Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Cave-LaCoste, Bristol

106 Left History
 
 
Jennifer Brier, Jim Downs, and Jennifer L. Morgan, eds. Connexions:  Histo-
r ies  o f  Race and Sex in Nor th America  (Urbana, Chicago, Springfield: Uni-
versity of  Illinois Press, 2016). 316 pp. Cloth $95.00, Paperback $30.00. 
 
Connexions: Histories of  Race and Sex in North America sets ambitious goals. First, it 
integrates interdisciplinary queer and feminist theory into US history. Secondly, it 
raises provocative questions rather than answering straightforward historical in-
quiries. Most importantly, the authors “[reimagine] the larger arc of  American his-
tory by making race and sexuality the focus.” This is intended to inspire all 
historians, but especially those of  Early America and American slavery, to consider 
sex in their own work (3). Anyone versed in the history of  sexuality will likely find 
this text successful at its project, although historians attached to using traditional 
archives of  primary sources may need more convincing. In the first chapter, Jim 
Downs succinctly offers a methodological solution in the face of  limited material 
evidence when he asks, “can theory take the place of  evidence?” (29). A reader’s 
gut reaction to this question, as excitement or skepticism, may determine their re-
sponse to the book at large. Downs’s work, along with many of  the other pieces in 
Connexions, suggests that going beyond the constraints of  material evidence can pro-
duce necessary and exciting views of  the past.  
The emphasis on innovation and provocation begins with the book’s title. 
Connexions is not a typo, but a reference to a nineteenth-century euphemism for 
illicit sexual contact. A few examples from medical and legal records of  the time 
suggest the term encompassed adultery, venereal disease, and interracial sex. Jennifer 
Brier, Jim Downs, and Jennifer L. Morgan suggest such an antiquated word might 
be re-evaluated by scholars in this century to approach the “multiplicities,” or com-
plex interactions between sex and other social constructions (2). Although the word 
“intersectionality” appears scantly in the remaining chapters, it offers a broad open-
ing to interpret intersections between race and sex in different ways. As a result, 
the subsequent chapters are theoretically as well as topically diverse. While this leaves 
the reader with fewer firm conclusions about the qualitative relationship between 
race and sex, the broad scope is effective at raising new questions for a wider curious 
audience.  
The chapters are divided into three sections: “Deep Connections,” “Beauty 
and Desire,” and “Subjectivities.” However, so many of  the works engage with sub-
jectivity and connection that the divisions do little to orient the reader. The first 
chapters by Downs and Julian B. Carter set the tone for a collection seriously com-
mitted to centring Black and queer subjects. The middle section on “Beauty and 
Desire” raises the most cohesive set of  questions around the role of  race in dis-
course on desire, especially when dominant groups spun conflicting narratives about 
the beauty and/or inadequacy of  non-white bodies. The attention to visuality, bod-
Book Reviews 107
ies, and media plays to the existing source strengths of  Early America. Whereas the 
other essays try to tell new stories in the absence of  documented evidence, essays 
by Sharon Block and Stephanie M.H. Camp, and Brian Connolly in section three, 
consider vast sets of  more traditional sources in seeking new conclusions that others 
have missed. These chapters would be invaluable to scholars less familiar with the 
field of  sexuality studies, but open to incorporating new questions without a dra-
matic shift in their own methods.  
The most compelling chapters have a more biographical focus, notably 
those written by Marisa J. Fuentes, Ernesto Chávez, Jim Downs, and Wanda S. Pil-
low, which allow for more concrete questions about how individuals of  colour nav-
igated sexuality. In these chapters, race was not a straightforward determinant of  
power or social positioning. In Chávez’s “The Soul of  the Boy Was … Aztec,” film 
star Ramon Novarro’s self-fashioning to American audiences is recast as an act of  
agency to improve public perception of  Mexicans (136). Jim Downs tells a story 
of  two black veterans of  the Civil War in love and seeking reunification, though 
records generated by white observers describe them as pitiful and “disgusting” (27). 
By reading widely across records addressing black and white male sexuality, Downs 
suggests words like “filthy” and “disgusting” in this period may have signalled same-
sex sex (21). Fuentes and Pillow break down the mythology surrounding much ear-
lier figures: black brothel owner Rachael Pringle Polgreen of  Barbados, and York 
and Sacajawea of  the famed Lewis and Clark Expedition, whose sexualized depic-
tions in travelogues deserve more critical dissection than previous scholars have 
done. This more biographical, single-subject approach produces more thrilling, if  
more contestable, configurations of  what might have been, and keeps the collection 
appropriately grounded in human vulnerability.   
This collection hits its targets precisely, highlighting the scholarship pos-
sible on sex and race, the utility of  contemporary theoretical frames for historians 
of  sexuality, and the pervasive historical influence of  slavery on racism in the United 
States. However, a glaring inconsistency will likely leave readers wondering. Although 
the title is Connexions: Histories of  Race and Sex in North America, “North America” 
mostly means the United States and colonial America. Fuentes’ chapter, “Power 
and Historical Figuring: Rachael Pringle Polgreen’s Troubled Archive” was the only 
piece set wholly outside of  the geographic US. Its alignment with the collection’s 
themes makes it an essential inclusion but brings further attention to the shortcom-
ing of  this collection as mostly focused on US history. With such a carefully framed 
introduction in every other regard, this conflation of  North America and the United 
States was disappointing. A more transnational array of  essays, exemplified by 
Chávez’s analysis of  Novarro’s celebrity persona, might further extend the reader-
ship. Otherwise, a clearer allegiance to the US field, as is apparent in many individual 
chapters, would probably make this book more marketable to the implied audience. 
The chapters, especially in the final “Subjectivities” section, could have also bene-
fited from some chronological division so that wonderful chapters on twentieth 
108 Left History
century history like Carter’s “Historical Methods and Racial Identification in US 
Lesbian and Gay History” do not get buried by equally important, but very different, 
pieces on early America.  
Connexions offers an easy opening to scholars new to the history of  sexu-
ality and historically rigorous suggestions for how race, sex, and power have inter-
sected, and continue to intersect. This text would prove especially valuable to 
non-historians curious about how historians employ theory. Applying theory to a 
material past—what was rather than what might be—complicates but can ultimately 
strengthen theoretical frameworks constructed in the present moment. Historians 
hoping to engage with contemporary issues should take heed from interdisciplinary 
work such as this.  
 
