Monumental Constructions: Statues, Identity, and Gabrielle Roy’s “L’arbre”

Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans garnered significant attention for his book In the Shadow of Statues (2018), observing that many Confederate monuments were erected to buttress Jim Crow laws and serve as a warning to those who supported the civil rights movement. Likewise, there are a number of monuments in Québec that serve a particular political or religious purpose, seeking to reinforce a pure laine ideology. In this article, I explore the parallels between the literal and figurative construction and deconstruction of monuments that have fortified invented ideas on identity in francophone North America. Further, Gabrielle Roy’s short story “L’arbre,” which describes a “living monument,” tells the story of a racialized past in North America and unveils the falsities that have been preserved through the construction of statues that perpetuate racial myth. “L’arbre” examines the natural, unconstructed monument of the Live Oak: a tree that witnessed and holds the visible scars of the many terrible realities that took place in its shadows. I use Roy’s short story to show how she sought to deconstruct a whitewashed history of the post-Civil War American South and suggest that her broader corpus rejects determinism wholesale.

“Les gens qui vous ressemblent”: Discursive Negotiation of Identity and Construction of Affiliation in the 2019 Canadian Federal Election Party Leader Debates

In the weeks leading up to the Canadian federal election, federal party leaders seek to appeal to a crucial part of the electorate - Québec voters, most of whom are of French-Canadian background - through a series of televised debates. As party leaders engage in discourse aimed at creating proximity with and enacting an affiliative stance toward these voters, the debates become a platform for discursive negotiation of Québec identity, in which identity stances and narratives are reflected, reproduced, and challenged. This study examines a corpus of party leaders’ discourse as these political actors interactively negotiate Québec identity during three party leader debates in the 2019 federal election. Following the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, the inquiry discusses the following aspects of the party leaders’ discourse: discursive representation of Quebecers’ group identity and self-positioning with respect to that identity, use of symbolic lexis and references that signal attachment to the French-Canadian majority’s collective memory, and self-positioning with respect to the French language. In addition, the discussion addresses implications of the bilingual nature of political discourse in the Canadian context, focusing on party leaders’ use of code-switching and metapragmatic commentary. Crucially, the study’s conclusions suggest that a shared vision of Québec identity has not yet been widely ratified. While the party leaders’ discourse appears largely felicitous with the inclusive, civic vision of Québec identity, the study’s findings point to continued primacy of the French-Canadian fact in its current conceptualization.

Lecture de la prédation sexuelle dans La coupe vide d’Adrienne Choquette

Cet article considère la parution de La coupe vide comme un jalon dans l’histoire des luttes contre les violences sexuelles en littérature québécoise. Dans ce roman structuré autour d’une agression sexuelle et d’une tentative de féminicide, Adrienne Choquette explore le système qui organise les relations sociales et sexuelles de manière mortifère. Il s’agit de comprendre quelles sont les stratégies narratives mises en place, dans le contexte littéraire des années 1940, pour dénoncer les mécanismes de pouvoir et de coercition menant à la mort symbolique des femmes. Deux stratégies particulières sont explorées: la prédation sérielle du corps des femmes et l’universalisation du désir de prédation. De manière oblique, Choquette parvient dans son roman à braquer l’objectif sur le caractère patriarcal des relations hommes/femmes et à préfigurer certaines revendications féministes.

Deirdre Kinahan’s Unmanageable Sisters: Michel Tremblay’s Belles-sœurs on the Irish Stage

In spring 2018, Deirdre Kinahan’s The Unmanageable Sisters, an adaptation of Michel Tremblay’s landmark Les belles-sœurs (1968), was performed in the Abbey Theatre. A “smash hit” (Abbey programme) with the Irish audience, it was restaged in summer 2019. The Dublin version by a young and accomplished Irish playwright stages the comparability of the language register and of the socioeconomic and cultural circumstances that inspired the original thus underlining the connection between the two theater communities. It also demonstrates theater’s role in voicing the language, lives, and daily traumas of impoverished, undereducated, and marginalized women. This study contends that Tremblay’s and Kinahan’s success is attributable to the dramaturges’ understanding, interpretation, and staging of the intersectionality of the issues addressed. Intersectionality focuses on the layering and interaction of multiple sources of power, oppression, and marginalization. Previous English translations did not capture the intersectionality central to the original.

Miron le fantastique: À propos d’« Arrêt au village »

S’il redit, à la suite de tant d’autres textes de L’homme rapaillé (1970), le danger de l’acculturation qui guette la nation québécoise, « Arrêt au village » investit un registre esthétique que Gaston Miron n’exploite nulle part ailleurs: le fantastique. En ce « dernier recours didactique », l’infatigable pourfendeur de l’impérialisme anglo-saxon qu’est Miron ne s’interdit pas de projeter une représentation inspirée par les codes de la paralittérature et les clichés de la culture de masse pour parvenir aux fins de conscientisation auxquelles il associe son engagement de poète. C’est là une proposition esthétique non seulement paradoxale, mais résolument originale, qui n’a pas d’équivalent dans le recueil. Mais c’est aussi une formule risquée sur le plan pragmatique où reconduit le « didactisme » mironien: car l’intrusion du fantastique dans le cadre du poème le marque au coin d’une fantaisie qui compromet peut-être le sérieux réclamé par sa fonction idéologique. C’est ce que nous serons amené à supposer, en nous intéressant aux particularités esthétiques et pragmatiques qui contribuent à imprimer à ce poème peu connu un relief saillant et quelque peu discordant en regard du reste de l’œuvre mironienne.

Transcultural Film in Québec: North African Diasporas in Bachir Bensaddek’s Montréal la Blanche and Raed Hammoud’s Documentaries on Daech

This article examines the films of Bachir Bensaddek (Montréal la Blanche, 2016) and Raed Hammoud (T’es où Youssef, 2017 and Les Poussières de Daech, 2020) against the backdrop of an ever-increasing global trend of migration, as is evident in the Bouchard/Taylor report on “Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation” (2008) and the 2018 Global Compact on Migration (IOM). By problematizing the homogeneity of both “home” and “host” cultures in their cinematic work on “néo-Québécois,” Bensaddek and Hammoud contribute meaningfully to how immigration and integration are inflected through the work of imagination within the Québécois context. The relevance of their transcultural films is evident in their focus on the experiences of the large, more recent group of immigrants to the francophone province from the Maghreb (North Africa). The films multiply strategies for understanding the different challenges facing new Québécois as well as providing insights into what might shore up an intercultural society.