Narratives of power: Historical mythologies in contemporary Québec and Canada

Race and Class

Volumn 52, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 19-32

  Austin, David ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Blacks in Canada; Citizenship; Indigenous people; Matthew da Costa; Nationalism; Pierre Valli res; Slavery; Sylvia Wynter

Indexed keywords

EID: 77954652806     PISSN: 03063968     EISSN: 17413125     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0306396810371759     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. The core arguments in this article were first presented in Montreal to students of Professor Aziz Choudry in November 2008 in a course on 'Multicultural education' at McGill University's Department of Integrated Studies in Education. I am thankful to both Professor Choudry and his students for the opportunity to 'field' these ideas before committing them to paper.
2. Sylvia Wynter, Beyond Miranda's meanings: un/silencing the demonic ground of Caliban's woman, in Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Fido, eds, Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean women and literature (Trenton, NJ, Africa World Press, 1990), p. 358. Here the word 'conquest' is used provisionally in so far as it suggests a finite process that is complete when, in fact, Indigenous resistance to the history and legacy of colonialism is an ongoing, continuous process. I am thankful to Scott Rutherford for pointing out the problematic use of this word.
3. Natasha Barnes, Cultural Conundrums: gender, race, nation and the making of Caribbean cultural politics(Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2006), p. 137.
4. Percy C. Hintzen, Diaspora, globalization and the politics of identity, in Brian Meeks, ed., Culture, Politics, Race and Diaspora: the thought of Stuart Hall(Kingston /Miami, Ian Randle, 2007), p. 250.
5. Ibid, p. 250.
6. Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the Past: power and the production of history (Boston, Beacon Press, 1995), p. 22.
7. Use of the term 'silence' is also borrowed from Silencing the Past.
8. For a response to this outlandish claim, see Harsha Walia, Really Harper, Canada has no history of colonialism?, Vancouver Sun (28 September 2010), ;.
9. See Paula C. Madden, African Nova Scotian-Mi'Kmaw Relations(Halifax & Winnipeg, Fernwood Publishing, 2009).
10. Ibid, p. 63.
11. Ibid, pp. 95-6.
12. For a compelling account of the experience of people of African descent in Canada, see Lawrence Hill's highly acclaimed novel, The Book of Negroes(Toronto, Harper Collins, 2007).
13. For an interesting autobiographical account of an Ethiopian Jew who lived in Montreal, see Baruch Tegegne, Baruch's Odyssey: an Ethiopian Jew's struggle to save his people(Jerusalem, Gefen Publishing House, 2008).
14. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977 (New York, Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 93.
15. Ibid, pp. 93-4.
16. Sunera Thobani, Exalted Subjects: studies in the making of race and nation in Canada (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2007), p. 5.
17. Ibid, p. 10.
18. For brief reflections on these omissions, see ibid., p. 11; Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: politics and popular culture in the post-civil rights era (New York, Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 133; Rinaldo Walcott, 'Within the archipelagoes of poverty: C. L. R. James, Sylvia Wynter and wasted lives', unpublished.
19. See Cecil Foster, Blackness and Modernity: the colour of humanity and the quest for freedom (Montreal/Kingston, McGill-Queen's Press, 2007) and in particular his chapter seventeen, 'Neo-mythic multiculturalism: blackness in Canada's mythology'. This is an intriguing, stimulating and frustrating book whose strength is also its weakness. Animated by Hegel's phenomenology, which reads notions of Whiteness and Blackness historically in Canada and in relation to the country's policy of multiculturalism, the occasionally turgid prose and Hegelian categories of thought encumber Foster's insights. For a review of Foster's book, see Roberta Hamilton, Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahier canadiens de sociologie (Vol. 34, no. 3, 2009), pp. 916-9.
