Filewood, Alan

English

University of New Brunswick: Centre for Digital Scholarship Journals

conflict, and disappointment, as well as possibilities for lastingand widespread positive changes.Situated within this rich interdisciplinary terrain, the proj-ects featured in both volumes challenge traditional assumptionsabout theatrical agents, customs, and processes. The projectsoften blur the boundaries between theatre and other fields,including development work, social work, law, sociology, andpsychology. As such, the essays would be of value to a wide varietyof scholars in the social sciences and humanities. Readers of thetwo volumes will benefit from their coverage of a multiplicity ofways in which theatre engages and is engaged by scholars andpractitioners from diverse backgrounds in innovative, creative,and meaningful ways.ERIN HURLEY  National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo 67 to Céline Dion. Toronto: U Toronto P, 2011. 244 pp. Illus., index.ALAN FILEWODWith the election of a Parti Québécois minority government in2012 and the promise of a referendum under the shadow of polit-ical violence, Quebec sovereignty is again on the national agenda.In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Premier-electPauline Marois on the night of the PQ victory, Céline Dion head-lined a benefit concert in aid of the family of Denis Blanchette, thetechnician working the event who was killed by a politically moti-vated gunman. At that concert, Dion was the ostensiblyQuébécoise face who legitimized the presence of anglophonemusical stars (Arcade Fire, Ben Harper, Patrick Watson, MarthaWainwright, and Anna McGarrigle) who shared the stage withQuébécois artists (Coeur de pirate, Dumas, Eric Lapointe,Vincent Vallières) to isolate the shooter as a lone madman and todeflect the fear of a reactionary anglo terrorism. I refer to Dion as the “ostensibly” Québécoise face because, asErin Hurley shows in this supple and provocative examination ofthe procedural rhetorics of Quebec’s national performance ofquébécité, Céline Dion (and her Americanized self, Celine Dion)troubles conventional readings of nation, performance, andrepresentation. Her “inescapabilty” can only be understood byexamining affect instead of signification; when we look at Dion’sTRiC / RTaC • 34.1 (2013) • Comptes rendus / Book Reviews • pp 125-142 • 129“emotional labours” we begin to perceive that although she isalways a commodified and shifting signifier, she generates power-ful affective response. Hurley makes the point that “Affect, in thiscase, provides the why of performance, the reason we must attendto it, even when we don’t particularly want to; it endows theperformance with sense and impact—with its mattering and, tothat degree, its meaning” (168).Hurley’s examination and critique of national representationin performance is vastly more complex and wide-ranging thanher title suggests. She does indeed begin with Expo 67 and itsformulation of an urban, modernist québécité, and end with themultiplied affects of Celine Dion, but bridging them she examinesthe problem of gender politics and form in Tremblay’s Les belles-soeurs, Marco Micone’s allophone challenge to the narrative of theQuébécois nation, and Carbon 14’s fragmented, assembled, anddeconstructed imagist performance. In each of these cases Hurleyoffers extraordinarily sophisticated readings that bring criticalreflection, performance analysis, and a suite of theoretical tools tobear on the problem of the nation in performance. Over the past twenty years, since Homi Bhabha changed theconversation by shifting understandings of nation in culturalproduction from representation to performance, we have seenincreasingly nuanced understandings of both of the constituentterms, of nation as it dissolves into contested nationhoods, inter-cultural constructions, subjunctive aspirations, racializations andgenderings, and of performance, as it opens into the broad reachof Performance Studies and the problematics of phenomenology.It has become too easy, if not glib, to speak of the nation as anenactment, or the nation as constructed in performance. Hurley’sbrilliant contribution in this book had been to materialize andresituate the concept of nation-as-performance to what shedescribes as “performing arts’ mimetic labours vis-à-vis thenation” (142) in a materialist semiotics grounded in feministtheory. She positions her project explicitly as a “feminist,Québécois rejoinder” to my own work on nation/performance, inwhich she “marks and unmasks the infrastructure of ‘national’performance, namely emotional labour and women (as bothfigures and actual people)” (18).If nation/performance can be unmasked to reveal itsgendered work, then it must be possible to analyze any moment ofcultural production in those terms. Hurley’s solution to the prob-lem of selection is the real strength of this book. Each of her casestudies addresses a different stage of her reordered taxonomy of130 • TRiC / RTaC • 34.1 (2013) • Comptes rendus / Book Reviews • pp 125-142the rhetorics of nation and québécité, working through, succes-sively, construction, reflection, metaphor, simulation, metonymy,and