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Book cover of Erin Hurley’s National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo 67 to Céline Dion (University of Toronto Press, 2011).

Jacket photograph courtesy of Fotosearch Jacket design by Greg Devitt Design

Erin Hurley’s National Performance is a highly accomplished, generous, and ground-breaking book. In at least three different ways—its choice of objects, deployment of inventive critical methods, and performance of scholarly ethics—it contributes to the understanding of an array of important, timely issues, making it relevant to readers concerned with Quebec, with nation, and with performance, as well as to anyone interested in ethical and multidisciplinary scholarly practice.

First, as promised on the cover, the book considers how performance objects broadly conceived have stimulated and complicated senses of québécité (Quebecness) from the 1960s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, a politically vibrant period that has witnessed Quebec’s Quiet Revolution and various “national legitimation crises” (19), including two referenda on Quebec sovereignty. After two introductory set-up sections, chapters three to eight focus on the following performance objects: Expo 67, with its pavilions, architecture, situation in Montreal, contents, narratives, and hostesses; le nouveau théâtre québécois of the 1960s to 1970s, led by Michel Tremblay and exemplified in his iconic Les belles-soeurs (1968); the culture immigrée (immigrant culture) or transculture of the 1980s produced by so-called néo-Québécois who were allophone (originally neither French- nor English-speaking) and whose writing Hurley demonstrates through the drama and poetry of Italo-Québécois author Marco Micone; the devised dance-theatre of Carbone 14, founded in 1980 and rising to international prominence across that decade and the next; the music and persona of international chanteuse Céline Dion; and the often collective feminist theatre of the 1970s and 1980s.

Hurley’s considered choice of objects is significant in a number of ways. The objects are emblematic of important cultural moments, offering examples that are vivid in themselves and vivid as ways into understanding a broader historical trend in each chapter as well as an historical throughline over the arc of the book. In chapter six on Carbone 14, for instance, Hurley offers perceptive and exciting readings of various shows but also notes how the company’s move away from words toward images was symptomatic of a “relatively apolitical interlude” in Quebec culture of the time, following “the political and cultural effervescence of the 1960s and 1970s” (114). Second, the variety of objects—which range formally from architecture via theatre to pop song, and in status from the “legitimate” to the “marginal” (10)—demonstrates the myriad cultural sources that inform national identity, as well as the necessity of a critical approach which democratically includes them all. Hurley consistently pays each set of practices rigorous attention—through luminous description, helpful inclusion of images, and relevant critical, historical, and social context; and she brings to each a truly inspiring disciplinary expertise which makes her detailed analysis especially persuasive. Third, Hurley examines some surprising objects that might not normally be seen as affirming national identity, or that do so differently than might at first be expected. Indeed, she is interested in most of her objects for the ways they complicate québécité by challenging common understandings of cultural productions as transparent representations of national identities (26). For example, chapter seven’s analysis of Céline Dion as “the phenomenon” and singer starts from the understanding that because Dion is both loved and hated by Québécois (as by other audiences), she is a source of national pride but also national shame; and chapter three’s consideration of Expo 67 argues that a conventional masculine reading of its claiming of pays (land) risks ignoring the important social, emotional, and narrative work that the Quebec pavilion hostesses performed. As these last two examples demonstrate, Hurley’s choice of objects focuses on the role of women and feminine signification as agents of nation, rather than...