Slippery Pastimes

Description

Sixteen essays, written by specialists from many fields, grapple with the problem of a popular culture that is not very popular — but is seen by most as vital to the body politic, whether endangered by globalization or capable of politically progressive messages for its audiences.

Slippery Pastimes covers a variety of topics: Canadian popular music from rock ’n’ roll to country, hip-hop to pop-Celtic; television; advertising; tourism; sport and even postage stamps! As co-editors, Nicks and Sloniowski have taken an open view of the Canadian Popular, and contributors have approached their topics from a variety of perspectives, including cultural studies, women’s studies, film studies, sociology and communication studies. The essays are accessibly written for undergraduate students and interested general readers.

Sujets

• Cultural Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 21 octobre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554587612
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

SLIPPERY PASTIMES
READING THE POPULAR IN CANADIAN CULTURE
Cultural Studies Series
Cultural Studies is the multi- and interdisciplinary study of culture, defined anthropologically as a way of life, performatively as symbolic practice and ideologically as the collective product of media and cultural industries, i.e., pop culture. Although Cultural Studies is a relative newcomer to the humanities and social sciences, in less than half a century it has taken interdisciplinary scholarship to a new level of sophistication, reinvigorating the liberal arts curriculum with new theories, new topics and new forms of intellectual partnership.
The Cultural Studies series includes topics such as construction of identities; regionalism/nationalism; cultural citizenship; migration; popular culture; consumer cultures; media and film; the body; post-colonial criticism; cultural policy; sexualities; cultural theory; youth culture; class relations; and gender.
The new Cultural Studies series from Wilfrid Laurier University Press invites submission of manuscripts concerned with critical discussions on power relations concerning gender, class, sexual preference, ethnicity and other macro and micro sites of political struggle.
For further information, please contact the Series Editor: Jodey Castricano Department of English Wilfrid Laurier University Press 75 University Avenue West Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3C5
SLIPPERY PASTIMES
READING THE POPULAR IN CANADIAN CULTURE
Edited by Joan Nicks and Jeannette Sloniowski
Cultural Studies Series
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Slippery pastimes : reading the popular in Canadian culture
(Cultural studies series) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-88920-388-1
1. Popular culture-Canada. I. Nicks, Joan, 1937- II. Sloniowski, Jeannette Marie, 1946- III. Cultural studies series.
FC95.4.S55 2002 306 .0971 C2002-900012-2 F1021.2.S55 2002
2002 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5 www.wlupress.wlu.ca
Cover design by Leslie Macredie, using an illustration entitled The Hikers. Illustration Doug Martin / www.i2iart.com
The following previously published articles have been revised for this volume:
Karen Dubinsky, The Pleasure Is Exquisite but Violent : The Imaginary Geography of Niagara Falls in the Nineteenth Century, Journal of Canadian Studies 29.2 (Summer 1994): 64-88.
Neil Earle, Hockey as Canadian Popular Culture: Team Canada 1972, Television, and the Canadian Identity, Journal of Canadian Studies 30.2 (Summer 1995): 107-23.
Valda Blundell, Riding the Polar Bear Express: And Other Encounters between Tourists and First Peoples in Canada, Journal of Canadian Studies 30.4 (Winter 1995): 28-51.
The author and publisher have made every reasonable effort to obtain permission to reproduce the secondary material in this book. Any corrections or omissions brought to the attention of the Press will be incorporated in subsequent printings.

