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Celebrity Cultures in Canada is an interdisciplinary collection that explores celebrity phenomena and the ways they have operated and developed in Canada over the last two centuries. The chapters address a variety of cultural venues—politics, sports, film, and literature—and examine the political, cultural, material, and affective conditions that shaped celebrity in Canada and its uses both at home and abroad. The scope of the book enables the authors to highlight the trends that characterize Canadian celebrity—such as transnationality and bureaucracy—and explore the regional, linguistic, administrative, and indigenous cultures and institutions that distinguish fame in Canada from fame elsewhere.
In historicizing and theorizing Canada’s complicated cultures of celebrity, Celebrity Cultures in Canada rejects the argument that nations are irrelevant in today’s global celebrityscapes or that Canada lacks a credible or adequate system for producing, distributing, and consuming celebrity. Nation and national identities continue to matter—to celebrities, to fans, and to institutions and industries that manage and profit from celebrity systems—and Canada, this collection argues, has a vibrant, powerful, and often complicated and controversial relationship to fame.
Katja Lee has recently completed a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia and now teaches at the University of Western Australia in Perth, Western Australia. She has published essays on celebrity, public identity performance, and life writing. Her most recent work has been published in Celebrity Studies, Life Writing, and The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies. With Lorraine York, she co-edited Celebrity Cultures in Canada.
|Lorraine York is Senator William McMaster Chair in Canadian Literature and Culture in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her most recent books are Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity (2013) and Literary Celebrity in Canada (2007). She is currently at work on a project on reluctant celebrity.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Celebrity Cultures in Canada: It’s Not a Question | Katja Lee and Lorraine York
1. Rediscovering Nell Shipman for Canadian Cultural Heritage | Amy Shore
2. “What an elastic nationality she possesses!” Transnational Celebrity Identities in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries | Katja Lee
3. Denaturalizing the Myth of Terry Fox and Canadian Disabled Celebrity | Valerie J. Millar
4. Canadian Political Celebrity: From Trudeau to Trudeau | Jennifer Bell
5. Celebrity and Indigeneity | Lorraine York
6. Lament for a Hockey Nation, Don Cherry, and the Apparatus of Canadian Celebrity | Julie Rak
7. Bon Cop, Bad Cop: A Tale of Two Star Systems | Liz Czach
8. Crossover Stars: Canadian Viewing Strategies and the Case of Callum Keith Rennie | Katherine Ann Roberts
9. What’s So Funny about Canadian Expats? The Comedian as Celebrity Export | Danielle J. Deveau
10. Celebrity Verses Scandal: Prizing Poetry in Canada | Owen Percy
11. Bureaucratic Celebrity | Ira Wagman