Je me souviens, j’imagine: essais historiques et littéraires sur la culture québécoise. Sous la direction d’Anne Caumartin, Julien Goyette, Karine Hébert et Martine-Emmanuelle Lapointe

Abstract

‘Je me souviens’ is the motto of Quebec province, and it is inscribed on the coat of arms on the Parliament Building in Quebec City (inaugurated in 1884). In this context it urged the Québécois to remember their history, embodied in the statues of key historical figures (founders, explorers, military, religious and political figures, and anonymous representatives of the indigenous population) which decorate the building. But in its more familiar context today — on the province’s car licence plates — the motto has lost its context and the population no longer makes the automatic connection between it and the collective identity it once invoked. The sense of historical continuity, which had been integral to the ideology of ‘survivance’ in Quebec from the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, no longer holds. The break with the traditionalist, Catholic past, which culminated in the Révolution tranquille in the 1960s, coincided with a questioning of the reliability of history and of collective memory. Across twenty-two essays by historians and literary and cultural scholars, the current volume addresses this rupture between a people and its history. Inspired by Pierre Nora’s concept of the lieu de mémoire, it offers analyses of key topoi of Quebec history and culture as they have been represented within the collective imaginary. Some contributions focus on a significant historical moment or emblematic location (for example, La Conquête, or Le Forum de Montréal, home of the Canadiens ice-hockey team, 1926–96), but more frequently the chapters take up commonplace figures such as the porteur d’eau or the coureur de bois, or choose a broader topic (the myth of Quebec as a matriarchal society; the high birth rate in francophone Canada; the shifting meanings of the term ‘colonisation’; attitudes towards the French language in Quebec), in order to revisit them, undermining stereotypes and analysing their transformations, and, in some cases, their relevance in Quebec today. The chosen sites of memory relate mostly to francophone (rather than anglophone or allophone) experience in Quebec, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Essays dealing with various figures of the Other study images, clichés, and stereotypes as they function and shift within the collective (francophone) memory. These include contributions devoted to: the place of the indigenous voice, focusing on the earliest contact under French colonization; les maudits Français and the ambivalence of their presence in the Québécois sense of identity; and the place of l’Anglais in the imagination of (francophone) Quebec. The essay on the migrant Other focuses on one of the most problematic objects of memorialization. Migration (inward and outward, forced or voluntary) is central to what it is to become or to have been Québécois. But to attempt to memorialize the passage of migrants within or beyond Quebec is to attempt to capture a process of flight, of transition, of adaptation or exclusion. Accordingly, the essays in this wide-ranging volume engage the reader in what is both a reconfiguration but also a fundamental questioning of what its authors term ‘les contours d’un Québec évanescent’ (p. 18).