Notions of identity have long structured women’s art. Dynamics of race, class, and gender have shaped the production of artworks and oriented their subsequent reassessments. Arguably, this is especially true of art by women, and of the so- cially engaged criticism that addresses it. If iden- tity has been a problem in women’s art, however, is more identity the solution? In this study of nineteenth- and early twenti- eth-century art in Canada, Kristina Huneault of- fers a meditation on the strictures of identity and an exploration of forces that unsettle and realign the self. Looking closely at individual artists and works, Huneault combines formal analysis with archival research and philosophical inquiry, building nuanced readings of objects that range from the canonical to the largely unknown. Whether in miniature portraits or genre paintings, botanical drawings or baskets, women artists reckoned with constraints that limited understand- ings of themselves and others. They also forged creative alternatives. At times identity features in women’s artistic work as a failed project; at other times it marks a boundary beyond which they were able to expand, explore, and exult. Bringing together settler and indigenous forms of cultural expression and foregrounding the im- portance of colonialism within the development of art in Canada, I’m Not Myself at All observes and reactivates historical art by women and prompts readers to consider what a less restric- tive conceptualization of selfhood might bring to current patterns of cultural analysis. Kristina Huneault is a professor of art history at Concordia University and co-editor, with Janice Anderson, of Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970. 2 6 M Q U P S P R I N G 2 0 1 8 A R T H I S T O R Y • W O M E N ’ S S T U D I E S I’m Not Myself at All Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada kristina huneault Is there an alternative to paradigms of identity in women’s art history? S P E C I F I C AT I O N S McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History June 2018 978-0-7735-5319-4 $65.00A CDN, $65.00A US, £54.00 cloth 7 x 9.5 400pp 140 illustrations, full colour throughout eBook available