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At the outset of this article, I presented melodrama and the Gothic as two foundational modes of Canadian culture. They are inseparable, yet they emerge as distinct idioms in the history of modernity: one a history of visibilities, the other a history of invisibilities; one yielding tales of home and belonging and multicultural futures, the other distressing viewers with its terrors and suffering, and its horizons of racial violence. Where melodrama can be understood as productive of and for the representation of identity through the affective tension between avowal and disavowal, which yields an emotional investment in the narrative, the Gothic arises from a structuring absence that can never but disrupt the presentation of self/nation. This disaffection of the text can be understood within colonial contexts as an historical trauma, as the dream world of national myth disturbed by the nightmare of history (as Goddu paraphrases Marx), and as an invisible latency without presentability, which haunts the house of the national consciousness. Hence, the Gothic can function as a mode of perception that opens the self of nationhood to its own otherness and, thereby, to the losses upon which it is founded. While few directors of Canadian cinema take this upon themselves as a means by which to inquire into the national imaginary, the regional politics of the Prairies appears to have opened a space for such work. Notes 1 These fragments are part of the oral history of my mother’s family, as told to me by relatives . 2 This question was articulated in personal correspondence with Tom Gunning. 3 Ryszard Bugajski,Clearcut (Canada, 1991); Robert Morin,Windigo (Canada, 1994); Alanis Obomsawin, Kanehsatake:270Years of Resistance (Canada, 1993); and Nettie Wild, Blockade (Canada, 1993). 4 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 6–7. 5 Pratt, 7. 6 Foucault defines “governmentality” as the question of how government acts to govern the action of others, since he is said to have defined “government” as the “‘conduct of conduct.’” Michel Foucault, “Governmentality” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality , ed. Graham Burchill, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 2. See also Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage), 1999. 7 The phrase “whiting out” comes from Christopher Gittings, Canadian National Cinema (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 198. 8 Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 10. 9 In Canadian cinema studies, Christopher Gittings, Brenda Longfellow, and Jean Bruce use the melodramatic lens as a means by which to critique the representation of nation in film and in film criticism. Gittings, Canadian National Cinema,12–32; Brenda Longfellow , “Gender, Landscape and Colonial Allegories” The Far Shore, Loyalties and Mouvements du désir,”Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women’s Cinema, ed. Kay Armatage 416 Cultural Dissidence et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 165–82. Other references for discussions of nation and melodrama include Julianne Burton-Carvajal, “Mexican Melodramas of Patriarchy: Specificity of a Transcultural Form,” in Framing Latin American Cinema : Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. Ann Marie Stock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 186–234; Christine Geraghty, Women and Soap Opera (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); Susan Hayward, “Framing National Cinemas,” Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 88–102; Marcia Landy, Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1930– 1943 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Ana M. López, “Celluloid Tears: Melodrama in the ‘Old’ Mexican Cinema,” Iris 13 (1991): 29–51. Feminist film theorists (particularly but not exclusively) have favoured the genre of melodrama, especially the sub-genre of “the woman’s film,” because the anti-realist excesses and overt ideological contradictions that strain the text are, some argue, an effect of a female pointof -view and address. More generally, the genre is gendered “feminine” due to its inversion of dominant, patriarchal forms and modes. Thomas Elsaesser, for instance, outlines a set of “feminine” terms to designate the genre against patriarchal narratives: emotionalism and internalization of violence; the social and political issues are played out in and through private contexts and family romances; the privileging of the victim’s, as opposed to the victor’s, point-of-view; and claustral settings and circular narratives as opposed to the domination of space (landscapes, cities, etc.) through a linear narrative structure and its attendant closure. Volumes have been written about melodrama and its subgenres...

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