"From Ethnic Nationalism to Strategic Multiculturalism: Shifting Strategies of Remembrance in the Quebecois Secessionist Movement," Javnost/The Public: Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture 4 (Fall 1997): 41-57. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Commemorating Quebec: Nation, race, and memory
2011
COMMEMORATING QUEBEC: NATION, RACE, AND MEMORY This study focuses on discourses of nation, race, and memory in present-day Québec society through an analysis of the celebrations of Québec City’s 400th anniversary in 2008. My analyses locate these commemorative practices within the broader context of a perceived crisis of Québécois identity. I identify the modes through which difference was discursively constructed in relation to culture, race, and gender in Québec. I then adopt a theoretical framework that examines the relationship among public commemoration, nation-building, and subject formation in Québec. Specifically, I examine the high-profile Rencontres spectacle, several museum and art exhibits, a theatrical production, a number of musical concerts, a variety of policy documents, various protocol events, and the Québec nationalist and anarchist protest movements in relation to each other. I argue that the Québec 400 is best understood as a set of subject-making practices that sought to define an ideal Québécois subject through norms of belonging that prioritized French colonial heroes and subjugated indigenous and non-French Others. Commemorative practices at the Québec 400 celebrations articulated the liberal discourse of cultural pluralism common in Western liberal democracies post-1980s in ways that effectively positioned the normative Québécois subject as the enlightened, generous, and reasoned patron of cultural diversity. Commemoration also operated as a creative, festive, spectacularized, and thus seemingly innocent mode of constituting national subjects in 21st century Québec, relying as it did on territoriality and kinship relations to interpellate subjects into a national project in Québec and to locate them in a hierarchy of belonging. The Québec 400 was also characterized by the performance of intimate relationships between France and Québec throughout 2008. The transnational dimensions of the normative Québécois subject were premised on a shared understanding of the colonial-settler project in Québec, organized around notions of whiteness, civilization, and territory
Entrenching Euro-Settlerism: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Nationalism in Québec
Canadian Ethnic Studies/études ethniques au Canada, 2014
In my admittedly open reading of Eve Haque's remarkable study, she casts a light on the many frayed threads hanging from the bilingualism/multiculturalism discourse in Canada; threads that beg unraveling since their apparent coherence masks a reformulation of national belonging that codifies the racialization and exclusion of people of colour and indigenous peoples. Pulling at these threads is a vital intellectual project, particularly at this juncture when colour-blindness (Bonilla-Silva 2010) and/or racial liberalism (Mills 2008), which define anti-racist analyses as themselves racist or more insidiously, as "reverse racism," gain ascendance in society and the academy. Through her research and analysis, Haque points to the shift from race to culture, from ethnicity to language, and we now know, to the official multicultural logic that makes considerations of the persistent racial inequities in Canada nearly impossible to hear against the din of self-congratulatory cheer. We are, after all, multicultural or in the case of Québec, intercultural -open signifiers that have come to mean anti-racist, in the sense of never openly discussing, let alone tackling racism. For those working to challenge the stranglehold that such fantasies have on our national imaginations, Haque's study offers an invaluable historical and political outline of the construction of state-based racialized logics.
