The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada

Jeffrey J. Cormier is an assistant professor of sociology at the
University of Western Ontario in London.

Eva Mackey is part of a young, trendy group of culture-studies types
concerned with critiquing traditional liberal values of tolerance,
pluralism, and multiculturalism. In Mackey’s view, these ideals amount
to a myth, one perpetrated by the Canadian state and diffused through
various national celebrations and patriotic festivals. Underneath the
official Canadian policy of multiculturalism, which on the surface
appears to support and celebrate ethnic difference, powerful forces are
managing, controlling, and manipulating representations that are
threatening to mainstream definitions of Canadian identity. Overt
manifestations of racial and ethnic exclusion—even
extermination—once the mainstay of nationalizing states, have been
replaced by much more subtle struggles over the manner in which
identities are represented.

Much of this analysis focuses around culture and representation, often
to the neglect of political, social, economic, or even historical
reality. As Mackey admits, she is interested not in “actual lived”
history but in “its representation.” Great effort is spent analyzing
the texts of such authors as Margaret Atwood and Northrop Frye, as well
as a host of official government documents and reports. Mackey also
conducted participant observational fieldwork and face-to-face
interviews with a variety of people in several small Southern Ontario
towns.

Capturing the views and opinions of the average Southern Ontarian
around the time of the 1992 constitutional crisis is the strength of
this book. However, much of this value is lost due to Mackey’s
editorializing immediately following their views. The equally
irritating, although very much in vogue, habit of putting every other
word in either italics or quotation marks does not help either.