Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 01:11:56 -0400
From: Bram Dov Abramson <babramson-AT-telegeography.com>
Subject: Re: language, Quebec, colonialism


Terry Goldie <tgoldie-AT-YorkU.CA>:

>Historically, francophone culture in Quebec was referred to as une race.
>This is no longer true, in the same way we no longer refer to the Irish as
>a race. Today, the PQ and the BQ claim they are supporting not ethnic
>nationalism but civic nationalism. In other words, "la race" is no longer
>the issue.  I wish I could believe that but when Bouchard and others speak
>of their vision of the future, I have trouble envisioning a francophone
>culture full of the children of Haitian immigrants.

This is usually narrated as a Quiet Revolution / modernisation progression
from a French-Canadian identity ("la race") to a Quebecois identity ("le
peuple").  The result is a constant slippage between ethnic and civic
identities -- instead of both coexisting, as they must, they are narrated
as a replacement of the former by the latter.  Hence evacuating the
category of ethnicity and, simultaneously, exploding it into the civic
project.

Or, to put it more simply, the word "Quebecois" is an ambiguous one.
Sometimes it refers to Quebec's majority ethnic group.  Sometimes it refers
to all Quebeckers, as a citizenry.  Each meaning contaminates the other,
wherein I suspect much of the ambiguity.

(I'll timidly add the cite for an article which a friend and I wrote a
while back.  It argues the above, but takes longer to do it ;-) ... see G
Elmer & B Abramson "Excavating ethnicity in 'Quebecois', _Quebec Studies_
23, 1997.)

cheers
Bram



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