20. Glen Coulthard, Beyond recognition: Indigenous self-determination as prefigurative practice, in Leanne Simpson, ed., Lighting the Eighth Fire: the liberation, resurgence and protection of Indigenous nations(Winnipeg, Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2008), p. 196.
21. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks(New York, Grove Press, 1967), p. 221.
22. Aziz Choudry, Transnational coalition politics and the de/colonization of pedagogies of mobilization: learning from Indigenous movement articulations against neo-liberalism, International Education(Vol. 37, no. 1, 2007), pp. 97-112; George Mentore, 'Guyanese Amerindian epistemology: the gift from a pacifist insurgence', in Race & Class (Vol. 49, no. 2, 2007), pp. 57-70.
23. Coulthard, Beyond recognition, op. cit., p. 199.
24. Ibid, pp. 199-200.
25. See Lee Maracle, Red power legacies and lives: an interview by Scott Rutherford, in New World Coming: the sixties and the shaping of global consciousness (Toronto, Between the Lines, 2009), pp. 364-5.
26. Debates in Québec about 'accommodating' immigrants and non-French Québécois were sparked by a series of events including the bizarre adoption of a code of conduct for immigrants in the municipality of Hérouxville, which has a population of 1,323 that includes less than a smattering of people of colour. The media, and particularly the francophone media, fuelled the debate by running a series of stories about unrelated events involving members of the Sikh, Muslim and Jewish communities in which 'unreasonable' requests for cultural accommodation were highlighted. The predictable result of the media frenzy and public outcry was a perception that Québec's values were being eroded and a subsequent commission of inquiry, presided over by prominent intellectuals Gerard Bouchard and Charles Taylor.
27. Hintzen, Diaspora, globalization and the politics of identity, op. cit., pp. 250-1.
28. Ibid.,pp. 250-1.
29. Léandre Bergeron's popular book, Petit Manuel d'Histoire du Québec (Montréal, Éditions Québécoises, 1970), is notable for its class-conscious reading of Québec history and its description of French exploitation of 'l'homme rouge' but is silent on Black slavery. Bergeron appears to have been generally oblivious to the presence of Blacks in Québec when the book was published.
30. Marcel Chaput, Pourquoi je suis séparatiste (Montréal, Les Éditions du jour, 1961), p. 124.
31. Hubert Aquin, La prochaine épisode (Montreal, Bibilotèque Québécoise, 1995).
32. In 2006, I attended a series of discussions at l'Unviversité du Québec à Montréal which in part celebrated the work of Hubert Aquin. Much to my surprise, a number of discussants invoked the notion of French Canadians as 'nègres'.
33. For a brief discussion of André Laurendeau's famous editorial on the 'Negro king', see Hugh Bingham Myers, The Quebec Revolution (Montreal, Harvest House, 1963), pp. 4-5.
34. Pierre Vallières, The White Niggers of America(Toronto, McClelland & Stewart Ltd, 1971).
35. See La Manière d'un nègre: Aimé Césaire, Chemin Faisant (Montreal, Éditions de l'Hexagone, 1993), p. 188, and the film of the same title (1991). Césaire was intrigued by the framing of French Quebecers as 'nègres', which here translates as 'Negro' or 'Black', arguing that it demonstrated that they understood that Negritude was not a question of skin and colour (p. 187).
36. Interestingly, it was Vallières who famously argued in 1968 that Québec was not subject to the irrational anti-Black racism that was the scourge of the US, although Indigenous peoples barely commanded a footnote in his 1968 classic (Vallières, White Niggers,op. cit., p. 21). While finding common cause with the US Black Power movement from the outset, he appears to have 'discovered' Québec Blacks shortly after, likely due to two events: the Congress of Black Writers (11-14 October 1968) and the Sir George Williams Affair (January/February 1969), both of which captured national and international headlines as acts of Black militancy highlighting Canada, including Québec's 'Black problem'. In a later edition of Nègre blancs, he added a footnote distancing himself from the earlier view that French Canadians did not suffer from the irrational racism that plagued the United States. See