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Political Science General

Exalted Subjects

Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada

by (author) Sunera Thobani

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
May 2007
Category
General, General
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780802094544
    Publish Date
    May 2007
    List Price
    $57.00
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780802092274
    Publish Date
    May 2007
    List Price
    $93.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442691520
    Publish Date
    May 2007
    List Price
    $45.95

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Description

Questions of national identity, indigenous rights, citizenship, and migration have acquired unprecedented relevance in this age of globalization. In Exalted Subjects, noted feminist scholar Sunera Thobani examines the meanings and complexities of these questions in a Canadian context. Based in the theoretical traditions of political economy and cultural / post-colonial studies, this book examines how the national subject has been conceptualized in Canada at particular historical junctures, and how state policies and popular practices have exalted certain subjects over others.

Foregrounding the concept of 'race' as a critical relation of power, Thobani examines how processes of racialization contribute to sustaining and replenishing the politics of nation formation and national subjectivity. She challenges the popular notion that the significance of racialized practices in Canada has declined in the post Second World War period, and traces key continuities and discontinuities in these practices from Confederation into the present. Drawing on historical sociology and discursive analyses, Thobani examines how the state seeks to 'fix' and 'stabilize' its subjects in relation to the nation's 'others.' A controversial, ground-breaking study, Exalted Subjects makes a major contribution to our understanding of the racialized and gendered underpinnings of both nation and subject formation.

About the author

Sunera Thobani was born in Buboka, Tanzania. She came to Canada in 1989. Thobani helped organize against to opening of sex selection clinics in British Columbia and was a founding member of SAWAN (South Asian Women's Network). She was elected president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), the largest feminist organization in Canada, in 1993. She is a single mother.

Sunera Thobani's profile page