“A Precise Instrument for Seeing”: Remembrance in Burning Vision and the Activist Classroom

Abstract

Drawing upon my experience of teaching Marie Clements' Burning Vision in an undergraduate course on political theatre and social justice in Canada, this article explores the challenges posed by this play's intervention into conventional, linear forms of historical memory. Burning Vision dramatizes through non-realist means the actual historical role that Canada played in supplying the uranium used by the United States during World War II when it developed the first atomic weapon of warfare. In radically reframing authorized history, the play effectively undermines the narrative of Canadian progressivism by which some students seek to construct a consolatory distance between themselves and the violence of war. The article thus considers student discomfort and resistance as themselves opportunities for critical engagement in the classroom, and thinks through these challenges as instructing us toward more reflexive reckonings with history.