Styling a nation: Theatre and belonging in Quebec

How is a nation invented? And how does that invention come to be lived as fact by those who would be its nationals? These two questions are fundamental to scholarly work on the nation in the social sciences and in postcolonial studies. "Styling a Nation: Theatre and Belonging in Quebec" proposes that some of the more productive and provocative answers to these questions are supplied by the practices and analytical tools of theatre and performance.;I take as my case study the production of le fait national (the national fact) and its attendant identity in the postcolonial "cultural nation" of Quebec, locating these processes in the material practices of quebecois theatre and cultural performance. I propose the concept of "style" as the means for investigating the naturalization of the invented nation. I argue that quebecois style, or quebecite, as practiced in and disseminated through theatrical and cultural performance, is the means by which the national fiction is reproduced as fact. "Styling a Nation" examines the changing contours of Quebec nation-ness, or quebecite , from 1967 to 1999 in relation to national movements within Quebec and Canada and to global systems, including anticolonial political movements, intercultural theatre, transnational capitalism, and immigration.;Through extended analyses of four different performance forms, this dissertation queries performance's various contributions and challenges to the independentist nation project and examines its potential for modeling new forms of quebecite . Chapter one analyzes the concept of the nation across a range of disciplines, using the 1967 World's Fair as a locus of competing national discourses. Chapter two analyzes dramatic realism as the preferred style of quebecite during the cultural nationalist period of the early 1970 in Michel Tremblay's Les Belles-Soeurs. Chapter three focuses on dance-theatre troupe Carbone 14 and their performative investigations of quebecois history during the 1980s and 1990s. Chapter four considers the trans-national style of Montreal's globe-trotting circus, the Cirque du Soleil. Finally, the Epilogue examines the stresses of immigration and the pressures of linguistic assimilation on quebecite through two manifesto-poems: Michele Lalonde's "Speak White" (1971) and Marco Micone's "Speak What" (1986).