Acting Out(side) the Canadian Multicultural "Script" in Toronto's Ethno-cultural Festivals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis articulates the promising disruptions of the Canadian multicultural “script” that a Brechtian dramaturgy of ethno-cultural festivals critically practices, and also draws attention to the fissures in scholarship and in the official record through which these festivals often tumble into either obscurity or reductive characterisations. Within the framework of performance studies, this thesis adapts Bertolt Brecht’s dramaturgical approach to interrogate the ways in which Toronto’s largest ethno-cultural festivals—in particular, Toronto Caribbean Carnival Festival (1967-present), Toronto International Festival Caravan (1969-2002/2003), and the Taste of the Danforth (1994-present)—produce, perform, and negotiate the plurality of contrasting and contested meanings of the Canadian multicultural “script.” Enshrining the values of multiculturalism as part of the performance of Canadian identity, this “script” was developed in stages by the Canadian Government after the Second World War, and was institutionalised in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) and the Canadian Multiculturalism Act (1988). I employ Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, gestus, and historicisation to denaturalise and make visible the often unnoticed discourses of power, that shape the presentation of ethno-cultural identities at festivals, for further examination and questioning. In doing so, I illustrate that the ways in which they operate are not just fixed within understandings of the official multicultural “script,” but rather can, and do, change over time. Organised around three meditations of performativity, this thesis examines how material objects like food, physical and metaphoric spaces, and performing bodies at festivals create, perform, and present multicultural identities that play into normative understandings of the multicultural “script” as well as opening the possibility of their resistance through performance. In addition to the existing critiques of commoditisation at ethno-cultural festivals, my work on the performativity of food opens up a dialogue about the other ways that the multicultural “script” contributes to the management of diversity in the nation. Foregrounding the discursive practices of space at ethno-cultural festivals, my study illustrates the ways in which access to, or displacement or exclusion from, space is a performance of power. The performing body in ethno-cultural festivals has counter-hegemonic potential that can interfere and disrupt the safe representation and consumption of the multicultural “script” that discursively reinforce unequal power relations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".