McGill-Queen’s University Press

  • Stage Turns

    The Canadian Association for Theatre Research has cited Kirsty Johnston’s Stage Turns for an honorable mention for best book-length publication in English.

    From the Ann Saddlemyer Awards Committee:

    “Johnston’s Stage Turns: Canadian Disability Theatre marks a substantial intervention into Canadian theatre studies from the dynamic perspectives of disability arts and disability-led performance. The core of her study is composed almost entirely of ‘on the ground’ research of companies in Canada who are testing assumptions about disability through performance. Her choice of companies attests to the work of groups and organizations across the country using theatre to combat the systemic discrimination and medicalization of differently abled bodies. Johnston’s commitment to a wide range of primary material practices – which include dialoguing with artists, researching the mandates and structure of companies, evaluating funding policies, and analyzing productions and festivals – challenges readers to understand disability arts in Canada as a context-specific and politically inflected praxis. Disability and disability arts are not uniform concepts and categories in this study as demonstrated in Johnston’s original case studies of Workman Arts, Theatre Terrific, Stage Left, and Realwheels to name just a few groups. This textured materialist analysis is accompanied by detailed and thoughtful readings of Stage Left’s Mercy Killings or Murder: The Tracy Latimer Story and Workman Arts’ Vincent expanding the canon of Canadian theatre studies. Stage Turns seeks to understand how disability artists bring politics to the stage through stories that are compelling because they are vital sites of activism.”

     

    To learn more about Stage Turns, or to order online, click here.


    Finalists for Canada Prizes announced

    Celebrating the best Canadian scholarly books across all the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, the Canada Prizes are awarded to books that make an exceptional contribution to scholarship, are engagingly written, and enrich the social, cultural and intellectual life of Canada.

    The following MQUP books are finalists for the 2013 Canada Prize in the Humanities.

     

    The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales

    Edited and with an introduction by François-Marc Gagnon, with Nancy Senior and Réal Ouellet

    Part art, part science, part anthropology, this ambitious project presents an early Canadian perspective on natural history that is as much artistic and fantastical as it is encyclopedic. Edited and introduced by François-Marc Gagnon, The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas showcases an intriguing attempt to document the life of the new world – flora, fauna, and aboriginal.

    The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas shows how the wildlife and native inhabitants of the new world were understood and documented by a seventeenth-century European and makes available fundamental documents in the history and visual culture of early North America.

    The Codex Canadensis won the 2012 Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, the 2012 Melva Dwyer Award and is a selected entry for the AAUP Book and Jacket Show.

    More on The Codex Canadensis
    Wilson_Mcgee2Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Volume 2
    The Extreme Moderate, 1857-1868
    By David A. Wilson

    After a tumultuous career as a revolutionary in Ireland and an ultra-conservative Catholic in the United States, Thomas D’Arcy McGee moved to Canada in 1857, where he became a force for moderation and the leading Irish Canadian politician in the country. Determined that Canada should avoid the ethno-religious strife that afflicted Ireland, he articulated an inclusive, broad-minded nationalism based on generosity of spirit, a willingness to compromise, and a reasonable balance between order and liberty.

    As someone who took an uncompromising stand against militants within his own ethno-religious community, and who attempted to balance core values with minority rights, McGee has become increasingly relevant in today’s complex multicultural society.

    Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Volume 2 won the 2012 Canadian Political History Prize and was shortlisted for the 2012 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize. Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Volume 1 won the 2010 Raymond Klibansky Prize and is the co-winner of the 2008 James S. Donnelly, Sr. Prize.

    More on Thomas D’Arcy McGee


    Sandra Djwa is a Finalist for the 2013 Charles Taylor Prize

    Djwa

    McGill-Queen’s is delighted to announce that Journey with No Maps: A Biography of P.K. Page by Sandra Djwa is a finalist for the the 2013 Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction. The Charles Taylor Prize recognizes excellence in Canadian non-fiction writing and emphasizes the development of the careers of the authors it celebrates. The winner of this year’s prize will be announced at a gala luncheon and awards ceremony at The King Edward Hotel in downtown Toronto on Monday, March 4th. More information here.

    Congratulations, Sandra!

    Read an excerpt from Journey with No Maps.

    To learn more about Journey with No Maps, or to order online, click here
    For media inquiries, contact MQUP publicist Jacqui Davis.  


     

    The Merger Delusion finalist for Shaughnessy Cohen Prize

     

    Djwa_journey

    Peter Trent’s The Merger Delusion: How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made an Even Bigger Mess of Montreal is a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.

