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Reviewed by:
  • Celebrity Cultures in Canada by Katja Lee and Lorraine York
  • Shraddha A. Singh
Katja Lee and Lorraine York (eds), Celebrity Cultures in Canada (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016), 285 pp. Paper. $34.99. ISBN 978-1-77112-222-1.

In their introduction, Lee and York assert that 'some of the(se) assumptions about what constitutes celebrity continue to be mobilized as reasons for disregarding the labour of Canadians in the field of celebrity culture' (p. 10), and go on to explain how they have used the term 'stardom' interchangeably with 'celebrity' as they find it more wholesome for the diverse range of practices it covers. In this primer, meant for exploring how celebrity operates within Canada, the focus is on the notion that it is the dominant discourse operating within the confines of the nation, which still controls the materialistic conditions of production. It is also responsible for controlling the hegemonic forces which propagate certain agendas, sometimes leading to identity formation and promoting a certain type of Canadianness that goes along with it; as is, for example, discussed in the essay on Canada's major poetry prizes.

The volume comprises 11 essays, and a foreword by P. David Marshall, whose work on celebrity culture is quite well renowned. He endorses the collection and compliments the nuanced understanding of its editors and authors, in especially how the 'book provides material and research that can both substantiate and refute some of the claims that I and others have made about celebrity in Canada' (p. ix). This interdisciplinary volume covers a range of topics across markers of class, gender, sexualities, race and disability. While focusing on literature, politics, television, and sports in order to bring to the fore issues that have been at the heart of Canada, this book explores certain themes across the essays [End Page 273] like Quebec vis-à-vis the rest of Canada, indigenous identity, multiculturalism, national identity, and transnationality.

What this volume has indulged in is primarily an examination of how the practices of production, dissemination, and consumption operate in contemporary materialist conditions of production, and thus the editors have selected essays that reflect on the awareness of how the local intersects with the global and results in emergence of a celebrity culture for Canada which seems to be credible and worth taking a look at. Celebrity is not just celebrated here, but its fraught relationship with fame is also explored; and an understanding of how someone's identification as a celebrity is received within Canada, and also operates as a signifier for Canada, is deliberated upon keeping the last two hundred years in mind.

Claiming a space for academic discourse around the idea of Canadianness and celebrity, especially in its historicisation of the notion, this book proves to be excellent reading for students and scholars of culture studies. What this book should do, in the scope of literary studies, is to fuel a desire among researchers to explore areas and themes hitherto unexplored, primarily in contemporary society (e.g. religion, music, art, activism, etc.) in identifying celebrity cultures in Canada; and this volume could be a starting point. [End Page 274]

Shraddha A. Singh
University of Delhi
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