‘Shut Up and Teach’: Confronting the Power of Racialized Hero Discourses of Soldier and Nation

This article offers a discourse analysis of a sample of negative responses to the public position of a group of Canadian professors who contended that a particular non-governmental scholarship glorified war and was indicative of both a creeping Canadian imperialism and an expanding military-educational complex. The author argues that the powerfully negative reaction to the critique of the Project Hero scholarships was rooted in a nationalist fantasy of Canada as a benevolent do-gooder, and dependent upon both overt and subtle forms of racism. The article also aims to prompt a dialogue about the extent to which public intellectuals and public universities are free to engage openly in critique of power rooted in the articulation of nationalism, militarism and racism.