Just copy & paste the session paragraph into the translator box!
SESSION II : DUALITIES
"Lest We Forget: Two Solitudes in War and Memory."
Alan Gordon (Nipissing University)
Hugh McLennan is credited with coining the phrase "Two Solitudes" to refer
to the uneasy existence in Canada of two founding peoples, to borrow a more
contentious modern phrase. This paper argues that, in the aftermath of the
First World War, the divide between these two important solitudes became
much greater. Over forty years ago Michael Oliver postulated a dramatic
shift in French-Canadian nationalism in the inter-war years. It was a
change the nationalists of the day recognized themselves. Meanwhile,
modern scholars have commented on the effect of the First World War in
promoting an invigorated Canadian nationalism among the country's
English-speaking patriots.
In other words, the nationalisms dominant in both "solitudes" were changing
in fundamental ways during the 1920s. These important changes can be traced in the monumental culture of the country after the First World War. Following the war, the different solitudes expressed in Canada's monuments diverged more than they had previously. This is not to argue that a once unified pan-Canadian nationalism suddenly split asunder in the 1920s. Not even Henri Bourassa could ever claim to speak for all French Canadians on such issues. But, in the 1920s, English and French Canadian "solitudes" drifted much farther apart.
Most historians' studies of nationalism have approached the subject from the perspective of intellectual history. The study of public monuments, on the other hand, reveals more of nationalism's underlying popular foundations. Monuments are typically planned and designed by people who operate just below the level of the leading nationalists. Their unveilings generally draw together thousands of members of the "nation" they are intended to celebrate. And their subsequent use reveals the extent to which nationalist meanings have penetrated popular culture. Thus the political culture of monuments building offers a particular window into the workings, meanings, and development of Canada's two main nationalisms.
"Scary Monsters: The figuration of the metropolis in Chicana/o and Québécois Cultural Nationalism"
Aureliano Maria DeSoto (California State University)
Chicana/o (Mexican American) and Québécois cultural nationalism have many compelling congruencies. In particular, both groups are brought into contemporary nation-states through war, and have laboured under colonialist or neo-colonialist socio-economic Anglo domination. Additionally, Mexican Americans and francophone Quebeckers share a history of Catholicism and linguistic heritages disdained by anglophones. Furthermore, both underwent similar periods of contemporary socio-political and cultural "awakening" in the sixties: the Chicano Movement in Mexican America and the revolution tranquille in Québec.
These social formations of the sixties were informed by long and contentious histories of debate within Québécois and Chicana/o communities over cultural specificity, linguistic and religious assimilation, and communal identity within the rubric of the anglophone nation-state. As the contemporary political struggles for empowerment continued apace from the sixties through the eighties, the cultural nationalist strategy in both Québec and the American Southwest embraced pastoral visions of authenticity grounded in essential relationships to land, nature, and "traditional" cultures of resistance. These emergent models based themselves in large part on a politically independent Quebec nation-state and the concept of Aztlán. These tropes of nationalist thinking continued and were supported even as both groups were experiencing great upheavals socially, culturally, politically, and technologically.
A continuing problem for pastoralist and/or essentialist cultural nationalist thinking has been the figure of the Metropolis. For Chicana/o and Québécois thinkers, Los Angeles and Montréal, respectively, have problematically questioned the assumptions of pastoralist conceptions of identity and politics in their cacophonous and clashing mestizaje/metissage of races, ethnicities, languages, sexualities, politics, and power. This paper examines the contradictions that the Metropolis presents to the cultural nationalist strategies emerging out of sixties political thinking in Québec and Mexican America. Specifically, the proposal examines the roles that Montreal and Los Angeles play in undermining nationalist thinking, while simultaneously offering interstitial and transformative spaces where the complexity of contemporary socio-political identities for Québécois and Chicana/o communities and individuals becomes visible.
