New Books in Canadian Studies New Books Network

In 2018, Janis Thiessen, Kimberley Moore, and collaborator Kent Davies refashioned a used food truck into a mobile oral history lab. Together they embarked on a journey around Manitoba, gathering stories about the province’s food and the people who make, sell, and eat it. Along the way, they visited restaurant owners, beer brewers, grocers, farmers, scholars, and chefs in their kitchens and businesses, online, and on board the food truck. The team conducted nearly seventy interviews and indulged in a bounty of prairie delicacies, from Winnipeg’s “Fat Boys” to Steinbach’s perogies to Churchill’s cloudberry jam.
Thiessen and Moore serve up the results of this research in Mmm... Manitoba: The Stories Behind the Foods We Eat (U Manitoba Press, 2024). Mixing recipes, maps, archival records, biographies, and full-colour photographs with fascinating stories, they showcase the province’s diverse food histories. Through the sharing and preparing of food, the authors investigate food security and regulation, Indigenous foodways and agriculture, capitalism’s impact on the agri-food industry, and the networks between Manitoban food producers and retailers. The book also explores the roles of gender, ethnicity, migration, and colonialism in Manitoba’s food history. From kjielkje and schmauntfat to snow goose tidbits, chicken karaage to pork inihaw, mmm... Manitoba offers a thoughtfully nuanced, deliciously digestible, and wholly unique regional history that is sure to satisfy.
Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.
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How do bureaucratic documents create and reproduce a state’s capacity to see? What kinds of worlds do documents help create? Further, how might such documentary practices and settler colonial ways of seeing be refused?
Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing: Documentation, Administration, and the Interventions of Indigenous Art (Fordham University Press, 2023) by Dr. Danielle Taschereau Mamers investigates how the Canadian state has used documents, lists, and databases to generate, make visible—and invisible—Indigenous identity. With an archive of legislative documents, registration forms, identity cards, and reports, Dr. Taschereau Mamers traces the political and media history of Indian status in Canada, demonstrating how paperwork has been used by the state to materialise identity categories in the service of colonial governance. Her analysis of bureaucratic artefacts is led by the interventions of Indigenous artists, including Robert Houle, Nadia Myre, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, and Rebecca Belmore. Bringing together media theories of documentation and the strategies of these artists, Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing develops a method for identifying how bureaucratic documents mediate power relations as well as how those relations may be disobeyed and re-imagined.
By integrating art-led inquiry with media theory and settler colonial studies approaches, Dr. Taschereau Mamers offers a political and media history of the documents that have reproduced Indian status. More importantly, she provides us with an innovative guide for using art as a method of theorising decolonial political relations. This is a crucial book for any reader interested in the intersection of state archives, settler colonial studies, and visual culture in the context of Canada’s complex and violent relationship with Indigenous peoples.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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The thrilling true story of Agent A12, the earliest enemy of the Nazis, and the first spy to crack Hitler's deadliest secret code: the framework of the Final Solution.
In public life, Dr. Winthrop Bell was a Harvard philosophy professor and wealthy businessman.
As an MI6 spy--known as secret agent A12--in Berlin in 1919, he evaded gunfire and shook off pursuers to break open the emerging Nazi conspiracy. His reports, the first warning of the Nazi plot for World War II, went directly to the man known as C, the mysterious founder of MI6, as well as to various prime ministers. But a powerful fascist politician quietly worked to suppress his alerts. Nevertheless, Dr. Bell's intelligence sabotaged the Nazis in ways only now revealed in Jason Bell's Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Agent A12 and the Solving of the Holocaust Code (Pegasus Books, 2024).
As World War II approached, Bell became a spy once again. In 1939, he was the first to crack Hitler's deadliest secret code: Germany's plan for the Holocaust. At that time, the führer was a popular politician who said he wanted peace. Could anyone believe Bell's shocking warning?
Fighting an epic intelligence war from Eastern Europe and Russia to France, Canada, and finally Washington, DC, Agent A12 was a real-life 007, waging a single-handed struggle against fascists bent on destroying the Western world. Without Bell's astounding courage, the Nazis just might have won the war.
Jason Bell, PhD, is a professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick. He has served as a Fulbright Professor in Germany (at Winthrop Bell's alma mater, the University of Göttingen), and has taught at universities in Belgium, the United States, and Canada. He was the first scholar granted exclusive access to Winthrop Bell's classified espionage papers. He lives in New Brunswick, Canada.  
Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.
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In 1845 an expedition led by Sir John Franklin vanished in the Canadian Arctic. The enduring obsession with the Franklin mystery, and in particular Inuit information about its fate, is partly due to the ways in which information was circulated in these imperial spaces. Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge: The Franklin Family, Indigenous Intermediaries, and the Politics of Truth (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Annaliese Jacobs Claydon examines how the Franklins and other explorer families engaged in science, exploration and the exchange of information in the early to mid-19th century. It follows the Franklins from the Arctic to Van Diemen's Land, charting how they worked with intermediaries, imperial humanitarians and scientists, and shows how they used these experiences to claim a moral right to information.
Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge shows how the indigenous peoples, translators, fur traders, whalers, convicts and sailors who explorer families relied upon for information were both indispensable and inconvenient to the Franklins. It reveals a deep entanglement of polar expedition with British imperialism, and shows how geographical knowledge intertwined with convict policy, humanitarianism, genocide and authority. In these imperial spaces families such as the Franklins negotiated their tenuous authority over knowledge to engage with the politics of truth and question the credibility and trustworthiness of those they sought to silence.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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To the degree that Canadians remember the treatment passengers on the Komagata Maru received when they were barred entry to the port of Vancouver in 1914, it is typically remembered in contrast to the supposed multiculturalism and openness of the country today. Contributors to this volume challenge this framing from top to bottom; not only do they trace out the legacies of the Komagata Maru as ongoing history, but they simultaneously challenge recovery narratives that obscure the colonial and imperial dynamics that are ultimately so fundamental to this story.
Phil Henderson is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Carleton University’s Institute of Political Economy where his research interests focus on the interrelations between Indigenous land/water defenders and organized labour in what’s presently known as Canada. More information can be found at his personal website.
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Burnt by Democracy: Youth, Inequality, and the Erosion of Civic Life (University of Toronto Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Kennelly traces the political ascendance of neoliberalism and its effects on youth. The book explores democracy and citizenship as described in interviews with over forty young people – ages 16 to 30 – who have either experienced homelessness or identify as an activist, living in five liberal democracies: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
Highlighting significant cuts to social and affordable housing, astronomical increases in the costs of higher education, and the transformation and erosion of state benefits systems, Dr. Kennelly argues that democracy’s decline is not occurring because young people are apathetic, or focused on informal politics, or unaware of their civic duties. Rather, it is because of collective misunderstanding about how democracy is actually structured, how individuals learn to participate, and how growing wealth inequality has undermined the capacity of those at the bottom to meaningfully advocate for changes that might improve their conditions.
Against a vivid and often heart-breaking backdrop of stories from young people struggling to survive and thrive under conditions of ever-expanding state retrenchment and inequality, Burnt by Democracy makes a timely and impassioned plea for protecting and strengthening democracy by truly levelling the playing field for all.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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