Papers by Jody Mason
Book History, 2022
Building on recent scholarship on the role of the Frankfurt Book Fair in contemporary book cultur... more Building on recent scholarship on the role of the Frankfurt Book Fair in contemporary book culture, this paper looks at the example of FBM2021, Canada’s guest-of-honour campaign for the 2021 Frankfurt Book Fair, the biggest cultural export initiative undertaken by the Government of Canada in recent history. FBM2021’s brand, “singular plurality,” depended on Indigenous authors and their writing to signify the particular post-reconciliation eclecticism that is at the heart of Canadian Heritage’s current cultural export strategy, particularly in relation to the beleaguered book. The sign of reconciliation—part of a settler strategy that Lowman and Barker identify as transcendence––is particularly treacherous in this context because it folds Indigenous writers and their work into a creative-economy logic that depends on cultural diversity as a unifying sign, while actively suppressing questions regarding Indigenous sovereignty. We argue that the campaign’s silencing of questions of production, in particular, is the motor of transcendence. Drawing on a survey we conducted with Indigenous-owned publishers in Canada, we attend to the unique needs and visions of Indigenous-owned and -operated publishers in order to make visible the fact that reconciliation is not simply a matter of culture; it is at the same time always a matter of political and economic sovereignty.
Canadian Literature, 2020
Though it has varied slightly in its telling, a standard narrative in the cultural and literary h... more Though it has varied slightly in its telling, a standard narrative in the cultural and literary history of English Canada is that literary culture was able to “develop” and “mature” in the wake of the 1951 Massey Report, finally “arriving” in the years between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s. This essay offers another view of this period, analyzing not the smooth developmental momentum but rather the contradiction and disavowal that attended one of the federal government’s first direct forms of support for the book. Anna Johnston and Allan Lawson theorize such contradiction as a “double inscription of authority and authenticity,” an authority originating at once in the Imperium and in Indigenous nations that settler cultures both desire and disavow (369). As the Imperium shifted across the Atlantic in the decade that followed the close of the Second World War, the settler nation struggled to locate itself anew in relation to these “origins of authority and authenticity.” The case examined here is the Canadian government’s attempts to enter the cultural diplomacy field, and the international order more generally, in the wake of the Second World War, just as the Massey Commission was disseminating its findings. Postwar cultural––and especially book––diplomacy efforts participated in and adopted the rhetoric of the cultural diplomacy practices dominated in this period by the United States. These efforts were thus obliged to emphasize the nation’s ostensibly robust domestic book industries, a disingenuous narrative that depended upon a cultural nationalism (settler-imperium difference) that appropriated Indigenous “craft” to its origin story.
Book History, 2017
This paper analyzes how the “particular symbolic fortunes” of Canada’s most widely recognized lit... more This paper analyzes how the “particular symbolic fortunes” of Canada’s most widely recognized literary prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, undergo what James English calls “capital intraconversion”––how they are “culturally ‘laundered’” through their association with Frontier College, Canada’s longest-running adult literacy organization. While the Giller initially benefitted from fashioning itself as the private, industry-driven alternative to state-sponsored culture in Canada, increasing criticism of its corporate sponsorship has led, in the past decade, to a rebranding effort. This effort, I contend, seeks to benefit from two key terms––multiculturalism and literacy. Associated as the discourse of multiculturalism and the figure of the literate citizen are with the strong publics of the western, liberal-democratic nation-state, they possess a remarkable ability to accentuate the symbolic capital of Canada’s most widely recognized literary prize.
Although the history of Canada’s oldest adult literacy organization, Frontier College, is of grea... more Although the history of Canada’s oldest adult literacy organization, Frontier College, is of great relevance to labour studies, it has been more or less ignored by this field, largely because of its links to the early 20th-century social gospel movement and because of the difficulty of studying workers’ responses to the association. This article examines the first half-decade of Frontier College (known until 1919 as the Canadian Reading Camp Association) using a variety of methodologies––labour history, cultural and literary history, the history of education, and the history of reading––to understand how culture was used in the service of liberal government in the context of northern Ontario’s lumber camps at the turn of the century.
This essay argues that periodicals of protest can be crucial in helping us to understand the tang... more This essay argues that periodicals of protest can be crucial in helping us to understand the tangled history of the welfare state in Canada, and it contends that the Communist periodical The Woman Worker (1926-1929) is one important site for undertaking this work. The forms of citizen participation that are evident in early- and mid-twentieth century periodicals of protest have not played much part in shaping narratives of the development of the welfare state in Canada. More invisible still is the role of women, and particularly working-class women, in this ephemeral history of political activism. Furthermore, if labour historians have mined periodicals of protest for their political content, little work has been done to analyze the cultural material in these publications, such as short fiction and poetry. This frequently devalued material plays a crucial role in the summoning of state reform that one finds in the pages of The Woman Worker.
Journal of Canadian Studies-revue D Etudes Canadiennes, 2011
Anti-modernism is a term that historians and literary critics have employed in different ways: to... more Anti-modernism is a term that historians and literary critics have employed in different ways: to refer to the rejection of an “overcivilized” modernity and to describe the popular literary forms that are understood to be the antithesis of literary modernism. The author argues that both understandings of the term offer helpful frameworks for a materialist reading of Graphic Publishers––an Ottawa-based
Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Canada, 2012
Like much Depression-era writing in Canada, Irene Baird's 1939 novel Waste Heritage is out of pri... more Like much Depression-era writing in Canada, Irene Baird's 1939 novel Waste Heritage is out of print and, perhaps as a consequence, has not garnered much recent critical or scholarly attention. Fortunately, University of Ottawa Press is publishing a new edition of the novel in zoo7 (edited and with an introduction by Colin Hill), which will certainly bring the attention of a new generation of scholars to bear on the issue of women's authorship during the interwar years in Canada.I Existing criticism of the novel is largely influenced by leftist nationalist Robin Mathews, who argued that Baird's novel should be heralded as a classic of proletarian literature in Canada-a novel that sympathetically represents the inevitability of class revolution.2 Yet archival evidence regarding the publishing history of the novel has allowed me to reconsider its political commitments in a more nuanced way. Although Baird has no authors' papers and although the original manuscript for Waste Heritazge is no longer extant, her correspondence with her Canadian and American publishers, as well as her articles on the writing of Waste Her-itage, are integral to the process of interpreting the novel's conflicted cultural and political meanmngs. t Jody Mason is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Carleton University in Ottawa. Her research on Irene Baird's Waste Heritage is part of a larger project on the politics of mobility in Canada. Mason has also published in Canadian Literature, Stu~dies in Canadian Literature, and University of Toronto Quarterly.
University of Toronto Quarterly, 2006
It was the rough and early days of oil. Every week a well blew, every month someone was killed. T... more It was the rough and early days of oil. Every week a well blew, every month someone was killed. This Thursday was Dovett=s father=s turn. The well blew sending fire into his plaid shirt that his mother, the serious-eyed girl, had ironed fresh that morning. Dovett=s father had ...
Books by Jody Mason
Home Feelings argues that literature, literacy, and citizenship took on new and contested meaning... more Home Feelings argues that literature, literacy, and citizenship took on new and contested meanings in early twentieth-century Canada, as British-Canadian settlers' desire to define themselves in relation to an expanding non-British immigrant population, as well as a need for immigrant labour, put new pressure on the concept of citizenship, particularly in the frontier work camps where the organization that eventually became Frontier College undertook its work. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, Home Feelings investigates how the reading camp movement used fiction, poetry, songs, newspapers, magazines, school readers, and English-as-a-second-language and citizenship manuals to encourage ideas of selfhood that were individual and intimate rather than collective. Through the Frontier College, one of the nation's earliest citizenship education programs emerged, drawing on literature's potential to nourish "home feelings" as a means of engaging socialist and communist print cultures and the non-British immigrant communities with which these were associated. Shifting the focus away from urban centres and postwar state narratives of citizenship, Home Feelings tracks the importance of reading projects and conceptions of literacy to the emergence of liberal citizenship in Canada prior to the Second World War.
This landmark study explores the cultural and literary history of unemployment in Canada from the... more This landmark study explores the cultural and literary history of unemployment in Canada from the 1920s to the 1970s, which were crucial decades in the formation of our current conception of Canada as a nation. Writing Unemployment asks how writers with diverse political affiliations participated in and protested against the discursive framing of unemployment. It argues that Depression-era conceptions of unemployment shaped later twentieth-century understandings of both worklessness and citizenship, and it demonstrates how writers affiliated with the cultural left articulated their conceptions of authorship in relation to the emerging national labour force.
By examining novels, short stories, poetry, manifestos, and agitprop, Jody Mason situates the literary history of the cultural left in a broader context, challenges the dominant literary-historical narrative of the pioneer settler, and contributes to new scholarship on Canada’s modern period. By bridging close textual readings with book and publishing history, economic and sociological analysis, and original archival research, Writing Unemployment offers new ideas on work by many of Canada’s most important writers.
Book Reviews by Jody Mason
Publishing History , 2023
Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 2023
University of Toronto Quarterly, 2016
Canadian Literature, 2009
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Papers by Jody Mason
Books by Jody Mason
By examining novels, short stories, poetry, manifestos, and agitprop, Jody Mason situates the literary history of the cultural left in a broader context, challenges the dominant literary-historical narrative of the pioneer settler, and contributes to new scholarship on Canada’s modern period. By bridging close textual readings with book and publishing history, economic and sociological analysis, and original archival research, Writing Unemployment offers new ideas on work by many of Canada’s most important writers.
Book Reviews by Jody Mason
By examining novels, short stories, poetry, manifestos, and agitprop, Jody Mason situates the literary history of the cultural left in a broader context, challenges the dominant literary-historical narrative of the pioneer settler, and contributes to new scholarship on Canada’s modern period. By bridging close textual readings with book and publishing history, economic and sociological analysis, and original archival research, Writing Unemployment offers new ideas on work by many of Canada’s most important writers.