"La Commission Laurendeau-Dunton, Pierre-Elliott Trudeau, et la tombe de la dualité canadienne"
Daniel Machabée (Université de Québec à Montréal)
La dynamique des relations Québec-Canada s'est radicalement modifiée au tournant des années soixante, alors que les anglophones et les francophones redéfinissent de façon diamétralement opposée leur nationalisme ainsi que leur vision de ce que doivent être les structures politiques canadiennes. L'enjeu pour les francophones est de faire reconnaître la dualité canadienne par la majorité anglophone, qu'ils accusent d'avoir transgressé le pacte d'égalité des deux peuples fondateurs de l'union fédérale de 1867. Les exigences du nouveau nationalisme québécois provoquent la création en 1963 de la Commission royale d'enquête sur le bilinguisme et le biculturalisme.
Cette commission, dont le mandat est d'enquêter sur la situation des francophones au Canada, se transforme rapidement en un champ de bataille politique qui mettra à jour de profondes divergences de vue entre les francophones et les anglophones et fera ressortir un malaise davantage politique que linguistique.
La Commission Laurendeau-Dunton échoue dans sa tentative de faire reconnaître la dualité canadienne parce que celle-ci est rejetée à la fois par la population de langue anglaise et par le gouvernement fédéral dirigé par Pierre Elliott Trudeau, farouchement opposé à un quelconque statut politique particulier pour le Québec. Également, la présence parmi les commissaires de Frank Scott rend inévitables les affrontements idéologiques entre lui et André Laurendeau parce que Trudeau partage à tous les points de vue la vision de Scott. En outre, la commission échoue parce que le problème canadien dépasse largement le cadre linguistique et qu'elle s'est avérée incapable de se fixer sur le statut politique du Québec.
La dualité canadienne était une option politique sertie entre le fédéralisme centralisé et l'indépendance du Québec. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, par la politique linguistique et constitutionnelle que son gouvernement a promulgué, a creusé lui-même la tombe de la dualité canadienne. Il a nié catégoriquement les aspirations nationalistes des francophones du Québec, en axant sa stratégie sur un bilinguisme canadien chimérique impossible à réaliser. Tente années après la Loi sur les langues officielles, on peut aisément se demander si, après avoir été le fossoyeur de la dualité canadienne, Pierre Elliott Trudeau ne serait pas également le fossoyeur du Canada tel qu'il apparaît aujourd'hui, puisque les problèmes du Canada sont toujours les mêmes et que la crise s'est fortement amplifiée malgré son entêtement à régler celle-ci à sa façon.
SESSION III : INTERWAR COMMUNICATION AND TECHNOLOGY
"A National Trust": Class, Nationalism, and Broadcast Policy in Canada, 1920-1945"
Marc R. Sykes (Rutgers University)
Few themes in Canadian history have engendered as much debate as the state's persistent attempts to forge an independent "national" culture. "A National Trust" traces the germination of this national policy to the development of radio technology in the early 1920s. Although Canadian independence is traditionally dated from Confederation in 1867, in the early twentieth century, Canada remained a new, untested nation in many respects. Canadian intellectuals saw broadcasting as an integral component of nation-building, hoping to unite a diverse and far-flung population through an emergent national culture that they envisioned as primarily an outgrowth of British "high" culture. Concerned about the influx of "popular" American radio programming, including jazz music and the comedy program " Amos 'n' Andy ", the Canadian government sponsored the Royal Commission on Broadcasting (colloquially the "Aird Commission," after its chairman, Sir John Aird).
After visiting Great Britain and the United States to assess the pros and cons of their public and private broadcasting systems, the commissioners spent several months touring Canada, conducting public hearings and visiting local radio stations. The Commission's records demonstrate the commissioners' notable bias toward public broadcasting as well as a disdain for American-style commercialism; transcripts of the hearings also reveal notable class tensions between the members of the Commission and its audience. Accordingly, it is hardly surprising that the Commission's report, which appeared in 1929, recommended complete nationalization of broadcasting and strict controls on imported programming. But the story had just begun, as implementation of the new policy would prove both controversial and problematic.