Bristol Cave-LaCoste  
University of  California, Santa Cruz


Jennifer Brier, Jim Downs, and Jennifer L. Morgan, eds. Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America (Urbana, Chicago, Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2016).

Penner, Mack

Book Reviews 115
 
 
Rhonda L. Hinther, Per ogies  and Pol i t i c s :  Canada’s  Ukrainian Lef t ,  1891–
1991  (Toronto: University of  Toronto Press, 2018). 312 pp. Cloth $65.00. 
The twentieth-century history of  the Ukrainian left in Canada, as Rhonda Hinther’s 
Perogies and Politics makes abundantly clear, was shaped by developments both inter-
nal and external to the movement itself. While never isolated from transnational 
political currents, especially those emanating from the Soviet Union, the trajectory 
of  Ukrainian leftism was tied in at least equal measure to endogenous social dy-
namics among the women, men, and children for whom the movement was, at var-
ious times, a source of  solidarity and success, as well as disappointment and failure. 
Impressively combining aspects of  political, cultural, generational, class, and gender 
history in order to show how these dynamics changed over time, Hinther’s study 
should be of  great interest to a diverse audience. 
Within the period from 1891–1991, Hinther focuses mainly on the years 
from the end of  the First World War through the 1960s. The first three chapters of  
the book deal in turn with Ukrainian men, women, and children as “ethnic hall so-
cialism” carved out a distinct place on the left during the interwar period (21). Struc-
tured institutionally by the Ukrainian Labour Farmer Temple Association and the 
Communist Party of  Canada (CPC), these years are well-trodden historical ground, 
but Hinther is particularly effective in addressing the experiences of  rank-and-file 
Ukrainian leftists who have typically received less scholarly attention than movement 
leaders. Many of  these rank-and-file leftists had complicated relationships with the 
institutions around them, especially the CPC, and by focusing on their experiences 
Hinther strikes a notable dent in a certain top-heavy narrative that largely treats the 
Ukrainian left as uncomplicatedly pro-communist. Chapter four deals with the tu-
multuous history of  the Second World War and its ramifications—repression, in-
carceration, and adaptation—for these leftists. Here, Hinther’s treatment of  the 
myriad consequences of  the internment crisis, where hundreds of  men with ties of  
some kind to the communist movement were arrested and imprisoned, is especially 
noteworthy. The final two chapters discuss adults and young people, respectively, 
as the cultural, ideological, and generational character of  the movement changed 
dramatically during the decades after 1945. The narrative of  these chapters is de-
clensionist in terms of  the movement’s influence and coherence, as Hinther draws 
out how growing feminist and peace movements, along with an emergent New Left, 
contributed to an increasingly wide dispersion pattern for activist energy.  
Throughout these chapters, the operant analytical logic is intersectional. 
Hinther is concerned with understanding the interactions of  gender, class, age, and 
ethnicity as a means of  highlighting the spatial and temporal contingencies that in-
fluenced the standing of  Ukrainian leftists vis-à-vis one another. In showing this, 
116 Left History
Hinther refuses to segregate the component aspects of  individual subjectivities, in-
stead treating these as mutually constitutive, interrelated, and always informative of  
social relations. This intersectional approach is then coupled with an adaptation of  
Gramscian hegemony analysis, which is especially important for Hinther’s exami-
nation of  gender dynamics. Identifying three distinct modes of  masculinity available 
to leftist Ukrainian men—hegemonic, complicit, and subordinate—along with two 
modes of  femininity available to women—hegemonic and oppositional—she traces 
a “gendered discourse and masculinist ideology that privileged and valued the older 
men’s work and activist priorities while marginalizing women’s contributions and 
perspectives” (134). This patriarchal order of  things, while always subject to chal-
lenge, opposition, and change, especially in times of  chaos like that which emerged 
during the Second World War, remained mostly intact throughout the century that 
the book covers. 
Hinther’s particular use of  the hegemony concept is the foremost strength 
of  her analysis, especially in terms of  what the book contributes most generally to 
historical scholarship about left politics. For good reason, left history is often writ-
ten, whether these terms are used or not, in such a way as to emphasize develop-
ments that proceed from a struggle between a hegemonic apparatus and a 
counter-hegemonic movement that levels some form of  challenge to that apparatus. 
In the process of  highlighting this oppositional challenge, it is possible for dynamics 
internal to left movements to be ignored or underplayed. What Hinther shows so 
effectively about the Ukrainian left in Canada is that, while it was attempting to 
build a viable counter-hegemonic alternative to liberal capitalist common-sense, the 
movement was hampered along the way by assumptions and ideals that were more 
limiting than liberating. As Hinther writes in the book’s conclusion, “even in the 
face of  seeming unity, internal tensions and conflicting membership priorities (not 
to mention inequality) challenged—and ultimately contributed to the decline of—
the movement” (206). Hegemonic masculinity, in this way, was partially responsible 
for the shortcomings of  Ukrainian left formations in the twentieth century. This 
insight stands out among others in the book.  
The most distinct limit of  Hinther’s analysis could perhaps be seen as fol-
lowing, understandably, from its main strength. In her discussions of  hegemonic 
social norms within the Ukrainian left, the nature of  the movement’s counter-hege-
monic perspective can feel underdeveloped. Hinther is clear about the presence of  
Marxism-Leninism, the official ideological perspective of  the CPC, but does not 
define or explain this perspective beyond broad strokes. And in the post-war years, 
as the influence of  the CPC waned considerably, the ideological alternatives that 
emerged are noted but not extensively described. The relationship between hege-
monic and counter-hegemonic thinking within the movement is thus not made pre-
cisely apparent. 
Perogies and Politics represents a substantial contribution to the historical lit-
erature on Canadian left movements, but also to historiographies of  gender, youth, 
Book Reviews 117
class, and immigration. Indeed, Hinther shows just how deeply these histories are 
intertwined, and it is to be hoped that her book finds a wide readership. 
 