Printed in Canada
All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means-graphic, electronic, or mechanical-without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping, or reproducing in information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the Canadian Reprography Collective, 214 King Street West, Suite 312, Toronto, Ontario M5H 3S6.
for Joe and for Ben, Suzanne and Kenji
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
HERITAGE
The Pleasure Is Exquisite but Violent : The Imaginary Geography of Niagara Falls in the Nineteenth Century
Karen Dubinsky
Aboriginal Cultural Tourism in Canada
Valda Blundell
Laura Secord Meets the Candyman: The Image of Laura Secord in Popular Culture
christine Boyko-Head
Canada Post s Le petite liseur (The young reader): Framing a Reproduction
Loretta Czernis
Dilemmas of Definition
Will Straw
TELEVISION
Reading Canadian Popular Television: The Case of E.N.G.
Jim Leach
Two Lawyers and an Issue: Reconstructing Quebec s Nation in A nous deux!
Sheila Petty
Straight Up and Youth Television: Navigating Dreams without Nationhood
Joan Nicks
Popularizing History: The Valour and the Horror
Jeannette Sloniowski
MUSIC
In the Great Midwestern Hardware Store: The Seventies Triumph in English-Canadian Rock Music
Bart Testa and Jim Shedden
Reelin n Rockin : Genre-Bending and Boundary-Crossing in Canada s East Coast Sound
Nick Baxter-Moore
Forceful Nuance and Stompin Tom
William Echard
It s My Nature : The Discourse of Experience and Black Canadian Music
Rinaldo Walcott
Cowboyography : Matter and Manner in the Songs of Ian Tyson
Terrance Cox
SPORTS
Canada, the Olympics and the Ray-Ban Man
Andrew Wernick
Hockey as Canadian Popular Culture: Team Canada 1972, Television and the Canadian Identity
Neil Earle
CONTRIBUTORS
INTRODUCTION
Cultural activity belonged to leisure time, to the amateur. It existed on Mount Olympus far away from the masses, from commerce, from the music, folk dances, and plays of New-Canadian cultural groups, and from the American forms of popular culture upon which ordinary Canadians, according to Bernard K. Sandwell, had become absolutely dependent by 1913.
-Maria Tippett, Making Culture
WHY SLIPPERY PASTIMES?
This collection of essays on the Canadian popular brings together varied research representing several fields of cultural and media studies. As co-editors we have endeavoured to elicit strong, accessible writing that is analytical and engaging for both academic and culturally interested readers. All but three of the essays (and these three have been revised) are original pieces for this publication. The book s overall focus is largely, though not exclusively, on English-Canadian topics, addressing historical, theoretical, and ideological issues, and effectively attempting a cultural reading of the Canadian popular. The purpose is serious, though not necessarily dry or antiseptic, exploration. The collection is analytical and reflective, avoiding mere celebration of, indifference towards, or disavowal of the Canadian popular.
We have given priority to examinations of popular culture that address primary artifacts and their contexts in order to enlarge interest in and understanding of, for better or for worse, something beyond what is deemed to be current or, on the other hand, pass , as media ploys would have us believe. Some of the artifacts analyzed by the authors are no longer in production or even widely circulated in the culture, which does not negate their popular-use factor, past or present, given the many personal resources (video-and audio tapes and other retrieval and storage modes) employed by readers, viewers, and listeners of all ages. We have taken the view that readers are interested in something more than reading about immediate moments of popularity (what s in or on today), assuming that critique can both enrich and question how we perceive the popular in a period or a place. This may not be as urgent a project for Canadian society as it has been historically for cultures where the first level of annihilation (Pol Pot s Cambodia) or of revolutionary action (Castro s Cuba) was the power of the popular. But our experiences with students and non-academic communities indicate that citizens increasingly want to discuss how the popular works as culture, not only as mixed pleasure, and why the Canadian popular should invite debate.
John Storey in his book Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture refers to popular culture as production in use (8), observing that this does not necessarily mean a degraded culture (6). In devising Slippery Pastimes as the title for this collection, we have in mind the ambiguities and processes enveloping popular culture. The term pastimes evokes the pleasures associated with the popular, not only leisure time but everyday experience. Popular culture crosses our daily activities, making us participants in its products and processes whether or not we are conscious of the visual, auditory, and textual operations at play. To define pastimes as slippery suggests sleights of hand: popular culture as unstable or elusive, sometimes serious but also shallow, merely clever or cunning. But the term slippery can also describe subtleties that can t always be accounted for in the production, promotion, or reception of the artifacts that make up popular pastimes. Within Canadian culture, there have been numerous government reports and public discussions on the slippages in Canadian/U.S. border matters. Canadian media and cultural concerns about the gatekeeping of international television/cable boundaries provoked wide debate. The freighted issues of how to prove the existence of the Canadian popular ( there is no such thing as Canadian popular culture ) continue, as do the ardent efforts to fool-proof Canadian culture ( Canadian culture is distinct and must be protected from external, especially American, interventions ).
The dynamics of popular culture are variously slippery, and especially so within a Canadian context, and this collection is an attempt to chart the complexities of how and why this is so. The concept of slippery pastimes offers potential for analyses and methodologies that both historicize and question slippages between cultu