"The All-Red Dream: Technological Nationalism and the Trans-Canada Telephone System."
Robert MacDougall (Harvard University)
On a Monday morning in January 1932, the Trans-Canada Telephone System was inaugurated with a cross-continental conference call that linked dignitaries in provincial capitals from Halifax to Victoria. For the first time, a human voice could travel from sea to sea entirely on "Red" - that is, Canadian-wires. "A new link of Empire has been forged," pronounced the Earl of Bessborough, Governor-General of Canada. By "rendering vast distances no longer a barrier to communication," the telephone would "unite and strengthen every part of this Dominion."
To a man, the assembled speakers echoed and amplified Lord Bessborough's vision of a Canada united by the telephone. In Edmonton, W.L. Walsh called the new system "one more tool in the hands of those who strive to weld Canada into one great nation with common ideals and aims." In Quebec City, Henry George Carroll declared, "il réalise ce que l'on croyait un chimére" - "it makes real what was previously thought to be a dream."
This paper demonstrates the importance of technological nationalism in the history of Canada's telephone network. It also exposes the ironies and problems of this "All-Red" dream. "Technological nationalism" is, essentially, the belief that technology, particularly the technology of transportation and communication, makes the nation possible and real. Throughout their history, Canadians have been drawn to this philosophy. The railroad, the telephone, the radio-each new development in long-distance communication has been enlisted to bring together Canada's diverse and scattered population, to heal regional disputes, and to protect the national identity from domination by the cultural and commercial engines of the United States.
The builders and promoters of Canada's telephone system embraced the rhetoric of technological nationalism, but the ironies in their position were rich. The Trans-Canada System was completed at a moment when the telephone was being eclipsed by the new technology of radio, and when economic hardships were forcing many Canadians to abandon their phones. This alleged triumph of Canadian unity connected the wires of seven squabbling systems. Four of these were private firms, dominated or owned outright by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company; the other three were government systems formed in bitter opposition to eastern capital and the American giant. And finally, telephone lines crossed the Canada-U.S. border long before crossing the continent. Only one of the dignitaries assembled to inaugurate the TCTS was so gauche as to mention it, but trans-Canada calls had been possible, using American lines, for years. The telephone brought many Canadians closer together, but it also served to integrate the continent-extending rather than limiting the interdependence of Canadian and American life.
Historians of institutions like the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation have alternately celebrated and denounced technological nationalism. But scholars have given little attention to its role in the planning, promotion, and regulation of a nationwide network of telephones. This paper not only illuminates the history of a technology fundamental to twentieth-century life-it also throws into sharp relief the aspirations and challenges of Canadian nationalism in the interwar years. Canada's long distance telephone wires trace the outlines of a nation simultaneously affirming its place within the British Empire, deepening its commercial and cultural relations with the United States, and grasping towards a destiny of its own.
SESSION IV : COMMUNICATION AND TECHNOLOGY AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR
"Culture, Numerically: The Fowler Commission, Canadian Content and Transformations in Policy Practice, 1956-1961"
Ira Wagman (McGill University)
This paper will examine the Royal Commission on Broadcasting of 1956-1957, also known as the Fowler Commission. The commission is significant as it represents the point where the imperatives of the economic sphere become placed at a level that was equal, and eventually greater than, those of the public sector within the Canadian broadcasting system. The legislation of the Broadcasting Act and the subsequent establishment of the Board of Broadcast Governors (BBG) effectively terminated the CBC's monopoly over the national broadcasting system. This was followed by ownership restrictions for Canadian private broadcasters, the establishment of content regulations for Canadian television, and the licensing of the country's first private network, CTV, in 1961.