Mack Penner 
McMaster University


Rhonda L. Hinther, Perogies and Politics: Canada’s Ukrainian Left, 1891–1991 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018).

Geo Takach, Tar Wars: Oil, Environment and Alberta’s Image (Edmonton: Universityof Alberta Press, 2017).Jessica Van Horssen, A Town Called Asbestos: Environmental Contamination, Health, and Resilience in a Resource Community (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016).Valerie Zink and Emily Eaton, Fault Lines: Life and Landscape in Saskatchewan’s Oil Economy (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016)

Jorgenson, Mica

Witnessing Collapse in Miniature: Three Case Studies in Extraction and Environmental History

Bryant, Rachel

Book Reviews 175
Jeffers Lennox, Homelands and Empir es :  Ind ig enous Spac es,  Imperia l  Fi c-
t ions,  and Compet it i on  fo r Ter ri tor y in  Nor theaster n  Nor th Ameri ca,  1690–
1763 (Toronto: University of  Toronto Press, 2017). 334 pp. Softcover $37.95.
Masterfully extending the work of  some of  the most important historical thinkers
from the Atlantic region, including John G. Reid and Elizabeth Mancke, Homelands
and Empires is a ground-breaking new take on the story of  Atlantic Canadian political
culture. This is a richly detailed, impressively illustrated, and highly readable account
of  the political and diplomatic relationships that gradually produced what are cur-
rently called the Canadian Maritimes. Focusing on the years between the English
assault on Port Royal in 1690 and the 1763 Treaty of  Paris, Jeffers Lennox describes
the features and functions of  a unique time in the history of  northeastern Turtle
Island—the near-century during which Indigenous, French, and English populations
failed or declined to assert control over one another and were thus faced with the
continuous and unavoidable problem of  how to peaceably (more or less) share
space. 
Today, for contemporary inhabitants of  these eastern provinces, where
French and Indigenous interests seem to be so frequently and frustratingly sub-
sumed and/or silenced by and within English governance and mythological struc-
tures, Homelands and Empires might be read as the story of  how we got here. The six
chapters that comprise the book explain how relationships among and across these
three solitudes changed in shape and significance over time. The first chapter,
“Neighbours in the Homeland,” surveys the years between 1690 and 1710, casting
French and English authorities as tactical storytellers unsuccessfully seeking to lodge
their narrow versions of  reality within a much wider transatlantic consciousness.
Here Lennox situates Acadia and Nova Scotia as amorphous and impermanent “fic-
tions” struggling and competing to gain purchase and legitimacy in Wabanaki home-
lands and beyond. He explains that such geographic and administrative fantasies
“existed . . . in the minds of  many [European] officials, but not on the ground” of
Wabanakik, where Indigenous peoples continued for many decades to maintain
control over their lands and lifeways (16). 
As the book progresses through its chronology, Lennox’s analytical em-
phasis on colonial maps and surveys increases to correspond with the developing
role those methods of  inscription would play in French and English legitimations
of  imperial fictions. Chapter Two, “Mapping the Spoils of  Peace,” explores how,
between the years of  1710 and 1725, four major attempts to extend British influence
beyond the walls of  small, scattered forts were thwarted by Wabanaki nations who
continuously maintained, asserted, and exercised their rights to act and ally with or
against neighbouring populations—be they Indigenous or European—without sur-
rendering power, freedom, or autonomy. The essential idea that Indigenous peoples
strategically made and broke alliances in and outside of  the eighteenth century, con-
176 Left History
sistently acting in their own best interests, surfaces throughout this book, productively
challenging mythologies that have tended to conflate Indigenous political and diplo-
matic activities with the passive surrender of  land and/or sovereignty. The third
chapter, “A Time and a Place,” describes three types of  shared spaces that emerged
between 1726 and 1744, which were years of  relative peace in the region. These
were commercial spaces, spaces of  political negotiation, and spaces of  “spiritual
accommodation,” and Lennox employs these categories as an analytical frame to
show his readers how shared spaces varied in form and function in accordance with
the values and perspectives of  their creators and participants (89).
Chapter Four, “A Pale on the Coast,” focuses on the founding of  Halifax
and on the relational changes that the arrival of  Governor Edward Cornwallis sig-
nalled to the other inhabitants of  Mi’kma’ki, and especially to the Mi’kmaq them-
selves. Here and in Chapter Five, “Acadia in Paris,” which focuses on the Acadian
Boundary Commission (1750–1755), Lennox identifies the culturally specific strate-
gies that British and French officials developed during this era to try to turn their
beloved fictions into accepted reality. At the same time, he emphasizes how imperial
claims were critiqued and refuted at every turn by astute and able Wabanaki polities.
With the establishment of  Halifax, the British sought to create a contained space
that could be “known” and thereby controlled; early maps of  the settlement helped
create, solidify, and spread knowledge of  what was depicted as an otherwise empty
space to which Britain held a supposedly clear title. Maps played an equally impor-
tant role during the boundary commission in Paris, where French and British rep-
resentatives worked both in competition and in concert to project their power and
knowledge onto seemingly available territory—land from which Wabanakis were
strategically and misleadingly elided. This cartographic elimination of  Wabanaki na-
tions from their homelands helped Britain begin to divest itself  of  the impetus to
compromise or share space. The sixth and final chapter of  Lennox’s book, “Map
Wars and Surveyors of  Peace,” explores how this divestment progressed during the
Seven Years’ War, a period of  military aggression and heightened propaganda that
finally transformed Nova Scotia “from imperial fiction to British plantation” in im-
perial imaginations (237). 
As an urgent and illuminating study of  the types and methods of  story-
telling that disparate populations used to assert claim or belonging in the eighteenth-
century northeast, Homelands and Empires represents an exciting start to the
University of  Toronto Press’s new Atlantic Canada History series. Lennox captures
empires in the process of  creating “knowledge” and of  building the fictional struc-
tures within which Atlantic Canadians continue to live their lives. As he repeatedly
and effectively demonstrates, imperial fictions, like the fiction of  Nova Scotia, re-
quired substantial, significant, and continuous physical and imaginative fortification
to survive inside what steadfastly remained Wabanaki homelands, and to convinc-
ingly feign its own truth and permanence, Britain needed to establish, protect, and
grow a society that would fortify its fictions in perpetuity. By focusing on a period
Book Reviews 177
during which “no single group could dominate the others” (256)—a unique era
when French, English, and Indigenous peoples continuously negotiated the terms
of  their cohabitation—Lennox simultaneously and effectively speaks to the con-
temporary dynamics of  a territory that Anglophone Settlers have arguably never
learned to share.  
Rachel Bryant 
Dalhousie University


Jeffers Lennox, Homelands and Empires: Indigenous Spaces, Imperial Fictions, and Competition for Territory in Northeastern North America, 1690–1763 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017)

Ingram, Robert G.

Book Reviews 131
Building Global Labor Solidarity that, I suggest, one must turn to appreciate the im-
port of  and the challenges that arise in building global labour solidarity. 
Stuart Rosewarne 
The University of  Sydney
James Kirby, Historians and the Chur ch o f  England: Rel igi on  and Histo ri ca l
S cho lar ship,  1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 257pp.
Hardcover $100.00. 
Historians now take seriously historical scholarship’s polemical potential for the
Church of  England’s proponents and opponents. Peter Lake, Anthony Milton,
Justin Champion, Jean-Louis Quantin, Rob Iliffe, and Brian Young have written
particularly fine studies for the early modern period. They have shown that while
early modern historians of  religion deployed evidence in increasingly sophisti-
cated ways, historical erudition got deployed for inherently polemical ends. It is
not, though, as if  nineteenth-century historians have missed that their own era’s
historians produced scholarly, yet polemical, histories of  the English Church. So,
the first thing that James Kirby had to do in his admirable Historians of  the Church
of  England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870–1920, was to explain what differ-
entiates his study from those of  Duncan Forbes, John Burrow, Christopher
Parker, Michael Bentley, and others. Kirby reckons that earlier work on nine-
teenth-century religious histories has mostly been insufficiently contextualized in-
tellectual history; his book, though, aims “to contribute not only to the history of
ideas (religious and historiographical), but also the histories of  scholarship, uni-
versities, and the Church of  England as an institution” (9). 
Historians of  the Church of  England focuses on the histories produced by
late Victorian Anglicans about the English Church. While acknowledging that
Nonconformists, Roman Catholics, and a host of  other non-Anglicans wrote
polemical religious histories between 1870 and 1920, Kirby keeps his sights on
Anglican historians and on intra-Anglican historical debate. In the process, he
tries to explain why, who, how, where, and what religious history got produced by
Anglicans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The reason
why late nineteenth-century Anglicans produced historical scholarship is clear:
well into the next century, history remained the primary site of  religious debate. It
is a commonplace that Anglicans value history, since reason, faith, and tradition
are held to be the three-legged stool atop which Anglicanism rests. Historical
scholarship is a way to ascertain and understand that putative Anglican tradition;
historical scholarship might even create Anglican tradition. Three other things
gave the past salience for the late nineteenth-century Anglican present. Firstly, the
Reformation was, among other things, an attempt to restore the English Church
132 Left History
to its primitive purity: historical scholarship was central to that restoration proj-
ect, since it might identity what had been primitive orthopraxis and orthodoxy
and might, furthermore, pinpoint when the primitive Church had been corrupted.
Secondly, recognition that the thing we now call the English Enlightenment was
not a rationalist, metaphysical movement, but was instead a long debate about the
past’s hold on the present: England’s Enlightenment was a historiographical mo-
ment. Thirdly, there was the Oxford Movement. As Kirby puts it, “[t]he decisive
force behind the ascent of  Anglican historical scholarship in the later Victorian
period was the Oxford Movement, or Tractarianism” (20). In making this judg-
ment he builds on Peter Nockles’s work and rightly breaks from the earlier esti-
mates of  Forbes and Burrow; at the very least, it may be said that none of  the
historians who populate Kirby’s book were neutrals regarding the Oxford Move-
ment. Late nineteenth-century Anglican historians of  the Church of  England,
then, inherited the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Tractarian preoccu-
pations with history; and in the half-century after 1870 they traversed much the
same ground that their Anglican historian forbears had done. On Kirby’s telling,
though, issues of  orthopraxis and orthodoxy mattered less to Anglican historians
between 1870 and 1920 than did “the confessional defence of  the Church of
England’s position in Christendom; and the constitutional defence of  the Church
of  England’s rights in the English polity” (9). For the established Church of  Eng-
land operating in a world after the repeal of  the Test and Corporation Acts, after
Catholic emancipation, and during the rapid expansion of  Britain’s empire, those
inter-confessional and constitutional issues were not of  secondary importance. 
History, then, mattered to the Church of  England and that, in turn, fu-
eled what Kirby identifies as a central feature of  Anglican identity—“the idea of
the learned church.” The Anglican historians who engaged with the confessional
and constitutional issues he identifies drew mainly from the High and Broad
Church traditions, with figures like William Stubbs, E.A. Freeman, and Mandell
Creighton hailing from the former camp and those like J.R. Green, J.R. Seeley,
and T.F. Tout hailing from the latter. Interestingly, Kirby identifies few Evangeli-
cal Anglican historians, whose dearth he chalks up mainly to the fact that Evan-
gelicals were largely uninterested in post-biblical evidence and that they were “less
committed to scholarship as such, prioritizing proselytism and the understanding
of  basic doctrines over the accrual of  erudition, which they feared might lead to
pride” (39). Those Anglicans who did write histories of  the English Church did
not just live within the golden triangle bounded by Oxford, Cambridge, and Lon-
don. Some wrote from local parishes, some wrote from cathedral communities,
some wrote from the universities—not just Oxford and Cambridge but also
King’s College, London, and Owens College, Manchester—and some, like Stubbs
and Creighton, wrote from all three. 
The bulk of  Kirby’s book covers what these historians actually wrote.
Deliberately avoiding studies of  Christian antiquity, Kirby instead focuses on his-
Book Reviews 133
tories of  the post-primitive Church. In five thematic chapters, he examines what
late Victorian Anglican historians had to say about the nation, the constitution,
social and economic history, the Reformation, and providence and progress. Pre-
dictably, there was no scholarly consensus on any of  these issues, and Kirby ably
schematizes potentially unruly material, identifies the points of  contention, and il-
lustrates how and why historians marshalled different bodies of  evidence to reach
different conclusions. While each of  the five thematic chapters can be read as a
stand-alone piece, a few salient themes run across them. Most importantly, they
reveal that late Victorian Anglican historians of  the English Church, like their
Anglican historian predecessors, obsessed about what had led to the cataclysm of
the 1530s and what had happened afterwards. 
The Reformation settlement is the subject of  one chapter, but the Re-
formation’s causes, course, and consequences are persistent subjects across the
book. Why had the Christian church splintered into national churches? Was the
English Church’s primary inheritance English or British? How had the English
Church related to the Roman one before the 1530s? When had the Reformation
really happened: under Henry VIII, Edward VI, or Elizabeth I? And what did the
reign of  Mary Tudor mean? Was the Reformation a break with English religious
history, or not? Had it cemented or created the Erastian English state? Or, was
England’s Erastianism illusory? What were the economic and constitutional ef-
fects of  dissolving the monasteries? Had English Protestantism created capital-
ism? These and a host of  other questions like them run across the chapters giving
a deep coherence to Kirby’s book. If  the late Victorian historians who are the
subject of  the book could not agree on the answers to these questions, at least
they could agree that these were the questions to be asking. Historians of  the Church
of  England ends, though, pointing towards a future when there were fewer polem-
ical Anglican historians who took up these questions. Yes, there were Anglican
historians who wrote about the Anglican pasts, but, on Kirby’s telling, they did so
with less confidence or openness than their late Victorian forbears had done.
Whether or not this was the case is debatable, but it will take a historian of  James
Kirby’s industry and insight to illuminate the polemical ends of  Anglican histori-
ans from Claude Jenkins and Norman Sykes to Gareth Bennett and Patrick
Collinson. 
Robert G. Ingram
Ohio University


