National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo 67 to Céline Dion by Erin Hurley (review)

category of entries deals with the great themes of the author’s work as well as the writers and artists who influenced him. The dictionary informs the reader about every aspect of Beckett’s monumental legacy, integrating the most recent critical responses. With the annexes,including a chronology,bibliography,and filmography,this dictionary constitutes an invaluable reference on Beckett’s life and works. The dictionary is comprehensive in scope, and the entries were carefully selected to facilitate research. They are succinct and to the point while providing more details when warranted. The necessary selection process does exclude other topics, but their content is skillfully subsumed under other entries, without unnecessary repetition or overlap. This allows the reader to access the information through a well-organized and controlled yet supple framework. Bowie State University (MD) Évelyne Bonhomme Hurley, Erin. National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo 67 to Céline Dion. Toronto: UP of Toronto, 2011. ISBN 978-1-4426-4095-5. Pp. 244. $45 Can. This ground-breaking study of the ways in which theatrical and cultural performances may be perceived as “national” is well-suited for a critical collection, Cultural Spaces, whose aim is “to publish new analyses and theories of the spaces of culture” (245). Hurley’s close reading of five emblematic Québécois performance productions is innovative in two important ways: first, by focusing on the affective experience of audiences, it points to new, alternative modes of figuring what has, in Quebec, become an increasingly oblique relationship between performance and national identity (10); second, its critical approach to reading Quebec-ness can potentially serve as a model for scholars studying national theater history in other postcolonial or settler societies presenting similar sociopolitical conditions and challenges (9). By examining the often-overlooked emotional labor performed by women and other marginalized groups, Hurley’s study aspires to a broader goal, that of opening“the field of national theater and performance studies to new objects and modes of interpretation”(11).As the subtitle suggests, National Performance traces the evolution of Québécois cultural and theatrical production over nearly a half century, from the mid-1960s when the creators of the Montreal World’s Fair symbolically rewrote Quebec’s national story (58), into the mid-2000s and“the Dion phenomenon”(146). To illustrate how evolving notions of theatrical québécité have come to complicate the process of determining which performances might qualify as being distinctly Québécois, Hurley opens with the example of the Cirque du Soleil, a certifiably Québécois global cultural export that many audiences nonetheless fail to recognize as Québécois. Noting the limitations of traditional criteria such as geographical location, language, and ethnicity in defining Quebec-ness (14), Hurley sets forth the study’s conceptual and historical groundwork in a chapter entitled “Marginals, Metaphors, and Mimesis.” The study then devotes a 268 FRENCH REVIEW 87.3 Reviews 269 chapter to each of the following performance objects: Expo 67 with its iconic Quebec pavilion and hostesses; Michel Tremblay’s controversial and widely-translated play, Les belles-sœurs; the dramatic and critical œuvre of Italo-Québécois author Marco Micone; the image-theater performances by the troupe Carbone 14; and the music and persona of Céline Dion. The first two case studies examine how the conceptual categories of reflection and construction function to establish a purely mimetic relation between a cultural production and the nation whose attributes it projects. The last three cases reveal the inadequacies of these conventional figures to define québécité in a postmodern society where the dominant ideologies of Québécois nationalism have shifted to those of transculturalism and globalism. Hurley makes a compelling case for revising the terms for articulating the performance-nation relationship to include the alternate figures of simulation, metonymy, and affection, terms which privilege emotional, rather than representational, labor and focus attention upon the ways in which a production’s affective appeals create shared emotional connections. While perhaps not as accessible to non-specialists as the dust jacket claims, Hurley’s study constitutes a challenge well worth taking up. Davidson College (NC) Carole A. Kruger Kinoshita, Sharon, and Peggy McCracken. Marie...