Racialized hegemony and nationalist mythologies: representations of war and peace in high school history textbooks, 1945–2005

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which high school Canadian history textbooks authorized from 1945 to the present have represented national participation in wars and peace‐making/keeping operations. I explore how national mythologies of Canada as a kinder, more tolerant, or less violent national body permeate the narratives of national history textbooks, but also position Canada, in racialized terms, as a nation superior to all others and thus burdened with the fantasized responsibility to uplift implicitly inferior spaces, nations and peoples elsewhere on the planet. I illustrate that these textbooks do not simply tell the history of the modern state of Canada and its relationship to war and war‐related issues (i.e., peace‐making/keeping), but rather redundantly disseminate racialized representations of Canada as a glorious and exceptional ‘living organism’ that matures through the development of such redeeming qualities as respect for humanity, morality, compassion, heroism and tolerance. I argue that these patriotic and presumably benign representations of war and peace assist in the hegemonic maintenance of white power, privilege and governance.