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| Feeling Canadian: Book Launch & Reading Featuring Marusya Bociurkiw | | Posted Monday, January 30, 2012 1:37 PM |
| Feeling Canadian:
Book Launch & Reading
Featuring Toronto author, academic & activist Marusya Bociurkiw
Thursday Feb. 17, Aqua Books, 274 Garry Street, Winnipeg
Info: kelly@aquabooks.ca
Media contact: chitchens@wlu.ca
Free! Cash bar!
"My name is Joe, and I AM Canadian!" How did a beer ad become a
national anthem? When did Olympic opening ceremonies become an
advertisement for national superiority? What do toques and canoes have
to do with nationalism?
Canadian couch potatoes need wonder no longer. This book by
award-winning Toronto-based author, media theorist, filmmaker and
professor Marusya Bociurkiw examines how affect (passionate sites of
feeling) and consumerism work together to produce shows like Canada A
Peoples' History, North of 60, and television coverage of the 2010
Olympics. As Canadian TV expert Michelle Byers writes, “Providing
anecdotes that most readers will be very familiar with, Bociurkiw’s
analysis situates us firmly within the context of our own uneasy,
ambivalent, and sometimes embarrassing viewing pleasures.”
The author tracks the rise of nationalist content on Canadian
television after the 1995 Quebec referendum, looking at how Canadian
television works overtime to resolve the messy contradictions of
nationhood. She closely examines the coverage of and aftermath to
9/11, when racial profiling became embedded in Canadian news. Drawing
anecdotally upon televisually-mediated childhood memories, her
Ukrainian background and more recent cross-media experiences, this
book also makes use of humour and poetic writing.
With Canadian culture currently at the mercy of various election
platforms and funding cuts, this timely book asks us to take a closer
look at some of our most dearly-held nationalist assumptions. The
proliferation of screens, the rise of social media and the ways in
which audiences now move across platforms, open up, the author argues,
opportunities for connection, empathy, and activism, and the creation
of new post-national narratives on and off the TV screen.
Marusya Bociurkiw is the author of five books including Comfort Food
for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl, an award winning literary
memoir, and Halfway to the East, a collection of poetry. Her articles,
essays and reviews have appeared in many academic, arts and activist
journals and books. She has been producing films and videos in Canada
for the past fifteen years and those works have screened at film
festivals and in cinemas on several continents. She is professor of
media theory at Ryerson University in Toronto where she teaches
courses on Canadian television, news theory, social media, and screen
theory. |
| | | For more information, contact:
Katie Man
Media Lab Technician
English, Film & Theatre
katie_man@umanitoba.ca
Phone: (204) 474-7411
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