Feeling Canadian: Television, Nationalism, and Affect

T he Québec referendum, Loving Spoonfuls, Trudeau's funeral, Joe Canadian, and 9/11 are all explored in Marusya Bociurkiw's Feeling Canadian.Bociurkiw examines the convergence of affect and nationalism in selected media super-texts from 1995 to 2002.With material primarily from the CBC, as well as the National Library and Archives, CTV, W, Knowledge and Vision networks (see chapter 2, "The Televisual Archive and the Nation"), Bociurkiw takes a interdisciplinary approach to her study of affect in Canadian television; grounded in affect theory (see chapter 1, "Affect Theory") she employs feminist theories of memory, Frankfurt School theories of production and political economy, television theories of the super-text, and queer and post-structural theories to create a work that is relevant, as a whole or in parts, to film, media, Canadian, and cultural studies and to critical scholars in anthropology, post-colonial studies, and feminist/queer studies.The book, originally Bociurkiw's doctoral thesis (Bociurkiw, 2004), has seven chapters framed by an introduction, a conclusion, and a coda.The author argues that marginalized identities within Canada's seemingly hybrid national identity are erased, suppressed, and/or vilified in order to market Canadian national identity both to us and to the world via media displays of affect.Bociurkiw appears in the book on both a critical and personal level, as she weaves autoethnographic vignettes on her queer Ukrainian childhood throughout.Her voice allows readers to see the issues of identity and difference from the perspective of the individual.For example, in chapter 4, "An Otherness Barely Touched Upon," Bociurkiw relates how her mother invited a news crew to her home to film the family's Ukrainian Christmas.Young Marusya is replaced with ethnically garbed and coiffed Maria whose love for being Ukrainian outshines Bociurkiw's "sullen resentment and ethnic shame" (2011, p. 87).The vignette propels the chapter outward into an analysis of how cultural food discourses, like Loving Spoonfuls, displace the immigrant and his/her painful experiences within the greater national discourse.Further developing the author's thesis are chapter 3, "Whose Child Am I?" (on the Québec referendum; this chapter also appears in Druick & Kotsopolos, 2008) and chapter 7, "Homeland (In)Security" (on 9/11 and the 2002 Winter Olympics).Both chapters deal with popular cultural texts that undulate with the pain and vulnerability from symbolic divorces and actual deaths.The chapters speak to each other because they each echo how the discursive work of nation-building is contradictory (e.g., Canadians as Americans and versus Americans), exclusory (e.g, ethnic others), and tied to globalization (e.g., media branding of nationhood).The chapters evoke a national machine that sells itself through media affect with little regard for the individual lives affected by the resulting cultural schisms.Cultural schisms lie behind high production value documentaries, such as Canada: A People's History (CPH), which Bociurkiw tackles in chapter 4, "Haunted Absences."The irony of the documentary is exposed when, for instance, the producer states that

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