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Description
Where is Here? The Drama of Immigration. Vol. I. Damiano Pietropaolo, ed. Winnipeg: Scirocco, 2005. 256 pp. $19.95 sc.
Where is Here? The Drama of Immigration. Vol. II. Damiano Pietropaolo, ed. Winnipeg: Scirocco, 2005. 160 pp. $19.95 sc.
Although the question posed by Northrop Frye in the 1960s has become a cliche of Canadian identity obsession, the eleven radio plays broadcast on CBC Sunday Showcase between 23 January and 27 February 2005 and published in the two volume anthology, Where is Here? The Drama of Immigration, suggest that the "Canadian" response is still ambivalent and varied. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) producer and editor Damiano Pietropaolo posits in his preface that they reflect Canada's movement from a "pre-national to a post-national consciousness" (p. 7), again citing Frye. Pietropaolo simply equates "post-nationalism" with "multiculturalism," but he also claims that CBC radio drama constitutes a "national theatre," as was the case in the 1940s and 1950s when the CBC was an instrument of Canadian culture instituted to unite a widely dispersed population. Pietropaolo also reaffirms the importance of radio drama by quoting David Mamet's contention that it responds to "our primal need for participatory narrative" (p. 9), again assuming social and cultural commonality in the audience.
Most of these plays have a heavy autobiographical investment, and many are "memory plays"--an adult recalling a childhood in another place, the memories triggered by a visit necessitated by the illness or death of a parent or grandparent in the "homeland" that results in a reassessment of the significance and... |
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