Contested Histories of Racialization and the Legacies of Sir John A Macdonald

The year 2015 marked the bicentenary of Sir John A. Macdonald’s birth and sparked renewed interest in his legacies and the contested histories of race and racialization in Canada. One version of a monolithic history of Canada venerates Sir John A. Macdonald for his role as Canada’s first Prime Minister, a paternal figure of Confederation, and a nation builder who implemented projects of infrastructure and industrial development (i.e., Canadian Pacific Railway) and systems of land tenure and ownership. This dominating story of Macdonald’s legacies reflects a historical canon of biographies, dramatic plays, musicals, guided tours and monuments such that Macdonald’s history is conflated with a founding history of Canada. By contrast, diverse and different stories about human erasure, physical and cultural displacement, and assimilation—notably, of Black, Asian, and Indigenous peoples—are made marginal by the dominating discourse of so-called Canadian national progress. The essays presented in this issue of the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry (JCRI) (Volume 3, Number 1) contest dominant interpretations of the legacies of Sir John A. Macdonald by offering theoretical, performative, and experiential analyses of Canadian history, race, colonialism, and Indigenous cultural resurgence.