James Kirby, Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Pullum, Amanda

Andrej Grubačić and Denis O’Hearn, Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016).

History, Left

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Michael Akladios is a PhD candidate in history at York University, working
under the supervision of  Dr. Roberto Perin. Michael’s dissertation examines the
transnational, pluricultural, and ecumenical history of  Coptic immigrants, first in
Egypt and then later in immigrant communities in Toronto, Montreal, and New
York. In addition to his doctoral research, Michael is the founder and project
manager of  the Coptic Canadian History Project, a non-profit public history and
community outreach organization affiliated with the Clara Thomas Archives and
Special Collections, York University Libraries.
Craig Heron is Professor Emeritus at York University, where he taught in the
Labour Studies and History programs for more than thirty-five years. He is the
author of  numerous articles and books, most recently Lunch-Bucket Lives: Remak-
ing the Workers’ City (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2015). He has been vice-chair of
the Ontario Heritage Foundation, co-chair of  the Workers’ Arts and Heritage
Centre, and president of  the Canadian Historical Association. In 2017 he won the
Lee Lorch (Distinguished Scholar) Award given annually by the Canadian Associ-
ation of  University Teachers.
Franca Iacovetta is Professor of  History at the University of  Toronto and a
trustee of  the Berkshire Conference of  Women Historians. She is the author or
editor of  ten books, including, most recently, a volume in honour of  Luisa
Passerini and the co-edited Beyond Women’s Words: Feminisms and the Practices of  Oral
History in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2018). She is currently completing a
monograph on women’s community-based pluralism.
Ian McKay, who was a fellow student with Craig Heron at the University of
Warwick and Dalhousie University, is now Director of  the Wilson Institute for
Canadian History at McMaster University. His next monograph will be about po-
litical theorist C.B. Macpherson.
James Naylor is Professor of  History at Brandon University and author of  The
Fate of  Labour Socialism: The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Dream of  a
Working-Class Future. He is currently researching the remaking of  class and ethnic-
ity in Winnipeg in the three decades after World War II.
Steve Penfold teaches history at the University of  Toronto. His research consid-
ers the history of  capitalism and culture in Canada.
Jason Russell is Associate Professor of  Labour Studies at Empire State Col-
lege—SUNY. He is the author of Our Union: UAW/CAW Local 27 from 1950 to
1990. Jason is also completing a new monograph on management education and
training in Canada during the post-Second World War period.
Saman Sarheng is an illustrator based in the Greater Toronto Area. His illustra-
tive work mostly focuses on portraits and conceptual editorial illustration.
Peter A. Stevens is a social and cultural historian with a particular interest in
Canadian leisure history. His publications have examined such topics as family
cottaging in Ontario, and the origins of  Canadian Thanksgiving Day. He com-
pleted his PhD at York University, with Craig Heron as his supervisor.
Ryan Targa is a PhD student at York University currently completing his disser-
tation on profiteering in Canada during the First World War. As an undergradu-
ate, Ryan studied under Dr. Craig Heron in his course titled “The Working Class
in Canadian History.” Dr. Heron and Ryan have also worked together on numer-
ous public history initiatives, such as developing York’s Public History Directory.


