Centre for Literatures in Canada | 2021 CLC Scholarly Lecture with Dr. Jody Mason @clcualberta | Uploaded November 2021 | Updated October 2024, 2 hours ago.
The “Creative Crusade”: Settler Colonial Antinomies and Books for Development in the Age of Three Worlds
Building on the work of scholars such as Frederick Cooper, who emphasizes the imperial genealogies of postwar development, this paper analyzes the book donation schemes created by Canada’s first NGO, the Overseas Book Centre / Centre du livre pour outre-mer (OBC / CLO), founded in Toronto in 1959 and still in existence today as the Canadian Organization for Development Through Education (CODE). I argue that the work of the OBC / CLO during the 1960s and 70s relied on a series of contradictions: while insisting on the unique ability of Canadian NGOs to act as “trusted brokers” in international development because of the nation’s own colonial lineage and while finding common cause at UNESCO with the decolonizing nations that were in this period pushing for transformations in the international communications order, OBC / CLO representatives were at the same time disavowing the racially differentiated status of Commonwealth members, as well as Canada’s ongoing colonization of Indigenous Peoples. At the same time, despite the attention in English Canadian and Quebecois nationalist circles by the late 1960s to the “colonized” status of the nation’s book cultures, OBC / CLO programs perpetuated neocolonial economic systems that failed to nourish local production capacities, shipping hundreds of tons of books annually to nations in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia.
Jody Mason is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University (cross-appointed with the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies). She is the author of two books, Writing Unemployment: Worklessness, Mobility, and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Canadian Literatures (U of Toronto P, 2013) and Home Feelings: Liberal Citizenship and the Canadian Reading Camp Movement (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019). Recipient of the 2019 Gabrielle Roy Prize, Mason is currently undertaking SSHRC-funded research for a third book project that examines Canadian practices of book diplomacy and uses of books as foreign aid in the last half of the twentieth century.
The “Creative Crusade”: Settler Colonial Antinomies and Books for Development in the Age of Three Worlds
Building on the work of scholars such as Frederick Cooper, who emphasizes the imperial genealogies of postwar development, this paper analyzes the book donation schemes created by Canada’s first NGO, the Overseas Book Centre / Centre du livre pour outre-mer (OBC / CLO), founded in Toronto in 1959 and still in existence today as the Canadian Organization for Development Through Education (CODE). I argue that the work of the OBC / CLO during the 1960s and 70s relied on a series of contradictions: while insisting on the unique ability of Canadian NGOs to act as “trusted brokers” in international development because of the nation’s own colonial lineage and while finding common cause at UNESCO with the decolonizing nations that were in this period pushing for transformations in the international communications order, OBC / CLO representatives were at the same time disavowing the racially differentiated status of Commonwealth members, as well as Canada’s ongoing colonization of Indigenous Peoples. At the same time, despite the attention in English Canadian and Quebecois nationalist circles by the late 1960s to the “colonized” status of the nation’s book cultures, OBC / CLO programs perpetuated neocolonial economic systems that failed to nourish local production capacities, shipping hundreds of tons of books annually to nations in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia.
Jody Mason is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University (cross-appointed with the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies). She is the author of two books, Writing Unemployment: Worklessness, Mobility, and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Canadian Literatures (U of Toronto P, 2013) and Home Feelings: Liberal Citizenship and the Canadian Reading Camp Movement (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019). Recipient of the 2019 Gabrielle Roy Prize, Mason is currently undertaking SSHRC-funded research for a third book project that examines Canadian practices of book diplomacy and uses of books as foreign aid in the last half of the twentieth century.
