"Colony-to-nation-to-colony": canada’s national development in the discourse of canadian intellectuals in the mid-xxth century

The paper examines how the concept of colony was changing its connotations in the intellectual discourse of Canada during the period of the late 1940s to the early 1970s in the context of the discussions on the path of the country’s national development. The famous book «From Colony to Nation» (1946) by Arthur Lower saw the status of a British colony in the fate of Canada as an important and inevitable step towards gaining the status of an independent North American nation. But in the new realities of the late 1950s and early 1970s this optimistic vision of Canada’s nation-building trajectory was replaced by the belief that the country is rapidly returning to its colonial status, this time becoming an American colony. In this context the country’s past colonial experience and the status of colony itself in many respects were dramatized and reinterpreted in the postmodern sense as the relations of power and subjection, aggressor and victim, center and periphery, creating a new national narrative.