidence of what these images tell us about how post-war Canada saw the North: as its own colonial other.
— Canadian Historical Review
“Sangster … is not the first to focus on the North and its place in the Canadian identity, but her effort must be celebrated because it is so candid.” Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students and up.
— CHOICE
This book fills an important gap in the field of Canadian cultural history.
— British Journal of Canadian Studies
Few authors possess the skill to take an everyday image and turn it just slightly, in Twilight Zone fashion, to reveal a startling and intriguing truth. Professor Joan Sangster of Trent University does just that in The Iconic North. To read Sangster’s account is to question every common media depiction of the Arctic.
— Blacklock’s Reporter
What makes Joan Sangster’s The Iconic North stand out is the way she links so many cultural forms – television and film, novels, periodicals, report and travel writing – with the political economy of northern development in post-war Canada. Though Sangster’s reading of these works is skillful, this is not a study in discourse analysis. Rather it is a richly contextualized interpretation that makes clear how cultural constructions of the North served to legitimate, justify, and explain internal colonialism.
— Canadian Journal of History