affect/affection, defined as “modes of ‘mattering’ disposi-tions” (147). In each case the exemplary text exposes fracturelines in Québec modernity and challenges an historical identitythat has traditionally been articulated through low-mimetic andiconic masculinity.In her discussion of the cool urban modernism of Expo 67,and particularly of the young women who worked the front-lineof reception as hostesses, Hurley critiques the constructivistmodel of national performance by investigating the “symbolic re-annexation of Quebec for Québécois” (58). It is here that shedevelops the concept of emotional labour that is the conceptualunderpinning of the book, and links it both to nation (as a processof facilitating affective responses) and to feminism, as it worksthough the bodies and labours of women. She follows thisthrough in her very persuasive reading of Les belles-soeurs, inwhich she dissects the representational modes of iconic realismand theatrical formalism to demonstrate how the play was (andis) “unassimilable” to representationalist readings that reduce it toa national metaphor, in which “the all-female cast stood in for anall-male polity” (61). Metaphor, Hurley explains, harmonizes signifier-signifiedrelations and, as these first two case studies show, does so at theexpense of women. Her three remaining case studies examinewhat she calls “mimetic figures” through structures of difference,not similitude. She examine Marco Micone’s work (particularlyhis manifesto Speak What) as an Italian-Québécois other in theimaginary of québécité in terms of simulation, in theBaudrillardian sense of a copy without an original; in this case theimmigrant experience functions as a simulation of québécitéwhile at the same time challenging from within, rather than froman “outside” as “les autres.” In her analysis of Carbone 14, she seesthe operation of metonymy, of “multivalent” imagery and decom-posed dance that moves beyond allegory to an assembled, shift-ing, and reflexive play of icons of national experience. And as wehave seen, in her analysis of Céline Dion she sees the play of affectin the life of the postmodern nation. In her conclusion, shereturns to the question of the feminist presence in a “mythologyof male national self-engenderment” (170), with a discussion ofemblematic feminist theatre work, touching on the collectivework La nef de sorcières, Pol Pelletier’s Joie, and JovetteMarchessault’s Les Vaches de nuit.TRiC / RTaC • 34.1 (2013) • Comptes rendus / Book Reviews • pp 125-142 • 131The achievement of this book is the way in which it managesto interweave two distinct projects, offering a feminist reconcep-tion of nation-as-performance and a history of québécité inperformance. In this second project I find that I have unansweredquestions that derive from Hurley’s very assured, polished, andsometimes arch writing.  It is expressive of intellectual rigour andworks through its arguments with dazzling skill. At times,though, it strikes me as distanced and perhaps reluctant toaddress its own positionality. This may be a consequence of whatI see as the one striking absence in her discussion, and that is therecurrent question of anglophone presence in québécité. I wouldbe fascinated to see how she reads David Fennario, whose self-position as a minoritised Anglo-Québécois is resolute but unwel-come in québécité. Or what she does with Arcade Fire sharing astage with Céline Dion.JUDITH RUDAKOFF, ed.TRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault: An Unreasonable Bodyof WorkChicago: Intellect Ltd.-The University of Chicago P, 2012. 264 pp. ZAREN HEALEY WHITETRANS(per)FORMING Nina Arsenault undertakes the ambitioustask of presenting and examining the many forms of this trans-gendered Canadian aesthete’s multifaceted “body of work.” As ananthology with a range of essays responding to the diverseavenues of inquiry provoked by this complex woman, the booksucceeds in capturing the theatrical, creative, performative, andspiritual conundrums embodied by Nina Arsenault. Through one-woman stage performance, self-portraiture,and the daily enactment of her hyper-femininity, Arsenault’s“body of work” is her evolving physical and spiritual self. In hertransition from man to woman and from woman to goddess,Nina Arsenault has undergone over sixty cosmetic surgeries andprocedures costing approximately $200,000. Funded primarilythrough sex trade work, Arsenault’s transition is a story of literalself-fashioning through a process of surgical alterations over eightyears. As an artist, Arsenault uses the aestheticization of thefemale form as fodder for her highly personal, carnal, and chal-lenging art practice; that is, she engages with the female form asmaterial object and ideological construct, with transgender132 • TRiC / RTaC • 34.1 (2013) • Comptes rendus / Book Reviews • pp 125-142

Erin Hurley National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo 67 to Céline Dion.

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Erin Hurley National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo 67 to Céline Dion.

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