About the Contributors

Hodgson, Elizabeth

130 Left History
Laine E. Doggett and Daniel E. O’Sullivan, eds., Founding Femini sms in
Medi eval Studi es :  Essays in  Honor  o f  E. Jane Bur ns (Woodbridge, Suffolk:
D.S. Brewer, 2016). 280pp. Hardcover $126.00. 
This rich and suggestive volume of  essays in honor of  E. Jane Burns, the eminent
and prolific feminist medievalist French scholar, wears Burns’ illustrious colours
with considerable aplomb. Edited by two scholars who know Burns well, and in-
cluding essays by fourteen medievalist French literary scholars and historians, Found-
ing Feminisms in Medieval Studies explores the Mongol silk trade, the early illustrated
manuscripts of  Marguerite de Navarre, Saint Anne’s reading habits, and the Tim-
buktu effect, all with a pleasure and verve rightly celebrating Burns’ own eclectic,
playful, and magisterial body of  work.
The collection is framed by a summary of  Burns’ contributions and a con-
sideration of  future directions for medieval studies, as well as an afterword by the
one scholar of  English literature in the collection, Elizabeth Robertson. Its essays
are gathered into four bundles reflective of  Burns’ own interests: “Debating Gen-
der,” “Sartorial Bodies,” “Mapping Margins,” and “Female Authority: Networks and
Influence.” As Robertson suggests in her reflections at the end of  the volume, these
essays should allay the fears of  any who think that historical women and their ma-
terial conditions might have fallen by the wayside in medieval studies. The essays in
Founding Feminisms are both rich in material detail—book history, manuscript prove-
nance, illustrations, archival discoveries—and sophisticated in their readings of
women’s kinship networks, political alliances, reading and devotional practices, and
cultural border-crossings. Considering both women’s own texts and the portrayals
and uses of  women (and trans) figures in medieval French literatures, Founding Fem-
inisms reveals the value and potential of  such synthesizing work.
Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner’s opening essay yields a central metaphor for
the collection in its study of  Jean d’Arras’s 14th century Melusine ou la noble histoire de
Lusignan. The legend of  Melusine, a woman who is part-human, part-animal, part
divine, “stands as a pointer to the way humans cross boundaries” (28) and invites a
reversal of  “the clerical tradition’s negative reading of  Eve” (30), while it playfully,
as Bruckner notes, forces its readers to “y penser et soy esmerveillier” (“to consider
it and be amazed”) (30). Kristin L. Burr’s study of  the 13th century Roman de Silence
likewise notes how the ambivalent narrator leaves the tale’s heroine open to provoca-
tive debate. Daniel O’Sullivan, in turn, studies the Provençal male troubadour and
female troubairitz, as the troubadour, like his Petrarchan descendent, depends upon
the lady’s disdain, while the female singers “are unwilling to remain rhetorical human
shields” (60). Like Rosalind Smith’s work on 16th century English women sonneteers,
O’Sullivan suggests that the empowering frustration of  the male troubadour is
proven fragile when the lady talks back. Lisa Perfetti also provides helpful case-
studies on teaching the fabliaux to reveal their similar diversity of  gender politics.
In the “Sartorial Bodies” section, Madline H. Caviness’ impressive essay
Book Reviews 131
on “Hats and Veils” considers the complex and variable meanings of  veils, wimples,
hoods, and hats in depictions of  wives, maidens, prostitutes, widows, Jews, nuns,
and criminals. Surveying medieval Jewish codexes, the German Sachsenspiegel and art
in manuscripts and stained glass, Caviness notes the cultural judgements implied by
sartorial prescription and choice in medieval Europe. She provides copious evidence
that “every time a dress code is imposed, abandoned, or changed it is worth asking
whose agenda it advances, and whether it was negotiated by the wearers” (95). Sarah-
Grace Heller turns the question back on men in her study of  vestimentary allegories
in the 13th century works of  Baudouin de Condé. She argues suggestively that these
allegorical poems on the manteau and the gardecors encourage noblemen to put on
loyalty and generosity to prove their masculinity. Ruth Mazo Karras and Tom Link-
inen explore whether clothing (literally) makes the man in the case of  John/Eleanor
Rykener, the medieval Londoner accused and convicted of  sodomy, cross-dressing,
and prostitution for what we might now call a transgendered history. Karrass and
Linkinen consider this complex case of  both sartorial and sexual “swerving,” a term
Stephen Greenblatt would recognize. 
Part III, “Mapping Margins,” includes Laine E. Doggett’s rich account of
maidens as healers in old French medieval courtly narratives. Unlike Wendy Wall’s
groundbreaking analysis of  gendered household medicine (Staging Domesticity, 2002),
Doggett focuses on the battlefield wound. Like Keith Thomas, Doggett attempts
here to tease out the tensions between spiritual healing, natural knowledge, and
magic, noting the frequent collapse of  these categories in the hands of  the noble
maidenly healer. Sharon Kinoshita’s fascinatingly wide-ranging essay “Silk in the
Age of  Marco Polo” examines Le Devisement du monde, written by Polo and Rus-
tichello of  Pisa, as Le Devisement reflects on the globalization of, and created by, the
silk trade, from China and the Mongol empire to Mosul, Cathay, Venice, and Genoa.
Helen Solterer pushes one step further out in her intelligent, detailed consideration
of  the curious figure of  a Muslim protagonist in Honorat Bovet’s 13th century Ap-
paricion Maistre Jean de Meun. Solterer argues that this noble Saracen, “aussy noi
comme charbon” (“as black as coal”) (153), both enables and disguises Bovet’s cri-
tique of  French decadence and internecine squabbling in what she calls “the Tim-
buktu effect.” 
The last section on female authorial networks pulls together beautifully il-
lustrated examples of  literary women’s alliances in thirteenth- to fifteenth-century
France. Cynthia J. Brown, Roberta L. Krueger, and Nancy Freeman Regalado all
explore, with admirable precision and deft analysis, manuscripts revealing in word
and art the reading and writing cultures which connected Christine de Pisan, Mar-
guerite de Navarre, Anne de Bretagne, and Anne de France. Rasmussen’s fascinating
study of  the fat books and healthy babies in depictions of  St. Anne’s Holy Family
further connects both saintliness and kinship at the heart of  literary medieval wom-
anhood.
A rich set of  materials, in every sense, and many suggestive lines of  inquiry
132 Left History
make this collection a worthy sign that St. Jane has given medieval feminist history
and literary study much to be thankful for.
Elizabeth Hodgson
University of  British Columbia
William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram, eds., God in the Enli ghtenment
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 322pp. Hardcover $99.00.
This important collection of  essays aims to address an irksome topic from an in-
triguing perspective, one that, so the editors hope, might help to heal the unfortu-
nate impasse in the current debate between “liberals” and “communitarians” over
the virtues or vices of  the so-called Enlightenment project. The volume’s main tar-
get is the well-known genealogy of  the Enlightenment famously furnished by
D’Alambert, who painted the Renaissance as preparing the ground for the Refor-
mation which, in turn, made the Scientific Revolution possible. It was thus, accord-
ing to this view, that the seventeenth century began the relentless destruction of
what eighteenth-century philosophes would refer to as “the system,” a quaint euphe-
mism for Aristotelianism and the way in which Christian apologists had chosen to
deploy it. Those who accept this view usually define the Enlightenment, to quote
one of  its most eloquent modern exponents, as “the broadly secular, experimental,
individualistic, and progressive intellectual world … in which the old and apparently
unassailable forms of  association, of  belief  and tradition, which had for centuries
divided human beings into mutually suspicious and often brutally homicidal groups,
were slowly and painfully, but irreversibly, abandoned” (Anthony Pagden, The En-
lightenment and Why it Still Matters, 2013).
Like all neat historical explanations, this one can be readily questioned.
The Renaissance and the Reformation did not inevitably lead to secularism. Indeed,
the seventeenth century was an intensely religious age during which the materialism
of  a Hobbes or the monism of  a Spinoza weighed light against the overwhelming
mass of  theologians and preachers who were almost solely responsible for popular
instruction. Even in the eighteenth century, the increasing prestige and influence
of  the culture of  the Enlightenment owed a great deal to the wide channels of  in-
ternational diffusion that it had acquired among the educated elites but which rarely
reached the rest of  the population. It is easy to forget that the vast majority of  peo-
ple in eighteenth-century Europe still lived in economically self-contained regional
units with their own laws and institutions, that Voltaire and Bolingbroke were the
contemporaries of  Wesley and St Paul of  the Cross, and that Gibbon and Adam
Smith composed their great works at the same time as St Benedict Joseph Labre
led the life of  a medieval ascetic and widely admired miracle worker.
All the essays in this collection tap various aspects of  this strangely neg-


