Siting the Other: Re-visions of Marginality in Australian and English-Canadian Drama ed. by Marc Maufort, Franca Bellasari (review)

466 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 favour of the distinctive cinematic canvas of the city-space. Catherine Nash, in >Siting Lesbians: Urban Spaces and Sexuality,= also focuses on the urban, but works from the field of urban geography. Nash explores lesbian city-spaces in Canadian cities, setting her own first-hand urban planning research against a gay maleBcentric sociological tradition. She portrays a community where issues of class and gender outweigh the politicized spectacle and hyper-sexuality of dominantly gay urban centres. An essay from Gordon Brent Ingram complements Nash=s piece. In >Redesigning Wreck: Beach Meets Forest as Location of Male Homoerotic Culture and Placemaking in Pacific Canada,= Ingram focuses on gay cultural landscapes. Ingram=s interlacing of the local, national, and international potential of such a place comes closer to positing a queer Canadian utopia than any other in this collection. Goldie initiates conversation between the pieces on film, space, spectacle, and other topics in his introduction, even as he labours to avoid imposing any authoritative order on this collection. What Goldie gains in his careful weaving, however, he sacrifices in representation. It is surprising that the borders of this queer country do not include any essays that focus on First Nations communities, and only one essay B >Buller Men and Bwatty Boys: Hidden Men in Toronto and Halifax Black Communities= by Wesley Crichlow B explores racialized queer experiences. Also surprising is a lack of overtly materialist/postcolonial interest, despite Goldie=s loud and insistent call for such a focus in GLBT studies in his Introduction to a special 1999 issue of Ariel, >Introduction: Queerly Postcolonial.= The individual essays are substantial, and collectively they offer a wide array of queer/Canadian studies topics and methods. Goldie clearly succeeds in showcasing the creative breadth of current academic studies of Canadian gay and lesbian cultures in this highly enjoyable collection. This, however, is also the text=s weakness. Despite Goldie=s disclaimer that his intention is >less to prove an argument than to posit a certain model= of queer Canadian nationalism, the diversity of the text=s contents prevents any discernible model from ever rising to the fore. (JOHN CORR) Marc Maufort and Franca Bellasari, editors. Siting the Other: Re-visions of Marginality in Australian and English-Canadian Drama Peter Lang. xii, 378. US $45.95 Although the title of this book indicates a revisioning of margins, hybridity is the recurring motif, from the >mongrelisation= Bruce Parr sees in Nick Enright=s ironic incorporation of the marginal queer into mainstream Australian theatre, to the >contingent construction= that Robert Appleford suggests destabilizes subject positions for both character and spectator in Native Canadian performance. Hybridity is a space of ambivalence, of humanities 467 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 >resistance and subversion= and >complicity and acquiescence,= as Jacqueline Lo argues in >Playing the Yellow Lady: Performing Gender and Race.= Hybridity reveals its gaps and sutures: Reid Gilbert, drawing on ðiñek, reads the shifting subject positions of the female characters in George F. Walker=s Suburban Motel as a >quilting= of signifiers. As these essays recognize, the hybrid disrupts binaries. Peter Fitzpatirck in >Spot the Infidel: Aspects of Multiculturalism in Mainstream Australian Theatre= describes how the term >the other= carries >associations of profound B even permanent B binary oppositions.= Indeed, some of these essays >write back= to the title, suggesting that the act of >siting the other= presupposes a vantage point of >self.= Ric Knowles in >Monique Mojica and the Mothers of the Métis Nations= recognizes his own risk of reinscribing colonial and gender relationships in writing about Mojica. Maryrose Casey entitles her article >Siting Themselves: Indigenous Australian Theatre Companies,= thereby reworking the singular and colonist implications of the book title through mimicry. Like the title, the organizing principle of the book fails to escape binaries. Maufort=s introduction notes that >the traditional link between centre and margin is reversed and thereby perverted through the sequence in which these essays are arranged: they move from the margins to the centre.= But here >reversal= and >perversion= are collapsed. To reverse margins and centre reinforces binaries and hierarchies...