Launch of Helene Vosters's Unbecoming Nationalism

Please join us for the Winnipeg launch of Helene Vosters’s Unbecoming Nationalism: From Commemoration to Redress in Canada published by the University of Manitoba Press.

With special guest Roewan Crowe.

About the Book
Canada’s recent sesquicentennial celebrations were the latest in a long, steady progression of Canadian cultural memory projects. Unbecoming Nationalism investigates the power of commemorative performances in the production of nationalist narratives. Using “unbecoming” as a theoretical framework to unsettle or decolonize nationalist narratives, Helene Vosters examines an eclectic range of both state-sponsored social memory projects and counter-memorial projects to reveal and unravel the threads connecting reverential military commemoration, celebratory cultural nationalism, and white settler-colonial nationalism.

Vosters brings readings of institutional, aesthetic, and activist performances of Canadian military commemoration, settler-colonial nationalism, and redress into conversation with literature that examines the relationship between memory, violence, and nationalism from the disciplinary arenas of performance studies, Canadian studies, critical race and Indigenous studies, memory studies, and queer and gender studies. In addition to using performance as a theoretical framework, Vosters uses performance to enact a philosophy of praxis and embodied theory.

About the Presenters
Helene Vosters is an artist-activist-scholar. She holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from York University, an MFA in Queer and Activist Performance from the New College of California, and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow and Project Coordinator with Transforming Stories, Driving Change, a research and performance initiative at McMaster University.

Artist and writer Roewan Crowe is energized by attempts at radical transformation. As a queer, white, feminist settler she explores artistic practice as a way to activate feminist and queer ecologies of possibility. She recently launched several new projects at the greenhouse artlab and is writing her next book, entitled, Ah Sugar. Her paid gig: Associate Professor at the University of Winnipeg.