In an about-face from the protectionist rationale of the Massey Commission, the findings of the Fowler Commission moved the state away from directly monopolizing the production of "national culture" towards a form of governance that sought to monitor "at a distance". As well, through an analysis of the period surrounding the Fowler Commission hearings, we are able to see that these sentiments were influenced by a series of attacks upon the Canadian "welfare state" system. The increased calls for public accountability, cost-effectiveness, and responsible government that accompany critiques of Canadian broadcasting before and during the Diefenbaker period provided the impetus for the federal government to reorganize the Canadian broadcasting system.
I will also present the introduction of content regulations as representative of a radical transformation in the ways the state administers to the cultural sector. "Canadian content" regulations signify the application of numeric logic to Canadian cultural production. Content regulations represent a move by the BBG to adopt the tools of science to provide a sense of rationality and measurability to the Canadian cultural sphere. I will argue that this decision presages the slow incorporation of statistical and econometric forms into cultural policymaking that serve to further distance state rationality away from the largely symbolic constructions used previously to justify its involvement in cultural production. What does it mean when Canadian culture, already and elusive notion, becomes subjected to counting, quantification, and calculation? This paper will be used as a preliminary step towards a historical analysis of the role of numbers in representing Canadian citizenship, economic sovereignty and cultural production.
"Canadian Nationalism Meets High Technology: The Department of Industry and the Search for a National Computer Policy After 1963"
John Smart (Carleton/Queen's)
English Canadian nationalism in the modern period might be said to have had its heyday between the publication of the Royal Commission on Canada's Economic Prospects in 1956 and the disbanding of the Committee for an Independent Canada in 1981. These dates are also important, for different reasons, in the history of high technology in Canada. In 1956 the UNIVAC computer was still a novelty in Canada while by 1981 Canadians were starting to buy personal computers. Between these dates computers and computer technology became pervasive in Canadian society and a touchstone of modernity and progress. That computers and computer technology came into Canada almost exclusively from the United States was viewed by some Canadian officials as regrettable.
In 1963, the new Pearson government created the Department of Industry, with a mandate to modernize Canadian industry. Creation of the Department fulfilled a key promise of the Liberal election campaigns of 1962 and 1963. As a policy initiative industrial modernization was associated with Finance Minister Walter Gordon. His political ally (and brother-in-law) Bud Drury was made first Minister of Industry. (Simon Reisman was deputy minister). One of the first problems identified by the Department was Canada's lack of a computer industry. Eighty per cent of this new technology came into Canada from the United States, predominantly from one company, International Business Machines. Concerned about the 'computer gap', Canada (and other countries) began to consider strategies aimed at strengthening their domestic computer industries. This concern was amplified in Canada by strong fears about the viability of an independent Canadian economy.
During the 1960s and 1970s the Department of Industry undertook a number of initiatives aimed at creating a computer industry in Canada, all of which basically failed. These efforts included financing a microchip factory for Northern Electric in 1968 and the subsidy of a number of smaller firms (now defunct) to allow them to get started in the manufacture of computer terminals, laser printers, and cable information systems. Today's strong high technology sector in Ottawa owes something to the federal government's efforts of thirty years ago but Silicon Valley North 2000 with its dependence on imported technology and on sales in the United States does not resemble the vision of a domestic computer industry held by officials of the Department of Industry thirty years ago. This case allows us to look at a government facing an important new technology and seeking to make it part of national policy and the national economy at a time when these terms were under serious revision and re-evaluation.
SESSION V: THE NORTH
"Comparing Mythologies: An Examination of Canadian Views of Arctic Exploration in the Twentieth Century."
Janice Cavell (Carleton University)
The writing of the history of exploration in Canada has not been the subject of academic investigation; while the explorers themselves have been given at least a small amount of attention by academic historians, the historiographic dimension of the topic has been completely ignored. However, the evolution of Canadian views on this subject during the twentieth century presents an interesting reflection of changing visions of the nation. In Canadian historical writing, as in the writing of other countries, explorers have traditionally been portrayed as embodiments of the national character and as examples to be imitated by the rising generation. In early twentieth-century Canadian writing on the subject (both academic and popular) there was a strong tendency to single out those explorers whose characters seemed to be especially striking illustrations of the "British" qualities which were then presumed to be necessary for the building of the Canadian nation. In particular, the naval officers who explored the Canadian Arctic during the early nineteenth century, such as Sir John Franklin and Sir Edward Parry, were presented as quintessentially British heroes, whom young Canadians would do well to imitate.
