Exploring race and nation in playground propaganda in early twentieth-century Toronto

Abstract

Abstract This article examines how a regime of knowledge was enacted on the bodies of children in Toronto playgrounds at the turn of the twentieth century. Using Foucault's description of biopower, or the 'power over life', I explore how performances of the body (visibilities) were integral in creating citizens in a colonial context (identities). I conduct a detailed reading of one part of Foucault's 'great bipolar technology', the biopolitical regulation of children as part of a population in order to highlight the importance of playground discourses and applications in the construction of subjects and a future nation. Keywords: playground movementracenationTorontochildren Acknowledgements Acknowledgements are due to Ranu Basu, Valerie Preston, William Jenkins, and Roger Keil who all aided greatly in the preparation of this manuscript. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editors who helped to make this a better paper. This project was partially funded by a Doctoral Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Notes The use of the term Native-born was interesting because it referred to both those born in Canada and Britain. It should be differentiated from its current use referring to indigenous peoples of North America. This term refers not to the visibility of the persons but to their absence from the dominant discourses. Although it should be noted that many blacks were living in the surrounding York Township (Shadd et al., Citation2002). Wall has noted that Indian lore and performance were integral to summer camp programming in Ontario in the 1920s and 1930s (Citation2005, Citation2009). Paris has also described a similar performance of 'Indian-ness' alongside minstrelsy in New York State in the 1920s (Citation2000, Citation2010). This argument does not have room for the discussion of the infantilization of racialized persons that saw fit to term adult black and Asian men 'boy' (Kennedy, Citation2002; Kim, Citation2002).