The final report of Canada’s Massey Commission, the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, was released in 1951. Often referred to as the Massey Report, this document provided the armature of what would become a state-defined national culture in Canada and gave birth to the idea of Canadian content.
Having been drawn to the Massey report not as a currency of cathexis but rather as a contemporary political problem and more in terms of a philosophical problem, in such a way that it is difficult to disarticulate one from the other. In this lecture, Zainub attempts to bridge history, policy and theory through invoking the nomos, telos, and ethos of the Massey Report on its 70th anniversary, anchored in lived experience, concrete knowledge and practice. Beyond the notion of an unconscious archetype, how does one account for its ubiquitous presence despite finding art and culture often in the backwaters of public policy discourse.