Laine E. Doggett and Daniel E. O’Sullivan, eds., Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies: Essays in Honor of E. Jane Burns (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2016).

Vanegas, Farid Samir Benavides

Book Reviews 109
Ulrich Oslender, The Geographi es  of  So cial  Movements :  Afro-Colombian Mo-
b i l iza ti on  and the Aquati c Space (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
304pp. Paperback $25.95.
In 1991 Colombia passed a new constitution that recognized the rights of  Indige-
nous peoples to territory and a special jurisdiction. The National Constituent As-
sembly had two Indigenous representatives who presented proposals for differential
rights for the original inhabitants of  Colombia. In spite of  their importance to the
Colombian nation and the fact that they make up about 30% of  the Colombian
population, Afro-Colombians did not have special representatives and it seemed
that they were not going to be granted the recognition of  special rights. The Con-
stituent Assembly was resistant because, according to some delegates, blacks were
Colombians like anyone else in the country (Benavides Vanegas, A tutelazo limpio,
2009).
From 2010 to 2016 the Colombian government was in the middle of  a
peace process with the communist guerrilla group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias
de Colombia (FARC). One of  the elements of  the talks was the creation of  a Com-
mission of  Historical Inquiry with the mandate to identify the causes of  political
and social conflict and to set the record straight on the reasons for armed violence
in Colombia. The Commission was made up of  white Colombian intellectuals. In
their final account of  the conflict there is not even one reference to the Afro-
Colombian population, as if  they did not exist or as if  they had not been victims
of  violence in Colombia. As Jaime Arocha put it, by refusing to acknowledge the
existence of  Afro Colombians, the Commission victimized them again (Arocha,
“Sin coincidencias”, 2015). 
The struggle of  the black communities in Colombia for recognition and
visibility is a long one, which dates way back before the 1991 Constitution. Black
people’s social mobilization was urban and rural, with different claims, given their
different historical trajectories. As Ulrich Oslender holds it, the Constitution-–and
especially Law 70—gave visibility to a new form of  social mobilization, mostly rural
and based on claims in term of  culture, ethnic identity, territory, and the right to
difference (2). In his book The Geographies of  Social Movements: Afro-Colombian Mobi-
lization and the Aquatic Space, Oslender, an anthropologist with more than 20 years
of  ethnographic field work in the Pacific lowlands of  Colombia, analyzes and shows
the development of  these claims and the creation of  the local councils ordered by
Law 70 of  1993—the law that implemented some of  the rights recognized in AT
(Transitory Article) 55 of  the 1991 Constitution. In order to show the struggle for
the territory and the social mobilization that led to the political organization of  the
communities, Oslender uses the concept of  the “aquatic space,” with the purpose
of  showing the changing and fluid nature of  the territory. He argues that the river
gives identity to the communities and, in doing so, it determines the kind of  organ-
ization they have and the spatial localization of  their struggles.
110 Left History
Territory is a central element in the struggles of  the black population in
the Pacific lowlands. Afro-Colombians were brought as enslaved people to the coun-
try more than 400 years ago, and due to their struggles and their resistance, some
of  them found a place in the Pacific lowlands. For them this is now an ancestral
territory that defines who they are and how they constitute their claims. But this
ancestral territory is different from the conception Westerners have of  it. Afro-
Colombians in this region live around the river, their houses follow the river, towns
are built with the river on their side, and a sort of  urban imagination is imposed
with branches of  the river treated as if  they were streets that little kids have to cross
in their canoes. The river affects identity as well as Afro-Colombian political organ-
ization. Law 70 had the provision of  recognizing communal property for Afro-
Colombian, but they had to organize local councils to claim their rights. But it is
the river that determines how these local councils are organized. Instead of  looking
at the town where they are, people organize around the river they use every day for
their trips, to buy food, to find relatives. This aquatic space defines the whole life
of  these populations.  
Oslender’s book is an important contribution to our understanding of  so-
cial movements, and particularly of  Afro-Colombian social mobilization. He shows
that traditional accounts of  social movements pay attention to their scripts, their
documents, and their struggles. Even though the space is present, as Oslender puts
it, there is not much thought on the spatialities of  social movements (13). According
to Oslender, it is important to understand how communities relate to the territory,
to the space, but also how this relationship is understood in concrete local situations.
Drawing from the works of  Henri Lefebvre, the urban Marxist philosopher, and
Marxist geographer David Harvey, Oslender introduces the idea of  a sense of  the
