Representations of Maritime Cultures and Histories: A Review Essay

Abstract

Representations of Maritime Cultures and Histories: A Review Essay Canadians at Last: Canada integrates Newfoundland as a Province. Raymond B. Blake. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Home Medicine: Newfound-land Experience. John K. Crellin, McGill-- Queen's/Hannah Institute Studies in History of Medicine, Health, and Society. 1. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994. Quest of Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in TwentiethCentury Nova Scotia. Ian McKay. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994. Tenant League of Prince Edward Island 1864-1867. Lease-hold Tenure in New World. Ian Ross Robertson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Labrador Odyssey@ journal and Photographs of Eliot Curwen on Second Voyage of Wilfred Grenfell, 1893. Ronald Rompkey, ed. McGill-Queen's/Hannah Institute Studies in History of Medicine, Health, and Society. 3. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996. This decade has seen a rising national and international interest in cultures and histories of Atlantic Canada. This attention - most conspicuously manifest in popularity of such contemporary artistic events as Shipping News, Margaret's Museum and Celtic music revival - perhaps signifies that a certain romantic nostalgia for simpler life lingers in popular imagination. In academic world, nostalgia is taking a reflexive turn, being acknowledged as an element at work in hermeneutics of texts and events. Such reflexivity is particularly evident in Ian McKay's Quest of and Ronald Rompkey's Labrador Odyssey, both of which offer alternatives to founding fictions that have worked to efface histories of at least some Atlantic Canadians. These texts foreground representation of culture, challenging us to read against historical and folkloric constructions of societies and their identities. They ask that we acknowledge subject positions of historical narratives and question processes behind what we are asked to read as culture. It is this reading practice that informs my own comments on five diverse accounts of maritime histories and cultures offered in Quest of Labrador Odyssey, Home Medicine, Canadians at Last and Tenant League of Prince Edward Island. McKay's Quest of examines antimodernist impulse at work in processes of selection and invention in twentieth-century Nova Scotia. Its thesis is interesting and adversarial: The Folk, as category and construction, reduces people once alive to status of inert essences and voids the emancipatory potential of historical knowledge (xvi). What is perhaps most contentious is not argument itself, but representation of cultural producers such as Helen Creighton as aesthetic colonizers who actively sought and produced according to their own romantic impulses: This book is about path of destiny that led Creighton and countless other figures to develop the Folk as key to understanding Nova Scotian culture and history. It is about ways in which urban producers, pursuing their own interests and expressing their own view of things, constructed of countryside as romantic antithesis to everything they disliked about modern urban and industrial life. (4) Its five chapters contextualize concept of explore Creighton's role in development of maritime folklore, examine commodification and discourse of Innocence, and survey idea of under postmodern conditions (30). In its demystification of interpretative framework and construction of culture and identity, Quest of revises twentieth-century Nova Scotian history and calls for a questioning of ways in which a politics of selection has made certain debatable assumptions seem like 'natural' commonsense (40). …