    About the Award

    The finalists were selected by a jury of politician and political scientist Ed Broadbent, columnist Tasha Kheiriddin, and novelist and translator Daniel Poliquin. The prize will be presented in Ottawa at the Politics and the Pen Gala on March 6, 2013.

    Now in its twelfth year, the prize is awarded annually to a non-fiction book that captures a political subject of interest to Canadian readers and enhances our understanding of the issue. The winning work combines compelling new insights with depth of research and is of significant literary merit. Strong consideration is given to books that, in the opinion of the jury, have the potential to shape or influence Canadian political life.

    About The Merger Delusion

    Powerless under the country’s constitution, Canadian municipal governments often find themselves in conflict with their provincial masters. In 2002, the Province of Quebec forcibly merged all cities on the Island of Montreal into a single municipality – a decision that was partially reversed in 2006. The first book-length study of the series of mergers imposed by the Parti Québécois government, The Merger Delusion is a sharp and insightful critique by a key player in anti-merger politics.

    Peter Trent, mayor of the City of Westmount, Quebec, foresaw the numerous financial and institutional problems posed by amalgamating municipalities into megacities. Here, he presents a stirring and detailed account of the battle he led against the provincial government, the City of Montreal, the Board of Trade, and many of his former colleagues. Describing how he took the struggle all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, Trent demonstrates the ways in which de-mergers resonated with voters and eventually helped the Quebec Liberal Party win the 2003 provincial election.

    As the cost and pitfalls of forced mergers become clearer in hindsight, The Merger Delusion recounts a compelling case study with broad implications for cities across the globe.

    Click to read an excerpt from The Merger Delusion

     

    To learn more about The Merger Delusion, or to order online, click hereFor media inquiries, contact MQUP publicist Jacqui Davis.  

  • Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-garde and Postdramatic Theatre

    The following is excerpted from Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-garde and Postdramatic Theatre by Mladen Ovadija.

    But what is sound to theatre, or theatre to sound? What would be the motive and the cue for our cry for sound? Whatever the answers to this quasi-Shakespearean question, it holds true that sound has become the subject of renewed interest in recent theatre discourse.

    In theatre, as in life, sound is born and dies with action. The transitory life of sound is essentially dramatic. It becomes audible only when a moving mass of gaseous, liquid, or solid matter encounters an obstacle to create whistling, trumpeting, hums, shrills, babbles, gurgles, shrieks, drumbeats, rings, and the like. Sound emanates from the stage in the form of vocal utterances (speech, chanting, and singing), instrumental renditions (music), and the clamour of environmental onstage and offstage events (noise). We perceive it as a sensory attraction caused by a movement of air coming from an animate source (such as a performer) or an inanimate source (perhaps a part of stage setting). We perceive sound directly without necessarily knowing its source or meaning: it simply escapes mere denotative function. Sound, thus, not only reveals dramatic performance: it is perhaps more appropriate to say, sound is performance.

    Click here to read more

     


    Youth Creative Work and the Hipster Blame Game

     

    Are young people aspiring to creative careers just a bunch of whiny trust fund brats? In the pilot episode of HBO’s hit series Girls, 24 year old Hannah Horvath is trying to make it as a writer in New York City. Confronted with the reality of having to financially support herself after her parents decide to cut her off, she begs for “$1100 a month for the next two years.”  Creator Lena Dunham is offering her character’s sense of entitlement up for comedic effect, but where’s the joke? Who is laughing at whom, and why? The Nation compares Hannah’s privileged upbringing and newfound experience of being broke to Fiona Gallagher’s working class reality of poverty in Shameless, but concludes that in today’s economically grim times, the distinctions between downwardly mobile, underemployed youth and the working poor may be becoming muddy.

    Click here to read more

     


    Whatever Happened to the Music Teacher

    Thirty years ago, Anglo-American politicians set out to make the public sector look like the private sector. These reforms continue today, ultimately seeking to empower elected officials to shape policies and pushing public servants to manage operations in the same manner as their private-sector counterparts. In Whatever Happened to the Music Teacher?, Donald Savoie provides a nuanced account of how the Canadian federal government makes decisions.Savoie argues that the traditional role of public servants advising governments on policy has been turned on its head, and that evidence-based policy making is no longer valued as it once was.

     

    Listen to Donald Savoie discuss his new book on RCI


    Canadian Medicare

    The following is excerpted from Canadian Medicare: We Need It and We Can Keep It by Stephen Duckett and Adrian Peetoom.

