Canadian national identity is bound to the idea of a Great White North. Images of snow, wilderness, and emptiness seem innocent, yet this path-breaking book reveals they contain the seeds of racism. Informed by the insight that racism is geographical as well as historical and cultural, the contributors trace how notions of race, whiteness, and nature helped construct a white country in travel writing and treaty making; in scientific research and park planning; and in towns, cities, and tourist centres. Rethinking the Great White North offers a new vocabulary for contemporary debates on Canada’s role in the North and the meaning of the nation.

Andrew Baldwin's profile page

Laura Cameron's profile page

Audrey Kobayashi's profile page

Andrew Baldwin is a lecturer in human geography at Durham University. Laura Cameron is an associate professor of geography at Queen’s University and Canada Research Chair in Historical Geographies of Nature. Audrey Kobayashi is a professor of geography and Queen’s Research Chair at Queen’s University.

Contributors: Luis L.M. Aguiar, Kay Anderson, Stephen Bocking, Emilie Cameron, Jessica Dempsey, Brian Egan, Bruce Erickson, Kevin Gould, Roger Keil, Phillip Gordon Mackintosh, Claire Major, Tina I.L. Marten, Tyler McCreary, Richard Milligan, Sherene H. Razack, Catriona Sandilands, Juanita Sundberg, and Jocelyn Thorpe.

Is the issue race or whiteness? Nature or wilderness? The best papers in this collection engage the tensions between key concepts, offering not only theoretically engaged analyses of the Canadian situation but also seeking to advance conceptual understanding of race or whiteness and nature or wilderness.

The Goose, Issue 10, 2012

Innovative...the book is also particularly stimulating in its attempt to read urban geographies against and/or as part of Canada's constitutive interaction with “nature.”

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Vol. 13 No. 3, Winter 2012