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Jeffrey D. Brison, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada: American Philanthropy and the Arts and Letters in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 2005)
JEFFREY BRISON'S Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada: American Philanthropy and the Arts and Letters in Canada is a good book. It is also deceptive. In the "Preface" Brison suggests that this text is designed to address a straightforward issue: "the relationship between American wealth [represented by the massive Carnegie and Rockefeller philanthropic foundations] and Canadian culture in the days preceding the advent of consistent federal support for the arts and letters in Canada [in the form of the Canada Council]." (ix) In reality, this book is a sustained engagement with two different but, as Brison explains, intimately inter-related narratives: the development of professionalized intellectual and cultural work in Canada and the processes of Canadian-American relations from the 1930s to the 1950s. What ties these two narratives together is the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations and the ways in which Canadian intellectuals and artists work with them to build a national cultural infrastructure in Canada.
Methodologically, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada is anything but simple. In Brison's view, the foundations' interaction with Canadian artists and intellectuals both was, and was not, a case of American cultural imperialism. Drawing heavily on the work of the late Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, Brison argues several key points. First, the creation - in the United States - of large philanthropic foundations represented a transformation of wealth into cultural power in civil society. Through their ability to channel resources, Rockefeller and Carnegie were able to influence a broad range of cultural processes from religious practice to the development of scientific medicine. second, these foundations' interests in Canada represented an outward extension of American cultural...