Painting the Maple explores the critical interplay of race and gender in shaping Canadian culture, history, politics and health care. These interdisciplinary essays draw on feminist, postcolonial, and critical theory in a wide-ranging discussion that encompasses both high and popular forms of culture, the deliberation of policy and its execution, and social movements as well as individual authors and texts. The contributors establish connections among discourses of race, gender, and nation-building that have conditioned the formation of Canada for more than one hundred years. At times provocative, Painting the Maple illuminates the challenges that lie ahead for all Canadians who aspire to create a better future in a reimagined nation.

Veronica Strong-Boag is a professor of women’s and gender studies and of educational studies at the University of British Columbia. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and a past president of the Canadian Historical Association. She has written widely on the history of Canadian women and children—including studies of the 1920s and 30s, the experience of post—WW II suburbia, Nellie L. McClung, E. Pauline Johnson, childhood disabilities, and modern neo-conservatism’s attack on women and children—and has won the John A. Macdonald Prize in Canadian History, the 2012 Canada Prize in the Social Sciences awarded by the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences and, with Carole Gerson, the Raymond Klibansky Prize in the Humanities. In 2012 Strong-Boag was awarded the Tyrrell Medal from the Royal Society of Canada for outstanding work in Canadian history. She is the author of Fostering Nation: Canada Confronts Its History of Childhood Disadvantage (WLU Press, 2010).

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Sherrill Grace
Sherrill Grace is a professor of English and theatre at the University of British Columbia. She is former President, Academy I, of the Royal Society of Canada. She has lectured widely in North America, as well as in Germany, Italy, England, Belgium, France, China and Japan.

A member of several professional associations, including the Association of Canadian Studies, the Canadian Association of American Studies, the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, the Canadian Comparative Literature Association, the Modern Languages Association and the International Association of Professors of English, Grace was awarded the prestigious Killam Teaching Prize in 2008, and in 2009 she received the Ann Saddlemyer Award for her biography Making Theatre: A Life of Sharon Pollock.

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A collaborative tour de force from a coterie of scholars at the University of British Columbia ... The debates and issues raised by Painting the Maple deserve the attention of all interested Canadians and should not be restricted to academic readers alone.

The Canadian Historical Review

Such a diverse range of essays is likely to be of most interest to practitioners of interdisciplinarity ... Others will find the theoretical discussions of the construction of Canada as an exclusive nation, characterized by racial and gender discrimination at worst and cultural insensitivity at best, instructive for any branch of Canadian studies.

Atlantis