The Exclusive Nature of Quebec's Contemporary Nationalism: The Pitfalls of Civic Nationalism
International Journal of Canadian Studies, 2013
With reason, Quebec contemporary nationalism can be defined as a form of civic nationalism. This type of collective identification can be defined as being inclusive for every citizen notwithstanding their ethno-cultural origins. However, the Quebec case tends to illustrate that the discourse surrounding civic nationalism can be as exclusive as ethnic nationalism. This is largely due to the fact that Quebecers' collective identity is defined around specific political values that are not and cannot by nature be shared by every Quebec citizen. This is what this text will show and it will focus on the reasons that explain such a situation. Résumé IJCS/RIE´C 47, 2013
Within the Black Box: Reflections from a French Quebec Vantage Point
American Review of Canadian Studies, 1995
y American colleagues have done an excellent job in analyzing the M 1995 Quebec Referendum. Even if I must part company with a number of their statements, I fall in agreement with most of their general conclusions. Perhaps their outsiders' positions afforded them a better opportunity to offer an objective evaluation. Yet one may wonder if Americans are totally outsiders in this question. Being English-speaking and culturally much closer to English Canada' than to Quebec, in spite of their real sympathy and friendship for Quebeckers, do they not tend to view things through the prism of English-speaking Canadians' standpoint? Moreover, the bulk of their information comes from Anglophone sources like the Toronto Gbbe and Mail and Maclean's. Even Robert Gill, who attempts a Quebec perspective, relies twice as much on sources outside French Quebec. This is not to say, of course, that the English Canadian media are always wrong and do not report the facts correctly. Some of them are making an honest effort to be objective. But French language media in Quebec have been obviously much more balanced in their coverage of the Referendum campaign. They have shown and explained the Yes point of view as well as the No in great detail. All the articles above, therefore, have remained largely outside the Referendum's "black box": the two million and a half voters who gave their support to the sovereignty-partnership project. As a French-speaking Quebecker and longtime analyst, I claim to be in a good position to open the black box and give an answer to the question: "Why did such a great number of Quebeckers vote Yes?" It is impossible to do so without going back to history. As Robert Gill correctly pointed out, "collective memory" played a prominent role in this Referendum. Recent history, in particular, has given ample motivation to the Yes vote. But what exactly did Quebeckers vote for? This is another issue to be addressed. I shall do so in analyzing the question that was proposed to the Quebec electorate. I shall also deal briefly with the actual result and its meaning. Because of its obvious importance, the issue of the ethnic vote and the alleged ethnic nature of Quebec nationalism will be given special consideration. Finally, like my colleagues have done, I will offer a few suggestions as to what seems to me to lie ahead.
Language, Identity and Secession: A Case Study of Quebec in Canada
How a cultural identity is communicated in a given territorial space raises a central issue of the linkages between the bases of that identity and its concrete manifestation? Nation state with long histories of political independence are characteristically self assured and matter of fact that about how they communicate their national identity. Exploring the wider dimension of identity in a culturally heterogeneous society like Canada could provide us important insights and ideas regarding distinctive identity of certain immigrant communities in Quebec. Through the paper one can have enriched understanding of the way multicultural society could accommodate certain minority communities and their distinctive cultural practices without endangering the larger Canadian identity. Through my paper I will look into that why a certain point of time Quebec wanted to secede from Canada?
Quebec Studies, 2010
For those following politics in Québec, the 2007-2008 period was an opportune time to conduct research on the dynamics of race and national identity. This paper follows a path through a number of events during this period in order to tease out the various dimensions of discourses about difference in Québec. I start with the proclamation of the Hérouxville Code of Conduct in January, 2007. From there I introduce the much talkedabout Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences (formed in February, 2007, and co-chaired by Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor), which tabled its final report in May, 2008. I next analyze the Government of Québec’s new immigrant integration policy, released in October, 2008. This paper presents and analyzes these three “events” in relation to the emerging academic literature on the politics of multiculturalism in Western liberal democracies. In particular, I argue that through relying on a civilizational discourse that depoliticizes “difference” in culture, the various events appeal to the dominant understandings of difference in Québec society, thereby obfuscating the racialized dimensions of these discourses. In order to situate my analyses, I begin with an overview of debates on cultural pluralism in Québec.
Québec's Distinct Society and the Sense of Nationhood in Canada
Québec studies, 1991
La défaite de l'Accord du lac Meech annonce la mort du fédéralisme traditionnel, selon les auteurs de cet article. Une nouvelle entente entre le Canada et le Québec ne peut être forgée à l'heure actuelle que si chacune des deux parties reconnaît le besoin d'autonomie et le nationalisme légitime de l'autre.