Representing Twentieth Century Canadian Colonial Identity: The Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE)

The author points out that colonialism in twentieth century Canada operated as a totalizing discourse, administered not by the force of a colonizing power, but by the mimicry of descendants from the constructed British imperial centre. She argues that these Anglo-Celtic descendants built a colonial identity that in its ideal manifestation asserted universal dominance and control, demanding that all difference assimilate or cease to exist. The Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE), a Canadian women's patriotic organization formed in Montreal in 1900 by Margaret Clark Murray, a journalist, philanthropist and wife of an influential McGill University professor, is used by the author to represent this colonial identity; a hegemonic process that was constantly changing, and produced in a recursive relationship to the threats and resistance that, at specific moments, challenged its composition. The author traces the historical/cultural geography of the IODE to reveal the shifting focus of Canadian identity from imperial space to national space. This shift, she maintains, was produced in a multiplicity of geographic locations that offer a complicated challenge to theories of 'public' and 'private', of masculine and feminine and the 'everyday' and the 'theoretical'.

PhD dissertation

McGill University

Montreal

1996

x-271p.

en