Tours Inside the Snow Globe: Ottawa Monuments and National Belonging

The
toppling of monuments globally in the last few years has highlighted the
potency of monuments as dynamic and affectively-loaded participants in society.

In the context of Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, monuments
inspire colonial and imperial nostalgia, compelling visitors to consistently
re-imagine Canada as a white, Anglophone nation, built through the labour of
white men: politicians, soldiers, and businessmen. At the same time, Ottawa
monuments allow for dominant affective relationships to the nation to be
challenged, demonstrated through subtle and explicit forms of defacement and
other interactions that compel us to remember colonial violence, pacifism,
violence against women, racisms.

Organized as a series of
walking tours throughout Ottawa, the chapters in Tours Inside the
Snow Globe demonstrate the affective capacities of monuments and
highlight how these monuments have ongoing relationships with their sites, the
city, other monuments, and local, deliberate, national, and casual communities
of users. The tours focus on the lives of a monument to an unnamed Indigenous
scout, the National War Memorial, Enclave: the Women’s Monument, and the
Canadian Tribute to Human Rights. Two of the tours offer analyses of the
ambivalent representations of women and Indigeneity in Ottawa’s statue
landscape.

Tonya Davidson teaches sociology at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is the co-editor of Seasonal Sociology (with Ondine Park) and Ecologies of Affect (with Ondine Park and Rob Shields).