White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada.

Nanette Morton teaches English at McMaster University in Hamilton.

In White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada, Daniel Coleman explores the ways in which English-Canadian literature helped to establish and maintain the country’s own definition of whiteness. Through the 19th and early to mid-20th centuries, Canadian “Britishness” was seen as a unique achievement, constituting “the most refined version of an orderly, planned, or ‘constrained’ society guided by ideals” —ideals that were connected to the Enlightenment and its “discourse of progressive civilization and modernity.” Characterized by internal pluralism and tolerance, this “civility,” as Coleman calls it, was deemed superior to both American bare-knuckle capitalism and English aristocracy.

Coleman writes that, in order to express this notion of Canadian Britishness, Canadian literature developed a series of stock characters, including the Loyalist brother, the enterprising Scottish orphan, the muscular Christian, and the maturing colonial son. These literary stereotypes continually reaffirmed that British whiteness was the privileged norm. “Foreigners”—typically non-whites, as well as southern and eastern Europeans—were seen as benefiting from this tolerance, although they did not become equal members of society. Only by approximating the British norm could they do so. Others, however, were debarred by difference. Coleman points out that, although multiculturalism represents the civility that Canadians take so much pride in, whiteness is still the Canadian norm. While he analyzes the white supremacy that lies behind British civility and the stock literary characters that represent it, Coleman argues that “civility itself is a positive value that is structurally ambivalent”: it creates and maintains justice and equality he says, even as its borders need to be renegotiated. Coleman’s solution to the underlying racism of Canada’s project of civility is what he refers to as “wry civility,” one “which knows that civility itself has a contaminated, compromised history but which nonetheless affirms that its basic elements … peace, order, and good government—are worth having and maintaining.” The conclusion is a hopeful one.

Given the general national amnesia regarding the treatment of Native peoples and exclusionary immigration policies, one wonders if such wry civility can truly be established without conflict, since its predecessor so firmly relies upon the privileging of whiteness.