Celebrity Cultures in Canada ed. by Katja Lee and Lorraine York (review)

Richly historicized and interdisciplinary in scope, this collection of eleven articles is an important contribution to the emerging critical discourse on celebrity studies. As the first edited collection to explore celebrity phenomena both in Canada and transnationally, Celebrity Cultures in Canada examines the conditions that shape celebrity in a range of cultural venues in Canada, from politics and sports to film and literature. The collection explores diverse historical examples, such as the polarizing and unifying celebrities of Don Cherry and Terry Fox, respectively, or the work of the Governor General and Griffin Poetry prizes to prioritize certain celebrity figures in the Canadian literary arts. The scope of the collection enables authors to highlight the trends that characterize Canadian celebrity – such as white heteronormativity and bureaucracy – and explore the regional, linguistic, political, and administrative contexts that distinguish celebrity in Canada from celebrity elsewhere.

The volume's title consciously embraces the term "celebrity" as opposed to stardom or other related terms, signalling the performance of public individuals, groups, and institutions across a whole range of media and cultural activities. It becomes clear from the various analyses, especially Jennifer Bell's study of the evolution of the different political celebrities of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Justin Trudeau, that celebrity is not simply something that happens to certain public figures but, rather, is a phenomenon that is actively cultivated and manipulated in the public sphere. Katja Lee, Lorraine York, and other contributors to the collection offer a complex account of the mechanisms employed to construct celebrity systems, which in turn influence and sometimes undercut the dominant Canadian value system. However, it is surprising that the collection does not consider figures of notoriety in addition to celebrity, whether it is the controversial political figure of Conrad Black or Nickelback, the musical group Canadians love to hate.

Celebrity Cultures in Canada rejects the argument that nations are irrelevant to understanding the construction of celebrity milieus or that Canada lacks an adequate system for producing, distributing, and consuming celebrity. Contributors insist that the national context continues to matter to celebrity studies and that Canada has a vibrant, powerful, and often complicated relationship to fame. The title necessarily suggests more than one culture of celebrity figures, but many contributions still take on a traditionally bicultural scope. Although Lee and York acknowledge how Canada is "host to several burgeoning pubic spheres, such as amongst Indigenous, Asian, and South Asian communities," the collection predominantly acknowledges Canada as "a nation with two formally acknowledged star systems, English-Canada and Quebec". By virtue of the national focus of the collection, Indigenous, diasporic, and transnational perspectives tend to be generalized to one or two contributions, with an explicit gap concerning Asian Canadian celebrity.

The Indigenous focus of the collection solely rests in the hands of York, whose contribution nevertheless offers valuable insights. York examines how Indigenous artists, communities, and the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), in particular, have sought to develop "a more flexible theoretical understanding of the workings of celebrity." The APTN is a paradigmatic example of the challenges of inserting new Indigenously sourced cultural materials into non-Indigenous celebrity-producing systems. Danielle Deveau's chapter likewise considers the extent to which Canadian stand-up comedy performers exhibit ambivalence in their work while trying to establish comedy careers in the United States in order to gain legitimacy.

Practices of dissemination and consumption are not only shaped by fan demographics and geographic borders but also by the regulation and funding of broadcasting content, networks, and corporations. Ira Wagman explores the relationship between artists and bureaucrats, specifically the legitimizing power of governmental paperwork, such as grant applications, annual reports, white papers, and other official documents. Owen Percy suggests that the Governor General's Awards function more successfully than other literary prizes precisely because of their "proclivity for controversy" surrounding the celebrity status of its nominees and judges.

Although there is valuable analysis of celebrity systems throughout the collection, there is room to deconstruct the...