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Article Excerpt
The proposition that nation is enacted in an imagined theatre implies that the two constituent terms are variable, changeable, and historically contingent. Yet both theatre and nation are real structures in that they exist as social formations in the real world, and they are both formative. In Pierre Bourdieu's celebrated phrase, they are "structuring structures," which he defines as a structure that "organizes practices and the perception of practices" (Distinction 170). In this chapter I will explore the implications of this apparent contradiction to suggest how nation and theatre produce each other in what I have already referred to as the elation of spectacle.
I begin with the notion that postcolonial nationhood is founded on fantasies of absent authenticity (commonly described as a crisis of national "identity") and that nationhood is enacted in a theatre culture that similarly refers to a imagined cultural authenticity. The idea of national theatre as an institutionalized theatrical industry that announces and enacts the historical presence of the nation through a canon of performed texts is in this sense an historical artifact originating in nineteenth-century movements of popular nationhood. As such, it presents a particular problem in the postcolonial settler nations of the anglophone world. In my reconsideration of the conjunction of these two unstable terms (theatre and nation) as a metahistorical fantasy that enacts historicized constructions of nation, I paraphrase Benedict Anderson's celebrated argument to suggest that the theatre as it is imagined, formally (through policy, canonization, spectacle, and critical discourse) and informally (through polemics, noncanonical textualities, pageants, literary closet dramas, and failed aspirations), is a legitimizing performance of the imagined community that is the nation.
My argument embraces not only the critical discourses that have framed the material stage. It is also located in changing and historically contingent visions of what the theatre might be. By literally destaging the theatre, I argue that the material theatre has always been the quotation of a more authentic performance that can never be realized. National theatre, in this postcolonial context, refers to performances of desire and surrogation, of lost authenticities reclaimed through spectacle, and the work of making spectacle.
In his influential study of the origins of nationalism, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that nations are imagined because no one person can know all the subjects they embrace. From that simple observation, he develops a sophisticated argument that analyzes the discursive structures that have legitimized nations as transhistorical narratives. Anderson's work is particularly useful in discussing Canada because he locates nationalism as a construct of colonial empire building. Following that, we can address the problem of postcolonial nationhood as one in which the state artifacts of empire produce informing narratives that seek to assign deep character to historically contingent structures.
Earlier historians of nationalism, such as Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, have demonstrated that nations justify themselves in originary myths located in immemorial time (or, as Anderson aptly summarizes, national time runs backwards from the present to a receding and mythic origin). In the collapse of the racial ideologies that justified the expansionist empire-building of the nineteenth-century (such as Victorian "Anglo-Saxonism"), postcolonial constructs such as Canada and Australia have been marked by recurrent crises of "identity" in the absence of an enabling transhistorical myth. In these terms, "identity" is a marker of an imagined authenticity. This crisis of imagined authenticity in effect simulates--in Jean Baudrillard's sense of a copy without an original--the narrative that enables nationhood. One of the more common tropes of this simulation is the idea of national maturity, which posits some nations as older and mature, and others as younger and adolescent.
The Massey Commission's repeated reminder that we are a "young" culture is worth recalling here. As a state, Canada is no "younger" than Italy or Germany. Like them, it is a product of nineteenth-century liberal nationbuilding, but unlike them, Canadians could not legitimize the national state by a mythic invocation of racial unity. This is not just because of the polyglot demographics that have produced modern notions of multiculturalism, but because the very premise of the postcolonial state is, like Lescarbot's masque, an expropriation of aboriginality. This is most vividly evident in Newfoundland, the first overseas colony of the British empire, and the only one where all of the aboriginal inhabitants were killed in a historical act of total genocide. (This claim has on occasion been made of Tasmania as well, but the survival of a small group of indigenous Tasmanians, and their subsequent erasure from the accounts of genocide, subjects them to what can only be called re-genocide. (1)) The particular nationalism that arose and still operates in Newfoundland was predicated on the literal expropriation of aboriginality. The three centuries of genocide leading to the death of the last Beothuk in 1827 were concurrent with three centuries of hard oppression for the island's white settlers. As Chapter Four argues, this now uncontested occupation of the island has given Newfoundlanders a sense of aboriginal "belonging" to the land (or more accurately, the sea) which inflected their response to the seal hunt controversy of the 1970s as an issue of, in effect, aboriginal right. The Australian playwright Louis Nowra has ascribed the anxiety of "identity" in terms that apply with as much pressure to Canada as to Australia when he refers to "a black hole of our history," a void he ascribes to the...
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