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ABSTRACT: This study investigates how The Birth of a Nation's Canadian exhibition and reception shaped Canada's racial formation during a decisive period of nation building. The notoriously racist film took Canada by storm despite national mythologies founded on principles of equality and compassion. While Black Canadians grounded their protests against the film in patriotic ideals, white Canadians brandished those ideals as evidence of the protests' redundancy. Analyzing historical discourse in mainstream newspapers, the Black press, trade publications, and censorship documents, I investigate how seemingly benevolent, Canadian modalities of racism enabled this white-supremacist film to triumph north of the border.
KEYWORDS: The Birth of a Nation (1915), transnational, reception, Black activism, Canadian audiences, censorship, World War I, national identity, anti-Black racism, white supremacy, liberalism
"We see in the United States what grave problems may arise from the presence of a race unable to become full members of the same social family as ourselves."
Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Prime Minister of Canada (Lieeral), 1910
"The long history of anti-Blackness in Canada has, for the most part, occurred alongside the disavowal of its existence. "
Roeyn Maynard, writer, activist, and educator, 2017
In recent years, racist events in Canada-from police killing Black and Indigenous people to evidence of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wearing blackface and brownface-have grabbed international headlines and provoked national conversations about Canadian racism. Yet efforts to dismantle racist systems have been repeatedly hindered by those who dwell on the more elementary question of whether Canada or its institutions can be accurately described as racist, especially when compared to the United States. This recurring incredulity at the prospect of racism in Canada occurs because it contradicts widely cherished mythologies of Canadian equality and compassion. As Cheryl Thompson argued in the aftermath of Trudeau's blackface scandal, "acknowledging the reality-that we have race issues in Canada-would mean we'd have to admit to the world, and to ourselves, that we haven't lived up to our own mythology."1 This essay examines a part of Canada's racist history: the exhibition and reception of D. W. Griffith's notorious epic The Birth of a Nation (1915) across the country. The rapturous response to this explicitly white-nationalist American film demonstrates that virulent anti-Blackness was a sanctioned and central feature of popular entertainment in Canada...