5 Similarities in Urban Development of the US and Canada

The combined aural and visual features of the corpus that express and are understood as Canadianness form what Beattie (2017a, b) refers to as banal diegetic nationalism, where nationalism refers to national identity. This notion is based on Billig's (1995) banal nationalism, which refers to the everyday ways in which national identity is preserved, reproduced, and, as Anderson (2010) points out, considered natural. Billig's work examines such approaches as 'flagging' - what could almost be called 'branding' of a country, in which signifiers of a certain identity are put throughout a given country as a constant reminder, the most evident being a national flag. In short, he is concerned with the day-to-day structures that remind and maintain national identity. While a literal 'day-to-day' (re)construction, maintenance, and reiteration of anything is difficult in the context of a television series, Gibbs points out that mise-en-scene can serve as a pattern established throughout the narrative (Gibbs 2002: 9, cf Butler 2002: 93). Beattie contends that the aspects in the mise-en-scene that are associated with national identity/ties serve as this banal diegetic nationalism. Thus, the persistent, repeated representation of national identity through a series' aesthetics, together with other diegetic aspects (e.g., storyline and characters), confers a perceived-national identity on both the series as a whole and individual characters.

This Volume 17, Issue 2 November 2020 Page 6 can be intentional on the part of a given production team and/or network

(see Beattie 2017a, b on the fourth series of Torchwood), but I would argue that in the case of the KITH corpus (save Death Comes to Town, discussed below), it was more a function of the Canadian production context. This concept, however, can be stretched further as follows. Kuipers and de Kloet (2009) remark in their study of global Lord of the Rings fans that their respondents' attitudes toward the original film trilogy are not highly correlated with national identity. They relate this to the possibility that their respondents were cosmopolitans, 'those whose life orientation centered around global interconnectedness rather than their local communities' (Ibid: 104). While they acknowledge that this may have influenced the representativeness of their sample, they argue that the lack of a significant difference in results between respondents with different national identities indicates that the films depict a strong banal cosmopolitanism 'in which everyday nationalism is circumvented and undermined and we experience ourselves integrated into global processes and phenomena' (Beck, 2002: 12, quoted in Kuipers and de Kloet 2009: 115). Mihelj, van Zoonen, and Vis (2011) believe that cosmopolitanism entails 'an aim to transcend the particular and tie it to [the] universal' (Ibid: 615-6), necessitates communication across difference and self-reflection, but must constantly be viewed in light of power imbalances. By merging these concepts with banal diegetic nationalism, one might argue for the presence of a banal diegetic cosmopolitanism in which narratives, characters, and aesthetic components constantly circumvent or subvert the national/particular in favor of the global/universal.

The series' high association with Canadianness among respondents

combined with variances in replies from different national identities, argue against reading the series in this way. While formats and scripted series sold transnationally are generally glocalised to and by the cultures who import them (Moran 2009, Straubhaar 2012, Hilmes 2013, inter multa alia), the fact that a format or series is part of a global brand can encourage the negotiation between global and local cultures, but as the KITH corpus is sold abroad as-is, the negotiation would primarily be the foreign viewer engaging with perceived-Can This can be interpreted as pushing Canadian media from the role of liaison between the US and the UK (Hilmes 2012) to a more global stance, as well as identifying itself as distinct while maintaining continual negotiation and international interaction. Acland (2003: 44) coined the phrase "felt internationalism" to express a concept comparable to cosmopolitanism. He defines it as 'a modern structure of feeling encompassing the negotiation and division of global, national, and city cultures.' As Shaw (2013: 59) points out, Acland's approach does not explore the text and does not address the reality that audiences within a particular national identity can react differently to texts, even when they share a viewing experience. My research compensates for these elements by analyzing the text and audience responses, as well as examining the negotiations between multiple levels of (perceived and represented) identities, which allows for a more in-depth interpretation.

As previously stated, Kuipers and de Kloet (2009) observe that all self-identified members of a given national identity will interpret things differently

while they attribute this in their study to the cosmopolitanism of the fans in the sample, they also question the nation-state as a basis for comparison (Ibid: 99). This is a valid criticism; nevertheless, because my research focuses on the development and perception of a national identity for and by a worldwide audience, I have preserved the terms 'foreign' (not-Canadian) and 'domestic' (Canadian) in my analysis. I'll go into more depth about this below. When considering the perception of national identity/ties, it is important to briefly examine the concept of stereotypes. While a full discussion of the discursive construction and attendant ambiguity surrounding what constitutes a stereotype is beyond the scope of this paper, for the purposes of this study, I would refer to Park et al (2006), who conducted audience research on stereotypes and the action-comedy film Rush Hour 2. They discovered that the impression of the film as a comedy alleviated some of the perceived prejudices, with the genre effectively rendering the acknowledged tropes acceptable. This permissiveness must be considered when analyzing audience data for any comparable study, including this one.