ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role played by art, and in particular landscape, in the establishment of emerging settler national identities in the dominions during the 1930s, with particular emphasis on Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand. It shows that a common settler speaking position is articulated via visual culture and surrounding discourses, to give voice to emerging national identities at a time of intensive settler nation-building, and that both landscape and modernism served as apparatuses for this task in all the British dominions. Identifying such a settler speaking position that cuts across the settler domains suggests that national distinctiveness, which is the mainstay of nation-building, is a myth. The chapter also focuses on the myth of settler national exceptionalism and identifies a common settler speaking position articulated through the genre of landscape and the appropriation of a moderate modernist vocabulary. The settler nationalism promoted by Contemporary Canadian Painting followed the terms established by the Group of Seven.
