The Great White North encounters September 11: race, gender, and nation in Canada's national daily, the Globe and Mail.

• Author: Jiwani, Yasmin

Terror is a feature of the symbolic order, the vast mesh of representations and narratives both official and unofficial public and private, in which a culture works out its sense of itself It affects that dynamic but relatively stable set of implicit parameters that establish a group's sense of the actual and the possible and create a loose but definite sense of collective identity.--Geoffrey Galt Harpham (2002: 573)

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BY BEGINNING THIS ARTICLE WITH AN EPIGRAPH FROM HARPHAM, MY INTENTION IS to highlight the nexus between the construction of terror and the consolidation of national identity. In the following sections, I argue that Canada's national daily, The Globe and Mail offered a symbolic and discursive universe that reinvented the Other in ways that helped to re-inscribe the nation as a peaceful haven. I contend that such an imaginary has strategic uses in formulating discourses of nationness, reflecting a textured landscape in which race, gender, and nation are interwoven in ways that suggest a unifying and homogeneous national identity. In the first part of the article, I discuss the centrality of the news media as purveyors of hegemonic ideals, and as unifying forces in solidifying a sense of an imagined collective, one based on a shared adherence to national mythologies. In the latter part of the article, I turn to an analysis of the coverage provided by the Globe and Mail, one of the national dailies, in the immediate aftermath of the events of September 11. Exercising an informal textual and discourse analysis of the paper's coverage, I outline the various ways in which race and gender are utilized as tropes by which to secure an image of the Canadian nation as a peaceful haven threatened by Others, whose differences are inflected in raced and gendered ways. I pay particular attention to representations of Muslim women, especially those in Afghanistan.

Situating the Print Media in the Canadian Landscape

In a nation whose geographic size is enormous and whose population lives on a miniscule percentage of the total land mass, the role of the national media assumes even greater import when considering issues of social cohesion and the construction of an imagined community (Anderson, 1983). The news media are a crucial conduit through which representational discourses about the self and other are communicated (Sreberny, 2002). Getting news to various provinces and territories and incorporating news from each of these localities is a challenge that few nations face. Added to this, regional differences compound the situation by reflecting divergent interests, agendas, and degrees of racial and cultural diversity. Language remains a major source of tension, localized in the popular imagination as stemming from and resulting in two distinct solitudes, the French and the English, both of which are enshrined as the founding or charter groups. Notwithstanding the above, the Canadian landscape is also marked by intense media concentration, wherein news stories (and entertainment media) are provided by a few conglomerates, and where local stories are often refracted through the lens of the monopoly that governs that local subsidiary (Hackett et al., 2000; Winter, 1997; 2002).

In terms of print media, three large corporations dominate the scene: Bell Globemedia Inc., CanWest Global Corporation, and Torstar. Within Quebec, Quebecor is a major player in that provincial market, being largely responsible for the production of French language dailies. There are few independent papers; CanWest Global, Bellglobemedia, or Torstar own most of those circulated in the major cities. The two national dailies, The Globe and Mail and the National Post, are owned by Bell Globemedia and CanWest Global, respectively, the two largest corporations. Thus, a paper like The Globe and Mail is simply one of Bell Globemedia Corporation's media outlets, which also owns CTV, a leading private broadcaster, the Discovery Channel, TSN.ca, robtv.com, and RDS, as well as numerous other stations and web portals. More important, the corporation has established news bureaus across the country and in numerous other sites worldwide, including Los Angeles, New York, Washington, and in countries such as India, China, Russia, Uganda, and Israel.