aquatic space where Afro-Colombians live and which determines their way of  life.
As Doña Celia, one of  Oslender’s fieldwork collaborators said, “A mi río, no lo olvido,”
that is, “to my river, I don´t forget” (12). 
But to do such deep analysis, Oslender needed to go deeper into his ethno-
graphic work. Instead of  just interviewing the leaders of  the social and political or-
ganizations, he interviewed and worked with local people, like Doña Celia and Don
Agapito, two Afro-Colombians with a memory of  the river and who transmitted
to Oslender their sense of  the place that allows him to understand to role the aquatic
space plays in political organization in Colombia.
Oslender tells a beautiful and fascinating story that starts with the river
and the stories Doña Celia tells about her childhood and her relation to the river,
as the place she played as a kid and where she did errands for her mother. But a
modern capitalist state like the Colombian one has tried to impose their view of
the territory onto these communities, affecting, among other things, their agricul-
ture. At the same time, these attempts to commodify the aquatic space have brought
about violence and war in the region. But Oslender does not want to end with a
sad note. He understands the fluid character of  the river and the resistance and re-
Book Reviews 111
silience of  the communities. As Oslender holds it, 
The Aquatic Space, however, will remain. Not the same as today.
Its assemblage of  constantly changing relations will produce new
expressions … And somewhat along the Guapi River, Doña
Celia will observe her grandmother as she applies medicinal
herbs and prayer to cure the evil eye, while Don Agapito is still
chasing and shooting rabbits in the Guajuí basin (217).
Farid Samir Benavides Vanegas
Universidad de Los Andes—Bogotá
Universidad Ramón Llull—Blanquerna—Barcelona
Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami, Burn ing Countr y.  Syr ians in Rev-
olu tion and War (London: Pluto Press, 2016). 280pp. Paperback $20.00.
In the mid 1990s, I lived in Damascus in order to brush up my knowledge of  Ara-
bic. These were the times of  Suriyya al-Asad, the Syria of  Hafez al-Assad, as the slo-
gans on buildings and along streets clearly indicated. Indeed, the “eternal leader”
and “beloved president” was omnipresent. Hafez al-Assad filled the daily news and
one could not escape his gaze in the public sphere. In Ambiguity of  Domination, Lisa
Wedeen aptly described the disciplinary power of  this cult around Assad and the
culture of  hypocrisy and opportunism that animated the Syrian security state of
the 1990s. However, besides this coercive symbolism and the relentless repression
of  any opposition, the power of  the regime also rested on a certain security bargain
with at least parts of  the population. In their introduction to Burning Country Robin
Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami point to the very nature of  this security bargain
according to which “people could live in relative peace.” The regime was able to
rely on the “partial consent of  a cross-sectarian peasant constituency” and co-opted
parts of  the intellectual and economic elites (13). It was the breakdown of  this bar-
gain after the death of  Hafez al-Assad in June 2000, during the rule of  his son
Bashar al-Assad, that “set the scene for the uprising” (34).
In Burning Country, Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami construct a
convincing analytical narrative of  the transformation of  Suriyya al-Asad into a hu-
manitarian disaster. They do so by giving a voice to those people who “dared to
demand freedom” and “received annihilation instead” (225). Burning Country is in-
formed by many of  the voices of  the vibrant popular movement that tried to dis-
place the Assad regime by non-violent means. In ten well-organized chapters the
book describes the historical path which led Syria into brutal civil war. There is
hardly any doubt that Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami wrote a partisan book. They
clearly express their sympathy with the grassroots activists and local committees
trying to push for reform in the years 2011–2012. Yet this partisanship does not


Not a member yet

Jennifer Brier, Jim Downs, and Jennifer L. Morgan, eds. Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America (Urbana, Chicago, Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2016).

Rhonda L. Hinther, Perogies and Politics: Canada’s Ukrainian Left, 1891–1991 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018).

Witnessing Collapse in Miniature: Three Case Studies in Extraction and Environmental History

Jeffers Lennox, Homelands and Empires: Indigenous Spaces, Imperial Fictions, and Competition for Territory in Northeastern North America, 1690–1763 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017)

James Kirby, Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Andrej Grubačić and Denis O’Hearn, Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016).

About the Contributors

Table of Contents

Laine E. Doggett and Daniel E. O’Sullivan, eds., Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies: Essays in Honor of E. Jane Burns (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2016).

Ulrich Oslender, The Geographies of Social Movements: Afro-Colombian Mobilization and the Aquatic Space (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

1,044

1,130