Love, Hate, and Fear in Canada's Cold War

The essays in Love, Hate, and Fear in Canada's Cold War present a Cold War different in many respects from the familiar one of anti-communist hysteria. In Canada, the Cold War raised issues of national self-representation that went beyond international political tensions related to capitalistic versus communistic regimes. If the discourse of the Cold War in Canada was anti-communist, it was also anti-American in many ways. Drawing on a number of disciplinary approaches and examining what Michel Foucault called the 'discursive' practices of the period, the contributors examine how, in the Cold War, the personal became the political through the state's attempt to regulate sexuality - in pulp fiction, in film, and in public spaces.

A major theme emerging from Love, Hate, and Fear in Canada's Cold War is that many issues associated with the Cold War in Canada actually preceded World War II and continue to haunt us today. This has become particularly apparent after the terrorist attacks of September 2001, when politicians began employing the rhetoric of the 'War on Terror' and invoking issues of border security, immigration and refugee quotas, and 'harmonization' of policies.

Richard Cavell is a professor in the Department of English and the founding director of the International Canadian Studies Centre at the University of British Columbia.