Performing the Nation in Thomas King's Short Fiction (original) (raw)
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University of Toronto Quarterly, 2017
father (his daughter Jennifer Surridge co-edits these diaries-a Herculean endeavour); he was a devoted husband. He also noted with cute acronym every instance of sexual congress with his wife, Brenda, and rated each act with one word (''admirable,'' ''surprising,'' etc.). At the end of each year he tallied up his performances and explained any falling off (partner away on vacation, intermittent bouts of impotence). His bigotries and prejudices abound (the Irish, Jews, etc.), some excusable for the times, but not all. In a period of increasing demand for women's equality, he refused to admit females to Massey College (this was the early 1960s, not the mid-nineteenth century). But then, Robertson Davies always suffused himself with an anachronistic air, with the high-Victorian tilt to the prophetically bearded visage declaiming graphically his stubborn allegiance to English literature's greatest century, even if the time had passed-most unfortunate-some hundred years earlier. Davies could always turn a phrase, delight with a stentorian sentence, but there are too few in these selections from the many sorts of diary he kept. These records are more mundane reports than revelatory musings, and much is pedestrian, even boring. The stretches of tedium can still be interesting generally for the picture they paint of the thoroughly Anglo-Canadian culture of mid-twentieth century. The insider portraits of the members of the highly influential, and somewhat dilettantish, Massey family also recommend a sporadic reading. But mainly these diary excerpts will be of interest to those readers who have the desire and time to learn a lot more about three things: the vicissitudes of the staging, touring, and precipitous closing on Broadway of the Guthrie-directed dramatization of Salterton's second novel, Leaven of Malice; the founding and furnishing of Massey College; and the daily Robertson Davies 1959-1963.
Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec, 2019
In Encounters on Contested Lands, Julie Burelle employs a performance studies lens to examine how instances of Indigenous self-representation in Québec challenge the national and identity discourses of the French Québécois de souche—the French-speaking descendants of white European settlers who understand themselves to be settlers no more but rather colonized and rightfully belonging to the territory of Québec. Analyzing a wide variety of performances, Burelle brings together the theater of Alexis Martin and the film L'Empreinte, which repositions the French Québécois de souche as métis, with protest marches led by Innu activists; the Indigenous company Ondinnok's theater of repatriation; the films of Yves Sioui Durand, Alanis Obomsawin, and the Wapikoni Mobile project; and the visual work of Nadia Myre. These performances, Burelle argues, challenge received definitions of sovereignty and articulate new ones while proposing to the province and, more specifically, to the French Québécois de souche, that there are alternative ways to imagine Québec's future and remember its past. The performances insist on Québec's contested nature and reframe it as animated by competing sovereignties. Together they reveal how the "colonial present tense" and "tense colonial present" operate in conjunction as they work to imagine an alternative future predicated on decolonization. Encounters on Contested Lands engages with theater and performance studies while making unique and needed contributions to Québec and Canadian studies, as well as to Indigenous and settler-colonial studies.
Border Narratives at Work: Theatrical Smuggling and the Politics of Commemoration
Geopolitics, 2008
This paper discusses how cultural and artistic work constitutes a powerful means for mediating the collective memory of state borders. The empirical case study concerns the commercialisation of a borderland culture in the form of a 'Smuggling Opera' in a crossborder project on the Finnish-Swedish border region where border crossing has been unrestricted for decades. This theatrical performance constructs a particular local narrative which contests the authorised representation of borders in the discourse of the nationstate. The narrative analysis method is applied to this popularised border narrative and its interpretation among local participants, leading to the conclusion that the understanding of state borders differs between authorised border narratives and the stories of borderland people for whom it represents part of the everyday surroundings, although both serve to fix the meaning and moral justification of the border or argument for its rejection. The narratives of people living in the 'borderless' Finnish-Swedish border region show the continuing significance of the border in people's lives as both a barrier and a place of contact.
Rethinking Canadian and American Nationality: Indigeneity and the 49th Parallel in Thomas King
American Literary History, 2006
In a recent issue of Comparative American Studies devoted to redressing "Canadianists' withdrawal from hemispheric conversations" (Adams and Casteel 5), the guest editors argue that "the past two decades have been marked by a growing recognition of the artificiality of assuming a purely national approach" to humanities scholarship (7). While the interdisciplinary field of "border studies," which focused primarily on the Mexican-US border, 1 is an important precursor, hemispheric studies has supplanted this interest in national dividing lines with a more "transnational" (6) comparative orientation, one that attends to "contact zones across the Americas" (10; emphasis added), and thus one that must attend to the Canadian-US as well as Mexican-US borders. In so doing, the field of hemispheric studies raises new and important questions about what might constitute "identity, citizenship, and belonging" (12) within and beyond the borders of the nation-states that constitute the Americas. This article takes heed of the call to "broaden the mandate of inter-American studies beyond a mere refashioning or rehabilitation of US American studies" (7) by turning to the work of a Native and Canadian writer, Thomas King, whose fictional accounts of the diverse experiences of aboriginal peoples highlight the complex role of Canada as well as the US in upholding the borders that delimit the identity and belonging of indigenous peoples. Hemispheric studies encourage comparative readings from a transnational or even a postnational perspective. King's writings suggest that such approaches may be both useful and problematic for indigenous individuals and groups, whose original occupancy of nation-state lands and alternative notions of nation remain either marginalized or unacknowledged altogether. Moreover, to move toward a hemispheric model that subordinates the idea of nation to
On Border and Identity: A Performative Reflection from an Applied Theatre Project
ArtsPraxis, 2021
As an artist-scholar, I query: In what ways does border perform, (dis)connect, alter, shift dissolve and (re)imagine identity? Migration is essential to human existence in this present 'postnormal times' characterized by chaos, contradictions, global displacement and neoliberal realities (Ziauddin, 2010). From voluntary to forced migration, border shifts as living and non-living things move, and it is constantly being re/negotiated. Beyond physical or territorial border navigated in migration, cultures and arts transverse boundaries because people move with cultural practices, beliefs and traditions. For instance, as migrants' cultural practices and art forms trans-border, culture becomes a mobile apparatus that constantly changes and shifts from one form to another. As an autobiographical piece, in this article, I focus on the experience of the individual [me] to explore how my migratory and mobility experiences shape my identity and in turn find expression in my artistic practice. I engaged the notion of root and identities' (Bhavnani & Phoenix, 1994) and creating my own 'imagined communities' (Anderson, 1991). I focus on my performance in an applied theatre project with refugees, immigrants, and international students in Victoria,