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Reviews
| Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada. By Franca Iacovetta. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2006. xiv + 370 pp. Photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 Canadian (cloth).
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This book makes an important addition to immigration history in North America, which has mostly focused on the great surge of migration from the 1860s to the outbreak of World War I, and with it, the transition to modern, urban, industrial society. This emphasis almost automatically led to irresolvable debates about uprootedness and transplantation that have been rescued more recently by cultural histories of malleable and invented ethnicities. Attention to mid- and late-twentieth-century immigration fundamentally changes this historiography. New travel and communications technologies, the coming of non-Europeans, the rise of a modern welfare society, the application of social scientific reasoning, and an ascending gospel of multicultural toleration produced a distinctive immigration era. Gatekeepers is part of this later narrative, albeit situated during the early decades of the Cold War. It focuses therefore on the reception of European refugees to Canada and not the later arrival of the more racialized immigrants such as Vietnamese, Chileans, Chinese, Lebanese, and Ethiopians. |
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The book is especially innovative in its methodology, linking cultural studies with Marxist analysis and drawing generously on the works of Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Sam Cohen, and others. Iacovetta argues that Canadian agents of integration employed a particular discourse to pursue the singular goal of integrating newcomers into a middle-class culture that was inherently heterosexual, patriarchal, capitalistic, and even racist. These agents included government social welfare and citizenship bodies, community immigration reception organizations, and journalists and film producers who shaped the "orderly" cultural entry of dispossessed immigrants into Canada. Iacovetta is particular not only about the ways in which Canada and Canadian values were presented to the immigrants, but also the process by which the culture and stories of the newcomers were trivialized and turned into consumables for the "enrichment" of the very society that was bent on assimilating them. |
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Canada's anti-Communism is not a new concern, but Gatekeepers takes the reader to new depths in this discourse. It shows just how intensely, broadly, cleverly, and paternalistically the ideology was pursued, particularly regarding two scantily examined arenas: sexual politics and mental health. Canadian gatekeepers were much more than homophobic: they attempted to inculcate newcomers with a specific, twentieth-century, gendered formula of domestic intercourse that idealized a civic-minded mother and a sympathetic father of assured masculinity who raised neat and well-adjusted children. Coincidentally, the imperative of "normalizing" what were considered immigrant pathologies was itself a way of reinforcing middle-class ideals for all Canadians. The book's consideration of mental health, and psychiatry in particular, is noteworthy. Concerns raised over immigrant mental illness reflected Canadian fears of nonconformist, dissenting newcomers and their hope that the "knowledge claims" (p. 64) of secular social sciences could create formulaic middle-class liberals. |
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This book is highly accessible. It is not published by a university press, but by Between the Lines, a progressive publishing house whose website promises books with "critical perspectives" from authors who actually "want to be read." Iacovetta reaches this standard well, producing a jargon-free and lucid text. Lengthy, multipage exposés of specific events, documents, and individuals are especially effective. They interpret specific cases at Canada's Citizenship Branch, settlement houses, urban institutes, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and social work offices and in magazine articles and documentary films. These exposés illustrate the fear, resistance, and hope of newcomers encountering the schemes of the gatekeepers while providing the grist of the main arguments. |
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This book describes a continentwide phenomenon with a special focus on institutions based in Toronto, the rapidly ascending cultural center of Canada in the postwar years. One could debate the use of "Canada" in the title, as the book offers relatively little comment on cities such as Montreal, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Edmonton, or smaller regional centers. I was left wondering about the particular array of gatekeepers in various cities and specific historical trajectories, demographic developments, provincial politics, migration crossroads, mixes of national and international migrations, language, and regional and local variations that would have affected the specific nature of Cold War cultures in different places. In deciphering those cultures in a meticulous and lucid manner, however, this book adds significantly to our understanding of the postwar immigration story. This is a dynamic and innovative study of a period that has just begun to attract its rightful analysis.
Royden Loewen
University of Winnipeg
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