The intersection between nature and culture has long been a relationship that has been constantly changing. In recent years, the rise of capitalism and continued emphasis on promoting a consumer culture has thrust this rapid progression into prominence. With this highlighting of the commercialization of spaces, a growing realization that identity categories are merely social constructs dictated and perpetuated by a materialistic society soon follows. Specifically, our consumerist approaches and treatment of nature leads the de-legitimization and even erasures of concepts of race if they do not directly fit within such capitalistic structures. Thus, the rise of consumer culture contributes directly to the discourses surrounding identity categories
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As Sunera Thobani’s article entitled “Multiculturalism and the Liberalizing Nation” argues, the concept of race was actually used as an exploitative tool to fulfill ulterior motives within the context of Canadian history. When Canada altered their previously strict immigration policy and implemented a “more welcoming” multicultural strategy, it was not done only to prove that the nation had undergone “a successful transition from a white settler colony to multiracial, multi- ethnic [...] society” (144). Rather, with a great demand for workers to supplement/aid in the repair of Canada’s economy post World War II, decolonizing instability of many regions in the perceived “Third World” motivated many workers to immigrate to Canada and take advantage of this opportunity. However, the reality of the situation is that Canada’s liberal multiculturalism was created as a pretense under which to capitalize on attracting cheap labour for capitalistic development. Simultaneously, the myth of Canada being a welcoming place for immigrants of all races and backgrounds became widely perpetuated, with Thobani claiming, “multiculturalism thus allows the nation to be imagined as homogeneous in relation to the difference of cultural …show more content…
In William Cronon’s piece “The Trouble with Wilderness”, he documents such an appropriation of nature with by the “elite urban tourists and wealthy sportsmen” who “created wilderness in their own image” (23). This came at the expense of Native Americans who having inhabited these lands for generations, being driven out of their ancestral homes, all to mold nature and it’s spaces into an image of which Western society finds desirable. As Cronon observes “The removal of Indians to create an ‘uninhabited wilderness’ – uninhabited as never before in the human history of the place – reminds us just how invented, just how constructed, the American Wilderness really is” (23). This idea of nature becoming a social constructed entity is not dissimilar to notions of race that have been perpetuated by society, with Cronon affirming “there is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny”
As Sunera Thobani’s article entitled “Multiculturalism and the Liberalizing Nation” argues, the concept of race was actually used as an exploitative tool to fulfill ulterior motives within the context of Canadian history. When Canada altered their previously strict immigration policy and implemented a “more welcoming” multicultural strategy, it was not done only to prove that the nation had undergone “a successful transition from a white settler colony to multiracial, multi- ethnic [...] society” (144). Rather, with a great demand for workers to supplement/aid in the repair of Canada’s economy post World War II, decolonizing instability of many regions in the perceived “Third World” motivated many workers to immigrate to Canada and take advantage of this opportunity. However, the reality of the situation is that Canada’s liberal multiculturalism was created as a pretense under which to capitalize on attracting cheap labour for capitalistic development. Simultaneously, the myth of Canada being a welcoming place for immigrants of all races and backgrounds became widely perpetuated, with Thobani claiming, “multiculturalism thus allows the nation to be imagined as homogeneous in relation to the difference of cultural …show more content…
In William Cronon’s piece “The Trouble with Wilderness”, he documents such an appropriation of nature with by the “elite urban tourists and wealthy sportsmen” who “created wilderness in their own image” (23). This came at the expense of Native Americans who having inhabited these lands for generations, being driven out of their ancestral homes, all to mold nature and it’s spaces into an image of which Western society finds desirable. As Cronon observes “The removal of Indians to create an ‘uninhabited wilderness’ – uninhabited as never before in the human history of the place – reminds us just how invented, just how constructed, the American Wilderness really is” (23). This idea of nature becoming a social constructed entity is not dissimilar to notions of race that have been perpetuated by society, with Cronon affirming “there is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny”