Distort, Deflect, Deny: Appraising European Colonialism at Empire’s End, 1956–63

Abstract

With an emphasis on the British Empire Commonwealth, this article explores how English-speaking Canadians understood European colonialism – its historical purpose, legacies, and demise – and the anti-colonial nationalism that ranged against it in the years bracketing the United Nations’ adoption of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples in 1960. An extensive survey of opinion in the mainstream English-language press, supplemented by the perspectives of intellectuals, diplomats, and parliamentarians, suggests that empire apologism, contempt for anti-colonial nationalism, and the misrepresentation of colonial liberation struggles were pervasive. Building on recent scholarship that explores how race thinking shaped Canada’s international relations, and drawing from cultural theorist Kuan-Hsing Chen’s concept of “deimperialization,” the author argues that the preponderance of these phenomena evinced and abetted a failure to come to terms with colonialism’s deleterious imprint on the Third World.