Finding Diefenbunker: Canadian Nationalism and Cold War Memory

By Sara Matthews, Justin Anstett and Patricia Molloy

The text discusses the legacy of the Cold War in Canada by looking at Prime Minister Diefenbaker’s “Diefenbunkers”—eleven nuclear fallout shelters constructed in secret in the late 1950s to protect the Canadian national and provincial governments from a nuclear strike. While many of these sites have fallen into disrepair or been sold off, one such site has recently been repurposed as “Canada's Cold War Museum” with the explicit purpose of fostering “interest and critical understanding of the Cold War.”

The text questions how the site, its museumological apparatus, and the community curation of various rooms in the museum, constructs a “Cold War” for use in Canadian memory; questions the validity of considering the Diefenbunker as a memory site, following Pierre Nora's seminal concept; and explores the role of fictions in the interactive exhibits that aim to engage Canadian youth—in particular—in the issues of nuclear war, emergency measures, and the role of civil defence. The museum and its displays are interrogated for their performance of and possibilities for inscription, re-inscription, and resignification of Canadian cultural memory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Jun 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781771121293

Sara Matthews

Sara Matthews is Assistant Professor, Department of Global Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University.

Book preview

CMTS DIALOGUES

Finding Diefenbunker

Canadian Nationalism and Cold War Memory

Authors

Sara Matthews and Justin Anstett

Respondent

Patricia Molloy

The Laurier Digital imprint publishes groundbreaking scholarly work, crafted expressly for digital media and to the same standards as WLU Press print publications. All titles undergo rigorous peer review and are exquisitely designed and judiciously edited. The imprint is open to works from all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, though it aims to publish projects that showcase the power inherent in digital media and that seek to revolutionize the reading experience, pedagogy, and scholarly communication in general.

CMTS Dialogues

In this unconventional series, short, thought-provoking texts analyze a specific work related to memory and testimony in the contemporary world. Each is accompanied by a set of questions addressed to the author by a respondent. Intentionally non-conclusive, these texts seek to engage a community of readers in a virtual debate in order to further discussion on salient aspects of our here and now.

Previously published title in the CMTS Dialogues Series

The Dialectic of Truth and Fiction in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, by Milo Sweedler

Contents

Preamble

Patricia Molloy

Presentation

Sara Matthews and Justin Anstett

Dialogue

Authors: Sara Matthews and Justin Anstett

Respondent: Patricia Molloy

About the Contributors

Preamble

Patricia Molloy

As someone whose work has long focused on media representations and cultural narratives of war, violence, sovereignty and nationhood, I am especially intrigued – simultaneously fascinated and disturbed – by the practices of the Diefenbunker, Canada’s Cold War Museum (http://diefenbunker.ca/exhibitions/), and its implications for how Canada’s Cold War history is understood, framed, and taught – or, perhaps a better word, packaged. I am thus grateful for this opportunity to introduce and respond to Sara Matthews and Justin Anstett’s paper, Finding Diefenbunker: Canadian Nationalism and Cold War Memory. My recent book (2012), Canada/US and Other Unfriendly Relations: Before and After 9/11, is particularly concerned with the processes, the practices and policies, by which Canada not only defines but asserts itself as a nation to itself and the rest of the world. The book is something of a sequel to my MA thesis in Art History, which examined the development of Canadian cultural policy and how it shifted from before World War II to the postwar years, as the Canadian cultural elite sought to align cultural policy with foreign policy objectives of projecting a certain image of the nation: an image befitting a leading democratic nation and emerging middle-power state. This suited Canada just fine at the time; in fact, as I argue in my book, it was our status as a middle-power that enabled Canada to assume the role of peacekeeper, one of our most deeply entrenched and enduring myths of identity.

I say myths because, as Sherene Razack (2004) argues in White Knights and Dark Threats, Canada’s proud tradition of peacekeeping is but a history of imperialist adventures and cannot be thought of outside of a colonial context. But the myth of Canada as a peaceable kingdom served an important function in our national imaginary: distinguishing us from the United States as nicer and less aggressive (33). They are warmongers and we are