Canadian Studies Announcements

In This Issue:

Program News

• New Hildebrand Fellow Angus Reid studies work of Chinese Canadian poet Fred Wah

• Get ready: Big Give is Thursday, March 12!

Upcoming Events

• Building and Fracturing Transnational Nativist Coalitions: Canada, Catholic Immigrants, and the Venezuela Boundary Dispute of 1895

External Events

• Aboriginal Identity and Nation-Building in the Mi’kmaw

• Film Screening: “Kill the Documentary” (feat. Joyce Wieland)

PROGRAM NEWS

Get Ready: Big Give is Thursday, March 12!

Mark your calendars! Big Give, Berkeley’s annual giving day, is just weeks away – and we hope you will join in to show support for Canadian Studies at this crucial moment. Your donations help encourage the study of Canada at the number one public university in the United States – funding research, sponsoring public lectures, and building community for Canadian students. Your gift supports vital dialogue between the US and Canada that builds cross-border engagement and mutual respect.

New Hildebrand Fellow Angus Reid Studies Work of Chinese Canadian Poet Fred Wah

The Canadian Studies Program is pleased to introduce Angus Reid as the latest recipient of the Edward E. Hildebrand Graduate Research Fellowship.

Angus is a PhD candidate in the Department of English. His dissertation project, “Landscape After Labour”, addresses the uses of landscape in the work of the poets Fred Wah, Etel Adnan, and Adrienne Rich. This project turns to landscape to understand the reconfigurations of race, class, and gender – and of political subjectivity more generally – after the social movements of the 1960s.

Angus’ Hildebrand Fellowship will support archival research in Vancouver on Wah, a Chinese Canadian poet and former poet laureate of Canada. Grounded in Canadian leftist debates of the 1970s, and particularly in a Canadian Marxist feminist archive, this research seeks to understand Wah’s poetics as emerging from the pursuit of a working-class Chinese Canadian standpoint.

Angus holds a BA (Hons.) in English Literature from the University of British Columbia.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Building and Fracturing Transnational Nativist Coalitions: Canada, Catholic Immigrants, and the Venezuela Boundary Dispute of 1895

Thurs., March 12 | 12:00 pm | 223 Philosophy Hall | RSVP

This presentation examines the rise and fall of the domestic and transnational coalitional politics of the American Protective Association (APA). At its apogee in the early-to-mid 1890s, the APA was the largest nativist society in the United States. It was also led by a Canadian immigrant, W. J. H. Traynor, based out of Detroit. Shanahan’s presentation will show how APA leaders like Traynor and propagandists allied to him formulated a distinctly transnational Anglo-North American form of late-nineteenth-century anti-Catholicism that envisioned subversive (often Irish-origin) Catholic forces on the march in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. That ideology both propelled the APA’s institutional growth in the United States and proved sufficiently flexible to enable its expansion into Canada. However, Shanahan will also show how a brief war scare between the British Empire and the United States in late 1895 over Venezuela’s international boundary line – which raised the prospect of a US invasion of Canada – gravely harmed the APA from without and fractured its cohesion from within.

About the Speaker

Dr. Brendan A. Shanahan is a lecturer in history at Yale University, and an associate research scholar with Yale’s Committee on Canadian Studies at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. His research and teaching focuses on North American immigration and citizenship policy, and comparative US and Canadian political and legal history. Dr. Shanahan received his BA from McGill University, and his PhD and MA from UC Berkeley, where he was a Hildebrand Fellow and active member of the Canadian Studies Program. He is currently working on a project about transnational nativist, anti-Catholic politics in the United States and Canada during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This event is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Bluma Appel Fund and the Consulate General of Canada in San Francisco.

This event will have a remote attendance option via Zoom. Please select the “virtual attendance” in the RSVP form to receive the link.

If you require an accommodation to participate fully in this event, please let us know with as much advance notice as possible by emailing canada@berkeley.edu.

EXTERNAL EVENTS

Aboriginal Identity and Nation-Building in the Mi’kmaw

Wed., Feb. 25 | 4:00 pm PT | Online | RSVP

This talk focuses on contemporary identity and nation-building dynamics among the Mi’kmaw First Nation people of Eastern Canada. After providing geographic and historical context, the talk will illustrate some of the elements that have characterized Mi’kmaw identity and its construction in recent times, including recent aspects of Indigenous nationhood, or First nationhood, and nation-building in the Mi’kmaw communities of Nova Scotia. The eclectic nature – cultural, political, economic, and territorial – of First National discourse among the Mi’kmaq makes nation building a promising path toward providing better services to Mi’kmaw families and communities and, at the same time, elevates it to the status of strategic asset for reclaiming treaty and aboriginal rights to self-determination.

Dr. Simone Poliandri is a cultural anthropologist specializing in Native American/First Nations Studies. He is a professor of anthropology and the director of the American Studies program at Bridgewater State University. He holds a PhD from Brown University and has conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the Mi’kmaw people of the Canadian Maritimes since 2000.

This event is brought to you by the Center for Canadian-American Studies at Western Washington University and the Foundation for WWU & Alumni.

Film Screening: “Kill the Documentary”

Wed., Mar. 11 | 7:00 pm | BAMPFA | Tickets

This short film program, curated in tribute to the late filmmaker and critic Jill Godmilow, includes Canadian artist Joyce Wieland’s whimsical yet profound Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968), which Godmilow provocatively called, “the {most} important film about the Vietnam War, or any war for that matter.” A satirical allegory of 1960s politics, the film follows a group of gerbils who are being held as political prisoners by a cat, and their subsequent heroic escape to Canada where they take up organic farming. It was Wieland’s first film to explicitly engage themes of Canadian nationalism, and reflects her belief that Canada was the world’s last hope for a peaceful utopian society.

Canadian Studies Program

213 Philosophy Hall #2308

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