Specifying the Canadian: Four Books on Hockey

Abstract

Specifying Canadian: Four Books on Hockey A Great Game: The Forgotten Leafs and Rise of Professional Hockey. By Stephen J. Harper. Toronto: Simon and Schuster, 2013. 368 pp. $34.99 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4767-1653-4. $22.00 (paper) ISBN 978-1-4767-1654-1.Hockey, PQ: Canada's Game in Quebec's Popular Culture. By Amy J. Ransom. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. 265 pp. $70.00 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4426-4813-5. $29.95 (paper) ISBN 978-1-4426-1619-6. $29.95 (ebook, EPUB format) ISBN 978-1-4426-7002-0.Refereeing Identity: The Cultural Work of Canadian Hockey Novels. By Michael Buma. Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2012. 324 pp. $95.00 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-3987-7. $29.95 (paper) ISBN 978-0-7735-3988-4.Stickhandling through Margins: First Nations Hockey in Canada. By Michael Robidoux. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. 176 pp. $21.95 (paper) ISBN 978-1-4426-1338-6. $14.95 (ebook, EPUB format) ISBN 978-1-4426-6214-8.The idea that a sport like might Canada is one that might inspire instinctive resistance, but in an era of discredited metanarratives we should come to accept that topics of broad national resonance, no matter what topic, may have power to explain essential features of Canadian society. Certainly, writers have acknowledged this. Al Purdy famously referred to as the Canadian specific (Purdy 1986, 55), and others have invariably pointed out that stories about carry a national narrative-of northernness, of our social values, and of Canada's collective nature (Harrison and Dopp 2009). It is, however, only in last decade that scholars have begun to bring critical attention to these notions, and in new millennium a subfield that Andrew Holman (2009, 7) has called hockey studies has begun to flourish.Seminal works such as Richard Gruneau and David Whitson's Hockey Night in Canada: Sports, Identities, and Cultural Politics (1993) look more critically at meaning and implications of Canada's national game.1 Proponents of subfield have followed their lead through a series of interdisciplinary conferences on held more or less biannually since 2001. The first was convened by Colin Howell at St. Mary's University in Halifax, and resulted in two conference volumes (Howell 2002) that showed variety of work being done on hockey, from climate of indoor rinks to perennial question of origins of game. Subsequent gatherings in Fredericton, Plymouth, Victoria, and Buffalo have allowed a vibrant community of scholars to emerge, and several more publications that pushed forward critical analysis, including a special issue of Sport History Review (Holman 2006) and edited collections by Whitson and Gruneau (2006), Richard Harrison and Jamie Dopp (2009), and Andrew Holman (2009).2 Many of same scholars have contributed to other important, more focussed collections, including those examining national spread of (Wong 2009), cultural place of Montreal Canadiens (Laurin-Lamothe and Moreau 2011), and of course, 1972 Summit Series (Kennedy 2014).The last half-decade has also produced several substantial individual works that address major concerns of scholars (primarily meaning of game in Canadian context) and approach questions in a variety of ways. In this essay, I consider four books that to various degrees make compelling claims about how study of and its motivating myths illumine interactions of major themes of Canadian society in modern age-colonialism, national identity, ethnicity, gender, and capitalism.It must be said that studying has a few perks, and to generate Refereeing Identity: The Cultural Work of Canadian Hockey Novels (2012), Michael Buma had enviable task of reading dozens of Canadian novels and placing them in context of Canadian literary criticism. His work followed swiftly on heels of Jason Blake's Canadian Hockey Literature (2010), which surveyed more broadly fiction, poetry, and drama. …