From the middle of the century on, however, these explorers became the targets of increasing criticism from Canadian writers, and they are currently considered to be illustrations not of the virtues of the British character but of the dangers of a Eurocentric approach to the North American wilderness. This shift in attitudes is generally presumed to have been a move from romantic illusions to a more objective and realistic account of the subject, but this paper will argue that in fact the change can tell us more about Canadian views of nationhood than about the British explorers, and that the prevailing view of Arctic exploration is a mythology or cultural construction, just as the earlier hero-worshipping literature was. The paper will examine Canadian writing on Arctic exploration during the past hundred years, and will contrast the views expressed in the first and second halves of the century. The "hero-worshipping" portrayals of Franklin and Parry will be compared to the treatment of other, supposedly more "Canadian" Arctic heroes, such as Samuel Hearne, John Rae, Richard King, and Roald Amundsen, with particular emphasis on the ways in which this second group, like the first, has been described as possessing qualities of character which Canadians should admire and emulate. The examination of this previously neglected cultural aspect of Canadian nationalism will, it is hoped, shed light on the complex cultural processes through which Canadians passed as they questioned British paradigms of nationhood and searched for a new vision of their national destiny.
"Inscribing the North: Scientific Representation and Canadian Nationalism in the Early Cold War."
Edward Jones-Imhotep (Harvard University)
Throughout much of its history, Canada has imagined itself as a northern nation. In the absence of linguistic or cultural unity to bind the country together, governments and citizens alike have historically turned their gaze northward and have seen in the Canadian geography and climate, and in the hardships they produced, a distinctive identity - a nationalism rooted in the famed 'idea of North'. Art and literature, music and film, politics and popular culture have all furnished potent and well-studied expressions of this northern nationalism.
This essay attempts to look beyond these traditional arenas; it seeks to understand how, in the opening decades of the Cold War, the northern touchstone of Canadian nationalism found cultural expression in the conduct and substance of natural science. Focusing on the field of ionospheric research and on its most cherished scientific product - the ionogram - the paper illustrates how the production and analysis of these images was rooted in intense post-war concerns over intellectual and territorial sovereignty, continental security and the place of the North in Canadian identity. The ionogram, scientists argued, was the key to understanding the particularly turbulent ionospheric conditions that threatened reliable radio communications to the Canadian North. On one hand, the images promised both cognitive and technological control over a region threatened with Soviet incursion and U.S. occupation. On the other, they promised to underwrite the nations claims to nordicity with the cold objectivity of scientific fact. Marshalling magnetic effects, auroral storms and the singular geophysics of northern polar regions behind them, scientists pointed to the visual traces of the ionogram as instantiations of a Canadian ionosphere, uniquely northern in its characteristics and threatening, as muskeg and Shield had done a century before, the completion of the nation through reliable communications. The attribution of this profound cultural position to the ionogram serves to further broaden our perspective on the manifold expressions of Canadian nationalism during the early Cold War.
