“My name is Joe, and I AM Canadian!” How did a beer ad featuring an unassuming guy in a plaid shirt become a national anthem? This book about Canadian TV examines how affect and consumption work together, producing national practices framed by the television screen. Drawing on the new field of affect theory, Feeling Canadian: Television, Nationalism, and Affect tracks the ways that ideas about the Canadian nation flow from screen to audience and then from body to body.
From the most recent Quebec referendum to 9/11 and current news coverage of the so-called “terrorist threat,” media theorist Marusya Bociurkiw argues that a significant intensifying of nationalist content on Canadian television became apparent after 1995. Close readings of TV shows and news items such as Canada: A People’s History, North of 60, and coverage of the funeral of Pierre Trudeau reveal how television works to resolve the imagined community of nation, as well as the idea of a national self and national others, via affect. Affect theory, with its notions of changeability, fluidity, and contagion, is, the author argues, well suited to the study of television and its audience.
Useful for scholars and students of media studies, communications theory, and national television and for anyone interested in Canadian popular culture, this highly readable book fills the need for critical scholarly analysis of Canadian television’s nationalist practices.

Marusya Bociurkiw is an author, filmmaker and professor. She has been producing films and videos in Canada for the past twenty-five years and those works have screened at film festivals and in cinemas on several continents. She has written five books, including the novel The Children of Mary, and the award-winning Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl, which was also shortlisted for the prestigious Lambda and Kobzar awards. More recently, her creative non-fiction entry, “A Girl, Waiting”, was a finalist for CBC’s 2015 Canada Writes award. She is associate professor of media theory at Ryerson University and Director of The Studio for Media Activism and Critical Thought. She has made ten films. Her latest, the documentary This is Gay Propaganda: LGBT Rights & the War in Ukraine, has screened in thirteen countries and has been translated into three languages.

Marusya Bociurkiw's profile page

Bociurkiw's writing in Feeling Canadian is rich enough to provide the benefit of academic research on our media landscape. Although it examines pop culture academically, the analysis is ... accessible to readers seeking to understand the significance of mediation on our feelings and perception of nation." (See the full review on [http://rabble.ca/books/reviews/2011/06/feeling-canadian-television-nationalism-and-affect Rabble.ca].)

Humberto DaSilva, Rabble.ca, 2011 June

Feeling Canadian is an original and incisive analysis of the pivotal role of television in creating the affective fabric of a nation. In its careful attention to, and appreciation of, the particularity of Canadian feelings, and of feeling Canadian, it provides a compelling model for accounts of different national contexts of affects, popular culture, and feelings. Feeling Canadian reminds us of the necessity to look at the differences and similarities of nationhood in the twenty-first century.

Elspeth Probyn, University of Sydney, author of <i>Blush: Faces of Shame</i> (2005)

À l'encontre de ce que soutient souvent la pensée postmoderniste, l'ouvrage de Bociurkiw illustre à quel point la question de la nation est loin d'être devenue obsolète.... Sa force se situe à deux niveaux : à l'aide de la théorie du trauma, il propose un cadre original pour étudier la formation des représentations collectives qui forgent les identités nationales ; avec finesse et sensibilité, il esquisse une image touchante de la société canadienne dans ses efforts de porter un regard réflexif sur elle-même.

Angeliki Koukoutsaki-Monnier, Communication, Volume 30/2, 2012 December