Cordula Quint, St. Thomas U
Of Volition and Belonging: Identities and Places in Contemporary Canadian Drama

In this essay, I will analyse a number of contemporary Canadian perspectives on the process of and the premises behind national, ethnic and racial affiliation. The dramatists under investigation are Guillermo Verdecchia (Fronteras Americanas), Robert Lepage (The Seven Streams of the River Ota), David Gow (Cherry Docs), and Drew Hayden Taylor (alterNatives)—among others. Their dramatic figures all represent myriad forms of displacement and embody a density of intercultural convergences and frictions. Verdecchia, Gow and Taylor, in particular, foreground the process whereby individuals surrender conceptions of self which privilege an epistemology of dwelling or of primordial biological origin in favor of the radical contingency of “border dwelling.” In alterNatives (2000), for example, Taylor uses his protagonist to throw into relief the notion that identities are revocable in the manner proposed by David Hollinger in Postethnic America. Verdecchia, in turn, interrogates the “easy” premises of his cultural and ethnic affiliation (as Latino or Chicano immigrant) while also exposing the myths and fantasies which buttress his experience of exile and alienation from “origins.” Lepage, in contrast, weaves a vast, if loose network of personal connections across the post-WWII period on three continents. He explores the potential of intergenerational healing in response to the historical trauma of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, and invents a contemporary world of traveling cultures which are founded on an acceptance of "heterogeneous, unmonolithic, and nomadic identities." All the dramatists under investigation clearly support a cosmopolitical ethos (Robbins) of affiliation in an era of rapidly increasing global interdependence.