“State of the union”: The “new pageantry” and the performance of identity in North America and South Africa, 1908–1910

Abstract

Summary A new performance genre, the “new pageantry”, was “invented” in England in 1905 and rapidly became recognised throughout England, North America and the British dominions as an effective means of celebrating centenaries and inaugural moments such as the establishment of Union in South Africa in 1910. The Quebec Tercentenary Festival adapted such a performance for the tercentenary celebrations in the summer of 1908; and this model was then employed for the celebration of Union in Cape Town, in October 1910. The question of “reconciliation” between Quebecois and English‐speaking Canadians was compared with the need for reconciliation between the Boers and the English‐speaking South Africans in that same decade. The genre of the “new pageantry”, the civic, national, and imperial reticulations by which the genre was performed and propagated, and the peripheral events that accompanied the more important performances, afford a composite and three‐dimensional model of period national and colonial (or imperial) identity and values. The paper traces some of the symbolism that was identified with the “new pageantry”, including the period emphasis on the Elizabethan age, the neo‐Hegelian imagery associated with imperial Freemasonic practices, and a tropology that represents the international network of empire as a “family” of states, “races” and nations. As a form of illusion, theatrical performance is seen as providing, in Raymond Williams's terms, a “subjunctive” mode of national or civic identity. The historical episodes depicted in the “new pageantry” form a canonical popular history for the “dominions”, and they reify particular ethnic stereotypes ‐ not only of North American “first nation” tribes, and of South African aboriginal peoples, but also of comparisons between English, French, Portuguese, Boer, Protestant, Catholic, and other colonial “types”. The genre is thus seen to have served in the formation of a colonialist national “public history” and “heritage”. The derivation of “pageantry” from pagus or field, and pangere, to cultivate, establish and pledge, helps to emphasise an extended understanding of the genre, as figuring the broader colonial enterprise: battlefields, mission fields, fields of endeavour, fields of discourse on which the nation solemnly re‐enacts chosen moments in order to selectively lift these from the realm of historical accident and locate them within a desired narrative of historical “destiny”.