Feeling Canadian: Television, Nationalism and Affect (review)

Feeling Canadian is a peculiar work. Bociurkiw set out to show how Canadian television reflected, promoted, or produced nationalism during a time of crisis and transition, the years 1995 to 2002. But the result is not a coherent narrative. Instead she has assembled a loose-knit collection of highly personal essays, full of theory but short on evidence, demonstrating most clearly the impact of a few, selected broadcasts on her own psyche. It fits much more in the ambit of cultural studies, particularly the study of meaning, than say history or media studies as normally practiced.

Aside from some comments on the famous Molson beer commercial ‘The Rant’ (2000, though Bociurkiw suggests 1999), Feeling Canadian deals much more in theory than text until we reach page 53, in short, one third of the way through the book. And that is by no means the end since theory always informs the discussion. Be warned: you will need to bring along your Foucault and other theoretical works to the task of reading Feeling Canadian. Hers is emphatically Foucault 1.0, the theorist of discourse and discipline. Bociurkiw does not employ the later Foucault, so well represented in the Collège de France lectures, that is the explorer of biopolitics, governmentality (only briefly mentioned), and truth-telling, all of which excite much work nowadays. Even so, she makes good use of discourse analysis to suggest the emergence of what she calls ‘a kind of super-genre’(18) that spoke of nation and self, the local as well as the global. Likewise she employs effectively Foucault’s ideas of a normalizing regime to query and counter what she sees as the prevailing elements of the country’s national narrative.

More problematic is Bociurkiw’s determination to draw on the claims of a gaggle of other theorists. There are references scattered here and there to Appadurai, Freud, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Butler, Kristeva, McLuhan, Bakhtin, and other such heavies. Nor is that the end of the smörgåsbord: bits and pieces of theorists of race and gender, queerness, trauma, and affect turn up throughout this short book. Perhaps we should be pleased that some big names in past media studies like Gramsci (hegemony), Baudrillard (hyperreality), or Habermas (the public sphere) are not present in the buffet, even if their insights might well apply to the topics at hand? The involvement of so many, sometimes contradictory, theorists disorders the narrative. Bociurkiw lacks the space to elaborate in sufficient detail what these worthies explained so she drops a quote or provides a brief summary that amounts to assertion rather than argument. Theory ought not to be treated like gospel. That is especially true when using, for example, two madcap philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari: their insights, like ‘desiring machines,’ ‘rhizome,’ or ‘line of flight,’ all of which appear in Feeling Canadian, require a lot of massaging if they are to assist an understanding of reality. All too often we get instead mysterious comments like this: ‘Trudeau was a machinic exercise with molecular components’ (107). It is welcome to see theory applied to things Canadian; it is also troubling when that application is at times so muddled.

Bociurkiw tackles at length only a limited group of texts. The main items are the coverage of the Quebec Referendum (1995), the Trudeau funeral (2000), the 9/11 horror, the Winter Olympics of 2002 (and, in an afterword, some of 2010). She supplements these with discussions of the first episode from Canada: A People’s History, one episode taken from A Scattering of Seeds (on a Ukrainian immigrant), the drama series North of Sixty, and the cooking show Loving Spoonfuls, plus bits of the satirical This Hour Has 22 Minutes. None of these readings amount to thick description, which makes it difficult to fully appreciate the programs unless you have actually watched them. That said, her commentaries are both interesting and provocative. The coverage of the Quebec Referendum, for example, highlights the presence in TV rhetoric of the family...