Clowning Canada: Performing the Structured Innocence of Settler Colonial Domesticity

This dissertation is a research-creation project that involves both creative and written outputs.

The creative project is an original short film, Land Hunger—a dark, feminist, clown satire of settler colonial nation-state building that explores how gendered histories of domestication were foundational for colonization in Canada and are still viscerally haunting the present. The written component incorporates critical theory, personal reflection, creative writing, and historical research to explore the question: What performance praxes are needed right now for settler artists to create work that pushes against hegemonic yet invisibilized structures of Canadian nationhood? While my research looks at the potential for settler performance practices to unsettle our cultural stories of Canadian-ness, my inspirations and theoretical anchors come from the fields of Indigenous resurgence and decolonization, which centre relationality to the land within research. My theoretical framework grapples with the question of settler artist accountability and responsibility within performance practice, stemming from the argument that culture is integral to the creation and maintenance of power structures (Said, 1994). I follow a genealogical process in the Foucauldian sense, which entails sifting through hauntings between the past and present to find not the origin of nation but rather its palimpsestic and discursive formation on the land and the gendered body.

This project originated in the messy, personal, and creative questioning of my relationship to the land I am on, to the nation-state of Canada, to the histories that brought me here, and to the discourses of power that weave through them. I argue that theories of settler colonialism, gender, and whiteness are not just the subject of my research, coincidentally resulting in a creative output; rather, these theories drive the foundational way that I come to understand my relationship to the land and to my performance practice. I attempt to chart an approach to performance practice that makes this central, arguing that settler theatre artists are structurally implicated in the ongoing reification of the colonial project of Canada. Therefore, as storytellers, we can work to make visible and imagine alternatives to white settler structures of nation and subjecthood that are often normalized in settler culture as invisible and unchangeable.