Stephanie Clare

Public Culture and the Performance of Northern Sovereignty

Over the past four years, Harper’s Canadian government has become increasingly concerned with asserting Arctic sovereignty. It has increased Canadian military presence in the north, developed northern national parks, supported scientific research related to northern natural resources, and funded a sovereignty patrol: a group of Rangers who, dressed in maple-leaf red suits, parades Canadian flags in the Arctic. These attempts to claim sovereignty can be understood as performances in that they are public exhibits that must be seen in order to legitimize sovereignty. These performances, in other words, constitute an attempt to produce a public that is not only framed and sanctioned by the state, but that also legitimizes the state’s presence in this particular space.

The paper I would like to present at the International Performances Studies Conference analyzes the performance of northern sovereignty, focusing specifically on the sovereignty patrol and the development of northern national parks. By probing the relationship between indigenous sovereignty and Canadian northern sovereignty, I demonstrate how these performances rely on both gendered and racialized bodies, and how the territory of the nation state can be understood as the result of a public culture created through performance. Ultimately, I argue that the territory of the nation-state is performative, produced less through borders and boundaries than through the performance of nationhood’s signs.