SESSION VI: FIRST NATIONS NATIONALISM
"The contribution to First Nations Nationalism of Onondeyoh (Fred Loft) in the l920s and early l930s"
Don Smith (University of Calgary)
Fred Loft (l86l-l934), a Mohawk civil servant and North American political organizer, established the first pan-Indian political organization in Canada immediately after World War One. The league held its first conference at Ohsweken on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario in December l9l8. Subsequent annual meetings were held at Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, in l9l9; Elphinstone, Manitoba in l920; Thunderchild Reserve, Saskatchewan in l92l; and Hobbema, Alberta, in l922. The centuries-old League of the Iroquois inspired Loft to found the organization. In the face of determined attempts by the Dept. of Indian Affairs to silence the league's independent voice, Loft perserved. But, the minimal resources he could command, particularly after he retired from the Ontario civil service in l926, prevented expansion. His own and his wife's poor health in the late l920s and early l930s further weakened his contribution to the league. In his early seventies the founder could no longer coordinate the diverse First Nation groups from Quebec to Alberta. By the time of his death in l934, the league, apart from its western Canadian branches, had come to a complete halt. But his heroic attempt, taken up by others, succeeeded a generation later in the form of the National Indian Brotherhood, and its successor, the Assembly of First Nations.
"In Quest of the Holy Grail: The Assembly of First Nations¹ Campaign to Entrench the Inherent Right to Self-Government, 1968-1987"
Michael Behiels (University of Ottawa)
Beginning in the late 1970s, Assembly of First Nations (AFN) leaders sought constitutional recognition of their peoples inherent right to self government. AFN leaders contended that aboriginal self-government flowed inherently from the sovereignty of First Nations peoples, a sovereignty which pre-dated European settlement of North America and which had never been relinquished or extinguished. By the late 1970s, achieving constitutional entrenchment of an inherent right to self-government, based on the concept of aboriginal sovereignty, was perceived by AFN leaders as the key to resolving many of their peoples deepening socio-economic problems. They believed that entrenchment would provide their peoples with the economic and territorial resources deemed essential to exercising their inherent right to govern themselves.
AFN leaders believed section 35 of the Constitution Act,1982, which they fought very hard to obtain, entrenched existing aboriginal and treaty rights and defined aboriginal peoples of Canada to include the Indian, Inuit and Métis peoples of Canada. Section 37 called for the convening of a constitutional conference dedicated primarily to the identification and definition of the rights of aboriginal peoples. In fact, four aboriginal constitutional conferences were held between 1983 and 1987. Much to the disappointment of AFN leaders no consensus could be achieved on the crucial matter of defining and entrenching the concept of the inherent right of self-government during these four dedicated conferences.
This paper illustrates the origins and development of the inherent right of self-government concept. It then offers an explanation as to why the AFN failed in its prolonged campaign to achieve constitutional entrenchment of this inherent right to self-government. Kathy Brock advances the argument that national aboriginal organizations, led by the AFN, failed in their quest of constitutional entrenchment because of the very nature of the procedure for constitutional amendments set out in Part V of the Constitution Act, 1982. The amending process placed the power in the hands of the executive branch of government, the Prime Ministers and the Premiers and their respective cabinets. This meant that when the Aboriginal organisations were invited to the First Ministers table for the four dedicated aboriginal conferences their representatives modelled their approach and demands on those of the provincial governments rather than other client groups. Hence, aboriginal peoples cast themselves as a third founding people of Canada and demanded to be included in the confederation bargain as an equal member. She contends the aboriginal organisations did not have the political clout, i.e. the bargaining power, to function at this level and as a result they were easily manipulated by the federal and provincial governments.
This paper demonstrates that the Constitutional process was not the primary reason for the failure to achieve the entrenchment of the inherent right to self-government. At the heart of the constitutional power struggle between the AFN and Ottawa and the provinces was the emergence of a clearly defined ideology of aboriginal nationalism and nationhood. Contemporary aboriginal nationalism had its roots in a new generation of well-educated aboriginal leaders seeking the survival and equality of the aboriginal peoples facing the assimilation forces of an increasingly homogenizing and hostile mainstream society that surrounded yet continued to marginalize them. The AFN, already deeply-imbued with a vibrant sense of aboriginal nationalism and nationhood by the late 1970s, achieved considerable success during the political negotiations which produced the 1982 constitutional reforms. AFN leaders had every reason to believe that a further consolidation of their aboriginal ideology and organisational strength would contribute to a formal recognition of First Nations as a third order of government within the Canadian federation. Little did they realize that in a head on clash of nationalisms and sovereignty, aboriginal versus Canadian. It was a foregone conclusion which of the two was going to win out, at least in the short run.
