Celebrity Cultures in Canada is an interdisciplinary collection that explores celebrity phenomena and the ways they have operated and developed in Canada over the last two centuries. The chapters address a variety of cultural venues--politics, sports, film, and literature--and examine the political, cultural, material, and affective conditions that shaped celebrity in Canada and its uses both at home and abroad. The scope of the book enables the authors to highlight the trends that characterize Canadian celebrity--such as transnationality and bureaucracy--and explore the regional, linguistic, administrative, and indigenous cultures and institutions that distinguish fame in Canada from fame elsewhere. In historicizing and theorizing Canada's complicated cultures of celebrity, Celebrity Cultures in Canada rejects the argument that nations are irrelevant in today's global celebrityscapes or that Canada lacks a credible or adequate system for producing, distributing, and consuming celebrity. Nation and national identities continue to matter--to celebrities, to fans, and to institutions and industries that manage and profit from celebrity systems--and Canada, this collection argues, has a vibrant, powerful, and often complicated and controversial relationship to fame.

If the twentieth century has been dominated by discussions of the public, public life, and the public sphere, Contemporary Publics argues that, in the twenty-first century, we must complicate the singularity of that paradigm and start thinking of our world in terms of multiple, overlapping, and competing publics. In three distinct streams-art, media and technology, and the intimate life-this volume offers up the intellectual and political significance of thinking through the plurality of our publics. "Countering Neoliberal Publics: Screen and Space," explores how different artistic practices articulate the challenges and desires of multiple publics. "Making and Shaping Publics: Discourse and Technology" showcases how media shape publics, and how new and emerging publics use these technologies to construct identities. "Commodifying Public Intimacies" examines what happens to the notion of the private when intimacies structure publics, move into public spaces, and develop value that can be exchanged and circulated.