Roxanne L. Korpan

Roxanne L. Korpan, “Scriptural Relations: Colonial Formations of Anishinaabemowin Bibles in Nineteenth-Century Canada,” Material Religion 17, no. 2 (2021): 147-176.

Roxanne L. Korpan’s article is a gripping interdisciplinary analysis of religious and colonial history of North America, alongside a skillfully developed material culture analysis. Korpan offers an in-depth examination of Christian bible translations done by Anishinaabe chief and Methodist minister, Kahkeaquonaby, or Peter Jones. The article expertly demonstrates how Indigenous-language bible translations not only facilitated relations between Indigenous peoples, missionaries, and colonial agents, but also represented a form of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. The article stands out because Korpan prioritizes the object history and materiality of the Indigenous-language bibles and effectively argues that religious texts reveal a distinct form of Indigenous activism. The intersection of cultural and religious history, coupled with Korpan’s compelling argument about Indigenous sovereignty, highlights the creativity in her analytical approach and the importance of her work.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

Emilie Jabouin, “Black Women Dancers, Jazz Culture and ‘Show Biz’: Recentering Afro-Culture and Reclaiming Dancing Black Bodies in Montréal, 1920s–1950s” Canadian Journal of History 56, no. 3 (2021): 229-265.

In this successful interdisciplinary article, Emilie Jabouin offers a restorative history of Montreal jazz and its origins. Despite the powerful marginalizing mechanisms of jazz historiography and the historical record – which she convincingly exposes – Jabouin demonstrates the fundamental role of dance, and in particular the performances of Black women, in the development of jazz culture and its subsequent commercialization. The author forcefully and coherently combines historiography, visual archives and personal experience to offer a feminist and transnational cultural history of Montreal jazz in the first half of the 20th century. Emilie Jabouin’s article is also a true lesson in interdisciplinary methodology as she draws on historiography, Black feminist theory, iconographic analysis and experiential knowledge to unfold her argument.

Michel Dahan, «“Tout le monde voyage” : l’agence Hone & Rivet et les débuts de l’industrie touristique au Canada (1894-1939) ». Canadian Historical Review 102, 3 (2021) : 365-389.

The history of Canadian tourism is skillfully renewed by Michel Dahan’s article, which offers a multidimensional analysis of the first decades of the existence of the Hone & Rivet Agency, a pioneer company in the Canadian tourism industry. Dahan’s article stands out for its original approach at the junction of the history of entrepreneurship, the history of the tourism industry, and the history of Quebec Catholicism, all of which constitute an important contribution to Quebec historiography. Using a variety of sources – newspapers, pamphlets, family archives, photographs, correspondence, religious archives – in elegant prose, Dahan shows how this Catholic enterprise prospered through its links with the ecclesiastical hierarchy and various international intermediaries. The important players in the tourism industry that the author presents to us participated in the transformations of Quebec society in the early 20th century. Dahan reveals with finesse the gendered and transnational aspects of this history.