The Making of Our Home and Native Land: Textbooks, Racialized Deictic Nationalism and the Creation of the National We

Abstract

This thesis project explores the ways that we/us/our, they/them, you/your and other grammars/pronouns position readers in relation to a nationalizing we. Building on the work of Michael Billig and his articulation of a theory of banal nationalism, I argue that curricular materials, authorized grade eight Ontario textbooks specifically, reflect and represent a national we that gets racialized—essentialized, arbitrarily defined and divided and continually reproduced—through the use of a grammar that permeates the representations of geography, language arts, science and mathematics discussions in curricular textbooks. Using a theory of racialized deictic nationalism, one that points to the representation of a racialized us that reproduces and reflects seemingly natural nationalized populations, I argue that the texts both actively operate to contain the imagined spaces of the nation and describe it as our space exclusive of a them through the subtlety of grammar. As a means of contesting the ease with which a racialized deictic nationalizing grammar is used, I analyze a Wikipedia article as an exploration of a potential space for re/writing notions of the racialized deictic national we. While the analysis of the Wikipedia article and the “behind the scenes” discussion highlights the difficulties of escaping the trappings of a racialized deictic national us, the analysis serves to show that individuals do hold differential conceptions about who we are and how seemingly static notions of us don’t accurately reflect us. I conclude with a discussion of the pedagogical implications of this project.