Pierre Vallières, Nègre blancs d'Amérique (Montréal, Éditions Typo, 1994), p. 61 and fn p. 62. For a brief discussion on Vallières in relation to the Black Power movements in the US and Canada, see David Austin, 'All roads led to Montreal: Black Power, the Caribbean and the Black radical tradition in Canada', Journal of African American History(Vol. 92, no. 4, 2007), p. 528. Sean Mills, The Empire Within: postcolonial thought and political activism in sixties Montreal (Montreal/Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010) discusses the Left in Montreal during this period, including the intellectual-ideological links between the Black and French Québécois Left.
37. Mills, The Empire Within, op. cit., pp. 21, 26.
38. For a probing study of the porous nature of Québec history and the ties between Indigenous groups and French traders in the Great Lakes region between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, see Richard White's The Middle Ground: Indians, empires and republics in the Greats Lakes region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991).
39. See, for example, the collection of essays published in Jacques Jourdain and Mélanie Mailhot, eds, Pierre Vallières: parole d'un negre blancs (Montreal, VLP Editeur, 2002). Shorn of the machismo and bravado that characterised his earlier work, Vallières' later writings tackle a range of topics including sexuality and the casualties of war.
40. According to Michel Foucault, in the first half of the nineteenth century, western European societies transitioned from being grounded in the historical consciousness of sovereignty and the dialectic of perpetual war in the form of inter-ethnic 'race struggle', which emerged in seventeenth-century France and England (characterised by war, looting, invasions and victories in societies that were defined according to language, custom and laws), to societies centered on a counter-history of revolution and class struggle. At the same time, a competing counter-history emerged, a biologically determined or evolutionist notion of race, among Europeans, in which the state was now seen as a kind of anti-body or protector of the purity and integrity of a race against foreign intrusion. See Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: lectures at the Collège de France, 1957-1976 (New York, Picador, 2003), pp. 59-60, 80-1.
41. Hugh MacLennan, Two Solitudes(Toronto, Macmillan Paperbacks, 1988), p. 377.
42. Thobani, Exalted Subjects, op. cit., pp. 13, 37-40, 42, 45.
43. MacLennan, Two Solitudes, op. cit., p. 96.
44. Visible minority population soars, Vancouver Sun(2 April 2008), .
45. Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angélique: the untold story of Canadian slavery and the burning of old Montreal(Toronto, Harper Collins, 2006), pp. 68-9.
46. Ibid., pp. 98-9, 164-6, 169.
47. Ibid., p. 99.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., p. 33.
50. See Madden, African Nova Scotian-Mi'Kmaw Relations, op. cit., p. 52.
51. Dorothy Williams, Blacks in Montreal: 1628-1986: an urban demography (Montreal, 2008), p. 7. Williams does not discuss da Costa in her more detailed history, The Road to Now: a history of Blacks in Montreal(Montreal, Véhicule Press, 1997). Daniel Gay barely mentions da Costa in his seminal history, Les noirs du Québec: 1629-1900(Sillery, QC, Les éditions de Septentrion, 2004). Curiously, Robin Winks refers to a 'Negro servant' named Mathieu de Coste in Acadia in 1608. Could this be a mistaken reference to Mathieu da Costa? See Winks, The Blacks in Canada: a history (Montreal/ Kingston, 1977), p. 1.
52. See rosalind hampton, Black learners in Canada, Race & Class (Vol. 52, no. 1, 2010).
53. Walcott, Within the archipelagoes of poverty, op. cit.
54. See Austin, All roads led to Montreal, op. cit., and 'An embarrassment of omissions, or rewriting the sixties: the case of the Caribbean Conference Committee', in Karen Dubinskyet al,eds, New World Coming: the sixties and the shaping of global consciousness(Toronto, Between the Lines, 2009), pp. 368-78; Mills, The Empire Within, op. cit.
55. Walcott, Within the archipelagoes of poverty, op. cit.
56. Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the Past, op. cit., pp. 28-9.
57. Ibid, p. 29.
58. Ibid, p. 153.