Curating Canadianness: Public Service Broadcasting, Fusion Programming, and Hierarchies of Difference
CURATING CANADIANNESS: PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING, FUSION PROGRAMMING, AND HIERARCHIES OF DIFFERENCE by © Rebecca Draisey-Collishaw A dissertation submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Ethnomusicology Memorial University of Newfoundland October 2017 St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador ABSTRACT “Fusion programming” is an approach to music broadcasting that was employed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) during the early years of the twenty-first century. It’s understandable as a response to systemic and systematic pressure to be “more multicultural.” It was about the artistry of musicians and entertainment of audiences, but fusion programming also served a didactic purpose for producers and listeners, participating in the production, elaboration, reinforcement, and/or deconstruction of existing cultural systems. Producing fusion programming involved bringing a minimum of two musicians/musical groups from different genres, languages, styles, scenes, and cultures into the same CBC-sponsored venue for the expressed purpose of performing together and discussing the challenges of collaboration. Performances, in many cases, were posited as “multicultural,” “cross cultural,” or “a collision of cultures,” and conversations framing the music often referenced diversity, multiculturalism, and difference, effectively mapping musicians’ positionality within Canadian society and geography. This study uses “ethnographically grounded” content analysis
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