Reimagining Canada
Language, Culture, Community, and the Canadian Constitution
- Publisher
- McGill-Queen's University Press
- Initial publish date
- Feb 1994
- Category
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780773511521
- Publish Date
- Feb 1994
- List Price
- $32.95
Add it to your shelf
Where to buy it
Out of print
This edition is not currently available in bookstores. Check your local library or search for used copies at Abebooks.
Description
Webber begins by showing how different conceptions of culture, Language, and nation shaped Canada's constitutional negotiations from 1960 until the referendum of 1992. He then calls for a reconception of the terms of the debate, claiming that the terms now used, often borrowed from quite different societies, have made resolution of the constitutional issues more difficult. He rejects the Language of nation and nationalism, and the tendency towards exclusiveness implicit in that Language, arguing for a Canadian community founded not on a rigid set of "shared values" but on shared debates and shared engagements through time. Recognizing that Canadians belong simultaneously to the larger community and to other more local communities each generating its own sense of allegiance Webber describes how their relationships are shaped by institutional, linguistic, and cultural factors and notes that these multiple influences produce an asymmetrical structure. He maintains that this structure should be reflected in an assymetrical constitution, and can be accommodated without undermining individual rights. Webber offers both an overview of the constitutional negotiations and a set of reflections on the appropriate relationship between culture, Language, and political community in Canada. These reflections, while rooted in the Canadian context, hold lessons for other pluralistic federations, or for nations confronting similar issues of cultural accommodation.
About the author
Editorial Reviews
"The book goes beyond its subject matter -- constitutional negotiations -- offering an imaginative, indeed philosophical, examination of how Canada has carried and should carry these out." Jenefer Curtis, Ottawa Citizen. "After all the anger and polemic
Other titles by
Recognition versus Self-Determination
Dilemmas of Emancipatory Politics
Between Consenting Peoples
Political Community and the Meaning of Consent
Storied Communities
Narratives of Contact and Arrival in Constituting Political Community
Let Right Be Done
Aboriginal Title, the Calder Case, and the Future of Indigenous Rights