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“Face-to-Face”: Open Secularism and the Politics of Display in Quebec’s Bouchard-Taylor Commission

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Performing the Secular

Part of the book series: Contemporary Performance InterActions ((CPI))

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Abstract

In 2007 , after a series of reported intercultural crises in Québec, Canada, the provincial government appointed a commission. Its task was to research and recommend best practices for negotiating religious and cultural differences. The Commission’s focal point was a strategy often favoured by proponents of liberal democracy : public consultation, enacted in ‘live’, face-to-face dialogue. This chapter interprets public dialogue as liberal democratic performance, and assesses its relationship to the Commission’s outcomes. It argues that the Commission’s reception and its ultimate recommendation for ‘open secularism ’ reveal a tension between two repertoires: a repertoire of self-abstraction and a repertoire of embodied immediacy.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia, USA

    Jordana Cox

Authors
  1. Jordana Cox
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Correspondence to Jordana Cox .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom

    Milija Gluhovic

  2. Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA

    Jisha Menon

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Cox, J. (2017). “Face-to-Face”: Open Secularism and the Politics of Display in Quebec’s Bouchard-Taylor Commission. In: Gluhovic, M., Menon, J. (eds) Performing the Secular. Contemporary Performance InterActions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49608-9_7

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