SESSION VII: THINKERS
"John Buchan and the British Imperial Origins of Canadian Multiculturalism"
Peter Henshaw (Queen's University)
John Buchan, who as Lord Tweedsmuir was Governor-General of Canada from 1935 to 1940, was an early and energetic exponent of a vision of Canadian nationalism that is strikingly similar to modern Canadian multiculturalism. But why did Buchan, a Scotsman and a staunch defender of the British Empire, promote a conception of Canadian identity typically seen as marking Canada's advance from colony to nation? And why did he do this at a time when the policy of the Canadian government was thought to have been one of encouraging conformity to a 'British' identity? The answer is neither that he was merely a spokesman for the Mackenzie King government nor that Buchan had given up on imperial unity.
Buchan had his own definite ideas about national identity before he arrived in Canada, ideas that he had formulated while thinking about how to keep Scotland within the United Kingdom, and South Africa within the British empire. Buchan was sure that imperial unity was best served by the development in Canada of a strong and distinctive national identity, an identity that could not and should not simply be a North American version of being British. As Governor-General, Buchan promoted the idea that Canadian national identity should be based on a strong connection with Canada's unique landscape and that Canadian culture should draw meaningfully on the cultures of all its peoples. Moreover, he insisted that all immigrants should work to preserve the cultures of their homelands even as they developed a strong and unifying Canadian national identity. He saw no contradiction in urging multiculturalism, a distinctive national identity, and imperial unity. This was because he recognized the reality and potential of multiple and transnational identities at a much earlier date than most analysts of Canadian nationalism.
"L'importance de la langue dans le nationalisme contemporain au Québec."
Michel Sarra-Bournet (Université du Québec à Montréal)
Cette communication est extraite d'une étude plus étendue des notions de langue, d'identité et d'histoire dans les essais de trois intellectuels nationalistes contemporains, l'anthropologue Claude Bariteau, l'historien Gérard Bouchard et le journaliste Jean-Marc Léger. Ces thèmes ont été au cour des débats politiques au Québec durant les années 1990: Jusqu'à quel point la langue est-elle essentielle au nationalisme québécois? Comment ces nationalistes définissent-ils le nation? Quel usage font-ils de l'histoire pour expliquer la situation du Québec? La question linguistique renvoie aux politiques gouvernementales qui renforcent le statut du français comme langue commune, comme langue de la citoyenneté au Québec. Elle est aussi liée à la question des droits des minorités (ceux de la minorité anglophone en particulier) et à celle de l'intégration immigrants en français dans la société québécois (ce qui n'est guère évident à Montréal où s'installent 90% des immigrants étrangers). Sur la question linguistique les opinions de Bariteau, Bouchard et Léger vont d'un vision utilitaire à une vision essentialiste de la langue comme élément du nationalisme québécois.
[The significance of language in contemporary Quebec nationalism]
This paper is part of a larger study of language, identity, and history in the writings of three contemporary Quebec nationalist intellectuals, anthropologist Claude Bariteau, historian Gérard Bouchard and journalist Jean-Marc Léger. These themes that have been central to the political debates of the last decade in Quebec: How is language crucial to nationalism in Quebec? How is the nation defined by Quebec nationalists? How is history used to explain the situation of Quebec? The issue of language is linked to government policies to support French as the common language, the language of citizenship in Quebec. It also borders on the theme of minority rights (namely the English-speaking minority) and the question of the integration of immigrants in French into Quebec society (something especially difficult in Montreal, where 90% of foreign immigrants settle). On the language issue, the opinions of Bariteau, Bouchard and Léger range from an utilitarian view to an essentialist view of French as a component of Quebec nationalism.]