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Patrizia Gentile and Jane Nicholas, eds., Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2013)
Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History is an expansive col- lection that attempts, in the editors' words, to "position the contested body as another category of analysis towards understanding both Canadian history and the nation." (3) Assembled between the covers are not only some of the lead- ing Canadian historians in the area, but also some of the most novel explorations of bodies, nation, and Canadian history recently published. Collectively, these articles push scholars toward material- izing histories of nation and nationalism in ways that contribute both to Canadian history and to theories of the body and embodiment.
Contesting Bodies is divided into three parts, which explore, respectively, the making of bodily and embodied knowl- edge, bodily representation, and the regulation and containment of variously othered bodies. Within each part is an array of articles that take on the topic within a variety of historical periods and often through differing scholarly per- spectives - some authors "stick to the history," while others illustrate their his- torical accounts by utilizing, for example, Foucaultian theories of discursive pro- duction or Butler's theory of performa- tivity. Despite their differing approaches and historical periods, running through each of the chapters is a recognition of the body not as a natural object but as a dynamic, contested text, the meaning of which shifts according to the time and place in which it materializes.
In Part I, authors explore how bodily knowledge is produced not only by dis- courses of race (Barrington Walker, Gillian Poulter) and masculinity (Amy Shaw),...