    Medicare is more than laws and regulations. As the Romanow report (2002) pointed out, from the beginning medicare has been an expression of our care for one another. As some other writers have said, it is as binding an element of Canadian life today as the railroads that connected East and West in the nineteenth century. Our medicare is a commitment Canadians made to one another more than half a century ago. In times of need brought on by health problems, we will continue to help each other financially. Medicare is ours. It is not the beneficence of governments, be they federal or provincial. Nor is it the goodwill of health care corporations. However much appreciated, it is not even the kindness of front-line health care professionals: physicians, nurses, equipment technicians, medical administrators, and hospital orderlies. All those simply represent the will of the people fed by a spirit of generosity and care for one another.

    Canadians sometimes forget this fact, and who can blame them? In a country as large as ours, with a population steadily growing and now well over 33 million, we need complex organization to give expression to our generosity. Our generosity gets to be mediated, almost overshadowed, by organizations. Many hospitals and drug companies are involved, and these institutions often obey their own primary rule: “got to be looking good.” Governments want to appear to be the source of citizen wellness, be it economic, social, or medical. Drug companies stress the presumed benefits of their chemicals and suppress their often highly questionable marketing strategies. Physicians don’t always possess superb bedside manners, and some believe they hold the key to unlocking the secrets of the human body and must be regarded with a special type of awe. However, the work of all of these contributors to the health care system, even the kindest of nurses, only happens because of the generosity of the more than 33 million neighbours who share our country, those we know and those we don’t know: our tax dollars pay for all of the costs of the Canadian health care system. This generosity sets the context for our medicare and must be kept in mind in any discussion about how to change the system.


    9/11 and the Freudian Uncanny

    The following is excerpted from Hijacking History: American Culture and the War on Terror by Liane Tanguay.
    CNN and CBS issued two commemorative DVDs that seemed to be aimed at satisfying a Freudian “compulsion to repeat” occasioned by the “trauma” that the networks themselves had helped to generate in the first place (for Freud, the principle of repetition- compulsion arises from a situation inassimilable into “reality,” or Lacan’s “symbolic order” – essentially, language – which therefore leads to repeated attempts to resolve it). CNN’s America Remembers: The Events of September 11 and America’s Response and CBS’s What We Saw: The Events of September 11, 2001 – in Words, Pictures, and Video reassert the event’s “traumatic” significance while at the same time re-indulging in repetition-compulsion. Both releases emphasize the shock value of the event, alluding first and foremost to the sheer ordinariness of the morning prior to the first strike on the North Tower. CBS anchor Dan Rather begins his introduction to What We Saw with the most banal of observations concerning the circumstances of that morning – namely, the weather: “September 11th, 2001,” he intones, “The sky over New York that morning was crystal clear.”

    Read more

     

     


    The Merger Delusion

    How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made an Even Bigger Mess of Montreal

    By Peter Trent

    Powerless under the country’s constitution, Canadian municipal governments often find themselves in conflict with their provincial masters. In 2002, the Province of Quebec forcibly merged all cities on the Island of Montreal into a single municipality – a decision that was partially reversed in 2006. The first book-length study of the series of mergers imposed by the Parti Québécois government, The Merger Delusion is a sharp and insightful critique by a key player in anti-merger politics.

    Peter Trent, mayor of the City of Westmount, Quebec, foresaw the numerous financial and institutional problems posed by amalgamating municipalities into megacities. Here, he presents a stirring and detailed account of the battle he led against the provincial government, the City of Montreal, the Board of Trade, and many of his former colleagues. Describing how he took the struggle all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, Trent demonstrates the ways in which de-mergers resonated with voters and eventually helped the Quebec Liberal Party win the 2003 provincial election.

    As the cost and pitfalls of forced mergers become clearer in hindsight, The Merger Delusion recounts a compelling case study with broad implications for cities across the globe.

     

    Click here for more information

     

     

  • Established in 1969, about 1800 titles currently in print. Scholarly books and well-researched studies of general interest in the humanities and social sciences, including anthropology, especially North American native peoples; architecture; Arctic and northern studies; art history, Canadian studies; Canadian literature; classics; communication and media studies; cultural studies; economics; education, environmental studies; ethnic studies; film studies; folklore and material culture; geography; health and society; history; Irish and Gaelic studies; law; linguistics; literary criticism; medieval and renaissance studies; military history; native studies; philosophy; poetry; photography; political economy; political science; public administration; Quebec studies; religious studies; Slavic and Eastern European studies; sociology; theatre; and women’s studies.

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