Creative Subversions explores how whiteness and Indigeneity are articulated through iconic images of Canadian identity - and the contradictory and contested meanings they evoke. These benign, even kitschy, images, she argues, are haunted by ideas about race, masculinity, and sexuality that circulated during the formative years of Anglo-Canadian nationhood. In this richly illustrated book, Margot Francis shows how national symbols such as the beaver, the railway, the wilderness of Banff National Park, and ideas about “Indianness" evoke nostalgic versions of a past that cannot be expelled or assimilated. As Canadians consume versions of a past that does not nourish, the living themselves become ghostly. Juxtaposing historical images with material by contemporary artists, Francis shows how artists are giving taken-for-granted symbols new and suggestive meanings. From director Richard Fung’s Dirty Laundry to the work of Indigenous artists Jeff Thomas and Kent Monkman and to Shauna Dempsey and Lorri Milan’s performance work Lesbian Park Rangers, this book explores how banal objects can be re-imagined in ways that offer the possibility of moving from an unproblematized possession by the past to an imaginative reconsideration of it. | Creative Subversions by Margot Francis, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters