Founding Races Research Articles

Cycling Sociability and Sport in Belle Époque France: the Véloce-club bordelais (1878–92)

The short-lived Véloce-club bordelais (1878-92) was one of France’s leading Belle époque cycling clubs. Although provincial, it was influential in developing cycle-sport nationally, including creating Bordeaux-Paris (1891), one of the founding races of cycling as a developing sport. Study of the internal life of the club shows how its social and sporting identity negotiated centrifugual and centripital forces within the institutional framework of associationism. Searching for the best organisational model for cycling sport and associativity in a period of rapid change in French sport and society, the club was refounded on a number of occasions but, despite many achievements, ultimately collapsed. As an early pioneer club, the Véloce-club bordelais (VCB) was partly a victim of its own success: having struggled to create a new ecosystem of cycling as sport and sociability, changing interests of Bordeaux’s social elite in new, motorised pursuits, or to cycle-touring rather than racing, removed the raison d’être of the club. The club’s demise subsequently created space in the sports-scape for new cycling clubs and other sports associations. Detailed analysis of club activities, internal organisation and management, membership and finances is enabled by its symbiotic relationship with the Véloce-Sport newspaper, which published and discussed much of the club’s sporting, social and administrative life. Close interpretation of the VCB’s brief but intense history shows how sporting sociability intersected with local government, politics and society and how the internal functioning of sports associations in France’s Belle époque demonstrates the significance of sports clubs as part of civil society.

Introduction: Revisiting Solitudes - Between and Beyond

This special issue of Etudes Canadiennes/ Canadian Studies has decided to revisit the concept of solitudes by exploring the social, linguistic and cultural interactions between the original inhabitants, the Indigenous peoples of Canada, and what has come to be called the “founding races”, as well as the more recent allophone communities, by considering the way they depict one another (or not) in fiction, song, and the visual arts. A quick glance at some of the national ethnic celebrations tha...

Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework: A Retrospective

Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework:A Retrospective Eve Haque (bio) Bilingual, Binational, Bicultural: Canadian Founding Myths On March 7, 2012, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto held a public event on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, the final installment in the second series of its very popular History Wars at the ROM, which explored "some of the most provocative subjects and personalities in Canadian history" (ROM 2014). This particular debate had as its central proposition that "Canada is not Bilingual, Binational or Bicultural." It featured Antonia Maioni, Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University and former Director of the McGill Centre for the Study of Canada, speaking against the proposition; David Bercuson, Professor of History at the University of Calgary, speaking in favour of the proposition; and Michael Bliss, a historian at the University of Toronto, moderating the debate for a mostly older and white audience of roughly five hundred people. How the arguments were framed was significant. During the debate, Bercuson did not build his argument in favour of the proposition on the basis of the "multicultural fact" of Canada, which is a common rhetorical strategy these days; rather, he emphasized that most Canadians were overwhelmingly monolingual in one of the official languages – mainly English. A study in contrast, Maioni strongly argued that Canada was indeed bilingual, bicultural, and binational and, moreover, stated emphatically that multiculturalism in Canada does not exist in a vacuum but is associated with and rooted in the prior existence of two distinct cultural and linguistic settings, that is, the founding cultures. Notably, despite their apparently opposing viewpoints, both Bercuson and Maioni shared a belief that Canada is a white settler society of "two founding races," that is, a nation founded by white English and French-speaking peoples. In this book, I attempt to unravel how it is that this discourse about Canada came to be normalized through state processes and practices. The ROM debate idea that Canada has is at its core a dual white settler founding nation is not an idea that is specific to academia, as shown by the public reactions to Statistics Canada’s release of the 2011 census data on language in late 2012 (Statistics [End Page 119] Canada 2014). Given the general interest in language issues in Canada, this data release on language use across the country generated nationwide media coverage and attendant commentaries. Although the data suggested an increasing presence of immigrant languages (such as Tagalog, Cantonese, and Arabic among twenty-two other immigrant mother tongues) in Canada, with one fifth of the population speaking a language other than English or French in the home, the 2011 figures also showed that the official languages remained robust with 58% of the Canadian population reporting English as a mother tongue, 22% reporting French as a mother tongue and 98% stating they were able to conduct a conversation in either English or French. The media scrutiny and extensive public reactions to these stories, however, focused mainly on the increase in non-official language use, generating such headlines as "Is Multiculturalism Stifling Bilingualism?" (Scoffield 2012). As well, reactions to these stories were exemplified in online reader comments such as, "When you are in Canada, nothing but French and English. If you dislike that go back where you came from" (Friesen 2012). The hundreds of online comments and letters posted in response to these stories made it obvious that for many, these figures on language produced deep racialized anxieties about multiculturalism and its adverse effects on the imagined nation of the two "founding races" (20). It is clear that more than forty years after the multiculturalism policy was adopted in Canada, these public debates, which harken back explicitly to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963-1970), remain stubbornly entrenched in a binary that ultimately sediments around the central question of the privileged status of the two founding nations/cultures. This process of reification takes place most clearly in Book I of the B and B Commission and becomes codified in the Official Languages Act of 1969, as outlined in chapter five. A genealogy of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism demonstrates that the production of this founding white settler duality...

Commissioning “Founding Races” and Settler Colonial Narratives

Eve Haque's pioneering work, Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework, invites us to think about royal commissions and the role that they play in politics, policy and administration. But, uniquely, this book also reveals the central role of royal commissions in narrating a racial order and settler colonialism at pivotal times in Canadian history and politics. This important and timely study provides critical insights into Canadian debates on race, language, culture and, specifically, the intertwined concepts of multiculturalism and bilingualism. In this review I focus on two themes in Haque's work in order to reflect upon the following: first, the role of royal commissions, and specifically, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, in narrating the nation, a racial order, and settler colonialism; second, the use of contested concepts such as founding races, ethnic and newcomers and the ways in which the B and B Commission attempted to stabilize and normalize these inherently unstable concepts and identities precisely at a time when they were losing their coherence. Finally, this review concludes with the urgent need to confront Canada's colonial present and to decolonize white settler colonialism. Haque's book engages in a close textual reading of the B and B Commission's use of language, nation, and race. She deconstructs the dividing practice evident in the constitution of separate and unequal groups like founding races and ethnic groups (Haque 2012, 4-5, 50-60) and the silence, if not narrative expulsion (Sassen 2014), of indigenous peoples in this official effort to narrate a nation. In the process, the book illuminates the under-studied role that royal commissions often play in narrating the settler nation state (e.g., Blake et al. 2011) and, also, in narrating a hierarchical racial order and colonial present. Haque also maps what she calls the durability of the white-settler bilingual/bicultural formulations in the present, and its contemporary mode of ordering racialized immigrant Others (see 9-30). Haque's meticulously researched book draws on interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences in order to remind us that royal commissions and commissions of inquiry have served many purposes in Canada, among them helping to build social knowledge and social consensus. They have been used to help policymakers clarify how we define a political problem or craft a social policy solution. Academic engagement, especially among political and social science scholars, has been central to the relative success of royal commissions as a governing instrument. scale of the research, the co-optation of the scores of scholars from all parts of the country to this endeavour, the publicity associated with their reports--these and other features of commissions of inquiry made them a central mechanism in the reconceptualization of Canadian federalism (D. Smith 2010, 37). Jane Jenson refers to them as commissioning ideas and notes that they set out the terms of who we are, where we have been and what we might and they are the locales for some of the major shifts in the ways that Canadians debate representations of themselves, their presents and their futures (Jenson 1994, 39-40; Haque, 30). Haque's work makes clear that public inquiries do not just gather facts; rather, they authorize certain forms of social discourse, which ultimately become truths because of the supposed neutrality of the inquiries themselves (Haque, 24; Anderson and Denis 2003, 381). The book reminds us that royal commissions have played a major role in policymaking since before Confederation. The British colonial government established various inquiries including Lord Durham's Inquiry on the causes of two rebellions in Lower and Upper Canada in 1837 and 1838 (Haque, 43, 86-7, 144, 265-8). In Chapter 3, Hearings and Report (52-92), Haque discusses the B and B Commission's Preliminary Report, which compares the situation in the 1830s with the conditions that gave rise to the B and B Commission (87). …

Introduction: Reflections on Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework

This review dossier focuses on Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race, and Belonging in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012) by Eve Haque, an associate professor of Applied Linguistics in the Departments of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at York University. It began as an Author Meets Critics session at the Association of Studies and Ethnic Studies Association joint annual conference in October 2012. The session provoked some heated debate about the nature of and Quebecois nationalisms, Canada-Indigenous relations, and racism and forms of belonging under settler colonialism. The many unfinished conversations ultimately led us to collaborate on this dossier of critical commentaries in order to reflect further on Multiculturalism in a Bilingual Framework's many broad themes. We are pleased that Ethnic Studies/Etudes ethniques au Canada has provided us with a venue to continue these important discussions. Eve Haque's scholarship has coalesced around four intersecting and overlapping research clusters over the years. First, she focuses on the ways in which the binary framing and institutionalization of within a bilingual framework effectively obscure racial hierarchies and secure white settler colonialism (Haque 2010). Second, she explores language rights, and the ways in which language policy and planning territorializes identity (Patrick and Haque 2010). Third, she grapples with the role that language plays in the formation of social and national identities, ethnolinguistic nationalisms, and cosmopolitanisms (Haque 2007). Fourth and finally, she considers the roles that teacher education and language training play in the socialization of newcomers (Haque et al. 2007). There are traces of each of these diverse research clusters in her first published monograph, which makes for a rich interdisciplinary tapestry of data and analysis. Haque's book is among the most authoritative studies of multiculturalism and bilingualism in Canada and, arguably, among the most important scholarly contributions on royal commissions or commissions of inquiry. The book takes as its point of departure two formulations--two founding races and within a bilingual framework--that emerged out of the final report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (B and B Commission). Canadian commissions of inquiry in some measure mirror the concerns of history; and part of the national story is found in the reports ... [such as] bilingualism and (Muldoon et al. 1979, 1-2). In her path-breaking genealogy of the B and B Commission, Haque deftly traces how this particular royal commission not only mirrored historical concerns; it, like other commissions, produced history and, indeed, constituted hegemonic national narratives. Whether in her attention to the minute details of Book IV of the B and B Commission (The Cultural Contribution of the Other Ethnic Groups) or in her meticulous treatment of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's triumphant announcement of within a Bilingual Framework, Haque sustains her passion for detailed archival research with careful erudition. The government of Liberal Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson established the B and B Commission in 1963 to inquire into and report upon the existing state of bilingualism and biculturalism in Canada and to recommend what steps should be taken to develop the Confederation on the basis of an equal partnership between the two founding races, taking into account the made by the other ethnic groups to the cultural enrichment of Canada and the measures that should be taken to safeguard that contribution (Haque 2012, 5). The Commission itself evolved during a post-World War II era in which biological racism had become verboten (Haque, this dossier) and the spectre of Quebecois state-based nationalisms evoked trepidation throughout the rest of Canada. …

The Book of Others ( Book IV ): Canadian Multiculturalism, the State, and Its Political Legacies

THE MULTICULTURAL MOVE TO LANGUAGE It is always worth reminding Canadians that when Pierre Elliott Trudeau introduced Multiculturalism Policy to Parliament in October 1971, it was not an attempt to change fundamental character of modern Canadian nation-state. Rather, policy's intent was to manage non-French and non-English peoples of nation, as Eve Haque clearly explains in her discussion of Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism's (B and B Commission) production of other ethnic groups of Canadian body politic (186-237). The B and B Commission's work simultaneously cemented idea that French and English/British ethnicities constituted founding races of Canada (5-8, 14, 53-56, 87-93, 140-52). Furthermore, move to language rather than ethnicity for white French and English/British was a cover to preclude racial designation as foundational to nation, all while making it fundamentally so (6, 18, 62-71, 75-78, 160-62). Indeed, late Robert Stanfield, Progressive Conservative Opposition Leader, stood to endorse policy by saying that, wish to state immediately, Mr. Speaker, that emphasis we have given to multiculturalism in no way constitutes an attack on basic duality of our country (234). The duality that was already assumed and came to be enshrined in bilingual and multicultural articulation of nation-state as fundamental to its founding was soon after enshrined in legislation and law. MULTICULTURALISM AS RACIOLOGICAL THINKING Eve Haque's Multiculturalism Within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race and Belonging in Canada returns us to origin scene of Canadian nation-state's formation and management of its non-French and non-English/British others, to provide an account of how language, race, and culture have produced modern context of contemporary multicultural Canada. Haque's engagement with Canadian multiculturalism focuses squarely on the Preliminary Report and Books I (The Official Languages) and IV (The Cultural Contributions of Other Ethnic Groups) (7); her focus cannot be downplayed, for effects of Book IV continue to mark Canadian multicultural policy, politics, and their associated imaginaries. Haque begins her study with Jacque Parizeau's 1995 outburst that money and ethnic vote were reasons that No Campaign was narrowly successful in last referendum in Quebec (3-4, 238, 264). By beginning there, Haque pinpoints how deep structures of language, culture, and continue to shape contemporary Canadian politics, public sphere, and national imaginary. This shaping of contemporary Canadian national imaginary is fashioned through a recourse that places two languages outside boundaries of and ethnicity, only to be remarked by their accent as cultures - founding cultures of Canada. Indeed, Haque's work seeks to unmake such remarking as troubling work of and raciological thinking. Furthermore, it is Haque's argument that multiculturalism as policy usefully operated and operates in a space where public policy as biologically based racial exclusions became increasingly politically and socially disreputable (6). The disturbing impact in aftermath is how language and culture has come to stand in for and raciological thinking and in new and sustained ways more than forty years later. It is precisely manner in which language and culture appear to foreclose discussions of race and racism in Canada that makes Haque's contribution and reading of historical documents so important to contemporary debates on multiculturalism and racism. Indeed, Haque's analysis in part points to reasons why term barbaric cultural practices is currently used by Government of Canada to describe exclusively non-white cultural in Canadian citizenship guide (Zine 2012, 18). …

The consequences of official bilingualism on the status and perception of non-official languages in Canada

The year 2011 marked the 40th Anniversary of Canadian Multiculturalism as an official federal policy. It also marked the 42nd anniversary of passage of the Official Languages Act (1969) that gave English and French equal status in the government of Canada. Much has been written, both positive and negative, about the impetus for and subsequent effects of official bilingualism and multiculturalism on Canadian society. More recently, scholars have revisited the history and politics that gave birth to both of these policies and have suggested that today, even more than was the case 40 years ago, the framework of official bilingualism and multiculturalism is inadequate from a practical standpoint and, arguably, at odds with Canada's self-image as a ‘mosaic’ of cultures and languages. In particular, the continued dominance of English and French as the ‘founding races’ of Canada not only tends to marginalize the status of ‘other’ groups and their languages within Canada, but it also presents an image of Canada, to itself and the world, that does not reflect the changing demographics and linguistic complexity of the country.

Jewish Communal Identity at the Crossroads: Early Jewish Responses to Canadian Multiculturalism, 1963-1965

This article challenges the assumption that the Canadian Jewish community embraced the discourse and potential of multiculturalism rapidly and enthusiastically. It has been proven that certain groups—most notably the Ukrainians—used the hearings of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, which promised to consider the ‘‘contributions of the other ethnic’’ groups, to promote the idea that Canada is multicultural. But the largest organization of Canadian Jewry—the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC)—was very cautious in its dealings with the Commission. It only participated in the Preliminary Hearings, in order to protest the preamble’s language that referred to the ‘‘two founding races. From the records of meetings, it is evident that CJC, based in Montreal—which was the home of the largest Jewish community in Canada at the time—was worried that introducing ‘‘multiculturalism’’ would offend the French. This article also asserts that CJC was not willing to define the Jews as an ethnic group, which was the implied category for groups in the new discourse of multiculturalism. CJC thought that a self-definition of the Jews as an ethnic group would weaken the place of Jews in Canadian society, both because of how Jews defined themselves on the census of 1961 and because they believed that they had a higher profile in the division of society into Protestant—Catholic—Jew than in a society divided into ethnic groups.

The Canadian Ethnocultural Council and Evolving Multiculturalism

Following the announcement of the multicultural policy in October of 1971, the Federal Government appointed members of ethnic communities to the newly created Canadian Consultative Council on Multiculturalism to participate in the formulation of recommendations which would address the challenges of implementing that policy. When the work of that committee was concluded, some of the ethnocultural groups took the initiative to create a new body which would continue addressing policy matters of concern to the cross section of communities. Thus, the Canadian Ethnocultural Council, a grassroots organization comprised of voices representing many ethnic and racially diverse communities and organizations, was established in 1980. It played a key role in shaping the implementation of the policy. This paper discusses that role and the precedent set by the Canadian Ethnocultural Council in implementing cross cultural cooperation at the grassroots level. Suite à l'annonce de la politique du multiculturalisme en octobre 1971, le Gouvernement fédéral a nommé des membres des communautés ethniques au Conseil consultatif canadien sur le multiculturalisme nouvellement créé, pour contribuer à l'élaboration de recommandations qui visent à répondre aux défis posés par la mise en place de cette politique. Une fois que ce comité a eu terminé son travail, quelques groupes ethnoculturels prirent l'initiative d'en créer un second pour continuer à traiter de sujets qui préoccupent une variété de communautés. Ils ont donc fondé en 1980 le Conseil ethnoculturel du Canada, une organisation de base qui comprend des voix d'un nombre communautés ethniquement et racialement diverses. Cet organisme a joué un rôle clé dans la définition et la mise en oeuvre de la nouvelle politique. Cet article porte sur ce rôle et sur le précédent créé par le Conseil ethnoculturel du Canada dans la mise en place d'une coopération interculturelle au niveau de la base.

Public Commemoration and Ethnocultural Assertion: Winnipeg Celebrates the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation

The Canada-wide celebration of the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation was intended to promote the idea of a “new nationality” based on the linguistic and cultural dualism associated with Canada’s two “founding races.” The widespread participation of New Canadians in the celebrations was expected to accelerate their assimilation into the “melting pot” of the new nationality, which did not recognize the legitimacy of dual identities and loyalties. Winnipeg’s diverse and marginalized ethnic communities challenged both the official meanings of the Diamond Jubilee and the hegemonic Anglo-conformity of the city’s civic culture. They transformed the celebrations into a vehicle for representing their ethnocultural identities in the public sphere and asserting an alternative, pluralistic version of Canadian nationality. Winnipeg’s Jubilee celebrations became a milestone in an ongoing “dialectic of resistance and accommodation” that allowed immigrant groups to negotiate the terms of their integration into Canadian society, and that continues to structure the relationship between minority and mainstream cultures in the twenty-first century.

Le Mouton de Troie: Changes in Quebec Cultural Symbolism

Tuons saint Jean-Baptiste! Brulons le carton-pate des traditions avec lequel on voulu mythifier notre esclavage. Apprenons l'orgueil d'etre hommes. Affirmons fortement notre independance. Et ecrasons de notre liberte robuste le paternalisme compatissant ou meprisant des politiciens, des papas-patrons et des predicateurs de defaites et de soumissions.... --Pierre Vallieres, Negres blancs de l'Amerique (58) In late June of 1990, the Meech Lake Accord, the most controversial clause of which would have confirmed Quebec's status distinct society under the umbrella of the Canadian constitution, failed. Two days after the failure, estimated two hundred thousand Montrealers took to the streets to watch the traditional Saint-Jean-Baptiste parade. Among the eleven elaborate floats depicting aspects of 30 ans de puissance tranquille (Nicalse 1992), the first in particular drew great deal of attention because of its attempted complex commentary on changes in Quebec's self-definition: holding blue-and-white streamers, twenty-four young Saint John the Baptists pulled along three-story high (a sheep its black head pointedly indicated) while, behind, young people from multiethnic backgrounds emerged from inside the gaping ribs of the animal to pass large cardboard fleurs-de-lys along into the audience. Le Devoir conceded that the lamb lent itself to multiples interpretations, but among these the newspaper stressed aura of self-confidence: this lamb n'en fait qu'a sa tete! (Cauchon 1990). The proverbial meaning of the Trojan horse (the model on which the Trojan lamb is based) refers to someone or something intended to or from within (Webster's). By analogy, the self-assured Quebecois lamb seeks to undermine or subvert the fortress of federalism, all with the cheerful cooperation of Quebecois from all ethnic backgrounds. To Le Devoir, the Trojan lamb amounted to une vision novatrice du defile (Cauchon 1990), combining it did amusing parody of traditional Saint-Jean-Baptiste imagery with conciliatory perspective on changing provincial demographics. By contrast, the Anglophone press, responding with the mixture of contempt and fear that it often reserves for ardent displays of Quebec nationalism, read the allegory conveying message that was ludicrous and threatening at once, namely a child's nightmare, with the head of black snake and the skeletal ribs of lost ram that perished in high-country blizzard three winters back (Todd 1990). These divergent responses may be nothing new, but the history of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste parade reveals that the represents one facet of semiotic system rather more complex than can be captured in this simple bifurcation. Over time, the parade has served to highlight conservative and progressive goals well exclusive and inclusive visions of Quebec society. To Canadian federalists and separatists alike, la Saint-Jean has become increasingly important barometer of separatist sentiment; depending on their respective affiliations, the media will report with alarm or satisfaction on any flagging participation, diminishing fervor, and decreasing financial support for the event. The attention focused on Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day is such that, in recent effort to promote federalist symbolism across the country, Heritage Minister Sheila Copps suggested that the day be made an integral part, not separate part, of celebrating Canada, plan ill-received by Bloc Quebecois MPs who read it as attempt to steal the sovereignists' fete nationale (Winsor 1996). (1) Such responses and the cultural symbolism that provoked them are predicated on the notion of two founding races, that is two societies, each essentially homogeneous, pitted against each other. The failure of Meech Lake and, more recently, the role of the ethnic and Native votes in the 1995 Referendum have proven this notion to be no longer true, if indeed it ever was. …

The Politics of Official Bilingualism in Canada

One of the main responses of Canada's government and its political elites the challenges from Quebec since 1960 has been the policy of official bilingualism. Its political objective has been convince the French-speaking minority concentrated in Quebec that they are fairly treated and should commit their political future Canada. The central government's methods have been raise the status of the French language parity with English, make French a language of service the public and of work in federal agencies, achieve balanced participation among the English and French speakers in the federal civil service, and persuade and induce provincial governments do likewise. ' Canada's political elites have attempted implement these policies in a federal political structure and a private enterprise economy in which the central government has limited power compel compliance outside its own institutions. The intellectual case for the federal response the challenge of Quebec's Quiet Revolution was shaped by the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. Its terms of reference in 1963 were to inquire into and report upon the existing state of bilingualism and biculturalism in Canada and recommend what steps should be taken develop the Canadian confederation on the basis of an equal partnership between the two founding races, taking into account the contributions made by the other ethnic groups the cultural

The Issue of Sovereignty: The Clarity Act as an Effective and Legitimate Response to Canada-Quebec Relations

Quebec sovereignty in the Canadian federation has elicited strong emotion across the spectrum of politics and national interest. The forwarding of the Clarity Act by Jean Chretien‘s Liberals was an attempt by the federal government to seek a resolution to the question of Quebec unilateral secession in a legal and clearly defined manner. The Act of 2000 was not of abstract materialization. Rather, it highlighted the complexity of Canada‘s multinational identity and the historical quandaries of her founding races. The Act was a response to the 1995 Quebec referendum, yet despite it being an attempt to provide clarity to concerns arising from the referendum, the Act has generated further debate and new anxieties regarding Canada-Quebec relations [...]