Ideologically, The Globe and Mail has the reputation of being positioned at the center and right of center in the political spectrum, as compared to its counterpart, The National Post (Henry and Tator, 2002; 2003; Hunter, 2001; Odartey-Wellington, 2004). Though each paper appears to offer perspectives that are ideologically inflected in different ways, the hegemonic power they wield as national dailies cannot be underestimated. As purveyors of "objective" and balanced accounts of the world (Molotch and Lester, 1974), the news media function as contemporary bards (Fiske and Hartley, 1987) producing and reproducing myths of the nation (Lule, 2002). Through the production and consumption of daily stories, the media communicate a sense of the issues considered to be noteworthy and, by omission, issues that are deemed to be irrelevant or nonexistent. As Gitlin (1979: 12) has argued:

The media specialize in orchestrating everyday consciousness, by virtue of their pervasiveness, their accessibility, their centralized symbolic capacity. They name the world's parts, they certify reality as reality--and when their certifications are doubted and opposed, as they surely are, those same certifications limit the terms of effective opposition. To put it simply: the mass media have become core systems for the production and distribution of ideology. They relay more or less patterned images of reality, through what can be called frames: persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis, and exclusion, by which symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse, whether verbal or visual. This pattern of framing--selecting what gets into the story and what is left out, as well as which issues are brought to public attention instead of evacuated from the public arena--makes the news a powerful ideological agent of legitimation.

Bird and Dardenne suggest that the "news is a particular kind of mythological narrative with its own symbolic codes that are recognized by its audience" (1988: 71-72, see also Lule, 2002). This mythological narrative is constituted by stories and chronicles. Stories draw on a common stock of knowledge and culturally specific templates. They are embellished accounts that reiterate particular ways of communicating information. They derive from and re-inscribe cultural formulae, emphasizing the prescriptive and descriptive elements of the cultural stock of knowledge. Chronicles, however, represent a recording of occurrences more tersely--they resemble the classic pyramid structure of news stories. Yet, which stories are selected and told is made possible by the conventions and criteria that regulate what is defined as news and how a particular news story is told (Schudson, 1982; 1989; Darnton, 1975; Tuchman, 1978).

In the context of the events that occurred on September 11, proximity was a major criterion that facilitated extensive and intensive coverage of the event (Ryan, 2004). That aside, the immediacy, unexpectedness, intensity, unpredictability, resonance, clarity, and intelligibility of the events corresponded with the dominant criteria of newsworthiness (Galtung and Ruge, 1973) and thus facilitated the extent and depth of the coverage that ensued.

Invoking National Mythologies

Canada prides itself on being a "middle-power" nation and a peaceable kingdom as compared to its powerful neighbor to the south. Such a mythology is buttressed by the nation's proclaimed celebration of multiculturalism, its presumed tolerance of Others, and its adherence to non-extremist views and perspectives. Indeed, this notion of the self as moderator, as peacemaker, underpins Canada's many forays into other parts of the world under the mantle of "peacekeeping." However, as Sherene Razack (2004: 13) has aptly noted:

This national mythology has always depended on race. It is informed by the notion that "we" know about democracy and "they" do not; "we" have values of integrity, honesty, and compassion that "they" do not; that "we" are a law-abiding, orderly, and modest people while "they" are not. These Manichean oppositions lend themselves well to news narratives of crime and deviance (Greer and Jewkes, 2005). More important, these binaries are predicated on a history of colonization whereby the colonized were constructed as Others, whose deviance from normatively enshrined appearances, values, and beliefs informed the rationale for empire (Hall, 1990; JanMohamed, 1985; Greenberger, 1969; Wolfe, 2002). Edward Said has demonstrated how these binaries are rendered into absolutes and translated into dogmas that uphold the master narrative of Orientalism. As he puts it (1978: 300), contemporary Orientalism is informed by the construction of "absolute and systematic difference between the West, which is rational, developed, humane, superior, and the Orient, which is aberrant, undeveloped, inferior."

In contemporary Canada, these binaries are mobilized in such a way as to augment the role of the nation as an icon of tolerance and as a "rescuer" of those who are victims of barbaric cultures and practices (Razack, 1998). As Mirchandani and Tastsoglou (2000: 49; see also Hage, 2000) comment, "toleration allows for an enactment of Canadian multiculturalism.... To 'tolerate' is to entrench the opposition between a national 'self,' and groups or individuals constructed as 'other' (between those who hold their breath, and those who smell!)."

National mythologies are undoubtedly gendered. As Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1992) posit, women are emblematic of national boundaries given their role as reproducers of the nation. However, it is critical to bear in the mind that not all women...